John, you ignorant slut . . .

Let me just point out, once again, that supporters of the occupation who argue that the U.S. should stay to prevent a worse state of affairs want to contradict the will of the vast majority of Iraqis for their own good.

I think it’s important to be very clear about this point when we’re debating the issue of withdrawal. By itself, I don’t think it’s decisive: I wouldn’t want to categorically deny that there could be cases in which we would choose to thwart the nearly unanimous will of a large group of people for their own good. But it surely puts the burden of argument squarely on anyone arguing for continued involvement in Iraq, even if we grant them their optimism about the effects of that involvement. That’s because when we’re dealing with adults, we tend to be very suspicious of paternalism, and when we’re not bigots, we tend to be very suspicious of paternalism displayed towards large groups of foreign adults. So we ought to take Iraqi opinion very seriously, even setting aside the possibility that Iraqis understand what is happening to their society better than we do – a possibility that would give us yet another reason to dismiss optimism about the effects of continuing to defy Iraqis on the occupation of their country.

At any rate, I think chewing on this one also really brings out the neo-colonialist flavour of the whole undertaking. The poor, lost souls need our help, and they’re so backwards they don’t even know it.

An ill Matthew Yglesias confesses he doesn’t know how exactly the U.S. ought to conduct itself with respect to Pakistan. Bradford Plumer has a nice summary of the problem (click through for the hyperlinks):

Most policymakers and pundits don’t seem to know how to deal with Pakistan. (I certainly don’t.) On the one hand, the United States wants Musharraf to be more aggressive about hunting down Al Qaeda operatives in North Waziristan. On the other hand, moving too aggressively against that part of the country might cause Musharraf’s government to collapse, in which case radical Islamists could seize power–and with it, control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Scary stuff.

Plumer then wonders:

At any rate, I’m curious to know what sort of safeguards Pakistan has in place to prevent its nukes from falling in the wrong hands, should, say, Taliban sympathizers in the intelligence services stage a coup (or whatever). The reporting on this front appears patchy. In 2004, Graham Allison warned that the security measures were still much too flimsy, and wanted the United States and China to do a thorough review of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, in order to help Musharraf set up proper controls. That would involve a lot of delicate diplomacy–especially since Pakistan is understandably reluctant to open its arsenal up to outside inspection–but it doesn’t seem completely undoable.

So what’s actually being done? A Congressional Research Service report in 2005 noted that the United States was offering some assistance, but mostly to “focus on helping secure nuclear materials and providing employment for personnel, rather than on security of nuclear weapons.” See also here. And last August, Pakistan declared that it had set up a “tri-command nuclear force,” but it’s not clear whether that would safeguard the weapons in the event of a coup. (In any case, the country’s past assurances on this score have been fairly suspect.) Those seem to be the main media stories of late. Who knows, perhaps the administration really is doing all it can here, but I’d sort of like to see a closer investigation.

There’s also the possibility of war with rival-nuclear-power-India to worry about. As for solutions, I too am stumped by the larger problem of how to deal with a nuclear power struggling with militants, rogue intelligence services, and hostilities with a nuclear neighbour. My modest suggestion of the day is that if I were in charge of U.S. foreign policy, I would have made a resolution of the Kashmir dispute a very high priority around 2002 (when things got very heated for a while between India and Pakistan), if I hadn’t already.

Obviously Kashmir is a tricky issue, but it’s not an impossible one. Constructive and careful intervention by an outside party might well make real progress on the issue, perhaps even leading to a solution that most of the parties could live with. This would be valuable for two reasons. First, one thing people are always forgetting is just how radicalizing the issue of Kashmir is within Pakistan. If you care about the issue of Islamic radicals in Pakistan – and you really ought to care – then you should be very interested in steps that might remove a major cause around which militants in the country have tended to rally. Second, obviously, a resolution of (or even progress on) the Kashmir dispute would significantly reduce the probability of a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent, an exchange that would be disastrous for the entire world’s environment and leave millions dead and dying.

Anyway, all this is just to say that I’ve spent the last few years wondering why this isn’t a very big priority for people whose opinions matter.

It would surprise me very much if this story weren’t somewhere in the vicinity of the truth (via).

I wonder what the Iranian version of Fox News thinks is the appropriate response to this sort of thing.

Anyway, as the Scallywag-in-Chief of a Very Important Blog, I call on all parties to cut the nonsense and calm the fuck down.

