Globalclashes

The shit and the glitz

When you see Christopher Hitchens become dull and conventional, you know that something is out of whack. Is it just me or are those two, Hitchens and Alterman stuck in 2002? I think that the trouble with liberalism is that it is a lot like love in the sense that few liberals dare to question it because it is both intoxicating and addictive. Baudelaire was lamenting in two centuries ago that he was bored in France because everybody resembled Voltaire, I am bored right now because everybody resemble these two thoughtful people who are stuck, passez moi l'expression, in their own shit, which wouldn't be too be bad if they still had an imagination.

Pacifism and Over-simplifications

Roger Cohen in his column writes:

Remember the Wehrmacht? It was a formidable fighting force. The modern German army, the Bundeswehr, is also very effective. Thing is, it is reluctant to fight or even place itself in danger.

[…] Some of this counterinsurgency toll is the work of U.S. and other special forces in the separate American-run Operation Enduring Freedom — the more secret of the Afghan campaigns. Still, NATO is at war here.

That, however, is a fact Europeans are reluctant to accept, just as the link between slaughter in Madrid, London or Amsterdam and the Afghan-Pakistani terror nexus seems unconvincing to many Europeans floating on an Iraq-comforted wave of moral smugness.

[…]  One German retort I’ve heard is that it’s no good having the United States demand that its allies fight and die in southern Afghanistan when Washington refuses debate over the role of its pampered friend, Pakistan, in the violence.

That’s a fair point. Still, it’s time to bring on the Bundesmacht and past time for continental Europe to overcome its pacifist mirage and accept that these are dangerous times demanding serious defense budgets and sacrifice.

Well, what else is there to say after reading that? The problem with Cohen is again that one gets the impression that history is destiny and that there is fundamentally wrong with Europe because it has been so many times on the wrong sides of history. I think that it is shameful always to come back to World War II when one needs to slam the Germans and the Europeans for what is perceived to be at best pacifism and at worst cowardice. I believe that it is impossible to dissociate Afghanistan from Iraq and then not to focus on the central issue, which is one of American leadership. Europeans didn’t become Europeans yesterday, and yet the world didn’t come explode and the west managed more or less well to stay united. To me, the issue is therefore not what not the Europeans are not doing in Afghanistan, but why the Americans are unable to use Nato effectively in that region of the world and to lead. Maybe the proper answer to the Afghanistan situation is that in spite of Merkel and of the Sarkozy’s revolution, Europeans don’t trust the American’s leadership because there is a competence crisis. My guess is that for all the glamorous images of the reconciliation between American and Old Europe, things will remain at a stalemate until the next US administration.

Fischer, Iraq, and anti-Americanism

Joschkar Fischer gave an interview to Spiegel in which he talks about his time as Germany Foreign Minister under Schröder. Fischer revisits the reason why Germany chose not to support the Iraq War. He makes convincingly the point that the decision had nothing to do with anti-Americanism, but more to do with a concern that America was taking on more than it could chew. Sugary excerpt:

It wasn't a quarrel. The chancellor sent me to Washington on Sept. 18, 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. I met with several people there, including President George W. Bush and (then Deputy Secretary of Defense) Paul Wolfowitz. There was talk of 60 countries that were supposedly supporting and funding terrorism. After that I became deeply concerned that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were next in line. I thought it was a big mistake from the very beginning. A horrible government was in power in Baghdad, but I was convinced that this should not be at the center of the response to this crisis.

[...] Schröder said that no matter what the United Nations Security Council decided, we would not be part of it. This sidelined the German position of abiding by the Security Council's decisions. And it put us in a tight spot. As fate would have it, we became a member of the Security Council on Jan. 1, 2003. There was also the risk that we would end up having to oppose all of our Western partners. If Russia and France had agreed to the war, we would have joined Syria as the only naysayers. […] We were truly in a bind. I made it clear that if we were isolated I would not be a part of it, and that I would resign. But for Schröder it was clear that he had given the German public his word during the campaign, and that he couldn't back down now. It would have forced him to resign.

[…] In my view, we couldn't have let ourselves be isolated in the end. There would have been some damage on the domestic political front, but we would have come to an agreement. The truth is that it became much easier for us once Paris and Moscow had taken a clear stance, the right stance. While we're on the subject, allow me to set something straight. It was repeatedly claimed that there was an anti-American axis. That's nonsense. We and the French were deeply concerned that the United States was biting off more than it could chew in Iraq, and that it was taking a fatally wrong step. We told ourselves that we could not afford a weakened United States. The concern was that the United States would ultimately leave behind a vacuum that neither the Europeans nor anyone else could fill. That's precisely the situation we are in today.

Then Surrender Monkey, now girlie Cowboys

David Chandler apparently has something against France and Bernard Kouchner. In his most recent article, he argues that France has become more gun-ho than the United States. However that in this case, Kouchner’s and France’s readiness to whack Iran is nothing more than bravado for they know full well that they won’t be the ones doing the whacking. Sugary excerpt:

In fact, the foreign policy pronouncements of the new French government of Kouchner and Sarkozy have striking parallels to that of Blair and his foreign minister Robin Cook’s incoming Labour government in 1997. Kouchner, like Blair before him, is able to make grand statements of foreign policy mission in the knowledge that responsibility will have to be taken by someone else – the United States.

For Kouchner and the new French Sarkozy government, it appears that US problems in Iraq and divisions over Iran are an opportunity to stake a claim of French leadership. Like Blair’s approach to the Kosovo crisis in 1999, this activist foreign policy depends on the fact that the US has already talked up the threat and is the only country with the capacity to carry out the threats that are made by others.

