Keep in mind that excellent reporter Tish Durkin is a pro-war hawk:
Bitter Baghdad Seeing Disaster As Rebels Rise: ...the team that America has sent to put to the Herculean task of building Iraq a democracy is basically divided between those who realize that they have no idea what is going on outside their gates, and those who don’t realize that they have no idea what is going on outside their gates.
Unfortunately, one of the things going on outside their gates is that Moktada al-Sadr has become a man to be reckoned with. Right now, there is undoubted and valid official debate as to the particulars of that reckoning: having been branded a criminal, should he be treated, within that definition, as a serious political adversary or a punk? Is his influence apt to spread or wane? Is his power best killed outright or left to wither on the vine?
It is to be hoped—but should not be assumed—that at least one participant in this debate has met someone who has met someone whose mother has a cousin who knows Moqtada from a frittata. But you can bet your bottom dinar that no one is asking: Why is there so much rabble for this kid to rouse? Why, a solid year into America’s self-congratulation on having removed the brute oppressor of the Shi’ite majority, does an at-least-unsettling segment of that majority have the time and the inclination to go forth and menace? Didn’t anyone get the memo that, when you take over a country that is bursting with unemployed and angry young men, it’s just not smart to leave them with nothing to lose?
Here is where the official explainers will explain, as they explain so well: This isn’t as easy as it looks; these problems are much more complicated than they seem; these are matters for the Iraqis to decide; and the all-time favorite, it takes time. Granted, in the abstract, these explanations sound eminently fair. But if you go someplace like the Al Rashid army camp, you can see the degree to which they are not explanations at all. They are excuses, and lame excuses at that.
The camp is located near downtown Baghdad, about four miles from the Green Zone, and occupies an area of five square miles. Under the old regime, it was one of the largest army camps in Iraq; it housed, according to an Iraqi Army officer who used to live there, over 200,000 soldiers. I can’t say what condition the buildings of the camp were in when the war ended, but I can say that the year since has not been kind to them. To this day—a year after the free-for-all of plunder that was first unleashed on Baghdad with the fall of Saddam—the camp is being looted.
This is too bad, because Baghdad could have used those buildings. The city has a housing shortage so acute as to have spawned squatters everywhere; abandoned ministries and houses and power stations are filled with the ranks of the evicted. Its citizens have gotten used to the fact that on the rare occasions when criminals are arrested, they are often released in a matter of days, if not hours, in part because there is no place to put them.
The camp could have served as part of the solution to any number of enormous and enormously pressing social problems. Instead, it is serving as an illustration of such a problem: lawlessness set free.
Actually, it probably isn’t right to say that the camp is being looted, for this is to give the picture of a bombed, burned-out or otherwise pre-ruined building being scavenged by desperate people for whatever fixtures or foodstuffs they can grab. The scene at the Al Rashid, which plays out every day, is both much crazier than that, and also much more systematic. On the day that I visited, in the first week of April, the buildings had long since lost their windows and doors and contents. But there was still looting to be done, and with great industry and ingenuity, thousands of workers on self-appointed deconstruction crews were doing it. Brick by brick, men, women and children were taking down walls and putting them in piles that eventually went into large, professional-quality dump trucks, so as to be sold for profit. They were digging trenches to reach and remove electrical cables, piping and sewage lines. In one quadrant of the huge site, children with shovels were cheerfully destroying the foundation of what had been a military hospital. In another part, a man with a jackhammer was destroying a perfectly good roof to get at the lucrative reinforcement bar within.
As images from Iraq go, this one at first didn’t seem so bad. It wasn’t humanity being dragged through the street. It wasn’t a crowd of protesters fleeing gunfire. It wasn’t a police station set afire by suicide bomb. What it was, though, was something that is, for those who care about Iraq and who want to be proud of America, heartbreak of another kind. It was, in a word, waste. Such waste. Waste in the form of opportunity lost, in good will ungained, in ideas not entertained, in common sense sent out for lunch. However desperate these people may have been, they and their fellow looters had done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of long-term damage for the sake of pocketing an infinitesimal fraction of that amount. For those hundreds of millions of dollars—actually, far less—the camp could have been guarded, the buildings could have been reused, and Iraqis such as these looters could have been offered jobs. And don’t think that the Al Rashid camp is some wild exception. In Baghdad these days, it is much more like the rule.