For no reason I can think of, I suddenly wondered this morning what the hell was up with Tariq Aziz these days. There wasn’t a lot I could find in 30 seconds of googling, but this piece says he’s being held without charge, and this piece says that he faces the death penalty. Both compatible, I suppose, but I wonder if I’ve misunderstood something here. Both pieces agree that Aziz (a Christian) has appealed to the Vatican for help, through his lawyer.

At any rate, I’m very curious what his debriefing was like. It’s not as if Saddam Hussein trusted Aziz a lot – if I recall, he used to throw Aziz’s son in prison when Aziz was out of the country, just to be safe. Still, Aziz must know an awful lot about the Ba’ath regime. Indeed, he must also know a lot about U.S.-Iraqi relations, which I suppose is one reason he’s not giving a lot of interviews these days.

I’m very glad that the U.S. and the North Koreans are talking, and that things are apparently going well, and I hate to be a pessimist, but I don’t think the odds are very good that the deal is going to stick. It seems unlikely that the North Koreans are done acting completely bonkers; indeed, their past negotiating style suggests that they’ll do something dramatic to derail things at the last minute, on the off-chance that they’ll be able to do even better than they have. And there are still powerful elements in the Bush administration and Congress that will be looking for reasons to scuttle the deal one way or another. Still, this looks more like progress than anything else we’ve seen in the last few years.

Spencer Ackerman is losing arguments:

A few weeks ago, I found myself drunkenly arguing with a conservative journalist about the wisdom of a war with Iran. It didn’t go well for me. The unshakable response went roughly as follows: It’s not us declaring war on them. They have declared war on us. They attack our troops. Your position amounts to requiring soldiers in a firefight to check the nationalities of their assailants before returning fire; and so you have reached absurdity. Victory is mine.

I’m not convinced Ackerman needed to lose that argument. The clever who-started-it rhetorical strategy looks great until you figure that the U.S. has been more provocative with Iran than Iran is accused of being with the U.S. so far.* But set that aside for a moment. The fact is this: Regardless of who started it, the U.S. simply can’t afford a conflict with Iran now. It just can’t. An invasion isn’t on the table, and even if the U.S. bombs the shit out of Iran, the best case scenario is a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. and a major set back in its anti-nuclear proliferation — excuse me, anti-bad-country nuclear proliferation — initiatives. The worst case is that Iran actually does get serious about meddling in Iraq and gets many U.S. soldiers killed there.

No. There’s nothing to do but diplomacy, even if everything alleged about Iran is true. And if not diplomacy, here’s some advice for U.S. policymakers: Just shut the fuck up about Iran. Since you really have your hands tied, and you don’t want to look weak, the best thing to do is to pretend that Iran isn’t supplying arms to insurgent groups in Iraq, since making a big stink about it and then getting nowhere makes you look even weaker than you otherwise would. So shut the fuck up. This is, by the way, what the rest of the world does in the face of provocations it can’t afford to respond to. Welcome to weakness, U.S. pundits and politicians. I know, it sucks.

Ackerman describes his debating partner as a conservative, but I take it that that’s a misleading label for “militarist,” since there’s absolutely nothing conservative about pushing for war with Iran. I think the appropriate response to a militarist who thinks that Iran has given the U.S. a clear casus belli is to say that it’s too bad then that the President has maneuvered the country into a strategic position so dire that it can’t afford to respond to a clear casus belli. But that’s how bad things are now. This is what serious strategic defeat looks like. So it’s time to make the best of it and shut the fuck up. Also crucial at this juncture: shutting the fuck up. In conclusion, pretty please shut the fuck up.

*Prediction: The next ten years will see a trickle of news reports about various naughty U.S. doings in Iran, including covert operations and support for groups opposed to the government. This will confirm and extend the impression created by the trickle of news reports to this effect which have come out over the last few years.

Jamie, on the surge:

As I understand it, the latest plan for Baghdad is to split troops into small units and place them in platoon house style setups across the city with Iraqi troops, many of whom are also members of Shi’ite militias. On today’s menu, the US army, disarticulated into tasty bite-sized morsels and spread lovingly on a bed of Baghdad.

That’s coming right up. Peering a bit further into the future, what I’d like to know is: What the hell happens if/when the Iraqi government asks the U.S. to leave? Increasingly, I suspect that a willingness to give the U.S. a really hard time will become a test of credibility, with anyone failing the test accused of being a pro-Yankee stooge. Once the U.S. has been publicly asked to leave, however, it has to choose between backing a coup to ensure a more favourable reception (which loops us back to the credibility issue), getting the hell out semi-voluntarily (still humiliating!), or actually getting forced out, with all that that involves (extra humiliating – supply lines cut, significant casualties, lots of equipment lost, etc. etc. etc.).