[…] Kouchner’s confidence in taking a warlike stance over Iran stems from irresponsibility rather than responsibility. Free from any final decision-making - or any substantial military role if there is a conflict - Kouchner’s warmongering rhetoric can only increase the tensions in the region, further destabilising the relationship between the US and Tehran. Rather than a moral or ethical stand, Kouchner’s position seems both craven and parasitical, both exploiting the US position and willing to risk thousands more lives in a region already torn apart by Western grandstanding.

Chandler is partly right to argue that France believes that they can take advantage of the Iraq war to become a bigger force on the international scene. However, something deeper is going on here that has everything to do with the ways mighty powers use force for the argument that Kouchner made by talking about using force wasn’t a Idealist argument, but a Realist one. He implied that there might not be any other way to solve the Iranian crisis than war and this fact makes diplomacy unnecessary for any compromise would be unacceptable. Charles Bremmer tries to explain to France’s new tough approach and has an interesting answer:

Unlike President Chirac, with his sanguine view of a multipolar world, Mr Sarkozy believes that the biggest international danger at the moment is the threat of a confrontation between Islam and the West. In his first big foreign policy speech he said: "We would be wrong to underestimate the possibility of this happening: the affair of the (Danish) cartoons of the Prophet was a warning sign of this."

If Bremmer is right, then the rest of Sarkozy’s term will be anything, but annoying for he seems to believe into tough talk, but the question is whether he is ever going to be willing to do something that looks bad on camera and that makes him unpopular such as taking the initiative in the name of his vision of the world to take action alone or rather alone with the United States.

Kouchner and the return of idealism

Bernard Kouchner has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune in which he explains why he went to Iraq and what France wants to do in Iraq. He writes that France wants to be a mediator and to help the Americans succeed in Iraq not only because America is France’s ally, but also because it is in the interest of France to do so. Sugary excerpt:

What can France do to help this ravaged country recover hope? First, it can be modest. No one imagines that we have a magic formula. But as one Iraqi official said when I asked him what France could do, "It can offer a fresh look." Another official added, "Restore our self-respect."

Everyone knows that France did not support the coalition's intervention in 2003. Although the invasion ended a brutal dictatorship, the methods used to build a secure and democratic Iraq have failed. It is time to start anew. There can be no lasting military solution to this crisis. The solution has to be political. The Iraqis themselves, including those most hostile to the American presence, may not want the foreign troops to leave immediately, but a withdrawal must nevertheless be planned, in consultation with the Iraqi authorities. At the same time, a broad-based government of national unity must be established. France is prepared to act as mediator in this endeavor.

Yes, France can help to provide a fresh look. It can do so because it did not take part in the 2003 intervention and because it is bound to Iraq by longstanding ties of friendship and because it has a broad spectrum of contacts with all of the country's communities. And it can do so because we are the allies - sometimes troublesome, as true friends are - of the Americans.

I wonder if France can really help the US in Iraq by simply serving as a mediator and whether mediation can be effective in this case given the fact it would probably view suspiciously since it is instigated by another Western country. I like and respect Kouchner very much, but I think that his time as foreign minister will at least tell us whether idealist rebels can make good foreign ministers especially in times when inaction may be less dangerous than action, but still objectionable. On the subject of Kouchner, he had to apologize to Al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, for calling for his ouster in an interview in Newsweek.

France is always guilty

I’ve read several articles on Bernard Kouchner’s visit to Iraq and too many of them show a worrying trend, which is a stubborn and illogic insistence that France or rather Chirac’s France doomed the Iraq war. The argument is that because France was opposed to the second Iraq war is divided the West, which crippled the war effort. I know that it is hard to follow but the point that many article are making is that Sarkozy is rectifying Chirac’s mistake, which was not only to refuse to participate in the war, but to weaken the western alliance for anti-American reasons when France’s participation would have made Iraq a success story. In the New York Post for example, Amir Taheri writes the following:

ONE key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct foreign-policy mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent Iraq's liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

Sarkozy's moves to correct the mistake started before his election, when he met President Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac's policy as "arrogant."

The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s.

In the Times of London, Bronwen Maddox continues the same line of argument by stating that,

Kouchner’s arrival follows the corncobs-and-hamburger informal summit between George Bush and Sarkozy. It shows that Sarkozy intends to put clear distance between himself and his predecessor Jacques Chirac, even on the most sensitive subject of Iraq, where Chirac had broadcast to the world his satisfaction at having foreseen the US’s predicament.

[…] What is there for France in involving itself in Iraq? A lot, given that it has no need to take responsibility for the outcome. It stands to gain the step forward on the world stage which Chirac had been seeking by opposing the Iraq invasion, wanting to set up France as an alternative pole to that of the American superpower. At that time Kouchner was a rare French voice in at least tolerating the invasion, calling his fellow officials “America-phobic”.

Chirac succeeded in shrinking support for the invasion to a devastatingly slender column, but the strategy then backfired.

The instinctive deep support for the US from Central and Eastern European countries, and at the start for the invasion itself from Italy and Spain, isolated him in his antiAmericanism, with his lone companion Gerhard Schröder, then German Chancellor. Both have been replaced by pro-US leaders.

Grandstanding aside, what can France contribute? It is helpful to have a country other than the US, Britain, or Iraq’s immediate neighbours, try to seek out common interests among Iraqis. US attempts to broker a deal are inextricably bound up with its urgent desire to reduce troops; the pressure on Bush – and his successor – is visible to the world.

