Is This a Great Country or What?

In Washington, our Congress has settled in to business as usual now that the Surge is going so well. Democrats are overjoyed at news of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, while Republicans are fresh from the triumph of sliming a brain-injured 12-year-old boy to make sure he and others like him don’t rip us off by getting health care insurance.

In Iraq today, other people acting in my name and yours killed six women and nine children during an air and ground attack on senior Al Qaeda leaders. We issued a statement of regret that “civilians are hurt or killed while Coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, AP reports, “has recently confronted top American commander Gen. David Petraeus about what he sees as overly aggressive U.S. tactics that harm innocent civilians, according to Iraqi officials.”

Last Friday, a pre-dawn U.S. raid on Khalis, a Shiite city north of Baghdad, killed 25 people when troops called in air strikes while hunting suspected smugglers of arms from Iran to Baghdad. Village leaders said the victims included civilians, but the military insisted the 25 killed were militants.

Meanwhile, Shiites and Sunnis are reported to be making no progress toward national reconciliation. But the Surge is working just fine, isn’t it?

We can all go on getting Halloween costumes for the kids and maybe driving somewhere for a little leaf-peeping.

A Bipartisan Push for Peace in Iraq

In a moment out of distant American history when politics was supposed to stop at the water’s edge, the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to Iraq and a Democratic candidate for President in ’08 joined this week in prodding Shiites and Sunnis to stop squabbling and make peace.

Ryan Crocker and Sen. Joe Biden accompanied top deputies of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on a trip to the Sunni bastion of Anbar Province to pledge more than $120 million in reconstruction money as a step toward political reconciliation.

Crocker pointed out that “Anbaris, the Iraqis, and the coalition have [pushed] Al Qaeda out to the extent that a conference [can be] held that doesn't even talk about security...That's really significant."

Biden was less enthusiastic but encouraged reconciliation. "If you continue,” he said, “we will continue to send you our sons and our daughters to shed their blood with you and for you...If you decide you cannot live together, let us know.... we can say goodbye now."

Perhaps as significant as the meeting of Iraqi factions was the joint effort by a Republican official and a Democratic critic. If that spirit is contagious, it may even be possible for Congress to agree on how to end the war. But then again they are on this side of the water’s edge.

Maliki's Meet the Press Panel

After a touchy few words about American Senators’ “severe interference in our domestic affairs,” Iraq’s Prime Minister assembled a Sunni, Shiite and Kurd panel today for his own Sunday talk show to report consensus on national reconciliation, an incredible feat in the face of a parliament still on vacation after Sunni leaders had stalked out of the government.

Incredible may be the operative word here, but the Democrats’ best move might be to congratulate Maliki, apologize for Hillary Clinton’s and Carl Levin’s rash calls for his removal and have Congress ready to start authorizing withdrawal of our troops in the face of the good news.

“I hope that this agreement will help Iraq move beyond the political impasse," the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said. "The five leaders representing Iraq's major political communities...affirmed the principle of collective leadership to help deal with the many challenges faced by Iraq."

The White House responded by announcing we will "continue to support these brave leaders and all the Iraqi people in their efforts to overcome the forces of terror who seek to overwhelm Iraq's democracy.”

Terror? Is there some doubt that Maliki has it nailed? Some suspicion he might be putting on a show to forestall getting kicked out of office? Not possible, not two days after President Bush said he’s “a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him.”

Checking Out al Maliki

The problem with puppet governments is that they come with strings. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki keeps trying to show he’s not our man but keeps tripping over his ties to fellow Shiites and losing Sunnis who don’t trust him. Now he’s losing us, too.

President Bush is expressing “frustration,” and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is echoing him: "We do expect results, as do the Iraqi people, and our support is not a blank check." So is the No. 2 commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen Raymond Odierno, using same “blank check” expression.

The American people meanwhile are picking up a monthly tab of $9 billion dollars and 100 lost lives while the President keeps saying “if the government doesn't respond to the demands of the people, they will replace the government. That's up to the Iraqis to make that decision.”

