Following up the last couple of posts, on deteriorating conditions in Iraq — Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon (via True Blue Liberal):

This latest “turning point” reveals an Iraqi state without a social contract, a government without a center, a prime minister without power and an American president without a strategy. Each sectarian group maintains its own militia. Each leader’s influence rests on these armed bands, separate armies of tens of thousands of men. The militias have infiltrated and taken over key units of the Iraqi army and local police, using them as death squads, protection rackets and deterrent forces against enemies. Reliable statistics are impossible, but knowledgeable reporters estimate there are about 40 assassinations a day in Iraq. Ethnic cleansing is sweeping the country. From Kirkuk in the north to Baghdad in the middle to Basra in the south, Kurds are driving out Turkmen and Arabs, Shiites are killing Sunnis, and the insurgency enjoys near unanimous support among Sunnis.

So what does Bush have to say about it?

In his speech on Monday referring to another “turning point,” President Bush twice spoke of “victory.” “Victory” is the constant theme he has adopted since last summer, when he hired public opinion specialist Peter Feaver for the National Security Council. Feaver’s research claims that the public will sustain military casualties so long as it is persuaded that they will lead to “victory.” Bush clings to this P.R. formula to explain, at least to himself, the decline of his political fortunes. “Because we’re at war, and war unsettles people,” he said in an interview with NBC News last week. To make sense of the disconcerting war, he imposes his familiar framework of us vs. them, “the enemy” who gets “on your TV screen by killing innocent people” against himself.

In his Monday speech, Bush reverted yet again to citing Sept. 11, 2001, as the ultimate justification for the Iraq war. Defiant in the face of terrorists, he repeated whole paragraphs from his 2004 campaign stump speech. “That’s just the lessons of September the 11th that I refuse to forget,” he said. Stung by the dissent of the former commanders of the U.S. Army in Iraq who have demanded the firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush reassured the audience that he listens to generals. “I make my mind up based not upon politics or political opinion polls, but based upon what the commanders on the ground tell me is going on,” he said.

Yet currently serving U.S. military commanders have been explicitly telling him for more than two years, and making public their view, that there is no purely military solution in Iraq. For example, Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander, said on April 12, 2004: “There is not a purely U.S. military solution to any of the particular problems that we’re facing here in Iraq today.”

In defending the war, righties like to point to the alleged high-minded goals. What is it about bringing democracy to the Middle East you don’t like? they sneer. And, y’know, I’m fine with democracy in the Middle East. I’m sure that Condi and Dick and crew are right that if Iraq and other nations of the Middle East were to become stable and democratic the whole world would benefit. The catch is that this is not the sort of goal that lends itself to a purely military solution. If, indeed, one nation could lead another nation — a nation on the other side of the world with a hugely different culture — to democracy, I suspect the way to do it is through the slow, patient work of cultural, economic, and political diplomacy. But the Bushies figured they could do the job a lot quicker through a purely military solution. All they had to do was invade and destroy the current government, and the Iraqis naturally would revert to the universal default form of government, democracy.

What the Bushies didn’t realize is that people of other cultures have very different notions of what is default.

At this point the rightie is dancing around, yelling what about Japan? Well, what about it? I realize that American popular history says 1940s Japan was a monarchy until General MacArthur gave them a democratic constitution and a representative government, but that is not exactly so. First, the role of the Japanese emperor before the war was not analogous to that of a European king; he had influence, but political power rested in an oligarchy made up of the ruling class. Emperor Hirohito didn’t have much to do with governing Japan, even though on paper he was the sovereign.

In the 1920s political power in Japan shifted away from the nobility and toward its elected parliament — yes, I said elected parliament — and democratic political parties. The democratically elected parliament had been established by a constitution adopted in 1889.

In the 1930s the military establishment — men who advocated purely military solutions — came to power and began to call the shots. Literally. And a few years later Japan was utterly crushed.

The postwar constitution, adopted in 1947, gave sovereignty to the people and guaranteed basic civil liberties for the first time in Japan. But as a practical matter the form of government the Japanese enjoyed after World War II was not as different from what they had before as Americans imagine.