I’m not buying it. I think that a lot can be said about Chirac and France’s refusal to participate in the Iraq war. It is possible to say that the French suspicion toward American power played a role in Chirac’s decision to say no to war. However, to focus merely on that is to offer a partial account of history for it is to say that France was solely responsible for the Iraqi crisis, which led to the war in 2003 and that Chirac had no other motives, but to want to hurt the American effort in Iraq. The point is that Chirac even if he may have right for the wrong reasons was right and that Sarkozy and even Kouchner never dared to say that they were in favor of the war in Iraq because they couldn’t defend it by simply arguing that the opposition was America-phobic. I agree that Sarkozy is signaling that he isn’t Chirac and that he indeed believes that he sees the world as divided between the West and the rest meaning that he would rather be wrong, but on the side of Bush than right, but on the side of the side of the rest of the world. That fragmentation of the world worries me. It is a reaffirmation of the so-called clash of civilizations, which implies that the West and the rest of world are so different that it is always preferable to be on the side of those who shares your values and your “blood” than to be on the side of those who don’t share those values and have a different culture. In other words, allegiance is absolute no matter the issue and no matter right and wrong. I don’t agree. The world isn’t divided between the West and the rest. Moreover, America is larger than the West because it is the symbol of the extraordinariness of human potential. I believe that the world needs America not just to stand there and to survive, but to be itself: to be good and to continue to be idealistic and to believe in difficult and sublime dreams. America isn’t just a country. It is a grand and sublime idea, which is that anything, even the impossible can happen with hard work and good deeds. It is for that reason that I thought that Chirac and Villepin went too far in expressing their rightful opposition to the war, they forgot that America was larger than the Bush administration and its childish rhetoric on French surrender and old Europe.

A French Doctor in Iraq

Bernard Kouchner, France’s Foreign Minister made a “surprise’ visit to Iraq yesterday. Although the visit doesn’t astonished me given the recent intimate meeting between Bush and Sarko, I still wonder what must the French diplomatic officials who were there during the 2003 Iraq crisis must be thinking. Charles Bremner, the Times of London’s Paris correspondent wrote the following about Kouchner’s visit:

Under Mr Chirac, Paris refused Iraqi requests to train the security forces and invest in reconstruction and it sought a firm timetable for the US retreat.

France, which once had close ties to the Saddam Hussein regime, has been criticised by the Iraqi Government for giving priority to its relations with Sunni leaders. [Emphasis added] Paris now wants to balance this with closer links with the Shia Muslim and Kurdish leaders who control the government, according to Dr Kouchner's aides.

Dr Kouchner has long had a friendship with President Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish President of Iraq and has also established a relationship with Adel Abdel Mahdi, the Shia Vice-President.

France is also keen to restore its influence in a region in which it has long been one of the main diplomatic powers. The opening to Iraq is matched by a new dialogue with the Hezbollah opposition in Lebanon.

Bremner seems to imply that Chirac said no to the Iraq war because he was close to Saddam Hussein and that to me is a rewriting of history. Anyway, I think for me the more important question is what will Kouchner and more importantly Sarko will do next. I wonder if they will go beyond symbolism to express their support for the failing Iraq enterprise. The most striking thing about the new French diplomacy is that it is implicitly erasing whatever marks Chirac and Villepin (who was the Foreign Minister at the time) made by making what many consider to be their only real accomplishment, that is their opposition to the Iraq war, something passé and that no longer matters. It is funny how rapidly a page can be turned in international relations.

The use of private armies

James Meek has a review of Jeremy Scahill’s The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The book is about the increasing use of private armies by some governments including in messy conflicts about its implications by focusing on a firm, Blackwater, which provided the US with some private soldiers in Iraq. Meek argues that Scahill’s book is incomplete because it fails to address important questions:

Even within the confines of Scahill’s theme, there are frustrating omissions. He writes about how much higher the daily pay of Blackwater guards in Iraq is than the pay of regular US troops, and the staggering sums Blackwater as a company is paid by the US government. But he fails to analyse the more difficult and more important issue about the money: is the government getting extra soldiers on the cheap, or not? The cost of a long-service professional soldier is reckoned not only in his daily pay but in how much it costs to train him, the cost of lifetime medical care (whether he is injured or not), and the cost of his pension if, as many do, he retires in his forties. Blackwater and other mercenary firms don’t pay to train their recruits: they hire ex-military men, and if there’s extra training, the recruits pay for it themselves; nor do they offer the same health and pension benefits as the military.

The most unfortunate thing about Scahill’s book is the way that, in serving its narrow subject, it manages to make the careless, callous US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq sound like a vicious plan that partly succeeded, rather than a monument to political incompetence such as the world has rarely seen.

Making a good point on Blair

Julian Baggini has a great post on Blair and his justification for the war in Iraq. It is worth reading because as always Baggini looks at this issue from a different perspective:

So, Blair’s point is that if we allow the brutality of the resistance of baddies a reason not to confront them, we actually end up treating people better the worse they are. And that’s kind of crazy.
Except that, of course, you can’t just ignore that factor either. You don’t try to take on a nuclear armed North Korea, because it would be catastrophic if Kim Jong-Il retaliated. So, actually, in a strange way again, sometimes, if someone gets too bad and powerful, you do have to back off.

