Failure is usually easy to spot

I wrote earlier about the success of the 101st Airborne in Mosul, Iraq in the early days of the US invasion. Led by a commander who earned a PhD from Princeton based on his careful study of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, the Screaming Eagles tested risky, complex, and innovative counterinsurgency operations. Soldiers got out of their SUVs and walked to work — and died much more often as a result. They built clinics, roads, and schools and became trusted by local leaders. The experience in Mosul led directly to the Anbar Awakening, to rapprochement with large sections of the Sunni minority in Iraq, and to major promotions for the commander, General David Petraeus.

Patreus of course, now has responsibility for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He must smile a bit when he reads One Tribe at a Time, a war fighting strategy just released online by one of his Special Forces officers.

Major Jim Gant took a dozen Green Berets into an Afghanistan village, formed an unbelievably close relationship with the tribal leadership, ran the Taliban out and kept them out. Click the link above and read the article — it is smart, powerful stuff not unlike the initial thoughts a young David Patraeus was recording after his experience fighting in Vietnam.

Gant is no army dissident and he is no social worker either. As he notes,

"I and the men I have trained and fought with have won 20 awards for valor. Twenty. That is a truly remarkable number. I had a great ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) 316 in Afghanistan as part of the 3rd Special Forces Group. We fought together for several years in Afghanistan. We fought in the Konar and Helmand Provinces in early 2003 and again 2004.

I then spent two years on a Special Projects team before returning to Iraq as the first American combat advisor for an Iraqi National Police Quick Reaction Force (QRF) battalion. Our mission was to kill and capture terrorists anywhere in the country. I won a Silver Star and the Iraqi National Police Medal of Honor while fighting alongside my Iraqi brothers in 2006 and 2007 when Iraq was the most dangerous place on earth."

Gant repeatedly asserts something that we know but still overlook: Afghanistan is a land of tribes, not nation of citizens. This is fundamental. Although the west has been growing more democratic since the Athenians in 500 BC, much of the rest of the world is either tribal (pick your pre-industrial country) or emerging from tribalism (many industrializing Middle East or African countries).

I dislike tribes, but I acknowledge that humans are wired for tribal behavior because tribes got us through several millennium when mammals as hairless, clumsy, and tasty as our forbears should have perished.

Gant knows that citizens and tribal members are not remotely the same thing. Citizens value adherence to common law; tribes value adherence to tribal authority. Citizens value freedom of choice; tribes value conformity to tradition. Citizens value gender and racial equality; tribes are patriarchal and ethnocentric. Citizens value education and criticism; tribes value fundamentalist religions that reinforce tribal beliefs. Citizens value initiative, innovation, and technology; tribes value personal honor, battlefield courage, and sacrifice for the tribe. Naturally, many citizens romanticize tribes and most tribes fear the rise of citizens.

Gant's account does a succinct and moving job of describing his approach, which is grounded in his understanding of Pashtunwali — the ethic of the Pashtun tribesman.

"This plan requires a small group of men who can comprehend the extensive networks, influences and idiosyncrasies of the mission and the environment.We’re talking about “street smarts”—the instinct to grasp and account for all second, third and fourth order effects of decisions at all levels.

"This is warfare at the Ph.D. level. It is constantly changing and requires continual assessment. Only a few dedicated men can execute this plan properly.

"It will become a very personal fight. Once we commit to the tribe, the Pashtunwali code comes into effect for the US team as well. In the end it will be the Tribal Engagement Team’s ability to build a true bond with the tribe that is backed up by warrior ethos: the ability and desire to fight and die alongside them when necessary."

Stephen Pressfield, a researcher who visits Afghanistan frequently, published Gant's account in his blog War & Reality in Afghanistan (the blog now carries a huge subhead: "It's the Tribes, Stupid" and an excellent video blog on tribal culture). He appeared with Jim Gant at a conference recently, just before Gant deployed back to Afghanistan. He reports:

""Midway through each speech, Maj. Gant started recruiting. He started firing up the troops. His eyes got big and the veins popped out on his neck. “You gotta be great! You have to be great every day or you’re dead and so am I. Don’t lie. Don’t ever lie, because they [the Afghan tribesmen] will see right through you. They know you better than you know yourself. If you promise something, deliver—because if you don’t you will lose everything including your life.” 

"Maj. Gant’s mission wasn’t to enlist anybody. The Tribal Engagement program isn’t even in place yet. But he couldn’t help himself.

“I want three years from you. That’s your commitment. Not seven months, not twelve months. I’ll send you home for thirty days a year and then you’re back with me in the shit.

"It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, to hear that, each day, as soon as Maj. Gant finished, he was swamped by Marines and midshipmen. “I’m in, Major.” Sign me up, sir!” At night, when he got home to his quarters, his inbox was overflowing with e-mail addresses. “Take me, sir.” “Here’s where you can reach me.”

Gant is obviously a talented and committed warrior. His thought-provoking essay is in direct contrast to the whining, ugly column by a mysterious defense contractor in yesterday's NYT complaining that restricting air power over fear of civilian casualties would cost us the ability to win the Afghan war.

If we get out of Afghanistan with anything like our integrity intact, it will be because among our citizens are tribal warriors like Gant who learned how to build trust-based relationships with their tribal warriors. And loved doing it.

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Understanding the economics of opium in Afghanistan is a good place to start. Every year, The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime conducts a remarkable survey of poppy farming in Afghanistan. They interview farmers, analyze satellite photos, classify poppies, document trade routes, calculate the capacity of heroin processing labs, estimate the value of the harvest, compute current Taliban inventories, and even determine the wages of local field hands. The UN then blindly issues routine calls for a war on drugs in Afghanistan — a classic example of a government agency doing an excellent job of gathering facts but a terrible job of understanding them.

BACKGROUND

Afghanistan now produces 93% of the world's opium, which is used to make heroin and morphine. 98% of the crop is grown in the south and west of the country, where it finances the Taliban. In southern Afghanistan, 73% of all households are involved in the production of opium — and roughly everybody else supports these households. Afghanistan has replaced the "Golden Triangle" of Burma and Laos as the center of world opium production.

The United Nations estimates that Taliban earned $300 million in opium profits last year. Drugs are far and away their major source of funding. The Taliban now produce enough heroin to supply 100% of world demand for the drug. As a result, they have been stockpiling heroin and growing so much that prices fell 20% last year. Destroy the opium economy and you radically limit the ability of the Taliban to operate.

Talib is Afghan for "students" but these guys were not economics majors or they would know that producing more than the market wants lowers prices and stockpiling goods that are declining in value is unwise. They did not even study Islam all that carefully. The UN reports that the main reason most farmers refuse to grow poppies is because it violates their religious beliefs.

In general however, cash trumps the Koran. In central, eastern, and most of northern Afghanistan, a farmer earns more money with non-poppy crops or is roughly indifferent economically. But in the south, poppies earn a farmer 45% more money than non-poppy crops. In the west it is 21%. The adjacent chart shows the result: a very high overlap between poppy production (brown dots) and Taliban control (red zones).

