A review of Iraq Study Group

By Tod Lindberg
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published December 12, 2006

A literary agent once told me that when you are trying to sell a book to a publisher, you should always keep in mind that it's not really the book you're selling; it's the idea of the book. Your objective is to get people excited about what's to come. The finished book, even if it's a very good book, ought to be almost anti-climactic. Otherwise, you haven't managed to get people as excited as you should have in the first place.
In this respect, indeed only in this respect, the report of the Iraq Study Group was exemplary. The idea that a bipartisan council of eminent persons would take an unvarnished look at Iraq and offer their collective wisdom on a fresh approach to extricate ourselves from our troubles was one whose time had come.
In the first place, we have the obvious fact of a policy that isn't working, at least if by "success" you mean a reduction in the violence in Iraq. So what's the new policy?
In the second place, the party of the president of the United States just suffered a big electoral defeat triggered by the perception of incompetence in handling the war. It's therefore a season of comeuppance and accountability, and the Iraq Study Group was perfectly positioned to crystallize the inchoate dissent voters were expressing into a comprehensive repudiation of past policy and the embrace of a coherent alternative.
In the third place, many Americans, including those most vocal in electing a Democratic Congress, want out of Iraq, preferably right now, but in any case sooner rather than later, and not on George W. Bush's indefinite schedule but in accordance with some timetable. Here was the chance to respond to their concerns.
Fourth, and most broadly, the report of the Iraq Study Group was to represent the end of the Bush administration as we know it. At last, a stake would be driven through the heart of what critics see as a naive and messianic mission of democracy promotion. The Iraq Study Group would represent the return of Washington to a sense of realistic seriousness and bring the final curtain down on the neoconservatives.
So, that's why so many people found the idea of the Iraq Study Group to be so exciting. Now as it happens, the "The Iraq Study Group Report" was not like a book deal. It was a book deal: Vintage brought it out. We are accordingly entitled to ask to what extent the anticipation surrounding the release of the report, including the selective leaks of some of its supposed recommendations and the photo portrait sessions for its co-chairs, was in fact manufactured or at least tweaked up by Vintage publicists in order to sell more books.
In any case, now we have our report and um, er, well, it's a flop. Oh, to the extent that it put a powerful wallop on the Bush administration for the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq, it delivered on one of its promises. But, let's face it, we are not exactly short on studies, reports, articles and books admiring the problem. What we are short on is serious proposals about where we go from here, and the more people got a look at the actual recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report, the clearer it became that the ISG didn't have one.
The elements of the report's big proposal for regional dialogue, engagement with Syria and Iran, and reactivation of the Arab-Israeli peace process may or may not be good ideas, but the notion that they would produce measurable results on the ground in Iraq is fanciful. If it is indeed true that the problems of Iraq can be solved only in the context of a broader settlement of Middle East security and identity politics, then that's a just a fancier way to conceive of inevitable failure.
As for the recommendations internal to Iraq, how come nobody before now ever thought of training up Iraqi military and police forces so that they can do more to provide security for the country? Oh, wait, that's already Bush administration policy. And it's hard to imagine that anybody who's seriously against the war at this point will find any satisfaction in a drawdown of forces as partial, contingent and far down the road as the ISG proposes.
As for the return of realism, it turns out realism has nothing much to say. The report is vaguely pro-Sunni and unambiguously pro-Saudi, but it evidently couldn't muster the nerve to say that what we really need is a good, pro-Riyadh strongman to take over the place and cut deals with our special envoy.
Yes, the ISG report will sell a few copies. How could it not, given the buildup? But as for policy, its main effect is to defer withdrawal pressure for a year as Mr. Bush claims to be implementing its bipartisan recommendations. Which means he's still going to have to figure Iraq out for himself. So once again, the reports of his demise have been exaggerated.

Source

The age of PR imperialism

From Afghanistan to Darfur, all the world's a stage for image-conscious statesmen.