But which Iraqis and when? As we keep coaching from the sidelines and talking about checks, blank or otherwise, how do we persuade the world we’re not pulling the strings? And if they replace al Maliki, most likely with an even more openly Shiite partisan, what happens then?

When Crocker and Gen. Petraeus give us their progress report next month, Congress will want an update on al Maliki’s checking account to go with it.

Buying Words With Blood

Sen. Carl Levin says the glass in Iraq is more than half-empty, Sen. John Warner says it may be half-full and Fox News sees it brimming over.

“Sens. Warner and Levin Travel to Iraq, Praise Surge Results” is their headline for a story that starts: “Sen. Carl Levin said Monday that the Iraqi Parliament should vote no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki because of its sectarian nature and leadership.

"The Maliki government is non-functional," Levin, D-Mich., said.”

Since President Bush, instead of drawing down troops in Iraq at the beginning of this year as 70 percent of Americans wanted him to do, announced the Surge, more than 700 of our young people have died there and thousands have been wounded.

With all this blood, we have bought words--from the White House, Congress and self-appointed experts across the political spectrum. Next month, we will get words from Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, which will lead to even more words from armchair warriors on all sides.

None of them will stop the dying and, if we want to know what for, here are words from a commander on the ground: “This is not black and white here. It’s all shades of grey, and there’s a mixture of extremist elements and terror elements and criminal activity. It’s all of the above,” according to Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division Center and Task Force Marne, whose words are reported on a Department of Defense web site.

“It’s naive to believe that all sorts of violence inside of Iraq is Sunni vs. Shiia or Shiia vs. Sunni; that’s just not true. And when you find intra-Shiia rivalry, it’s primarily a function of the struggle for power and influence.”

How many words will it take to stop the bleeding?

Petraeus and Crocker: No Slam Dunk

After phony patriotism failed, the last refuge of the Bush Administration in Iraq has been competence, replacing robot generals and servile ambassadors with two men of substance, David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker.

For months, Bush has kept Congress from taking action to start stopping the war by hiding behind Petraeus’ September progress report. Now, worried about what the General and Crocker will say, the Administration is trying to have them testify in private while Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates do the public cheer-leading.

No dice, the Democrats answer. "Americans deserve an even-handed assessment of conditions in Iraq,“ House Democratic Chairman Rahm Emanuel declared, not “a snapshot from the same people who told us the mission was accomplished and the insurgency was in its last throes."

Administration’s worries are reflected in what the straight-talking Petraeus told reporters yesterday: "We know that the surge has to come to an end. I think everyone understands that, by about a year or so from now, we've got to be a good bit smaller than we are right now.”

Five years ago, Crocker was one of the authors of a State Department memo on the pitfalls of an attack. Based on long experience in Iraq, Crocker warned that an invasion could "unleash long-repressed sectarian and ethnic tensions" and that “the Sunni minority would not easily relinquish power, and that powerful neighbors such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would try to move in to influence events."

If you’re still trying to sell that war, you don’t want Petraeus and Crocker to do the pitching. You need a toady like George Tenet out there to predict a slam dunk.

A Preview of the Iraq to Come

In today’s Washington Post we can see the future, and it doesn’t work. The southern city of Basra, where there has been no sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, once considered a “success story” of the post-Saddam era, is now becoming a different place as British troops prepare to leave.

“Three major Shiite political groups,” the Post reports, “are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by ‘the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors,’ a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.”

There is no ideological winner or loser. The U.S., Britain and Iran, the ISG concludes, are “equally confused” about what’s happening in the city with two-thirds of Iraq’s oil resources.

Our politicians have been arguing over whether Iraq is emblematic of the Middle East and to what extent our staying or going is a test case of our will and accepting responsibility for what has followed the overthrow of Saddam.