Fukuyama and the end of history

Francis Fukuyama writes in Haaretz about the history of his famous book, “The End of History and the Last Man.” He tries to untied the bond that many have made between his argument for there is no alternative for a modern society than free markets and a democratic political system and the Bush foreign policy, which has emphasize the need to spread democratic to the world especially to the Middle East. He writes that he never argued that there was a universal desire to live in a liberal society and that he never argued that every country would end up having an American model of social or political organization. He also asserts that America should use his military to spread democracy. Sugary excerpt:

To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care and education they lack at home.
But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society - that is, a political order characterized by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is indeed something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernization.
Moreover, the desire to live in a modern liberal democracy does not necessarily translate into an ability to actually do so. The Bush administration seems to have assumed in its approach to post-Saddam Iraq that both democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which societies would revert once oppressive tyranny was removed, rather than a series of complex, interdependent institutions that had to be painstakingly built over time.

The problem that I have with Fukuyama is that I have the impression, which could be wrong, that he waited until the Bush Foreign policy became a disaster to take his distance with the neocons and with their ideology. I have the feeling that had Iraq been a success, Fukuyama would be taking credit for the ideas that led to it by arguing that his book was the catalyst behind them.

Outrage and impotence

Brendan O’Neil argues that the current hostage crisis in Britain just shows how impotent the war in Iraq has made Britain since all that the British can do is to watch their 14 captured seamen paraded on Iranian television and to be outraged at the evilness of Iran:

The Iranian captive crisis has provided some striking snapshots of Britain’s standing: its isolation post-Iraq; the emptiness of its foreign policy; a view of the military as victimised, vulnerable. The affair shows Britain is the loudmouth of international affairs - it talks big, but it lacks the strength or coherence to back the talk up.

What I wonder is whether Blair’s weakness isn’t having a negative impact on the situation in the sense that the Iranians knows that he doesn’t have the support of his people and that he is his way out and cannot therefore afford to make the mistake of confronting him. One of the biggest drawbacks of having an impotent leader at the top of an important such as Britain is precisely that they can’t deal with any crisis or with any international issue precisely because their interlocutors have no faith in their ability to keep their word and to act.

American power after Iraq

Joseph Nye imagines in the essay American Foreign policy after Iraq and argues that it will neither go back to a narrow realism and remain within the new unilateralism, which based on the erroneous assumption that “the unipolar distribution of power in the military context was sufficient to guide foreign policy." The most important point of Nye's essay is the following, which he makes at the conclusion of his article:

The paradox of American power is that the world’s only military superpower cannot protect its citizens by acting alone.

Should we start writing an ode to the glory of the multipolar world?

Compassion fatigue, action, and mass killings

Paul Slovic attempts to explain why people ignore mass killings. He argues that it is harder to react and to act when killing happens on such a large scale as it does with mass killings. Sugary excerpt:

The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It’s not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human beings. In fact, the opposite is true. Just look at the extraordinary efforts people expend to rescue someone in distress, such as an injured mountain climber. It’s not that we only care about victims we identify with—those of similar skin color, or those who live near us: Witness the outpouring of aid to victims of the December 2004 tsunami. Yet, despite many brief episodes of generosity and compassion, the catalogue of genocide—the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur—continues to grow. The repeated failure to respond to such atrocities raises the question of whether there is a fundamental deficiency in our humanity: a deficiency that—once identified—could be overcome. […]When writer Annie Dillard was struggling to comprehend the mass human tragedies that the world ignores, she asked, “At what number do other individuals blur for me?” In other words, when does “compassion fatigue” set in? Our research suggests that the “blurring” of individuals may begin as early as the number two.

Slovic is right, I wonder if scale is a more important factor in the setting in of compassion fatigue than distance that is whether one feels that the mass killing can endanger one’s own life. In other words, I wonder whether the silence or rather the manufactured and inactive outrage expressed by most about what is happening in Darfur can be explainable not only in the fact that hundred of thousands are dying by also that they are dying in Sudan, a country that is located away from most of them and that is at the center of a continent used to poverty and to mass killings. The Iraq war is still defendable not because there aren’t Mass killings, but because there exist American interests. Defenders of the Surge and of action even though it is unclear whether it will stop the killing can argue for the mass killing in Iraq should be stopped by the use of American troops, because the war in Iraq is in some way about America’s safety and the mass killings may happen in American streets.

Darfur and Iraq : Genocide, civil war and military intervention

Mahmood Mamdani argues in a provocative that there are many similarities between Darfur and Iraq and the only difference is that one conflict is named Genocide and the other a Civil War. Mamdani's argument is that the naming of these deadly conflicts has to do with politics  because genocide is a" label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies." In other words, the US and others are less risk averse when it comes to Iraq and are willing to intervene because the perception is that the civil war can be stopped while they are most risk averse when it comes to Darfur because a genocide is harder to stop and to police. In other words,:

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

Hillary and Apologies

The New York Times has this excellent article on Hillary and apologies, which show that she can apologize, but she is also caught up in the fact that she has to be tough, which is a point that I have made several times. The two best quotes from the article come from Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown:

1. “In politics, people demand an apology from an opponent in order to humiliate them.”
2. “We’re a very macho culture, and I think every woman in public office has to find her path to negotiate that. […] To the extent she’s a woman and has to prove she’s tough, standing her ground is the best thing to do. And to the extent she’s a woman and people don’t tolerate toughness in women, she’s going to be faulted for that.”

Intellectuals and Iraq

Gustav Seibt argues that the many intellectuals who supported the Iraq war were not only arrogant, but also didn't care about Iraq. He writes that those "intellectuals hawks" were focused on the wrong issues such as pacifism, anti-Americanism, and appeasement instead of addressing the overriding issue of what the war meant and what it was going to be its consequences. Sugary excerpt:

Most of those behind the war – the exception being Herfried Münkler – didn't even concern themselves with Iraq, international law, the chances and risks of a war in the Middle Eastern context. The vast majority of arguments for the war were drawn from European experience of the last two or three generations. Thus, one wrote about the overriding issues such as pacifism and anti-Americanism, appeasement and anti-Semitism, rather than addressing the thing itself.
First and foremost was an attempt to draw broad historical analogies. The fall of Saddam, a desirable enough goal, was compared directly with the fight against Hitler, the democratisation of Iraq with the democratisation of West Germany and Japan after the Second World War and the chance for democratic change throughout the entire Middle East was compared with the end of the East bloc and the quick establishment of civilian democracies afterwards. But virtually nobody had anything to say about the actual domestic situation in Iraq today.