It could have been different. It should have been different. And if the lights were on and somebody were home in the future-of-Iraq department, it would have been different.
What Robert Novak writes invariably has a random relationship to the truth--it may be true, it may be false, you just don't know. But I've heard enough from people in the security community to believe this story is largely accurate:
Posted by DeLong at April 16, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postDavid Rennie in Washington: America's top commander in Iraq has warned Washington that he will not be "the fall guy" if violence in the country worsens, it emerged yesterday, as word leaked out that US generals are "outraged" by their lack of soldiers. America's generals consider current troop strengths of 130,000 in Iraq inadequate, reported the columnist Robert Novak, a doyen of the old-school Right in Washington.
Gen John Abizaid, commander of Central Command, told his political masters earlier this week that he would ask for reinforcements if requested by the generals under him. His words overrode months of public assurances from the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and other civilian chiefs that more troops are not necessary. As violence flared across the Sunni triangle and the Shia-dominated south of Iraq on Wednesday, Mr Rumsfeld indicated that troop numbers would be bolstered at least temporarily, by leaving in place units that had been earmarked to return home as part of troop rotation, while still sending replacements. But officers who will not speak out in public let it be known that major reinforcements might be impossible to find. US forces are so overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan that "there are simply no large units available and suitable for assignment", Novak wrote in his column in The Washington Post.
The leaks have revived memories of the bitter debate that raged in Washington in the run-up to the Iraq war, as uniformed chiefs clashed with Mr Rumsfeld and his aides, who predicted that US forces would be welcomed as "liberators", allowing troop numbers to be reduced rapidly. Relations between the uniformed military and the Pentagon's civilian chiefs are currently worse than at any time in living memory, Novak wrote, citing a former high-ranking national security official who served in previous Republican administrations.
Many still in uniform bitterly recall the public dressing-down earned by the then army chief of staff, Gen Eric Shinseki, when he told Congress a month before the invasion, in February 2003, that "several hundred thousand troops" might be needed to occupy Iraq. That estimate was slapped down as "wildly off the mark" by the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Thomas White, the army secretary and a former general himself, publicly backed Gen Shinseki. Mr White was sacked shortly afterwards by Mr Rumsfeld. A new account of the war, In the Company of Soldiers, reveals that in May 2003 Pentagon planners "predicted that US troop levels would be down to 30,000 by late summer [of 2003]"...
THE STATE OF THE ECONOMY is looming, as it always does, as a key issue in the presidential election. The Democrats are hammering President Bush for some 2 million jobs "lost" during his tenure in office, and for the sluggish rate of job growth during the current recovery. These attacks appear to have struck a chord with the public, eroding the president's approval rating and elevating the jobs issue to a central role in the campaign.
President Bush, of course, can make a good case in his own behalf. His policies, he argues, especially his tax cuts, have put the economy on a path to recovery. The economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip in 2003, and independent forecasters are expecting growth of 4.5 percent in 2004. Last week the Labor Department reported that the economy created 308,000 new jobs during the month of March, the most since April 2000. This new report suggests that the expansion which began two years ago is beginning to generate large numbers of new jobs.
If we consult history and long-standing patterns of voter behavior, there is every reason to think that the economy is going to work strongly to the president's advantage (see chart). But will those patterns hold true this year?
Of course the economy is not the only issue that decides presidential elections. War and peace, and foreign policy crises of various kinds, have frequently been decisive as well. In 1952 and 1968, for example, the interventions in Korea and Vietnam were the key issues ...
Or not.
Industrial output just dropped.
It might be a dead cat bounce.
Posted by: Matthew Saroff on April 16, 2004 02:47 PMAdrian Spidle - "(see chart)"
What chart?
If you’re going to cut & paste provide your source.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Check.asp?idArticle=3954&r=xwmuf
(You’re not plagiarizing are you Adrian?)
Adrian, you're beginning to suffer from what I would call the "Mike Syndrome." This comment is only tangentially related to the post and obviously lifted from somewhere else. I mean this as a bit of friendly advice from a fellow conservative (a minority on this site), because you're obviously intelligent and interested in what's being said.
As a rule of thumb, your opinion on the issue at hand is much more interesting than a copy-and-paste of a post from freerepublic.com. And don't forget to be civil. Nobody likes to listen to someone with an axe to grind.