LEARN FROM IOWA

In 2008, payments to farmers for their dried poppies (the "farm gate" price) totaled $732 million. After processing, drug wholesalers sold the crop for approximately four times that. The Taliban impose a ten percent tax on all sales and own several processing facilities.

Legalization and eradication are not great options here. Since virtually all of the processed opium is exported, legalizing the drug in Afghanistan would have little effect. Eradication efforts work when accompanied by political leadership and crop substitution but cannot on their own disrupt the economics of Taliban-held regions.

When David Petraeus had to stop a civil war in Iraq, he paid insurgents to stop fighting. In Iowa, when the federal government is concerned that corn prices will drop too low, we pay farmers to not grow corn and we buy surplus corn at above market prices. As a permanent solution, this is brain-damaged (note that Obama named the former Governor of Iowa to run the Agriculture Department. His knowledge of farm subsidies would have been more valuable as Assistant Secretary of Defense).

In Afghanistan it makes a lot of sense to buy the poppy crop directly from farmers so long as you do it correctly. The government should announce in March that it will buy the 2009 poppy crop and provide income support to current poppy farmers for 2010 and 2011 so long as they grow a different crop. Only farmers growing poppies in 2009 would be eligible. Since poppies are a seasonal crop, it is too late for new farmers to join the club now. Normally guaranteeing sellers a sale is a quick way to grow supply — so we need a clear rule here.

What would we do with the poppies? Destroy them — or if they are medicinally usable, stop paying Turkey to produce medical opiates. But assume the crop has no value. Destroying a huge portion of the world's opium
supply will cause the price of opium to skyrocket and will presumably attract others to the business. Near term this is fine — our goal is to starve the Taliban of financing not rid the world of opium. If you want to get rid of illegal opium growers, you countries with a demand for heroin have to make it obtainable in a safe, medically
supervised form to those who need it. There are other other good reasons for doing this outlined here.

The Taliban cannot compete in legalized markets. In 1999, the US could produce
the equivalent of 1 kilogram of morphine for $56. The
current cost in Afghanistan is approximately $450 — meaning that the
Taliban can only supply heroin to countries kind
enough to drive the price up by making the product illegal.

To qualify for purchases at slightly above market prices, farmers will need to decide what alternative crops they wish to grow. Afghanistan was once known for fantastic raisins made from local grapes and for pomegranates (which the US spends $12 million a year urging local farmers to grow for export — with some evidence of success). These crops take 2-3 years to establish, which is why we need a period of income support to allow farmers to shift from opium to any crop but cannabis, which is emerging as a substitute in some areas. The UN says that Farah and Nimroz (as well as Zabul and Day Kundi) are great places to
start, since opium cultivation is high but support for the insurgency
are lower than further south and these are not places that are especially favorable for growing opium.

Once we outbid their customers, we should continue to attack processors, rogue growers, and middlemen directly. We should warn populations that we treat heroin processing labs as military targets. We need to find and destroy the (large) stores of opium held by the Taliban. Special efforts to stop the flow of the chemicals used to process heroin, especially acetic anhydride, appear to help. Getting Iran, Pakistan and China to take more aggressive steps in disrupting supply routes and money laundering makes sense since these drugs are heading for their countries. These are difficult now, because the Taliban control supply. Once we control supply, these steps become realistic steps.

What would this cost? Well, the current farm gate price is $735 million, so figure $1 billion a year for three years of price support, administration, enforcement (mainly of bribes to local warlords — war really is hell), and logistics. In military terms, this is nearly free because farmers tend to like their customers, so in addition to cutting off funds to our enemies, we are buying at least temporary loyalty from their subjects.

This effort needs to complement, not replace, normal counterinsurgency initiatives. We still need to feed the destitute, support other farming initiatives, build a high integrity system of justice, and send Taliban combatants a well-targeted missile when we find them.  A PR campaign to make it clear that Osama Bin Laden is a heroin dealer who defiles the Koran wouldn't hurt either.

Counterinsurgency operations cannot turn around the war in Afghanistan can succeed unless they they address the economic needs of poor farmers and make long term economic sense. Buying the Afghan poppy crop as part of a program to transition farmers to licit crops and disrupt Taliban funding made sense under the Bush administration but was never seriously considered due to the ideological blinders worn by senior administration officials. We will soon know whether Obama can think about the problem differently.

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I admire Petraeus and profiled him here ("David Patraeus, Rock Star General"). I still believe that that he would be an impressive presidential candidate. The current election is the wrong one for him — he still has real wars to win — but I’d love to see him remain in public life, like Dwight Eisenhower did (both Democrats and Republicans recruited Eisenhower to their ticket in 1948 and he turned them both down).

Petraeus is the architect of not only the surge, but of the new combat
doctrine that made it work. If we get out of Iraq (defined as fewer
than 25,000 troops in country) in the next 18 months, it will be
because of Petraeus — as even Barack Obama now tacitly admits.

General Petraeus marked today’s transition with an eloquent farewell letter, which sounded some of the tones of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address 47 years ago. I reproduce Patraeus’s letter below, with excerpts from Ike’s famous speech in italics.

It is not a perfect mashup: one was a televised speech, the other a letter. Ike was retiring; Petraeus continues to serve. Above all, Eisenhower used his speech to famously warn Americans that the creation of a "military industrial complex" was both necessary and a very dangerous for American politics and liberty, whereas Petraeus thanks his troops for fighting and winning a very different kind of war and a different foe than Ike ever encountered.

Petraeus:

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Civilians of Multi-National Force-Iraq:

It has been the greatest of privileges to have been your commander
for the past 19 months. During that time, we and our civilian and Iraqi
partners have been engaged in an exceedingly complex, difficult, and
important task. And in the face of numerous challenges, we and our
partners have helped bring new hope to a country that was besieged by
extremists and engulfed in sectarian violence.

When I took command of Multi-National Force-Iraq in February 2007, I
noted that the situation in Iraq was hard but not hopeless. You have
proven that assessment to be correct. Indeed, your great work,
sacrifice, courage, and skill have helped to reverse a downward spiral
toward civil war and to wrest the initiative from the enemies of the
new Iraq.

We now stand ten years past the
midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great
nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these
holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and
most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this
pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige
depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and
military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of
world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America’s adventure in
free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to
foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity
and integrity among peoples and among nations.

Any failure traceable to arrogance
or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict
upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Together, Iraqi and Coalition Forces have faced determined,
adaptable, and barbaric enemies. You and our Iraqi partners have taken
the fight to them, and you have taken away their sanctuaries and safe
havens. You have helped secure the Iraqi people and have enabled, and
capitalized on, their rejection of extremism. You have also supported
the Iraqi Security Forces as they have grown in number and capability
and as they have increasingly shouldered more of the responsibility for security in their country.

Progress toward these noble goals
is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It
commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a
hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in
purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses
promises to be of indefinite duration.
 