One of my favorite French philosophers André Glucksmann was for the war in Iraq because it believed that the world could no longer accept the taking of hostage of a whole population by a dictator such as Saddam Hussein. Glucksmann based its support on the idea that le droit d’ingérence that is the right that the world has to intervene even with force to stop an injustice. Glucksmann still supports that idea because he believes that the status quo in too many parts of the world, particularly in Chechnya, is unacceptable and the Iraq war was right because it got rid of Saddam and gave Iraqis a chance to seize control of their future. For many intellectuals such as Glucksmann, stability, and peaces based on injustice cannot work in a world, which has know 9/11. It is because Glucksmann believes in action that he has declared his support to Nicolas Sarkozy because he believes that the left doesn’t understand the world has evolved and changed and that sometimes it is necessary to strike without overanalyzing or accepting to compromise with dictators such as Putin while people die because they were sold out in the name of peace and stability.

The escapism of Bush bashing

Gerald Baker wonders whom his critics will blame for the sorry of the world when Bush is gone. Baker writes that Bush bashing is just a convenient way for Europeans and Americans politicians to escape the fact that he isn't responsible for everything, to take on some ownership of the current reality by coming up with real ideas to deal with the mess in Iraq, Iran and in Afghanistan. Sugary excerpt:

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes.

D'Souza and Abu Ghraib

Dinesh D’Souza makes me laugh because I don’t think he believe in what he says. Here is what he has to say about Abu Ghraib and “the Muslim world”:

Now we are in a better position to understand the Muslim reaction to Abu Ghraib. Most Muslims did not view it as a torture story at all. Muslims were not outraged at the interrogation techniques used by the American military, which are quite mild by Arab standards. Moreover, many Muslims realized that the most of the torture scenes in the photographs—the hooded man with his arms outstretched, the prisoner with wires attached to his limbs—were staged. This was simulated torture, not real torture.

The main focus of Islamic disgust was what Muslims perceived as extreme sexual perversion. For many traditional Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring. In the Muslim view, this perversion is characteristic of American society.

Moreover, many Muslims viewed the degradation of Abu Ghraib as a metaphor for how little Americans care for other people’s sacred values, and for the kind of humiliation that America seeks to impose on the Muslim world. Some Muslims argued that such degradation was worse than execution because death only strips a man of his life, not of his honor.

D’Souza likes to use the expression “sexual perversion” because to him that is what liberalism is all about and because it helps him to make the case that in fact liberalism are responsible for everything including Abu Ghraib because the torturers in Abu Ghraib were just imitating liberal behavior. I wonder what makes D’Souza an expert on liberalism and on Muslim society.

Peter Galbraith and the surge

Peter Galbraith critiques the surge in Iraq and argues that it is a way for President Bush to avoid admitting defeat in Iraq by just punting away the ball to the next president:

President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

[...] At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure. But it is also a reckless escalation of the military mission in Iraq that could leave US forces fighting a powerful new enemy with only marginally more troops than are now engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency. The strategy also risks extending Iraq's civil war to the hitherto peaceful Kurdish regions, with no corresponding gain for security in the Arab parts of the country.

Blair and denial

Marina Hyde compares Tony Blair unfavorably to Baghdad Bob and argues that he has lost touch with reality. Blair is going away and it seems to me that the harder people pound Blair when he is so close to the end, the more difficult it becomes to see the whole picture. Is it possible to argue that Blair's political career is going to be summarized in one word: Iraq? I don't think that it will be.

Bunkers and reality

The Guardian has an excerpt of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book about the Iraq War, “ Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” It's a fascination reading. Sugary excerpt:

Unlike almost anywhere else in Baghdad, you could dine at the cafeteria in the Republican Palace in the heart of the Green Zone for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread, or a lamb kebab. The palace was the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American occupation administration in Iraq, and the food was always American, often with a Southern flavour. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food.

None of the succulent tomatoes or crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. US government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations. Milk and bread were trucked in from Kuwait, as were tinned peas and carrots. The breakfast cereal was flown in from the US.

Goode is bad

I think that there is just one thing to say after watching this video and that is : unbelievable!

Did John Howard win the argument?

Greg Sheridan argues in the Australian that John Howard's won its tit for that with Obama. He writes that by slamming the American presidential candidate, Howard was able to show to strengthen his security credentials at home and to make the point that Obama's position is wrong. Sugary excerpt:

The week began with an unusually vigorous attack by Howard on the position of the junior US senator from Illinois, Obama, that the US should withdraw its troops from Iraq. By saying that al-Qa’ida would be praying for an Obama win, Howard was in substance correct, but needlessly undiplomatic.

However, the consequences are not great. There will be five minutes of annoyance by congressional Democrats with Howard and then the whole thing will be forgotten.

In the very unlikely event that Obama becomes president and the equally unlikely event that Howard is still Prime Minister, some months later, say mid-2009, the two men will smile, grip, embrace and praise each other with all the customary enthusiasm. In the meantime, the Bush administration was very happy with Howard’s remarks.

