Thursday, December 15, 2005

Iraq War: The war, Iraqi elections and US politics

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

David Sirota has a long blog post analyzing the electoral implications of public opinion in the US on the Iraq War: The Big Lie that is skewing the Iraq debate Sirotablog 12/15/05.

I don't believe what he's saying is just wishful thinking.  Because while the Big Pundits - and even some liberal bloggers who should know better - were babbling about how there was no antiwar movement, somehow someway a big majority of the public became highly critical of the war and Bush's policies.  One of the stranger theories I've come across is that this happened because there was (allegedly) no antiwar movement.

I'm sure I'll return more than once to that whole bizarre way of looking at things.  But Sirota has a real point here:

Listen to today's NPR piece, and you will hear this assumption all the way through, from both politicians and political "experts." The assumption is simple: it basically states as fact that those who support an exit strategy in Iraq will not only be attacked as "cut and run" cowards (like the GOP attacked Jack Murtha), but that voters will give credence to those attacks. Put another way, the political Establishment - which prides itself on "expertly" reading public opinion data - is actually ignoring all the hard data and simply assuming that Americans will politically punish those who support a withdrawal. In the process, they are asserting as fact the concept that Republicans will be able to use the war as a political bludgeon - as a winning issue - when all the hard evidence says the exact opposite.

Let's be clear - polls have consistently shown that on the issue of when/whether to bring troops home, the public is at best evenly split, and more often in favor of an exit strategy. But beyond this question of policy is the clear, crisp evidence that the entire population - regardless of their position on when/whether to bring troops home - is angry about the war and about the administration's behavior surrounding the war. And, at the absolute least, that should lead us to believe that even the minority of voters who say they do not yet support a withdrawal will not electorally punish politicians who do support a withdrawal. For to believe the Establishment's assumption that pro-exit-strategy candidates will actually be punished, you have to actually believe the public is going to simply forget its overarching anger about the war itself, about the President's dishonesty and mismanagement, and about the desire of every patriotic American to see our troops brought out of harms way. That's positively insane. (my emphasis)

I'm glad to see Sirota using the word "Establishment", with a capital "E", no less.  Something that longtime readers of Old Hickory's Weblog have seen once or twice here.

He also looks closely at poll findings to get at the intensity of feeling against the Iraq War.  In the country that the Big Pundits tell us has not antiwar movement, Sirota argues that in fact there is not only very widespread anger over the war, but "overarching anger":

The fact that such a huge percentage of Americans are telling pollsters that their president "intentionally misled" the country into a war, or that their president is continuing to mislead them about the situation in that war, or that their president basically has no idea what he's doing in Iraq is not just sentiment on any old poll question about any old issue - these are anger point issues, ones that go well beyond a debate about this policy or that and into the emotional sentiments that actually play in elections.

Sirota's post is well worth reading in full.  The one reservation I would mention here is that anger doesn't necessarily translate into votes for the Democratic Party, even if the candidates stop trying to tiptoe around the war issue.  Today's Republican Party, after all, is built on appealing to the "angry white man".  The Reps have plenty of scapegoats ready to offer up to that constituency.

Remember all that about how Katrina woke up our "press corps"?

Those who were expecting a post-Katrina, post-WMD-scam, post-Plamegame, post-all-the-rest-of-the-outrages press corps to be probing and critical during the rest of the Bush administration might want to contain your enthusiasm for a while longer.

Bush's fourth and final in his series of Iraq War marketing speeches came on Wednesday: President Discusses Iraqi Elections, Victory in the War on Terror 12/14/05. Bush repeated once again the administration position they've taken since it became glaringly obvious that the prewar claims about Iraqi WMDs were just plain bogus.  He said he duped by bad intelligence, but that going to war was right anyway.  And besides, the Democrats are just as much to blame as me.  Some excerpts:

When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq - and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that. At the same time, we must remember that an investigation after the war by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that Saddam was using the U.N. oil-for-food program to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting his weapons programs once the sanctions collapsed and the world looked the other way. Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat -- and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power. (Applause.) We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place. (my emphasis)

For my earlier thoughts on the question of the war goals, see Why shouldn't we call a lost cause a lost cause? 12/09/05.

Bush's method of reforming the intelligence capabilities has so far been focused on making sure that the intelligence information he gets is even more carefully tailored to tell him what he wants to hear than what he got before the Iraq War.  See The Yes-Man by Robert Dreyfuss American Prospect 11/10/05 issue.