To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional
and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us
to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of
a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus
shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course
toward permanent peace and human betterment.

You have not just secured the Iraqi people, you have served them, as
well. By helping establish local governance, supporting reconstruction
efforts, assisting with revitalization of local businesses, fostering
local reconciliation, and conducting a host of other non-kinetic
activities, you have contributed significantly to the communities in
which you have operated. Indeed, you have been builders and diplomats
as well as guardians and warriors.

The progress achieved has been hard-earned. There have been many
tough days along the way, and we have suffered tragic losses. Indeed,
nothing in Iraq has been anything but hard. But you have been more than
equal to every task.

Your accomplishments have, in fact, been the stuff of history. Each
of you should be proud of what has been achieved and of the
contributions you continue to make. Although our tasks in Iraq are far
from complete and hard work and tough fights lie ahead, you have helped
bring about remarkable improvements.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have,
on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation well rather
than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the
nation should go forward. So my official relationship with Congress
ends in a
feeling on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much
together.
 

Your new commander is precisely the right man for the job. General
Ray Odierno played a central role in the progress achieved during the
surge. He brings tremendous skill, experience, and understanding as he
returns to Iraq for a third tour and takes the helm of MNF-I just seven
months after relinquishing command of MultiNational Corps-Iraq. I have
total confidence in him, and I will do all that I can as the commander
of Central Command to help him, MNF-I, and our Iraqi partners to
achieve the important goals that we all share for the new Iraq.

Three days from now, after a half
century of service of our country, I shall lay down the
responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the
authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor…

Like every other citizen, I wish
the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray
that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for
all.

Thank you for your magnificent work here in the "Land of the Two
Rivers." And thank you for your sacrifices-and for those of your
families–during this crucial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I am
honored to have soldiered with you in this critical endeavor.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all
faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs
satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to
the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual
blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy
responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others
will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance
will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of
time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by
the binding force of mutual respect and love.

With great respect and all best wishes

David H. Petraeus
General, United States Army
Commanding

Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it.
 
Thank you, and good night.

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Robert Gates is promoting David Petraeus to run CentCom — meaning that he Petraeus will run both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is of course excellent news — Petraeus understands both history and modern counterinsurgency warfare better than any general officer in the US military. He is a significant upgrade from Admiral William Fallon, a solid Navy guy who was sacked to make room for Petraus. If Petraus can’t be on the ticket with Obama (and yes, I know that I am the only Democrat in creation who would even entertain such a goofy idea), then at least let him turn both wars around.

Again, notice the hue and cry among Democrats at the promotion of the man they once libelously termed General "Betray Us?". You haven’t heard any objection? Me neither. Again, watch what is not being said. Democratic lawmakers are quietly acknowledging that Gates, Crocker, and especially Petraus are winning the war. With luck, he will have enough momentum by January that neither Clinton nor Obama can get in his way.

But Democrats will not get in the way of Petraus way any more than they will get in the way of Israel doing the right thing with Syrian and North Korean perfidy.Today’s
revelation that Israel’s decision to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor
that it suspected but could not conclusively prove was intended to
produce nuclear weapons was also interesting for the dog that did not
bark.

No Democrat criticized Israel’s action. Not that any of them praised it.

There are plenty of announcements not being made about Iraq. One of the most remarkable is the failure of any Democrat to correct the prevailing narrative on what happened last month in Basra.

A month ago the story seemed clear. Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki launched a surprise attack against the main Shia
militia in Basra and got creamed. Green Iraqi soldiers were either crushed by the battle-hardened
street-fighters of the Mahdi Army or they simply turned tail and ran.

The press carried stories of defecting soldiers, tanks destroyed by the Mahdi militiamen, and US or British troops and aircraft rushing in to save the battle (which was not only botched but launched weeks ahead of plan). The few British soldiers remaining in Basra had to strap on their rifles and go to work.

But a month later, al-Malaki is in control of Basra and the Mahdi Army has been decimated. What happened? Was al-Malaki a genius who led a band of military
novices to achieve in a month what thousands
of highly trained British forces could not do in four years? Or did mercenary soldiers led by a power-hungry
crook collapse at the first sign of battle?

Or did the Iranians cut off Moqtada al-Sadr at the legs and leave his guys to the tender mercies of the Iraqi Army?

Regardless, Basra is completely under Iraqi government control and by all accounts — bloggers, MSM, Europeans — the people of Basra are dramatically better off now than they were under the British. Notes the London Times

Young women are daring to wear jeans, soldiers listen to pop music on their
mobile phones and bands are performing at wedding parties again.
 

All across Iraq’s second city life is improving, a month after Iraqi troops
began a surprise crackdown on the black-clad gangs who were allowed to
flourish under the British military. The gunmen’s reign had enforced a
strict set of religious codes.
 

It appears that the Mahdi Army is being devastated with the tacit permission of Iran. al-Malaki even issued an ultimatum today, according to AP and reported by blogger Bill Roggio in Bagdhad.

In Basrah, General Mohan al Freiji, the chief of the Basrah
Operational Commander and leader of the security operation in the
province, has issued warrants "for 81 people, including senior leaders
of the Mahdi militia, and they have 24 hours to give up," The Associated Press reported.

Iraqi troops continue to clear Basrah, although the fighting has been sparse since security forces cleared the Mahdi Army-controlled Hayaniyah
neighborhood in Basrah last weekend. Iraqi forces "seized a cache
containing huge amounts of weapons and ammunition" in the Al Tanuma
neighborhood in eastern Basrah, Voices of Iraq reported. "The
cache contains more than (1000) mortar rounds of different calibers,
explosive equipment, and improvised explosive devices," a source told
the Iraqi newspaper.

Roggio reports further, that operations agains the Mahdi Army have continued throughout Iraq.

Iraqi and US forces have not stopped their operations against the
Mahdi Army in Baghdad and the South despite Sadr’s threat to conduct a
third uprising. US forces in Baghdad alone have reported 56 "criminals"
killed since Sadr issued his warning. The US military refers to the
Mahdi Army as criminals in an effort to marginalize and delegitimize
the group.

Twenty-seven Mahdi Army fighters were killed during clashes in Sadr City and Baghdad on April 20. US troops killed five Mahdi Army fighters in Sadr City and another seven fighters in New Baghdad on April 21. US soldiers killed another fifteen Mahdi Army fighters inside Sadr City on April 22.

South of Baghdad in the city of Karbala, Iraqi police detained seven members of the Mahdi Army on April 2

So is the Mahdi Army finished? Depends on what Iran wants. When
the Mahdi Army serves their purposes, as it does in Baghdad, they
receive all the rockets they need and lob them into the Green Zone with
impunity. But in Basra, Moqtada al-Sadr was increasingly fighting with Iran for political control as the British pulled out.