Getting to Know Muqtada al-Sadr

Patrick Cockburn has a fascinating portrait of Muqtadar al-Sadr in the Independent. It's an essential reading to understand his rise to power and why he has become a threat to the United States. Long sugary excerpt:

Yet the source of his power has remained a mystery to the US and many Iraqi politicians. Few men have been so consistently underestimated. He is not a great orator, nor does he have huge charisma. His movement has limited resources. Until recently, his militiamen were unpaid and provided their own weapons. He does not have a powerful foreign backer. In spite of US efforts to link him to Iran and claim that he has fled there, he and his movement have traditionally been suspicious of the Iranians, and they of him.

The real source of his vast influence among the Shia of Iraq - the Sunni see him as orchestrating the death squads that have killed so many of them - is that he promulgates a blend of religion and nationalism that they find deeply attractive. He comes from the deeply revered Sadr clerical family that provided so many martyrs under Saddam Hussein. Some American commanders may wonder if it is wise for the US to pick a fight with a religious leader regarded with cult-like devotion by millions of Shias. They may also reflect that he is not just popular with the poor masses of Shia Iraq - his picture also hangs on the wall in many Iraqi police stations and army barracks. Some of these will be the very people on whom US and Iraqi commanders will rely in order to regain control of Baghdad.

It is impossible to explain Iraq today without understanding the reasons behind the astonishing rise of Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement in less than four years. Muqtada appears to have come from nowhere. In reality, he is heir to a social and political movement with a history that stretches back almost half a century. In addition, he could not have become so powerful so fast had he not come from a family that provided some of the most revered leaders of the Shiah clergy in their long and bitter struggle with Saddam Hussein.

Picking a bone with Obama

The New York Post is finally able to identify what is Barack Obama's first blunder of his young presidential campaign. It has something to do with his response to the attack of Australian Prime Minister John Howard against his plan for Iraq

Hillary, Nuance, and Iraq

Conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton should renounce her vote for the Senate resolution to use force in Iraq in order to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008. Conventional wisdom in this case is wrong. Hillary Clinton cannot and should not renounce her vote because doing so would not make her unelectable but rather unattractively calculating. It may be hard to the Democrats to hear this, but nuance is good for it is precisely the lack of nuance, which lead the United States in the position in which it is today in Iraq because it fails to see the nuance between militant and radical Islam and Saddam Hussein. So when I heard Hillary’s answer in New Hampshire to a question, which asked her to renounce her vote on the vote without nuance, I was relieved that she didn’t take a bait, which she cannot afford to take. It is important to remember that Hillary cannot win in Iraq and she will never be able to satisfy true believers on either side, which will regard either a late conversion on the absolute condemnation of the war or a conditional support for the US presence in Iraq as a betrayal and as a proof that she is too careful and too manipulative. However, the truth of the matter is that Hillary’s biggest challenge isn’t to convince true believers that she is with them on Iraq, but rather to convince Americans that she can be Commander in Chief and thus, defend the United States against its dangerous and ruthless enemies. She cannot start this long and strenuous process to become a woman capable of being Commander in Chief by apologizing for using force in Iraq. Hillary’s model in this case shouldn’t be Gandhi, but Golda Meir. Golda Meir was able to be the Prime Minister of the State of Israel in one of the most critical time of its history because she convinced Israelis that she was always going to err on the side of their safety and never flinched when the time came to strike. Of course, instinct and judgment are vital qualities for a Commander in Chief, and I happen to believe that nobody can argue that Hillary’s instinct and judgment are the same as the ones of President Bush. I believe that those who aren’t going to vote for Hillary because of her views on Iraq were always going to find reasons not to vote for her so she shouldn’t worry about them. She shouldn’t despise them, but she should be resolute and says what she believes and asks them to respect her opinion and to vote their conscience as she did when she voted yes on the war resolution.

Shi'a, Sunnis, geopolitics, and history

Fred Halliday argues that the current sectarian strife between Shi'a and Sunnis is more geopolitical than religious and historical. Sugary excerpt:

[…] there are many analysts or propagandists who resort to the notion that this sectarianism is a "deep structure", reflecting a latent atavism that has long underlain the politics of the region. The implication is that the overt violence of 2006-07 involves the emergence to the surface of deep and ever-present, hatreds. (Similar arguments about "ancient ethnic hatreds" were heard repeatedly in the context of the wars in Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland).

However, another analysis is more persuasive. This sees the Sunni-Shi'a conflict as essentially a recent development, a product of the middle-east political crisis in recent decades and, in the case of Iraq, of the spiral of violence released by the United States invasion of 2003. In this perspective, the origins of the conflict - and more generally of the Arab-Persian conflict - lie not in ancient hostility and grievance, but in the modern history of the region; in particular, the ways in which the twin revolutions of Iraq (1958) and Iran (1979) set in motion rivalry and insecurity between states and peoples that exploded first in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, and again, inside Iraq, from 2003.

Hope spring eternal

“The big disappointment to me, well, it’s not the only one, but of the Iraq expedition was I hoped, I still do, that getting rid of a totalitarian slum next door, mainly with a Shia population, would have a positive effect by producing democratic ferment on Iran. And by the way, I think in the long run, that’s not a totally futile law or a romantic belief.” Christopher Hitchens.

Lack of Understanding of Iraq

USA today has an editorial on what it argues is the US lack of understanding of Iraq before and after the war. It focuses on the testimony of Paul Bremer, the former head of  Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in which he admitted some mistakes without admitting the most important one, which that he had no idea what he was doing.