All of this said, I think that whatever happens in the next two weeks will determine whether or not the situation in Iraq is irreparable. It does seem clear that the country doesn't have the social or institutional infrastructure for a republic that is both democratic and free. A best-case scenario would probably be some sort of benevolent dictator that nudges the country in the direction of Turkey or Morocco. A worst case would be a failed state. But either way, the nonexistence of institutions that can resume sovereignty worries me.
If the US manages to restore order in the next couple of weeks, it would send a signal that we're willing to pay the cost to prevent a failed state. Currently I'm a little bit skeptical that we'll succeed but I sure hope that we do. This is what I think that Bush's reelection chances will depend on. Many of us have supported the war contingent upon not making a hash of things now.
The real lesson of Vietnam for many conservatives was not that war is always a bad thing. It was that war requires a total commitment to victory. It's a classic time-consistency problem.
Regarding the economy, what Democrat hasn't run against an incument on the economy in the past 72 years? Mondale ran on the economy, in an expansion nonetheless. Dukakis ran on the economy well into the same expansion. Clinton ran on the economy in an expansion and won anyway. I think that it's an interesting view into the self-image of the party--it's still pretty much the party that was shaped by the Great Depression, while the Republicans seem to have been shaped by the counter-counter-culture of the 1970s.
Personally I'd give Bush a C on economic policy and an incomplete on foreign policy. If Iraq stabilizes, an A- or B+. If it doesn't, a C. My expectations for Kerry would be a D and a C+, respectively. These are the two major candidates?!
Posted by: Chris on April 16, 2004 03:38 PMDon't blame the military for the mess in Iraq. The mess in Iraq is the fault of the politicians.
The CIA told the politicians, "Don't disband the Iraqi army."
The US military told the politicians, "Don't disband the Iraqi army."
The British military told the politicians, "Don't disband the Iraqi army."
The British politicians told the Bushies, "Don't disband the Iraqi army."
What did the politcians do? They disbanded the Iraqi army.
A force that could have been used to maintain order is now fighting against us and against order.
Who thought it was a bright idea to move against Sadr? Who shut down his newspaper? Who asked the military to go after him? The POLITICIANS.
Who wanted the military to go into Falloojah? The politicians.
The politicians are making unreasonable demands of the military while failing to uphold their end of the bargain.
The #1 goal of the politicians is to establish order. The military is only good at killing people and destroying things.
Iraq is a prime example of what happens when politcians go off half-cocked. There is a limit to how much damage the military can fix. Kerry is correct. Stabilize Iraq and go home.
The former Baathists are going to run the Sunni triangle whether we want them or not. The Shia are going to run the South whether we want them or not. The Kurds are going to run Kurdistan. The trick is to leave Iraq with a balance of power such that they cannot genocide each other and will be dissuaded from waging war against each other. Our military should not be policing their turf. The politicians need to take a page out of the ways the LAPD manage rival street gangs. The best we can hope is to prevent another Yugoslavia.
Why are we spending $80 billion / y? We should be able to buy the place for less than $10 billion / y.
Posted by: bakho on April 16, 2004 03:43 PMChris, what i don't understand is how any true conservative can think of bush as anything but a failure, even in the areas you give him (potentially) good marks in. Right-wingers? Sure, there's not really a political philosophy underlying the modern right-wing, merely hatred of all sorts: hatred of taxes, hatred of liberals, hatred of the other.
But i digress.
But what conservative would think that there was a true causus belli in iraq? what conservative would think that iraq had a meaningful relationship to the struggle against islamic fundamentalist terrorism? what conservative would support a government that was actively hostile to the informed opinion of the military leadership? what conservative would have believed the utopian vision of cakewalk/liberation/down to 30K troops by september? (side note to prof. delong: actually, that 30K number isn't recently discovered (as Novak) wrote, Zev whatever his name, Rumsfeld's numbers whiz, testified to this in front of congress in summer, 3003).
Now, i think your opinions about kerry are wrong too - given that he's been on record for quite a while as favoring more boots on the ground and more international involvement, the positions that bush is now, effectively, embracing, it's hard to see how you can grade him lower than your worst case Bush scenario - but the real issue, chris, is why honest conservatives have any truck with george bush any more.
Seriously, what's your argument for giving him a good grade if we merely return to the number of attacks and american being killed that obtained in march?