His Mahdi Army was contesting for political power with the Badr
Organization, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran. So Iran cut al-Sadr up by cooperating with the US and the British
in attacking his "outlaws". Iran
is not about to concede Iraq’s largest oil reserves and only route to
the sea to a group of Iraqi Shia over whom it had only financial, not
ideological control.

The same Iranian ambassador who had lauded al-Malaki for prosecuting
outlaws in Basra condemns the US for attacking Mahdi forces in Baghdad. Once again, Iran is winning the war in Iraq.

This is the arcane world of
Shia politics, where some houses appear to have doors and windows and others do not. I do not claim to understand it — and neither do American politicians.

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I photographed men and women, both
Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in
Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it
before carrying it up to the dome.

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company
2-12 Infantry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and
Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an
occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

I find this story encouraging not because real freedom actually rings in Iraq or because Iraqis are thanking Americans. It’s impressive because it represents a tiny flicker of basic religious tolerance that is incredibly scarce in this and many other parts of the world.

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The Army is rapidly scaling up its use of UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Hunter, for example, carries a 42 lb laser-guided glide bomb that has a one-yard wingspan and is accurate to within a meter. The latest model weighs 1,940-pounds, costs $2
million, is packed with modern avionics, and has fuel-efficient diesel engines that enable it to fly for 21 hours at
altitudes up to 15,000 ft. It has no seats and no windows — but can carry a JDAMs (for precision use in urban environments) or Hellfire missiles (where collateral damage is less of a risk).

that enable it to fly for 21 hours at
altitudes up to 15,000 ft. It has no seats and no windows — but can
carry a JDAMs (for precision use in urban environments) or Hellfire
missiles (where collateral damage is less of a risk). The increased use of video (which is now deployed in most
aircraft and many ground vehicles to enable troops to see around
corners and over hills in battle) raises some interesting questions.

Can combat become entirely remote controlled?

Technology
has been enabling combatants to kill each other at a greater distance
for centuries. Adding video sensors, avionics, and good software is a
natural (and cost effective) progression. Video feeds are now
ubiquitous in combat operations and the number of feeds beamed from
UAVs has jumped to 1,000, up from 200 just six months ago. Wait until
there are 100,000 video feeds — or  a million. And there will be. Of
course you need soldiers installing and interpreting video feeds and
doing the work that can only be done on the ground. But people behave
better when they know they are on camera — and soldiers fight better
when they know what is around the corner.

How remote is remote?

Some
UAV "pilots" flying missions in Iraq work out of battlefield trailers
not far from their drones. Others work in air conditioned offices in
Nevada. These guys get home to see their kids soccer games. War is not
equally hellish for everyone.

Will kids notice the difference?

America’s
middle class is producing a generation of young people with great hand
eye and and eye mouse coordination who have racked up thousands of
hours in video combat. UAVs may help those army recruiting numbers.
Except for the push-ups, some kids may not notice that they enlisted.

Can I play too?

The explosion of digital video feeds in military
surveillance, communications and reconnaissance operations — using
UAVs and ground based video — may benefit from online networks. There
are already security cameras at industrial facilities and border
crossings that are monitored by citizens who report unusual activities.
Why not let qualified Americans and Iraqis watch every road in Iraq for
guys planting IEDs?  If the war is televised, we can not only watch –
we can participate.

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"Doing what?"

"I am making a movie. In Baghdad. About the war. I wrote it and I’m directing and producing it."

Investor. Friend. Baghdad. Toxic. War. Pathologically intense. I confess that this did not strike me as a winning combination.

Charles Ferguson is an exceptionally smart, entrepreneurial, and, yes, intense guy. After grad school in political science, he

published provocative articles and books about technology
businesses. In the mid 90s, he started a software company with fellow
MIT grad Randy Forgaard and named it Vermeer Technologies after his favorite Dutch painter.
They released their signature product, FrontPage, in 1996 and were
promptly acquired by Microsoft. The irony of this was not lost on those
who read Charles’ frequent criticisms of Gates & Co. Charles would
have likely sold his Microsoft stock on principle, but the terms of the
deal required that he hold it for three years. During this time, the
stock roughly tripled, so Charles became comfortably rich.

The title of his book about his experiences, High Stakes, No Prisoners: How I Won My David and Goliath Battle in Silicon Valley — a Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars
says it all: the book is a tell-all expose of the foibles of Silicon
Valley’s princes (even though Vermeer was based in Massachusetts, not
California). Written as a trash-talking victory lap, he declares the
Valley a place where "one finds little evidence that the meek shall
inherit the earth", dishes Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison "severely warped", and generally gets a load of invective off of his
chest. Amazon compared the book to having lunch with a co-worker where
you suddenly find yourself listening to "a savage stream of
unflattering assessments of bosses, wicked gossip, and
the-emperor-has-no-clothes analysis of your industry".

Ferguson spent the next few years writing and investing (this Tech Review article on Google struck me as brilliant at the time and has stood up very well). Still, it was not necessarily comforting to picture him wandering around a war zone with a camera followed by guys with AK-47s covering his backside. Although he might be safer in Baghdad than parts of Palo Alto, this latest entrepreneurial venture seemed truly high stakes, no prisoners. It seemed likely that it would turn out extraordinarily well or end disastrously.

Ferguson sought help from Alex Gibney, the screenwriter-director of the award-winning "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room".

"It was the weirdest experience," says Gibney, who got a call from Ferguson out of the blue in late 2005. "He had never made a film before. He’d invented a Web construction program and sold it for a zillion dollars. He was a political science professor. He knew a lot of people in the foreign-policy arena. He’d done some writing. He wanted to do a film about the occupation of Iraq. He came to New York, and we discussed it. The subject was important. ‘Would you help me?’ I gingerly went forward: ‘Let’s see how it goes.’ "

Charles, whose voice is in the film but who keeps himself behind the camera, describes how he decided to make the film here:

Eventually an email arrives announcing that the film had been finished and had been accepted for showing at the Sundance Film Festival. Remarkable. Several weeks later I glance up at CNN in an airport and see that No End in Sight won best documentary at Sundance and received a Special Jury Prize. Amazing. The movie has been picked up for limited but decent national distribution. It is out and now enjoys a rare "A-" average from both professional reviewers and viewers on Yahoo! Movies. In the critical consensus of American Film Reviewers, major film reviewers around the country rank it #5 out of sixty or so movies currently playing. Having now seen it, I am confident that the film will surely contend for an Oscar.

This is wonderful — and at some level completely extraordinary. So tonight I took the whole family to see it. (After all, if there is no end in sight, the kids may inherit this one).

No End in Sight is a cool-headed, devastating film that succeeds for at least three reasons. First, Ferguson interviews mainly Republicans. This is not Michael Moore playing adolescent poseur with his own camera. It is a lucid, relentlessly factual view of a peacekeeping effort that has been as incompetent as the warmaking effort was brilliant. Charles designed his film to reach across partisan lines — something that few political films even attempt.