Democracy and war

“[…] democracy is not the best way to end civil war. What is needed now in Iraq is assurance of two things: first, the country's territorial integrity; and second, the basic establishment of the rule of law. Neither is easily achieved through democracy. Democracy tends to come after establishing the rule of law and after achieving territorial integrity. They have the cart before the horse in constantly holding elections.” Ian Shapiro.

Feingold and the end of the war

Russ Feingold, the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, is arguing that Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq and I have to admit that I don’t find his arguments convincing for two reasons:

1. Congress cannot win a struggle with the Bush administration when it is not united and after years of the Bush administration asserting its authority to fight its war on terror by using pretty close to any means necessary.
2. Bush has too much to lose by letting Congress win this fight, which will make it a fight to the death since he knows that losing it would mean the end of his presidency. Moreover, very few politicians are willing to risk their future, which they believe involves a stay in the White house, to end Bush’s war and to assume the consequences of what may ensue. Feingold is going to remain virtually isolated unless something happens on the ground, which angers Americans and forces not only to be against the war, but also to be for its immediate stoppage.

The Neocons haven't changed

Francis Fukuyama makes the point in an article in the Guardian that the Neocons have learned nothing from the last few years. How could they since there was nothing wrong with their policies, but only with the way they were implemented and with the people who implemented them?

Blankley and defeat in Iraq

Tony Blankley has succeeded in his editorial  in taking fearmongering to the next level by making the following point:

If we are going to throw in the towel, then we should bring the troops home promptly, lick our wounds and prepare for the inevitable Third Gulf War, which we will have to fight under far worse conditions than currently. Either option is at least honest (although the latter is dangerously foolish).
But the current mentality in Washington -- to pretend that there is a third way between victory and defeat -- is morally despicable. Washington politicians of both parties are trying to salve their consciences for the ignominy of accepting defeat by fooling either themselves or the public into believing they are doing otherwise.

The only question that I have is if the US is fighting in Iraq just not to lose or to avoid a Third Gulf War, hasn't it already lost?

Defending Jane Fonda

PZ Myers defends Jane Fonda over at Pharyngula. He makes the following point, “Jane Fonda was exactly correct on the Vietnam War; we should not have been there, we shouldn't have thrown away tens of thousands of American lives in that futile, destructive effort.” I think that Jane Fonda knows that she doesn't have anything to gain by marching or speaking against the war and that she does it not only because she believes that the war is wrong, but also because she is an informed activist. It is easy to dismiss her as part of loony left, but even when one doesn't agree with her points of view or find them outrageous, they are well thought out and based on information not just ideology.

Self-interest is for suckers

“The 11th Commandment for liberals seems to be, "Thou shalt not intervene out of self-interest." Intervening in civil wars for humanitarian reasons is OK, but meddling for national security reasons is not. This would explain why liberals supported interventions in civil wars in Yugoslavia and Somalia but think being in one in Iraq is the height of folly. If only someone had thought of labeling the Korean conflict a humanitarian intervention back then, we might not face the horror and the danger from North Korea today.” Jonah Goldberg, “Fight Today or Occupy Forever.”

Dangerous illusions

“Few politicians want to be known as spokesmen for retreat. Instead we hear such words as "redeployment," "drawdown" or "troop cap." Let's be clear: If we restrict the ability of our troops to fight and win this war, we help the terrorists. Don't take my word for it. Read the plans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman Zawahiri to drive America from Iraq, establish a base for al-Qaeda and spread jihad across the Middle East. The terrorists are counting on us to lose our will and retreat under pressure. We're in danger of proving them right.” Liz Cheney, “Retreat isn’t an Option.”

Overcoming the scars of war with love

The best article of this Sunday, in my opinion, is in the Times of London about the love story and between Ty Ziegel, a marine who suffered severe burn in Iraq, which destroyed his face and an all-American girl who just marred him. Moving story:

Ty gets headaches sometimes, but he just takes an aspirin and gets on with it. In hospital he saw soldiers and marines with fewer injuries than him behave more self-pityingly. “Anger has a lot to do with the person,” he says. “I’ve seen guys who had no complaints, really, act pretty pissed off.”

Ty has a plastic skull now, and the old one is still stuck in his insides. He taps the side of his waist, where there is a slight bulge. The lump of bone will be removed one day but he is in no hurry to undergo another operation. There will be plenty of those ahead: he hopes the sight in his blind eye can be restored, though he doubts he is going to rebuild his nose – it involves too many awkward skin grafts.

In Metamora, people know him well enough not to stare a lot, but he gets plenty of looks elsewhere. Mostly he shrugs it off. “I give people the benefit of the doubt. If you were me, I might look at you.” If they are particularly rude, he will turn and say: “So what were you going to ask me?”

Understanding the world and governing America

“I don’t think he understands the world. I don’t think he’s particularly curious about the world. I don’t think he reads like he says he does.” John D. Rockefeller, Democratic Senator from West Virginia.

Cutting and Running

“It is over. What we need to face now are the consequence of the folly of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice in launching this unnecessary and unprovoked war, the folly of the neocon snake oil salesmen who bamboozled the media into believing in this insane crusade to bring democracy to Baghdad in the belly of Bradley fighting vehicles and the folly of the Democratic establishment in handing Bush a blank check for war out of political fear of being called unpatriotic.” Pat Buchanan, “See the Superpower Run.”

Bush, Kalashnikovs, and Iraq

Spiegel has one of the best articles, which I have in Iraq in a while, titled, “Checking the Kalashnikov Index” which has some incisive analysis on what has come to be know around the world as “Bush’s war.” Sugary excerpt:

A lot of things are scarce in Iraq these days, and the resource that is among the most difficult to find is Amal, Arabic for "hope." Indeed, as the country sinks ever deeper into chaos, there is only one business that continues to boom: the weapons trade. The daily fluctuating price for arms, know here as the "Kalashnikov Index," is considered by many Iraqis as the most reliable indicator of what the future may bring.