One of the blessings of our free society is that we can debate these issues openly, even in a time of war. Most of the debate has been a credit to our democracy, but some have launched irresponsible charges. They say that we act because of oil, that we act in Iraq because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. Some of the most irresponsible comments about manipulating intelligence have come from politicians who saw the same intelligence we saw, and then voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein. These charges are pure politics. They hurt the morale of our troops. Whatever our differences in Washington, our men and women in uniform deserve to know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm's way, our support will be with them in good days and bad, and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory. (Applause.) (my emphasis)

This is no change in Bush's position at all.  Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo 12/15/05) notes that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, aka DiFi (with long "i"s), asked the Congressional Research Service if it was true that Congress saw the same intelligence Bush did.  Their response is available online: Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information Congressional Research Service 12/14/05.

This is a sample (and the CRS is nonpartisan):

By virtue of his constitutional role as commander-and-in-chief and head of the executive branch, thePresident has access to all national intelligence collected, analyzed and produced by the Intelligence Community. The President’s position also affords him the authority – which, at certain times, has been aggressively asserted1 – to restrict the flow of intelligence information to Congress and its two intelligence committees, which are charged with providing legislative oversight of the Intelligence Community. As a result, the President, and a small number of presidentially-designated Cabinet-level officials, including the Vice President – in contrast to Members of Congress – have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods. They, unlike Members of Congress, also have the authority to more extensively task the Intelligence Community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the President and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the Community’s intelligence more accurately than is Congress.

In addition to their greater access to intelligence, the President and his senior advisors also are better equipped than is Congress to assess intelligence information by virtue of the primacy of their roles in formulating U.S. foreign policy. Their foreign policy responsibilities often require active, sustained, and often personal interaction, with senior officials of many of the same countries targeted for intelligence collection by the Intelligence Community. Thus the President and his senior advisors are uniquely positioned to glean additional information and impressions – information that, like certain sensitive intelligence information, is generally unavailable to Congress – that can provide them with an important additional perspective with which to judge the quality of intelligence.

So of course our newly vigilant press corps pounced on things like this and carefully analyzed the President's speech.  NOT

Instead, we get things like this, about which Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby might say, read this and gaze upon the empty soul of your "press corps": Media falsely reported that Bush "took responsibility" for flawed prewar intel Media Matters 12/15/05.

Reading the Iraqi election

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has a new paper just out on the Iraqi elections: The True Meaning of the Iraqi Election: A “Trigger,” Not a “Turning Point” 12/15/05 version. He explains what he means by the catchy phrase in the title:

... any analysis or coverage of the election must be based on an understanding that the election will not resolve any major issue confronting the Iraqi people. It is not a “turning point,” but a “trigger.” It will start a political process during the course of 2006 that will almost certainly determine whether Iraq has a solid chance of emerging out of its present turmoil with stability, as well as the success or failure of the Coalition in Iraq.

He cautions that national figures on Iraqi opinion are often effectively meaningless.  One has to see the sectarian and regional breakdowns of the results to understand what they might imply. He writes:

Like all of the ABC summaries [of opinion polling data], these results also need to be put in context. They do not break out the results by province or ethnic/sectarian group. The Shi’ites and Kurds living in the relatively safe provinces have every reason to be far more optimistic about security and life than other Iraqis. Nation-wide results disguise more than they reveal in describing an insurgency that is driven by a Sunni minority that cannot be more than 20% of the total population and which is scarcely united around the insurgents.

The following is an important feature of the election to keep in mind when we're reading the various analyses and interpretations that will be coming out in the next few weeks:

It is also an election where most Iraqis will have to vote for the top of the ticket, or make a choice between key national, ethnic, and sectarian parties without really knowing what given party tickets stand for. Not only are most of the major parties mixes of very different voices and beliefs, but there are 7.655 candidates on 996 candidate lists, and 307 political entities (single candidates and political parties) and 19 coalitions. In Baghdad, for example, the ballot paper has 106 candidate lists with 2.161candidates for 59 seats in the Council of Representatives. There are 212 political contestants on the national ballot.

Cordesman explains that there are two large umbrella lists among the Sunni parties, the Iraqi Accord Front and the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue.  He calls particular attention to the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is part of the Iraqi Accord Front electoral list:

The overall numbers of Sunnis voting, and whom they vote for, should be apparent in very crude terms. However, there are many mixed areas in Iraq and Sunnis will sometimes vote for the nationalist ticket or even Shi’ite tickets. The voting for Tareq al-Hashemi and the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the largest Sunni Arab political groups, will be particularly important since this group was one of the few Sunni groups to openly endorse the constitution.

He doesn't think the vote in the Kurdish areas is likely to give us much of a clue of what to expect there, because the party choices won't show much about the intensity of regional sentiment there.

But among the Shi'a, he makes this observation:

Perhaps the most important indicator would be a major vote for Iyad Allawi and the nationalist parties. The problem is that Allawi did receive money from the CIA during his opposition to Saddam Hussein, and has been cast in much of the campaigning against him as a tool of the US, and many Iraqis see a need to vote an ethnic or sectarian ticket in this election even though the new ABC-Time Oxford Research International poll does not show strong support for religious government.