Ferguson, like most of humanity, sits comfortably to the right of Michael Moore in any case. He was sympathetic to using force to remove Saddam Hussein and spends little time worrying about the origins of the war. You hardly hear a word about bogus WMDs; his focus is the execution of the occupation. He interviews Bush Administration insiders at length, including Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Deputy Richard L. Armitage and his Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. We quickly understand the disastrous consequences of the Bush directive that gave control of post-war Iraq to a Pentagon in the thrall of Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was the exiled founder of the Iraqi National Congress whom neocons dubbed "the George Washington of Iraq" even though he was wanted for embezzling nearly $300 million through a bank he had created in Jordan.

Ferguson gets access to senior military leaders who were in Iraq during the critical early months including Col. Paul Hughes, a strategic planner for the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who served as head of the Organization of Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, and Barbara Bodine, ambassador in charge of Baghdad. These military leaders and Bush Administration officials repeatedly describe the disastrous and occasionally comic lack of preparation for the occupation. Teams were frequently assigned only a few weeks before they were expected to arrive in country and perform vital work. Barbara Bodine describes arriving in Baghdad without staff, security, or telephones, noting that "there truly were no plans." Ferguson spends time on the ground spent outside the Green Zone (it is perhaps notable that Charles thanks Falcon Security prominently in the opening credits, not in mousetype at the end).

Charles gives the authors of several books on Iraq a chance to summarize their arguments: Nir Rosen (" In the Belly of the Green Bird"), James Fallows (" Blind Into Baghdad"), Yaroslav Trofimov (" Faith at War"), Samantha Power (" Problem from Hell"), and George Packer (" The Assassins’ Gate"). Packer’s experience in Baghdad reportedly inspired Ferguson to make the film. (Charles inexplicably shoots Packer from below while seated in some kind of stairwell with lighting that deeply shadows his face. This gives the impression that Packer is either an oracle or has enemies as vicious as those chasing Omar Fekeiki, an Iraqi who managed the Washington Post’s Baghdad office who could well need the anonymity his back lighting gives him.)

The second reason the film works is that it is rigorously fact-based and focuses on what many analysts have concluded were the Bush administrations three most catastrophic decisions:

• The decision to neither declare martial law, empower an Iraqi government, nor prevent massive destruction, aka "looting". "Looting" is a completely inadequate term for what took place in Iraq. It suggests poor folks grabbing groceries in the wake of a riot or disaster. In Iraq, looters salted the earth, disassembling entire buildings for their rebar and copper. "Looters" drove forklifts and used industrial cranes. They disassembled not only priceless museums but entire factories. Iraqis trashed their communications systems, information assets of all kinds, computer and teleco infrastructure, office furniture, and books. "The greatest mystery of post-war Iraq involves…. why the U.S. didn’t do anything to control the looting because in a way, everything that’s been a problem since then started in that first month," noted James Fallows.

• The decision to pursue radical "de-Baathification", meaning to prevent any member of Sadaam’s former Baath Party from holding public sector employment. Since the private sector consists roughly of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, this step removed anyone with technical, leadership, or teaching skills from the economy. It disenfranchised exactly the people that were most vital to rebuild the country. And these were the country’s thought leaders — meaning that as each was told they had no future in Iraq, they influenced dozens of others.

• The breathtakingly stupid and enormously consequential decision to dissolve the Iraqi military. Without this decision, there is a chance that you could repair the first bad decision and rescind the second. But the decision to humiliate hundreds of thousands of men trained at arms with ready access to Sadaam’s enormous weapon’s caches unleashed the insurgency and turned Iraq over to sectarian militia associated with extremist mullahs.

The film lays these decisions out calmly, but also shows them to be the result of shocking ignorance, willful incompetence, and an impeachable disregard for American interests. If George Bush were working for Iran, it would be hard to come up with a better course of action than the one he and Rumsfeld directed. If your goal was to create a vacuum for Islamic thugs like Muqtada al-Sadr, you would start with these three steps. You would create a huge void, knowing that it would be filled by the last remaining institution in society: Shiite and Sunni militias and mullahs. These three decisions would guarantee anarchy, civil war, and ultimately genocide.

The final reason that No End in Sight works is that Ferguson orchestrates three sets of contrasting voices into a powerful chorus. One group of voices are the authors. The film uses them as background narrative and as teachers who accompany the audience through the film. Packer and Samantha Power of Harvard are especially effective in this role. One wonders if Charles considered using Thomas Rick, the Washington Post military editor and author of Fiasco (reviewed here) — still one of the best books on the failed occupation.

The second part of the chorus is current or former Bush Administration officials, most of whom bemoaned the tendency of the administration to completely ignore the deep knowledge and experience of military, diplomatic and technical professionals in favor of the blind certainty of political loyalists. Ferguson does not limit his interviews to disaffected professionals from State. He all but fillets Walter Slocombe, the incompetent Pentagon official who acquiesced to the firing of the Iraqi army without even visiting the country. He tells us again the stories of Republican Party operatives (including clueless students just out of college) being put in charge of sensitive or complex areas of post-war administration for six months before returning home. And we hear the Deputy Secretary of State detail a decision making process that completely excluded the part of the American government consisting of people with expertise, experience, and language skills relevant to Iraq.

The third voice in the movie comes from soldiers. It starts quietly, but tears you apart by the closing scene. The contrast between warrior and bureaucrat, remorseful or not, is palpable and from the heart. We meet all too briefly First Lieutenant Ann Gildroy, who joined the Marines out of Georgetown Foreign Service School a month before 9/11. We hear from two men nearly killed by IEDs: Hugo Gonzales, an Army Field Artillery Gunner from Puerto Rico and David Yancey, an MP who served in the 155th Combat Team. Both men were and are badly injured; both are trying to find meaning in their sacrifice and that of their comrades.

Most memorably however, we hear from Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton. They don’t make many guys like this — but the ones they make end up United States Marines. Moulton grew up in the old whaling town of Marblehead, Massachusetts and attended Andover — one of America’s most elite prep schools. Then Harvard, where he was a physics student, crew member, and organ player. His classmates selected him to give the oration at their 2001 commencement (his best line: "When you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t; always do.") Moulton thought about a career on Wall Street, but decided to join the Marines.

"I have a degree in physics, but I knew I didn’t want to spend my life in a lab, I wanted to do some sort of service… We can talk a lot about what we wish we did in the past and the kind of world we’d like to have for the future, but this is not just a question of what we want for tomorrow. It’s a question of what we’re willing to do today.

Moulton deployed to Kuwait in January 2003 and fought with the First Marine Regiment in the attack on Baghdad. In Hillah, Moulton oversaw Iraq’s largest-circulation newspaper and started a television channel and a radio station with his translator (you can see some clips from the Seth and Mohammed show here). In 2004, Moulton led his platoon into combat with the Mahdi militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Sadr City area of Baghdad and in the city of Najaf. (He described his experiences to NPR here and reflects in the NYT on the kinds of soldiers we need here. The combat photos in this post are of Moulton and his platoon during in the assault on Najaf).