Last month, Colin Powell said that troops “can only put a heavier lid on this boiling pot of sectarian stew.” As in Basra, today’s report suggests, there are also boiling non-sectarian stews all over Iraq and that keeping the lids on is not the critical question.

Until the heat is turned down by the emergence of another Saddam or, more likely, a number of regional Saddams, our going or staying is not the answer. The withdrawing British are not leaving behind a “success story” in Basra, but would their staying have made any difference or only postponed the inevitable outcome?

Smart People, Dumb Choices

As an antidote to Bush fatuity, we now have the thinking man’s explanation for supporting the war and getting it totally wrong.

A former Harvard professor now a member of the Canadian parliament, Michael Ignatieff writes in the New York Times Magazine today:

“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us...What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror...

“I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds...I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying...”

Ignatieff is more than a bit glib, but shrewd on the differences between academics and politicians: “Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.”

But Ignatieff is too easy on himself. Going back to David Halberstam’s dissection of the intellectuals who misled JFK into Vietnam, the ironically titled “The Best and the Brightest,” it has become fashionable to dismiss thinking in favor of instinct in matters of war and peace, life and death. We need both, and we need them in people who admit human fallibility and still have the courage to make the best decisions they can.

Informed emotion may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s our best hope.

"Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?"

The immortal words of Casey Stengel come to mind for the Bush Administration’s latest moves in the Middle East. Casey’s incompetent Mets were only losing baseball games. This bunch is playing with our country’s future.

The most recent tragi-comedy of errors is reported in today’s New York Times:

“The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to total $20 billion over the next decade at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.”

Counterproductive is a euphemism for exporting radicals to car bomb our troops there while King Abdullah tells Arab heads of state that Americans in Iraq are “an illegal foreign occupation.”

Next week, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will go to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis, please, to “make clear to Sunnis engaged in violence in Iraq that such actions are ‘killing your future.’”

At the same time, to allay the fears of our most reliable ally, the Bush team is promising to increase military aid to Israel to $30.4 billion over the next decade. There is nothing like a little arms race to promote stability in a trigger-happy region.

There may be some devilishly clever, subtle master strategy in all this but, based on past performance, they might do well to consider Casey Stengel’s advice for managing tough situations: “The secret is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”

Iraq Vacation Plans

The U.S. Congress, the Iraqi Parliament and every psychotherapist in America will be taking time off in August. But the folks, as George Bush might call them, who want to kill our troops in Baghdad will be busy.

According to a Guardian report from Damascus, “Seven of the most important Sunni-led insurgent organizations fighting the US occupation in Iraq have agreed to form a public political alliance with the aim of preparing for negotiations in advance of an American withdrawal” and they plan to “hold a congress to launch a united front within the next few weeks.”

While our politicians anguish over what will happen when U.S. troops leave, the Sunnis are quietly making their own plans to hasten the day with bloodshed and then nullify “political institutions set up under the occupation...and all decisions and agreements made by the US occupation and Iraqi government.”

On the Shiite side, Moktada al-Sadr is getting ready for our departure, too, and doesn’t seem too keen on retaining the democracy we brought his country.

The only folks who have no plans for Iraq are in Washington, D.C. or on vacation from their jobs there.

Roaring Twenties in Iraq

It’s beginning to look like those old gangster movies in Baghdad with Moktada al-Sadr playing Little Caesar.

Instead of selling bootleg booze, his machine gun-toting henchmen are distributing food, medicine and fuel to the locals while collecting protection money, about $4 a monthly, from residents.

Gang killings are routine, with Sunni bodies piled up at neighborhood boundaries to discourage incursions by rival outfits.

With the U.S.-backed central government as impotent as our 1920s Feds were to enforce Prohibition, outlaws are fighting it out while terrorizing the population.

Our gangster nightmare ended with the repeal of Prohibition when lawmakers realized they were engaged in a futile enterprise. Maybe Bush and Cheney should stop watching “High Noon” and study those Edward G. Robinson flicks.