Posted by: howard on April 16, 2004 03:54 PMChris: you "supported the war contingent upon not making a hash of things now." I cannot understand why.
No one thought it would be very difficult to overthrow Hussein. But everyone thought that there was insufficient realistic planning for the post-war period, including the point made by Bahko. What led you to think that before the war President Bush had a Plan B to avoid the current situation, if we were not welcomed with candy and flowers?
Posted by: masaccio on April 16, 2004 04:17 PMOxymoron heard on NPR this morning -
"Impose Democracy"
It was by an announcer, but the mindset it shows is informative. By it's very nature, democracy can not be imposed on any society. It has to accept it.
rbb
Posted by: MobiusKlein on April 16, 2004 04:25 PM"Impose Democracy" does sound a little deranged, doesn't it? But we frequently heard similar phrases used during a certain war in the Sixties. (Or, as Dwight Macdonald paraphrased them: "YOU, over there. You be free! You hear me, boy?")
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on April 16, 2004 05:20 PMHere is an interesting followup question.
Was there a moment after 9/11 when the American voters would have approved of a formal declaration of war on terror, a shift of the national economy from peace mode to war mode, and say a fourfold increase in the American armed forces?
I suspect so, but I have a high level of faith in our willingness to make a large-scale committment when challenged - if 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor then a 1941 style response could well be expected.
The followup is, of course, would the American voters accept such a declaration of war, change in the economy, and increase in the military today, in April, 2004?
If not, then at what point did the window for a massive national commitment close, and why did it close?
Americans are all for military action and we stand behind our troops. However, the best military and the best military tactics are pointless if they are not backed by a sound political process.
Let's go back to the Civil War for an example of how the political process worked at the end of the war. The terms of surrender Grant gave to Lee at Appomatix allowed former soldiers to take mules and go home and plow. Sherman later gave even more lenient terms to Johnston, was almost cashiered by the politicians and had to re-nogotiate tougher terms. Sherman's greatest fear was that the Confederate army would not surrender, but would dissolve into the countryside and fight as partisans. Having fought in the Seminole Wars and aware of the havoc soldiers like Forrest could create, Sherman was not anxious to repeat that exercise on a grand scale. Thus Sherman gave lenient terms. There was no punishment of soldiers or jail time or banishment from ever serving in the reconstruction that followed.
Compare that to what we did in Iraq. Prior to the US invasion, the politicians openly declared there would be regime change and openly declared that no Iraqi soldiers or Baath Party members would have a future in the new Iraq. Commanders of the army were put on notice (decks of playing cards) that they were subject to arrest and imprisonment. Knowing these conditions, the Iraqi army did not surrender, they faded into the countryside to fight as partisans. This is not the fault of the Generals, it is the fault of the loud mouth arrogant politicians.
As for regime change, it could take place in an orderly or an unorderly fashion. Most coups start by declaration of martial law. Daily life is kept as normal as possible so the population will have no cause to complain or rebel. The regime change in Iraq was accompanied by chaos, disorder and anything goes looting. The strategic bombing that spared crucial infrastructure was vastly damaged by the looting that followed. Iraq proved how easy electrical grids can be crippled.
Rummy's comments in response to the looting were entirely inappropriate and demonstrated his lack of understanding of the political process needed to secure a military victory. Military victory is only secured if political order can be restored. Inadequate force was sent to Iraq and the force structure was not correct. There were way too few MPs and soldiers trained in civilian control. There was no plan to swallow the Iraqi army and make it our own. There was no plan to swallow the Iraqi police force and put it under US control. The military objectives were met. Few of the political objectives that could have supported the military effort have been met.
In the Civil War, slaves that were freed as the Northern Armies passed through were directed to areas where they could farm or find employment. The most fit young men were hired by the army as Pioneers to construct the roads and bridges the army needed to march through South Carolina. They were not given carte blanche to loot and pillage and little damage was done to the infrastructure of the South (except for that done deliberately to destroy support for the armies).
Compare what went on in Iraq. There was a complete failure to restore law and order in much of the country. The US force was inadequate for the task and the politicians failed to acquire available in country assets or international assets that could have quickly restored order. Maintaining order that is already established is a much easier task than trying to impose order on chaos.
The US military has performed admirably in Iraq. Our politicians have failed them.