By Mick Hume

The 2012 Olympics have apparently been ‘in crisis’ before a high-security brick has even been laid; the London stock exchange – heart of the UK economy – has come under threat of foreign takeover; the health service has been in turmoil (again). So the publicity-hungry leaders of Britain’s political class have naturally raced to make high-profile political statements: that is, they have raced to Afghanistan (Tony Blair), to Iraq (Gordon Brown), and Darfur (David Cameron).

Why can you never find a UK politician when you want one? (Yes, I know you cannot imagine ever asking that, it’s a rhetorical question.) But if you happened to live in one of the world’s high-profile trouble spots these days, you might well think that British political leaders are like London buses: you have hardly seen one, then they suddenly come along three at a time.

Each of the three leaders was making his first trip to the war-torn region concerned. But the coincidence of their visits confirms a well-established rule of politics today: that it is easier to look statesmanlike striding across the world stage than scrambling about in the muddy middle ground of domestic issues.

If feeling in need of a pick-me-up, many people now take a budget flight to warmer climes for the weekend. When politicians feel the need to top up their false tans or authority, they fly off to an international hotspot with a media crew in tow, for a short session basking in the bright lights.

Two striking images were splashed across facing pages of The Times (London) this week. On one side New Labour prime minister Tony Blair was pictured, ‘in navy blazer, casual trousers and black suede shoes’, smiling and talking to members of the crack Royal Marine Commandos in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, ‘the heart of Taliban country’. It was classic Blair – a show of resolution, helicoptering into a war zone to rub shoulders with men in uniform, talking about the Afghan conflict as the frontline in the battle for the future of the free world (and in the process momentarily focusing attention on this ‘good war’ rather than the unfolding disaster in Iraq).

On the opposite page, Conservative Party leader David Cameron was pictured in shirtsleeves, chatting earnestly with African Union peacekeeping troops in Darfur, where the Sudanese government has been accused of supporting genocide, before visiting a camp for civilians displaced by the conflict. That Cameron has not yet got the hang of this globalised gesture politics became clear when he could only describe the situation as ‘quite depressing’ – not exactly Blaire-standard rhetoric. Cameron also had to fly in a private jet owned by the Tory Party deputy chairman, rather than the prime minister’s military helicopter, but Conservative aides were keen to stress that the trip was ‘carbon-free’ because they had planted trees to compensate for their emissions (oak trees perhaps, as seen in the party’s new symbol?).

Revealing an acute awareness of what all this was about, The Times then got three leading spindoctors from the world of communications and PR to give their interpretation of how the two leaders’ trips – or rather, the images they were staged to create – might ‘play’ in political terms at home. One noted that Blair was with the troops in Afghanistan because ‘he needs to convey a sense of purpose about the military intervention and distinguish it from Iraq’. Another suggested that, in a world dominated by ‘symbols and images’, the Blair pictures provided ‘an image that should restate the government’s concerns with global security and statesmanship’, while Cameron in Darfur was ‘an attempt at portraying a clear symbol of a new, caring Conservatism’. The third observed that, ‘Tory leaders traditionally visit the troops and Labour leaders the starving in Africa. What a contrast!’

As party leaders jostle to show their best side on the world stage, it can seem as if foreign policy has been reduced to a photo-opportunity. They are seeking to project a dramatic image of the sort of authority that they find so elusive in the dull world of managerial politics back home. How much easier it is to strike an international contrast between good and evil against the Taliban or genocide in the Sudan, than to try to differentiate the attitude of your party’s accountants towards NHS funding or VAT.

Welcome to the age of PR imperialism, where Western leaders trample across other countries not to capture territory so much as to capture a defining image of their intervention. PR imperialism is not in any way limited to the ultra-PR conscious Blair and Cameron. Even boring old Gordon Brown has caught on, travelling to Africa and now to Iraq in order to look like a world statesman in the run-up to his expected coronation as Blair’s successor.