Moulton has more formal education than most Marines, but like many front line officers seems focused and incapable of guile. He is the kind of soldier men trust with their lives. Having helped document the treasonous incompetence of the US occupation, Moulton takes the final word of the film and it burns long after you leave the theater.

Looking straight at the camera and speaking calmly, he asks "You’re telling me that this is the best America can do?"

"No way. Don’t tell me that. That makes me angry."

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Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

OK, time out for a confession. I love this guy (as noted here, here, here, and here). The breadth of his intellect and the audacity of his arguments astonishes and convinces. One of my goals in life is to never debate Christopher Hitchens — and frankly, the list of people I would avoid debating is pretty short.

I could not put down his latest best-seller. I busted the e-book
while traveling, so I quickly bought a real copy from my favorite
online seller of real books. God is not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything
may not leave you convinced, but it will leave you impressed. True,
Hitchens pretty much defines religion as a list of stuff he hates about
churches and god and proceeds to demolish it — but it is a very
impressive list and quite a thorough demolition. And yes, he cheerfully
pile drives anybody who wants to keep the good and toss out the bad by
asking who in God’s name made them the great sifter?

His book is a New York Times best-seller for a reason: it is a slashing tour de force on a topic that lesser pundits dare not touch. Forget Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins — these guys are a warm up act for the real thing. Hitchens vs God — definitely a worthwhile fight.
(In person, Hitchens is no less intimidating: at a recent Commonwealth
Club debate in San Francisco, I thought that he had converted his host,
a noted religious scholar, to a life of godless athiesm).

Today
however, Hitch picked a soft target, slammed it against the wall, kneed
it in the groin, casually backslapped it across the face, smiled while
it suffered briefly, and issued a pitiless coupe de grace to the back of the head.

Would that all British jihadi Muslims went down so easily. Thankfully these guys were dropouts — disgusting enough to plant car bombs (are all suicide bombers Muslim?
Ever heard of one who wasn’t?). These guys were so bad the London cops
actually called them amateurs (and the Bobbies should know. They towed into an underground parking garage a car reeking of gasoline from the bomb inside. Ouch.).

What’s wrong with this picture? Consider this: the associates of the attackers are not apologizing and the would be victims are not complaining. As Tom Friedman  put it this morning:

In the past few years, hundreds of Muslims have committed suicide amid innocent civilians — without making any concrete political demands and without generating any vigorous, sustained condemnation in the Muslim world….

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it’s been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren’t doing this
— nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to
understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their
religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

Actually, and very encouragingly, one associate of the attacker did apologize. Writing in the London Observer,
an extraordinary fellow named Mr. Hassan Butt has some genuinely
thoughtful things to day. This guy was once a member of Al-Muhajiroun
and a Muslim jihadi. He begins:

When I
was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi
Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups
linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in
celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for
Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was
Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our
actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda
work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday’s
attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed
car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist
plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And
as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line
that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, yesterday on Radio 4′s Today programme, the mayor of
London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about
the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is
not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’

He then refused to
acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that
the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to
suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were
both part of the BJN – I met him on two occasions – and though many
British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across
the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme
terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we
were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would
eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

Read the whole thing.
We need voices like this: young, westernized, Islamic voices who dare
to defy the authoritarian tendencies in their religion and renounce
terror — just as brave Jews, Christians, and even athiests like
Hitchens have been doing for centuries.

The second voice we need — and we need it LOUD is women. I cannot believe that a bunch of medieval mysoginists have declared war on women and not one western feminist of note has denounced it.

Ladies, find your voices — these guys (and they are all guys) want you dead. Hitchens, having denounced the criminally idiotic coverage of this event by British media, notes:

Only
at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might
have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies
night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure
people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the
succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and
nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack
on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these
terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted
by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by
assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

Ayann Hirsan Ali (and here) is not enough. Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein where are you? Bush got your tongue?

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…The sole duty of any self-respecting commentator is to interrogate and then indict Blair – as if he were a cross between Radovan Karadzic, Augusto Pinochet and Adolf Eichmann…As at many a London dinner table, one’s own superior virtue, and one’s belonging to the tribe, is demonstrated by the unbounded vehemence of one’s denunciation of him. “Not in my name” is all that needs to be said, or rather shouted.

BDS has mutated and spread across the Atlantic. The clinical condition formerly known as Bush Derangement Syndrome — an emotional disability that causes the afflicted to bark and foam rather like rabid dogs at the mention of the US head of state — has become Blair Derangement Syndrome. At a time when the Rasmussen Reports finds that “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure”, it is safe to say that BDS has become a serious public health threat and that too many Democrats have been breathing their own exhaust.

Now that Tony Blair has announced his retirement admidst a raging BDS epidemic on both sides of the Atlantic, it is good moment to reflect on Blair’s decade as British Prime Minister.

Blair, who just reached that marvelous age of 54 — took office as the youngest Prime Minister in modern British history. He leaves office as the Labor Party’s longest-serving prime minister and the only Labor prime minister in British history to serve more than one full consecutive term. He is also the only person to have ever lead the Labor Party to three consecutive general election victories.

Garton Ash tallies Blair’s foreign policy record:

“If you believe, as I do, in genuine liberal intervention – that is, intervention to prevent genocide or other massively inhumane or life-threatening behavior within the borders of another state – then high on the credit side of the (Tony Blair) balance sheet must be Kosovo. There, Blair led the way in forging an international action to reverse a genocide being perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic against the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians. And we did not make a complete bloody mess of the occupation afterwards. Switzerland it isn’t, but Kosovo today is on the way to being a European country. Both Serbian and Kosovan warlords are being prosecuted in the Hague. For a liberal interventionist, Kosovo was Blair’s finest hour.

Britain’s relations with both the US and our partners in the European Union are better than they were in 1997. In the European context, devolution to Scotland and Wales, and the amazing spectacle of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness starting to govern together in Northern Ireland, must be counted to his credit. Britain is also stronger in Europe and the world because it has a relatively strong economy, mixed with a partly reformed welfare state. The attraction of what Italians, French and Germans see as Blairism is an element of British soft power too.

For all the problems that remain, you must ask yourself this question: who is better off? Britain after 10 years of Blair, France after 12 years of Jacques Chirac, Germany following eight years of Gerhard Schröder, or the US in the seventh year of George Bush?

Garton Ash then notes that “on the debit side, there is one overwhelming red figure – Iraq.

Blair keeps insisting that history will give the verdict on Iraq, but we can already say this with confidence: Iraq is a disaster. To describe it as a case of liberal interventionism is the greatest disservice anyone could do to the cause of liberal interventionism. We went to war on a false prospectus about weapons of mass destruction and without proper authority, either legal or political. The failure to prepare for the likely consequences was a disgrace. It would be difficult for things to be worse than they were under Saddam Hussein, but they now are. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or maimed, and there is no end in sight. US intelligence agencies say Iraq has become a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists. The hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on the war and occupation could have bettered the lives of many of the world’s poor.