Posted by: bakho on April 16, 2004 07:58 PM"If not, then at what point did the window for a massive national commitment close, and why did it close?"
It's hard to say exactly when. My willingness grew less as the administration used 9/11 to sell a pre-9/11 agenda (tax cuts, gutting environmental legislation) and proposed, on a flimsy pretext, war against Iraq. My willingness died completely with the failure to prepare the nation for the war and its costs. It's hard for me to take the war talk seriously when the budget is a party-time, tax-cutting orgy. War should be national effort. Best I can tell, servicemen and women are bearing the brunt of it, while the home front cashes refund checks. The "war president" might talk war, but he walks corporate.
Posted by: Batavicus on April 16, 2004 08:20 PMChris wrote, "Adrian, you're beginning to suffer from what I would call the 'Mike Syndrome.' "
ROTFLOL!
Ted K. wrote, "Was there a moment after 9/11 when the American voters would have approved of a formal declaration of war on terror, a shift of the national economy from peace mode to war mode, and say a fourfold increase in the American armed forces?"
What makes you think that an efficient waging of the War on Terror would require a quadrupling of the armed forces?
Even if one were to agree that the WOT would require certain nasty operations (e.g., assassinating Al Qaeda leaders), this isn't a job for armed divisions, with the one exception of Afghanistan.
Special forces, CIA covert missions, blah blah, that stuff sounds plausible, but millions of soldiers? It's not that kind of war, unless you plan on taking it to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Posted by: liberal on April 16, 2004 08:35 PMVis a vis the Iraq "looters", jackhammering roofs to get at cables:
What is the marginal value of shelter in Iraq? What is the marginal value of cable?
This could easily be arbitrage rather than sabotage; this could be rational allocation rather than the "worst administration ever." (It could also be both; but it is the economist in me rather than the partisan that prompts me to post.)
Posted by: kingjl on April 16, 2004 11:38 PMKingjl ... I am sure you nor I know anything serious about the flow of future rents from that specific building in Iraq, but you will agree that it would have to be very low to be less than the salvage value of the construction materials and fittings, where the latter is measured net of the labor spent on the de-construction: in other words, this is still looting and this is still the worst administration in history. Even the perfect loyalist David Brooks (NYT of 4/17/2004) is getting nervous.
Posted by: John M on April 17, 2004 03:18 AMBakho-- good post. But that is exactly why I opposed this war. I believed that the occupation would be exactly the mess we are in.
Part of the problem is that Bush lied about reason for the war. If he had been honest,
he could now go to public and say we need the resources to do the job. But because he did not prepare the public for the reality of what the occupation would be he can not now tell the public the truth of what it will cost. So now he is left with no option but to cut and run.
Your grade of a C on the economy is about right.
But the grade on Iraq has to be an F, and that is only because I cannot give it a lower grade.
Posted by: spencer on April 17, 2004 06:47 AM"...the team that America has sent to put to the Herculean task of building Iraq a democracy is basically divided between those who realize that they have no idea what is going on outside their gates, and those who don’t realize that they have no idea what is going on outside their gates."
There are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns.
You'll find Lord Rumsfeld rewriting history again, when he blames the current situation in Iraq on the Joint Chiefs 'failure' to ask for more troops in a timely fashion, as he did last month, only confirming Rumsfeld has a bad case of the Alzheimers. "I have no recollection of that." Although, I heard from those who may know that Reagan in fact HAS recollections of his era and many other things, but that his handlers are skillfully keeping him away from the media.
Do you suppose the next president after Bush will seal Bush-era records indefinitely also? Do you suppose Rumsfeld will retire after Iraq and write a memoirs that completely de-constructs and absolves himself of all responsibility?
Isn't this sorta like the dark side of the moon?
Doesn't your mouth feel like it's full of worms?
Is it the taste of the crypt, or the only food that poor people will soon be able to afford?
"Why is there so much rabble for this kid to rouse?" How can one hope to answer this question without considering the actions of Iraq's neighbors. Here's Iraqi blogger Sam:
"Regional countries which do NOT like to see free Arab state are many and involved directly. This includes of course, Syrian Bathist Regime, Saudi Wahabist, Wahabist in other Gulf and Arab states including Jordan and Egypt, Iran especially Khadem Hairi group which support MS [Muqtada Sadr] and other states to some extent."
http://hammorabi.blogspot.com/ (April 9, 2004)
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