Darfur has become a particularly powerful magnet for international politicians in search of a dramatic platform. The camps visited by Cameron have previously ‘entertained’ US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor Colin Powell, along with lesser New Labour lights such as Jack Straw and development minister Hilary Benn. One aid worker there was quoted complaining that politicians should ‘go elsewhere and raise the profile of other, more-neglected areas’. But that is not the sort of ‘profile’ these trips are designed to raise.

It is not just that political leaders are cynical. Most of them are no doubt well-intentioned in their interventions. But the moribund state of Western politics continually pushes them to seek energetic causes elsewhere. Over the past two decades, several leaders started out with the intention to focus their efforts on domestic matters, often in contrast to the international posturing of their predecessors or opponents. All soon succumbed to the call of the world stage. It is often forgotten that Bill Clinton’s famous election slogan ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ was meant as a criticism of the amount of time President George Bush senior had devoted to international affairs, supposedly at the expense of America’s own wellbeing. Yet within no time at all, President Clinton had won a reputation as the ultimate global politician/poseur. For his part, Blair came to power on the slogan ‘New Labour, New Britain’. But it was not very long before New Labour’s inability to forge that ‘New Britain’ had Blair turning outwards, redefining his mission as to heal the world.

In many ways, as we have argued on spiked, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were themselves products of PR imperialism; supposedly ‘nation-building’ exercises that were really more about forging a purposeful image for the US and UK states. But such militarised stunts can have grim consequences for those on the receiving end. And the way that Bush and Blair have become bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan shows the problem with trying to make the real world bend to fit a PR consultant’s image of how things ought to look. Darfur appears to be next in line to discover the high price the developing world has to pay for being used as advertising space in the West’s PR imperialism (see Darfur: damned by pity, by Brendan O’Neill).

As so often today, celebrities seem to do these things with more pizzazz than the politicians, whether it is George Clooney crusading for intervention in Darfur or Madonna treating Africa as an orphan in need of adoption. But it’s a similar script, an everyday story of influential folk showing they care for the wretched of the Earth in order to meet their own unfulfilled needs (see Brad, Angelina and the rise of ‘celebrity colonialism’, by Brendan O’Neill).

At spiked we have always been firmly in-interventionist where foreign wars are concerned, believing that Western intervention only creates, intensifies and perpetuates conflicts. Of course, as an alternative to all this we don’t want Western isolationism or ‘Little Englander’ leaders; every politician needs to be more engaged with the wider world. But not as a backdrop against which to strike messianic poses for the international media.

A century ago, the White Man’s Burden was about colonial conquest and imperial domination. Now the burden often seems to be more about carrying enough guns and digital cameras to helicopter in and out again with the right image, usually leaving the ‘extras’ on the ground worse off than you found them. PR imperialism is not a pretty picture.

Mick Hume is editor of spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2120/

Our Orphaned Middle East Policy

Things are looking up as everyone starts jumping ship.
---

It is common now to hear of an American Middle East policy in shambles. And why not, given the daily mayhem that is televised from the West Bank, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the overt threats of Iranian President Ahmadinej(ih)ad?

Somewhere in the Sunni Triangle, with costs mounting in our blood and treasure, the United States lost the last vestiges of that wonderful sense of national unity that had swept the country following September 11. About every week now some administration official seems under pressure to resign or in fact does.

Tell-all books by disgruntled former CIA agents and ex-diplomats lament how the supposedly clueless people in power did not listen to their own Protean expertise. Those who leak from the CIA, an agency with analysts seemingly at war with their own government at a time of war, are hardly considered culpable — so long as their tips were to the "right" newspaper and for the "right" cause.

Former proponents of Saddam's removal and democratization are now unabashedly triangulating — scrambling to be recast as "I warned them" foreign-policy consultants, as they showcase their intellectual wares for the next generation of politicians in 2008. Their support comes and goes, as they wonder whether the good news from Iraq should rekindle guarded approval, or the bad news should reaffirm their belated opposition. Not since the up-and-down summer of 1864 has this country at war seen such equivocating and self-serving editorialists and politicians.