Drawing away troops from Afghanistan when the job there was only half done, we have created two failures instead of one possible success. The Shia-Sunni rift has been inflamed across the Muslim world. The theocratic dictatorship of Iran has been greatly strengthened. The moral authority of the US is in tatters, and that of the United Kingdom dragged down with it. Iraq has alienated Muslims everywhere, including our own fellow citizens. Need I go on? This is the most comprehensive British foreign policy disaster since the Suez crisis of 1956.

This is the reasoned modern view — factual and well short of BDS. But it is fast-food history — an interpretation whose chief merit is speed, convenience, and a certain greasy digestibility.

Timothy Garton Ash is a serious historian (he witnessed the Velvet Revolution that brought Solidarity to Power in Poland and Vaclav Havel to power in what was then Czechoslovakia. His book The Magic Lantern Theater is an indispensable first-hand account of the chaotic and thrilling rise of democratic power from the ashes of communism in 1989). He knows well that history may record Blair’s decision on Iraq as wrong, but he also knows that this decision was never self-interested and will be recorded by those of us who watched it at the time as extraordinarily courageous.

“Democracies, like markets, are messy and, over time, self-correcting. Because democracies penalize leaders for advocating politically unpopular causes, those who achieve high office have powerful incentives to not bet all of their political capital on a single venture — especially if the venture is politically unpopular. This incentive is especially strong in Great Britain, where the penalty for taking an unpopular position does not come every four years — it comes immediately.

British political accountability, the vestigial monarchy notwithstanding, is up close and personal. When a British Prime Minister wants to go to war for example, he or she does not dispatch staff from 10 Downing to lobby Parliament. He does not simply address the country on television from in front of the executive fireplace. And he sure doesn’t hire a silver-tongued press secretary to spin the local press corps. Instead, the PM enters Parliament, where he is physically surrounded by elected Members of Parliament. They sit close enough to smell him: Tories to the right, Labor to the left, and dissident members of the Prime Minister’s Party in the rear (thus the respective origin of “right wing”, “left wing” and “back bench”). The Prime Minister makes his case not to a respectful audience, but to a rude one — MPs interrupt, and often try to shout down the speaker. The PM is expected to simultaneously speak and respond to his or her accusers a task which, among other things, makes a TelePrompter useless. After the speech, the PM engages in a debate that is a grueling verbal free-for-all. Although I suspect that amid the guys in silly white wigs there is a clock somewhere and standards of decorum to hold the place together, neither are much in evidence. This goes on for hours. And to further discourage either subtlety or reasonableness, the entire event is carried live on television, like the contact sport that it is.

I then described the events of the past 24 hours as I had seen them.

Until recently, the English have not supported war in Iraq — polls suggest that Brits are roughly twice as antiwar as Americans. But Tony Blair has bet everything on this war — a decision that cannot possibly be motivated by a calculus of political gain — there just isn’t any. Yesterday was his day to make the case for war to the British Parliament. It got going about 10 am as Blair met privately with members of the Labor Party, who were in open revolt at Blair‘s decision to align himself with George Bush. Pundits estimated that Labor would vote 2:1 to renounce Bush — to them an anti-European cowboy who has yet to master the mother tongue. Few believed that Blair would be advocating for this war but for Bush and many wondered openly what he had been smoking recently. Three members of his cabinet along with six sub-cabinet ministers had resigned as of yesterday morning, with more expected. Left-wing MPs (and at least two of our booksellers) talked preposterously of prosecuting Blair as a war criminal in the newly launched World Court in the Hague. Blair made it clear that he would not continue without Parliamentary support, although with the Torry vote assured, there was never any real doubt of the outcome of the overall vote.

Blair was still in front of Parliament when the vote came twelve hours later, starting at 10:00 pm last night. His opening speech earlier in the day was a Churchillian tour de force that was replayed endlessly on radio and TV. Knowing that this was an extraordinary leader having what history may judge to be one of his most extraordinary days, I hurried over to Parliament last night after the Book Fair, the seller reception, and dinner. I did not get into the galleys (actually, I am not sure that Parliament has open galleys while in session). There were a couple thousand protesters surrounding the Parliament listening by radio or portable TV. Not one Blair supporter was anywhere in evidence.

I wandered around asking protesters a single question: “why is Tony Blair doing this?”. Most didn’t care — they were pissed at Blair much as most anti-war Americans are pissed at Bush. For others, protesting was a way to add a day to their St. Patrick’s hellraising. Many were principled pacifists. A few suggested that Bush had seduced Blair, at least until I suggested that this would require Bush to be the smarter of the two. What, I asked 20-30 people, was going on?

At about 10:20 pm, vote results emerged. Labor had swung for Blair 2:1 (the press focused naturally on the third of his party that voted against him. This is not irrelevant or trivial, but at the start of the day many did not believe that he would win a majority of his own party).

As the news of the magnitude of Blair‘s victory spread through the crowd, I continued to ask why Blair was risking so much on this war. The answers required that I believe that Tony Blair is idiotic or has been hypnotized by George Bush — something nobody I spoke with really believed was possibly true.

Finally, I asked two college-age women what they thought. “The truth is, Blair has believed for many years that the spread of weapons of mass destruction to unstable countries is a very big, very serious risk” one of them said. She became quiet: “and when I think about what he knows that he cannot tell us and when I see that he is gambling his political future on this, it is very frightening. I am opposed to war on principle — but Blair has just spent twelve hours arguing that war is our duty. This horrifies me and I reject it — but I really don’t have an alternative approach. I am exhausted and frankly, I am not sure what to think”.

As she finished, I realized that the crowd had become quiet. It was like being outside a prison when anti death penalty protesters hear that the execution has been carried out. Everyone suddenly seemed cold and tired — and few were crying. We were going to war.

An extraordinary leader had persuaded his countrymen — and he had persuaded me — that the death of thousands of combatants and noncombatants was both necessary and worthy of a great nation.

I returned home impressed that these times have produced leaders as resolute as Bush and Blair and as prepared to risk their political futures. At at the same time, I was envious that Britain had a leader who could engage his people as well as command them, who could acknowledge the seriousness and even the moral ambiguity of the decision to use military force without weakening his resolve.

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]]> http://jamsidedown.com/2007/05/bds-spreads-as.html/feed 0 http://jamsidedown.com/2007/03/iraq-was-not-cr.html http://jamsidedown.com/2007/03/iraq-was-not-cr.html#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:18:07 +0000 Marty http://localhost/wp_jamside/2007/03/iraq-was-not-cr.html
Regular know of my fondness for Christopher Hitchens, the leftist turned realist by 9/11. My reviews of Hitchen’s books and writings appear here and here. Now, following my post of Michael Totten’s experience in Kurdistan, comes his wonderful reflection on Kurdistan as the Iraq that might have been. Hitch spent his Christmas vacation in Kurdistan with a brief visit to Baghdad and describes it in the current Vanity Fair.