He reminds us that the vote itself will also be hard to interpret until the actual governing coalition is formed - assuming the United Iraqi Alliance doesn't win an absolute majority of parliamentary seats and decides to form a government on its own.  Even a UIA government would be a kind of coalition, though, because the list includes a diverse assortment of groups.

He writes that the following positions will be particularly important:

The choice of Prime Minister, and of the key Ministers – Defense, Interior, Oil and Finance – may well do more to define power in practice than the elections. So, however, may the kind of legislative alliances that define how the Constitution is completed, amended and interpreted.

Critical areas for political decision-making and the choice of leaders will be:

(i) The requirement that two-thirds of the newly elected national assembly has to agree on the “Presidential council” and the president and two vice presidents who must nominate a prime minister for approval by the assembly. This not only adds a major new political issue to selection of a prime minister, it raises real issues about the real world aftermath.

The presidential council seems weak on paper, but could bargain and in any case will be much stronger if the prime minister is not strong and his coalition is weak.

(ii) Whether the Ministry of Defense continues under Sunni leadership, and to emphasize a truly national army and one that is sensitive to Sunni concerns.

(iii) Whether the Ministry of Interior is brought under control, moves away from its recent tendency to tolerate or carry out Shi’ite revanchism, and becomes effective in creating truly national special security and police forces.

(iv) Whether the Oil Ministry has professional leadership and moves forward decisively to renovate oil and gas facilities, and carry out exploration and development of a kind that will ease the tension between factions. There have so far been far too many studies, and far too few tangible actions and results.

(v) Whether the Ministry of Finance gets leadership that can actually manage resources and the budget, bring overspending in other ministries under control, and deal with the necessary compromises over how to handle oil and other state revenues and taxation.

Reservations about the extent of democracy

These are not reservations that we'll be likely to hear from the Bush administration, despite their alleged new openness and candor.  But Juan Cole writes (High Turnout Expected as Iraqis go to Polls Informed Consent blog 12/15/05):

The LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks that. The Iraqi "government" is a failedstate. Virtually no order it gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are unlikely to change any of this.

The only way in which these elections may lead to a US withdrawal is that they will ensconce parliamentarians who want the US out on a short timetable. Virtually all the Sunnis who come in will push for that result (which is why the US Right is silly to be all agog about Fallujans voting), and so with the members of the Sadr Movement, now a key component of the Shiite religious United Iraqi Alliance. That is, these elections lead to a US withdrawal on terms unfavorable to the Bush administration. Nor is there much hope that a parliament that kicked the US out could turn around and restore order in the country.

The Los Angeles Times editorial to which he refers is One step at a time in Iraq 12/15/05.

In that same post, he also mentions this about voting in Anbar province:

From all accounts,the voter turnout is likely to be good, given that more Sunni Arabs are going to the polls this time than last. Still, a lot of polling stations could not open in Anbar Province, a severe problem for the legitimacy of the voting outcome. (Aboveboard elections of a sort that can be internationally certified require that security permit people throughout the country to vote if they want to.)

A negotiated truce?

The Moonie Times is reporting that the US military negotiated a truce with "most of the main insurgent groups" in Iraq to halt attacks on election day and the immediate aftermath: U.S. military, insurgents agree on vote truce by Paul Martin Washington Times 12/15/05. Martin reports:

After months of painstaking dialogue, U.S. officials have persuaded most of the maininsurgent groups to cease violence for today's election and its immediate aftermath,U.S. officials said yesterday.

In return, the U.S. military agreed, despite severe internal disagreements, to halt "offensive operations" during the period, U.S. Embassy officials said on the condition of anonymity.

I wouldn't want to overstate the significance of this.  But it is one concrete example indicating that a negotiated settlement between the US and the insurgents might be possible in order to extricate US troops from Iraq.

But I actually do think this short truce is pretty significant:

Earlier, the results of the decisions to halt violence, taken without a public announcement, were much in evidence on the fields of battle. An unparalleled calm descended on Iraq, in contrast to the bloodshed before the elections in January.

"We're shifting the battlefield. The arena - if things work out - is about to become parliament, not violence," one official said.

The decision to negotiate, taken by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, met with resistance from several of his fellow officers. It was then decided to make no public statement, but simply to act on the new orders in secret.

U.S. forces are thought to be fighting dozens of different insurgent groups, making it difficult to measure the effort's success.

Moreover, the time frame for the agreement, which also included several days prior to the vote, is not clear.

Nevertheless, the agreement has generally held up, despite some notable exceptions, such as Tuesday's killing of a leading Sunni politician in Ramadi. On the same day, U.S. forces raided the  city.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05

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