No one pauses to suggest what the region would now look like with Saddam reaping windfall oil profits, 15 years of no-fly zones, ongoing corruption in Oil-for-Food, the bad effects of the U.N. embargo, Libya's weapons program, and an unfettered Dr. Khan. If a newly provocative Russia is willing to sell missiles to Iran's crazy Ahmadinej(ih)ad, imagine what its current attitude would be to its old client Saddam.

Or perhaps, as in the 1980s when over a million perished, our realists, who seem fond of such good old days of order and stability, could once again encourage an unleashed Saddam, with Uday and Qusay at his side, to be played against Iran for a (nuclear) round two. How sad that those who once fallaciously argued that the fascist Saddam was the proper counterweight to the fascist Iran now ignore that the genuine corrective is a democratic and humane Iraq.

A few retired generals smell blood, want to even old scores, and have demanded Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation. They earn not the usual condemnation from liberals for intruding into the gray area around our hallowed civilian control of the military, but praise for their insight and courage — as if speaking out on in retirement is especially brave or calling for radical change at a time of war is always wise. That they are usually Army officers long furious over military transformation is left unsaid — as is the irony that Iraq will largely be saved by the skill of their brethren U.S. ground officers currently deployed.

Scholars under the rubric of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, not the American Conservative magazine, publish a pseudo-scholarly treatise about undue Jewish influence that resulted inexplicably in a disastrous tilt in American policy toward the only liberal society in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, we are faulted for "outsourcing" the problem of Iranian nuclear ambitions when we let the multilateral Europeans take the lead in talks with Tehran. And we are then condemned as itching for more "preemption" and "unilateralism" when we sigh that at some point someone may have to act to prevent Mr. Ahmadinej(ih)ad from arming his missiles. This is a psychopath, after all, who assures those on the West Bank of his love and support by promising to send a nuke soon in their general direction. I suppose Hamas thinks that 50 kilotons can distinguish east from west Jerusalem.

But if we look beneath all these self-serving contradictions, real progress amid the carnage since September 11 is undeniable. It is not just that the United States has not been attacked again. Al Qaeda's leadership has been insidiously dismantled. Even bin Laden's communiqués are increasingly pathetic, whining about lost truce opportunities for the Crusaders while warning of more welcomed genocide in Darfur. We can be sure of his war-induced attenuated stature when some on the Left are already suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were mostly the operations of just a few criminals rather than precursors to international jihad.

Some European governments that were patently anti-American — Chirac's in France or Schroeder's in Germany — are either gone or going. The European public no longer thinks that the threat of Islamic fascism was mostly something concocted by George Bush after 9/11. American supporters in Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom were returned to power. Finally a parliament is meeting in Iraq. There have been open elections in two regions of the Arab Middle East. In one place, terrorists were voted in; in the other place — the much more criticized one — terrorists are being hunted down.

Hamas wanted power; the Americans didn't interfere, and they got elected. Now they can galvanize their people for their promised war against Israel (that they will lose), or they can find a way to evolve from thuggery to governance — it's their call. It is not the decision of the United States, which, after fifteen years, is finally freed from subsidizing West Bank terrorists masquerading as statesmen.

It is a fine thing for all to see the once swaggering gunmen now on television appealing for daily cash from suddenly stingy Middle East benefactors, as Hamas whines that Fatah is in Israel's hip pocket and decries militants who shoot without government authorization. Democracy, not more autocracy, exposed that absurdity.

Middle Easterners wish that we would be humbler, that we would let more Arabs into the United States, that we would not lecture them so, that we had not used force to remove Saddam, that we did not seem so self-righteous when promoting Western democracy, that we could express our intentions in a more sympathetic and articulate fashion. It is true that at critical junctures we did not explain ourselves well, and did not apprise the public candidly here and abroad about the range of poor options that confronted this nation after September 11.

But aside from these complaints, the people of the Middle East for the first time are watching on television a voting parliament in Iraq — and what sort of killers are trying to stop it. They know that oil skyrocketed and that the petroleum of Mesopotamia was not appropriated by the United States — and that huge windfall profits in the Middle East are still not likely to trickle down their way. They also accept that China in the Middle East cares only for petroleum, Russia only to cause others trouble, and Europe mostly to talk.