Well, as it happens, I … did spend most of the Christmas holiday in Iraqi Kurdistan, bringing my son along with me, and had a perfectly swell time… We did visit the ancient citadel in Erbil, where Alexander the Great defeated the Persians-my son is a Greek-speaking classicist-and we did sample the lovely mountains and lakes and rivers that used to make this region the resort area for all Iraqis. Air and road travel were easy (you can now fly direct from several airports in Europe to one of two efficient airports in Iraqi Kurdistan), and walking anywhere at night in any Kurdish town is safer than it is in many American cities. The police and soldiers are all friendly locals, there isn’t a coalition soldier to be seen, and there hasn’t been a suicide attack since May of 2005.

Hitchens contrasts his visit with a trip in 1991, when he snuck into Iraqi Kurdistan from Turkey and

"toured the shattered and burned and poisoned landscape on which Saddam Hussein had imprinted himself. In the town of Halabja, which has now earned its gruesome place in history, I met people whose hideous wounds from chemical bombardment were still suppurating. The city of Qala Diza had been thoroughly dynamited and bulldozed, and looked like an irretrievable wreck. Much of the area’s lavish tree cover had been deforested: the bare plains were dotted with forbidding concrete barracks into which Kurds had been forcibly "relocated" or (a more accurate word) "concentrated." Nearly 200,000 people had been slaughtered, and millions more deported: huddling in ruins or packed into fetid camps on the Turkish and Iranian frontiers. To turn a spade was to risk uncovering a mass grave. All of Iraq suffered terribly during those years, but its Kurdish provinces were among the worst places in the entire world-a howling emptiness of misery where I could catch, for the first time in my life, the actual scent of evil as a real force on earth.

His visit thus had the benefit of a contrast that few journalists could make:

Thus, I confess to a slight lump in the throat at revisiting the area and seeing thriving, humming towns with multiplying construction sites, billboards for overseas companies, Internet cafés, and a choice of newspapers. It’s even reassuring to see the knockoff "MaDonal," with pseudo-golden arches, in the eastern city of Sulaimaniya, soon to be the site of the American University of Iraq, which will be offering not only an M.B.A. course but also, in the words of Azzam Alwash, one of its directors, "the ideas of Locke, the ideas and writings of Paine and Madison." Everybody knows how to snigger when you mention Jeffersonian democracy and Iraq in the same breath; try sniggering when you meet someone who is trying to express these ideas in an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas.

This, contends Hitch, is the Iraq that might have been and largely vindicates the Bush I "no fly zone" that enabled the Kurds to fashion an autonomous exisitence.

Thanks to the reluctant decision of the first President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, those fresh princes of "realism," the United States and Britain placed an aerial umbrella over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and detached it from the death grip of Saddam Hussein. Under the protective canopy of the no-fly zone-actually it was also called the "you-fly-you-die zone"-an embryonic free Iraq had a chance to grow. I was among those who thought and believed and argued that this example could, and should, be extended to the rest of the country; the cause became a consuming thing in my life. To describe the resulting shambles as a disappointment or a failure or even a defeat would be the weakest statement I could possibly make: it feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of betrayal from which there can be no awakening. Yet Kurdistan continues to demonstrate how things could have been different, and it isn’t a place from which the West can simply walk away…

In Kurdistan, to take a few salient examples, there is a memorial of gratitude being built for fallen American soldiers. "We are planning," said the region’s prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, in his smart new office in the Kurdish capital of Erbil, "to invite their relatives to the unveiling." Speaking of unveiling, you see women with headscarfs on the streets and in offices (and on the judicial bench and in Parliament, which reserves a quarter of the seats for women by law), but you never see a face or body enveloped in a burka. The majority of Kurds are Sunni, and the minority are Shiite, with large groups belonging to other sects and confessions, but there is no intercommunal mayhem. Liquor stores and bars are easy to find, sometimes operated by members of the large and unmolested Christian community. On the university campuses, you may easily meet Arab Iraqis who have gladly fled Baghdad and Basra for this safe haven. I know of more than one intrepid Western reporter who has done the same…

The approaches from the south are patrolled by very effective and battle-hardened Kurdish militiamen, who still carry the proud title of their guerrilla days: the peshmerga, or, translated from the Kurdish language, "those who face death." These men have a very brusque way with al-Qaeda and its local supporters, and have not just kept them at a distance but subjected them to very hot pursuit. (It was Kurdish intelligence that first exposed the direct link between the psychopathic Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden.) Of the few divisions of the Iraqi Army that are considered even remotely reliable, the bulk are made up of tough Kurdish volunteers…

All of this is terribly inconvenient for Turkey of course, home to most of the world’s 25 million Kurds. More amazingly, a de facto Kurdistan may arise from the ashes of Iraq with almost no additional sacrifice needed by Kurds. All the US has to do is not betray the Kurds a third time.

The Kurds are the largest nationality in the world without a state of their own. The King of Bahrain has, in effect, his own seat at the United Nations, but the 25 million or so Kurds do not. This is partly because they are cursed by geography, with their ancestral lands located at the point where the frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria converge. It would be hard to imagine a less promising neighborhood for a political experiment…

"The state of Iraq is not sacred," remarked Dr. Mohammad Sadik as we drove through Erbil to his office at Salahaddin University, of which he is president. "It was not created by god. It was created by Winston Churchill". Cobbled together out of the post-1918 wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq as a state was always crippled by the fact that it contained a minority population that owed it little if any loyalty. And now this state has broken down, and is breaking up.

The long but unstable and unjust post-Ottoman compromise has been irretrievably smashed by the American-led invasion. Of the three contending parties in Iraq, only the Kurds now have a serious Plan B. They had a head start, by escaping 12 years early from Saddam’s festering prison state. They have done their utmost to be friendly brokers between the Sunni and Shiite Arabs, but if the country implodes, they can withdraw to their oil-rich enclave and muster under their own flag. There is no need to romanticize the Kurds: they have their own history of clan violence and cruelty. But this flag at present represents the closest approximation to democracy and secularism that the neighborhood can boast…

America
ns have more responsibility here than most of us are aware of. It was President Woodrow Wilson, after the First World War, who inscribed the idea of self-determination for the Kurds in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, a document that all Kurds can readily cite. Later machinations by Britain and France and Turkey, all of them greedy for the oil in the Kurdish provinces, cheated the Kurds of their birthright and shoehorned them into Iraq. More recently, the Ford-Kissinger administration encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Baghdad, offering blandishments of greater autonomy, and then cynically abandoned them in 1975, provoking yet another refugee crisis and a terrible campaign of reprisal by Saddam Hussein. In 1991, George Bush Sr. went to war partly in the name of Kurdish rights and then chose to forget his own high-toned rhetoric. This, too, is a story that every Kurd can tell you. However the fate of Iraq is to be decided, we cannot permit another chapter in this record of betrayal. Meanwhile, you should certainly go and see it for yourself, and also shed a tear for what might have been.

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