These days I’m increasingly leaning toward the view that we may see the last of those scenarios played out, around the time that the U.S. stops being more useful than not to the project of consolidating Shiite power in Iraq. I’m not yet ready, however, to make that an official Explananda prediction.

I’ve noted before that the U.S. debate about leaving Iraq is typified by a remarkable lack of interest in Iraqi opinion polling (though I do recall being wrong about this). A related feature of the Western debate is lack of attention to the fact that the decision to leave Iraq is not entirely up to the U.S. If things aren’t managed properly the U.S. really will have to fight it’s way out. I do hope that it doesn’t come to this.

What she says she’d do:

“If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as President, I will.”

So how would she do it, if she were president?:

As I’ve said before, I’ve long been for beginning a phased redeployment from Iraq as soon as possible, and I have cosponsored legislation to that effect last year. I think we should begin to get U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as we can and would urge the administration to do so as expeditiously as possible. I think it is the responsibility of this president to resolve our presence in Iraq before he leaves office. I’ve also, as I said last week, introduced legislation to cap the number of troops in Iraq at pre-escalation levels as of Jan. 1 and require both the Iraqis to meet certain conditions in order to continue funding the Iraqi security forces and to require that the administration meet additional conditions or require a new authorization resolution in order to keep our troops in Iraq. And I believe that that approach, keeping the pressure on both our government and the Iraqi government, trying to cap the troops, trying to get more leverage on the Iraqis to perform the way they have promised, is a comprehensive approach that, if it were pursued in addition to a diplomatic offensive, would be the best way to end our involvement in Iraq in the right fashion.

“Trying to get…the Iraqis to perform the way they have promised”? Are you kidding me? You’re going to place more American lives in the balance in order to get the Iraqis to do what they’ve promised? With both a civil war and a war on the occupiers standing in the way? As Al Gore said to Bill Bradley in a 2000 debate concerning a different issue, That’s not a plan, it’s a magic wand. And it dun’t work that way.

UPDATE: More at Booman Tribune.

Paul Wolfowitz visits mosque, respectfully removes shoes, is revealed to have holes in his socks. Lack of foresight, is what I’m saying here. Certain problems are foreseeable, and if you plan properly you can avoid them, is what I’m saying.

This piece in the NYT today is pretty irresponsible: Iran May Have Trained Attackers That Killed 5 American Soldiers, U.S. and Iraqis Say. Yes, indeed. It may have done so. But good golly the evidence for that right now is thin. The authors of the piece – two of them beavering away at the story! – are unable to come up with very much to support the theory. The idea seems to be that the attack was pretty sophisticated, and Iran is sophisticated. Just put two and two together! I think this is my favourite part:

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

The last sentence gives everyone involved – from the officials to the reporters to the bloggers who pick it up and move the story along without the qualifications – a cover if it turns out to be nothing.

This isn’t just idle speculation. The Bush administration very much wants to broaden the confrontation with Iran. I’ve put my money on covert operations against Iran, but no actual bombing of the country. But the plan is to be much more aggressive in the future, and an important contribution to that effort is to convince the public that Iran is the source of all evil in the world. In that context, it’s not right for the NYT to amplify and transmit the administration’s messages about Iran’s evil, evil doings without having solid, independent reasons for thinking that they’re true. And putting in a weasel sentence admitting that the piece is a baseless speculation doesn’t really get them off the hook for doing it.

Stephen says sorry:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology and a compensation package to Maher Arar and his family on Friday for the “terrible ordeal” they suffered after Arar spent nearly a year in a Syrian jail.

“On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you…and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003,” Harper said.

“I sincerely hope that these words and actions will assist you and your family in your efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in your lives,” he said.

Harper, who made the announcement in the foyer of the House of Commons in Ottawa, said the settlement negotiated with Arar includes $10.5 million for pain and suffering along with an estimated $2 million for legal fees.

Most well-informed Americans know about the Arar case, but I doubt that very many people among even this small cross-section of American public opinion know what a huge deal the Arar case is up in Canada. It’s just all over the news, all the time. There was a scandal, a major inquiry, a series of closely followed (fruitless) negotiations and briefings with U.S. counterparts, and now this. So it’s constantly in the news, and opinion is pretty solidly unanimous that it is a bad thing that the U.S. government abducted a Canadian citizen and deliberately sent him off to be tortured in Syria.