Those in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, as elsewhere in the Arab world, want closer, not more distant, relations with the United States. Ever so slowly the Arab Street is grasping that the more its own governments are angry at us for prodding them, the more it is a sign that we are on the right side of history.

As for the Iranian crisis, the only peaceful solution, given Russian meddling and Western fear over oil prices, may be through the emergence of democracy in Iraq, which would then galvanize dissidents in Iran. Anyone who rules out force in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions should support unequivocally the democratic experiment in Iraq.

For all the scrambling to disown the present policies, the irony is that they are bearing fruit and always had the best chance to end the region's genesis of terror. How sad that those who supported the costly spread of freedom are written off as illiberal, and those who resigned themselves to the easy status quo were seen as wise and sober.

So there we have it: an orphaned policy with a bright future that is being claimed by fewer and fewer — we'll see if that changes when Iraq emerges as a stable democracy.

A Footnote

I spent recent days recovering from emergency surgery for a perforated appendix in a Red Crescent clinic in Libya. I owe a great debt to the skill and confidence of a general surgeon, Dr. Ayoub, who was roused at 3 A.M., and saved me from a great deal worse, along with Dr. al Hafez who offered his medical expertise and care that allowed me to get back to California. Throughout all this, I did not experience a shred of anti-Americanism, but instead real kindness from Libyans from all walks of life. There is sometimes perhaps hurt and confusion over America's intentions — but also grudging acknowledgement that for the first time in memory there is real hope for something different, something far better in the future of the Middle East.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.


Source

Hopeful Signs in the Middle East

Weekly Column

Something extraordinary happened on March 1st: a New York Times editorial had some nice things to say about President Bush. For those who don't know, Times editorials have been reflexively hostile, the type that mumble, "Bush's fault. Volcanoes, mosquitoes, paper cuts - all Bush's fault.'

That's why it was such a surprise to open my paper and find the following:

"[T]his has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power."

Why is there so much hope among policy makers currently? Freedom, it seems, is on the march.

Many pundits doubted that elections were possible in Iraq and called for a postponement until the security situation could be improved. But U.S. and Iraqi leaders concluded that before we could bring peace to the country and turn its security over to its own people, we would have to let the Iraqi people establish a government that they could truly call their own.

Once given the opportunity, Iraqi voters turned out in large numbers to select their leaders. So far, the sober work of the newly elected officials is refuting the notion that Arab culture is incompatible with democracy. Time will tell, but the signs are hopeful.

Due to the passing of Yasser Arafat, and during the run- up to the Iraqi elections, on January 9th the Palestinians held their first elections since 1996. The resulting parliament seems to be committed to negotiating peace with Israel, attacking corruption, and establishing a competent government.

In Lebanon, the assassination of an opposition leader brought a broad political coalition out in the streets to demand that Syria end its decades-old occupation of that country. The pressure became so intense that the Syrian- dominated government resigned. Lebanese citizens and the international community are saying clearly that it is time for Syria to get out so the upcoming Lebanese elections can be held without interference.

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak has agreed to allow opponents to run against him in the upcoming presidential election. Previously, voters were only going to be allowed to vote "yes" or "no" to Mubarak's continued rule. Nobody expects Mubarak to change the rules enough to make it possible for him to actually lose, but growing numbers of Egyptians are looking at the elections in Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere, and are saying, "How about us?" It's a healthy development.

Under pressure from the U.S., and with the Iraqi elections as a backdrop, Saudi Arabia's feudalistic monarchy is holding a series of municipal elections. Everybody agrees that this is just a start, but one that was long overdue.

Given the relentlessly autocratic history of most of the Middle East, even tentative advances for freedom in the area are important. Once the people of the Middle East feel that they can influence their governments through peaceful means, they will be less likely to produce extremists who express themselves through bombs and bullets at home and abroad.

Source