On Thursday morning, only hours after US President George Bush once again promised America would help bring peace and stability to the war-torn nation, Baghdad's weapons prices weren't dropping. Glock-19 pistols were stable at $500 and the popular compact version of the AK-47 was still fetching $2,000.

The politics of good and Evil

I just read Michael Medved's post on his blog and the following paragraph caught my attention:

Moreover, has the left so utterly lost touch with reality that they believe that Bush is a criminal mastermind who willingly slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of his own countrymen just to get a few plum contracts for his pals? I know that many liberals honestly believe that Bush is incompetent, stupid, deluded, dangerous, a religious fanatic, and so forth, but how could they believe this nonsense that he cynically led us into an utterly pointless war just to make a few bucks? Nothing in his background suggests personal greed or shady-dealing for money. In direct contrast to his predecessor, Bush came from a privileged background and never needed to scramble for bucks. Of all the scandals his enemies have tried to attach to him (youthful drug use, draft dodging, drunk driving, frat boy partying, and so forth) none of them involve financial wrongdoing.

What! Why does any of this matter? Politics isn't about whether Bush is good or bad, but about ideas, policies, and their results. The argument isn't about who Bush is and his motives are, but about what whether what he is doing is working., whether the  war, the surge are good ideas. Medved is purposely confusing, avoiding the issue, to talk about what he is more conformable talking about and that is about culture wars and the facts that some Americans aren't real Americans. That's the reason why he is focusing on who Bush is as a way to say that it doesn't matter what the does, because on the contrary to the loony left he is a good and patriotic American. He is on the right team and therefore results don't matter. However, we know that it isn't true and to use a football analogy, we know that no matter how good a quarterback is, what matters is whether he leads his team to victory.

Iraq and politics

“We discovered that we were not fighting a military campaign, but a political campaign -- not too different from what a small town mayor might do to win reelection back in the U.S. . . . Fighting terrorists was only something we did when needed, because it interfered with our political objectives. If we could ignore the terrorists, we were winning. If we had to stop our economic and political activities in order to fight terrorists, they were winning.” An Army Officer in Iraq.

Bush and Hegel

Scott McLemee answers the question of whether President Bush would be considered a great man in the Hegelian sense of the term. Hegel believed that great men were the ones who were slaves to their passions, which lead them to follow nothing else, but their objectives. The question is whether by choosing stubbornly to seek victory in Iraq, President Bush is entering the circle of great men or blind and foolishly proud creatures. In other words, is Bush, Hannibal a great tactician, or Oedipus a man so in love with an illusion that he cannot see anything else? I think that the answer to this question will depends on he result of his policy for after all, greatness isn’t measure is by the intensity of one’s passion, but rather by the deeds, which that passion drove one to accomplish. Sugary excerpt:

Above all, the World-Historical leader must be single-minded. He is, as Hegel explains, “not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower – crush to pieces many an object in its path.”

War and fantasy

“To listen to Bush's speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.” Juan Cole, “Bush Sends GIs to his Private Fantasyland.”

Iraq fatigue

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of Iraq being a political issue when it is clear that it is anything but that. I heard President Bush's speech tonight and I thought what else is new! I guess America is going to have to wait another six months or another year for the President to do the right thing and to face the reality that that Iraq isn't a military problem and that more troops won't force Iraqis to stop hating each other and the people they consider invaders, occupiers or infidels. How did we get here?

A good debate

Those clips are excerpts of a British show called Question Time, in guests such Martin Amis and Ruth Kelly (Britain’s Education Minister) answered questions from the audience about Iraq and other important matters. Watching I thought it was a good and more importantly a constructive debate, unlike those which are prevalent in American TV where guests always end up shooting at each other and talking past each other.

Ted Kennedy on the Surge

“I've said that my vote against the war in Iraq is the best vote I've cast in my 44 years in the United States Senate, but no matter what any of us thought then, the Iraq war resolution is obviously obsolete today. It authorized a war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, but there were no WMDs to destroy. It authorized a war with Saddam Hussein, but today, Saddam is no more. It authorized a war because Saddam was allied with al Qaeda, but there was no alliance. […] In everybody's reality except the administration's, Iraq is now in the middle of a civil war.” Ted Kennedy at the National Press Club.

The truth about Hawks and Doves

Abhi at Sepia Mutiny has written a good post, which explains why haws always seem to get their way during a conflict.

Crimes against humanity and Saddam

“[…] the decision to charge Saddam Hussein with crimes against humanity was morally and legally justified. Nevertheless, the process fell short of what is needed to invoke the transcendent norms of universal justice. This was a profound failure. As with the other shortcomings of Iraq's government, many players were at fault here: the Americans for failing to provide security for the Iraqis, including the defense team; the Iraqis for failing to get the trial - or the country - to run smoothly; the international community for sanctimoniously disengaging.” Noah Feldman, “Not the Case.”

The answer in Iraq isn't less, but more ruthlessness

“Our past errors were not so much dissolving a scattered Iraqi military or even de-Baathification, but rather giving an appearance of impotence, whether in allowing the looting to continue or pulling back from Fallujah or giving a reprieve to the Sadr militias.
So, yes, send more troops to Iraq — but only if they are going to be allowed to hunt down and kill the vicious and sectarian in a manner that they have not been allowed to previously.” Victor Hanson, “Stasis or Victory?”