The U.S. continues to insist that Arar is guilty of some unspecified crimes, but also claims that it can’t publicly reveal its reasons for thinking this. Given that the main reason seems to be a desire to avoid admitting that they cheerfully enabled the torture of an innocent Canadian citizen, given that they are sociopaths who lie and lie repeatedly about these and related matters, given that being an accessory to torture in this way is technically a crime according to U.S. law, as well as international law . . . well, given all these things, no one believes the U.S. government’s claims about Arar. And indeed, when U.S. officials briefed the Canadian government privately on its Arar file, the Canadian side came away distinctly underwhelmed by the quality of the evidence. And just to give you an idea of where the Canadian government is coming from on this, we’re talking about a Conservative government, that is, a bunch of people who would just love to get cosy with the U.S. on all kinds of issues, and would surely back down on this issue if it were at all possible. (To give you an idea of the ethos of the government, the Prime Minister praised Israel’s “moderation” during the recent Israel-Lebanon fighting.)

My dear American friends, this matters. This really matters to us. Canada is, as you so often remind me, an insignificant country. But we do what we can to help – for example, in Southern Afghanistan now, where Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in an offensive against the Taliban – and occasionally we can offer resources, diplomatic support, credibility, and so on. When you fuck with us in this way, it makes it harder to cooperate with you in other constructive ways that figure into the larger effort to protect ourselves. And in the end, even setting aside moral objections to torture, that ought to matter to you.

I should make more predictions: they’re good at forcing me to think through an issue, and they’re nice and testable, which gives me a chance to look back later on and weep or cheer, as the case may be. On the soon-to-come second incarnation of this blog, I will have a wildly expanded list of categories, including one for predictions, which will make it that much easier for my friends and foes to weep or cheer, as the case may be.

Anyway, let me make a prediction about Iraq’s newly drafted oil law. The proposed law might make it through Iraq’s political process to become the law of the land, but it hardly matters: Renationalizing the Iraqi oil industry will become a test of will and credibility for Iraqi politicians for as long as it takes to renationalize the oil industry. If I was an oil exec, I would be very reluctant to bet on this law. It doesn’t have a chance.

This column by Fred Kaplan at Slate isn’t very good. Kaplan’s basic idea is that Condoleezza Rice’s backpedaling from previous rhetoric about democracy and human rights in Egypt shows that she has woken up from a “dream.”

In her 2005 speech, Rice famously said, “For 60 years, my country … pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region … and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” But now, less than two years later, the region teeters on the edge of the abyss like at no time in recent history, and Rice suddenly sees there’s value in stability after all.

Kaplan goes on to contrast Rice’s pre-9/11 realism with her subsequent rhetoric on the subject of Egypt and human rights. He describes her words from the dream period as “a relic of stunning innocence.”

I’m all for bashing the Bush administration, but in the course of attempting to do so I think Kaplan’s article perpetuates the idea that there was something sincere about this aspect of the Bush administration’s rhetoric in the first place. That seems to me a wildly charitable reading of the last few years. There have been a few sporadic and half-hearted gestures couched in the language of freedom and democracy, but setting those aside you might even call hypocrisy on this issue one of the great unifying themes of Bush’s foreign policy.

Anyway, this is irritating. It’s irritating because it lets so much dishonest rhetoric from the Bush administration in the past few years go unchallenged. You wouldn’t guess from Kaplan’s article that, aside from springing a high-profile dissident or two, the U.S. used essentially none of its leverage with Egypt to produce meaningful change throughout the period in which Bush’s democracy rhetoric was trumpeted most vigorously. Or that the U.S. worked together with Egypt in the extraordinary rendition and torture of terror suspects during the same period. You would think from reading the Kaplan article that Rice’s shift in rhetoric actually marks a shift in policy. This is criticism that skims the surface; in some ways, it’s worse than no criticism at all.

Faced with a record of someone who talks like a “realist” (a horrible label, but I’ll use it) for most of her career, adopts idealistic language for a while during which time she participates in policies which mostly belie that rhetoric, and then reverts to “realism”, Kaplan decides that the intervening period of rhetorical idealism shows a “stunning innocence.” I think the more reasonable assumption is that it shows a stunning cynicism, or, to be absurdly generous, a stunning degree of self-deception. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine in what ways Kaplan’s read on the situation is stunning.

Contrary to what Kaplan implies, cynically propping up pro-American dictators and human rights abusers is not the only alternative to delivering hypocritical sermons about democracy and freedom while at the same time propping up pro-American dictators and human rights abusers. There is another way, but it includes a fundamental reform of U.S. goals in the world and in the sorts of compromises it’s willing to make in the pursuit of those goals.

Then and now.

via