There are myriad other distinctions, such as the fact that the Japanese had a unified national/cultural identity that Iraqis lack. After the war the Japanese people could still look to their own emperor as their symbolic head of state. And I suspect the Confucian/Buddhist ethical sensibilities imported long before from China made a huge difference as well, although that’s too complex a topic to take on right now. But the larger point is that the United States did not introduce representative government to Japan for the first time and turn a monarchy into a democracy. And without Japan, examples of totalitarian nations successfully forced to become democratic by another nation, through a purely military solution, are mighty hard to come by.

Blumenthal continues,

Newsweek reported this week that the U.S. military, in fact, is no longer pursuing a strategy for “victory.” “It is consolidating to several ‘superbases’ in hopes that its continued presence will prevent Iraq from succumbing to full-flown civil war and turning into a failed state. Pentagon strategists admit they have not figured out how to move to superbases, as a way of reducing the pressure—and casualties—inflicted on the U.S. Army, while at the same time remaining embedded with Iraqi police and military units. It is a circle no one has squared. But consolidation plans are moving ahead as a default position, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has talked frankly about containing the spillover from Iraq’s chaos in the region.”

Yet Bush continues to declare as his goal (with encouragement from his polling expert on the NSC) the victory that the U.S. military has given up on. And he continues to wave the banner of a military solution against “the enemy,” although this “enemy” consists of a Sunni insurgency whose leadership must eventually be conciliated and brought into a federal Iraqi government and of which the criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi faction and foreign fighters are a small part.

Bush’s belief in a military solution, moreover, renders moot progress on a political solution, which is the only potentially practical approach. His war on the Sunnis simply agitates the process of civil war. The entire burden of progress falls on the U.S. ambassador, whose inherent situation as representative of the occupying power inside the country limits his ability to engage in the international diplomacy that might make his efforts to bring factions together possible. Khalilzad’s tentative outreach to Iran, in any case, was shut down by Washington. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for her part, finds herself in Bulgaria, instead of conducting shuttle diplomacy in Amman, Jordan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ankara, Turkey; and Tehran. The diplomatic vacuum intensifies the power vacuum in Iraq, exciting Bush’s flights of magical thinking about victory: I speak, therefore it is.

Bush’s Iraq policy, insane as it is, makes sense to hard-core righties. It makes sense to people who divide the world into two basic groups — “Americans” and “foreigners.” It makes sense to xenophobes who believe the foreigners want nothing more than to be just like Americans. It makes sense to authoritarians who assume that the only smart way to deal with people is by force. Diplomacy is for weenies. Considering foreigners’ point of view is appeasement. Appeasement is weak. Force is strong. We are strong. Therefore, we use force.

The whole insanity of the Global War on Terror is that righties insist it must be a literal, shoot-’em-up, John Wayne landing on the beach-type war. But you send armies to fight other armies, not a tactic. If your goal is to change peoples’ hearts and minds, shooting at them seems a wrongheaded way to go about it.

Righties insist on a hard, rigid approach to fighting terrorism. But terrorism is fluid. It is not bound by territory. It perpetually seeks new channels for expressing itself. In time, what is fluid will nearly always defeat what is hard and rigid, like water wearing away a rock.

Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water.
Yet nothing is better at attacking the hard and strong.
There is no substitute for it.
The weak overcomes the strong; the soft overcomes the hard.
Everyone knows this, but no one puts it into practice. — Tao Teh Ching, verse 78

Blumenthal continues,

Bush doesn’t know that he can’t achieve victory. He doesn’t know that seeking victory worsens his prospects. He doesn’t know that the U.S. military has abandoned victory in the field, though it has been reporting that to him for years. But the president has no rhetoric beyond “victory.”

Bush’s chance for a quick victory in Iraq evaporated when the neoconservative fantasy collapsed almost immediately after the invasion. But the “make-believe” of “liberation” that failed to provide basic security set in motion “fratricidal violence,” as Nir Rosen writes in his new book, “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq,” based on firsthand observation of the developing insurgency in the vacuum created by U.S. policy.

Whether Bush is or isn’t the flaming idiot we sometimes make him out to be is a matter of opinion. But it’s plain he has a rigid mind, as well as a lazy one. And, I suspect, his thinking remains parochial — he views the world through the prism of American national politics. What is actually happening in Iraq may interest him less than the war’s value to him in political capital. In that sense, what the American people think is happening in Iraq is the only relevant reality.

Blumenthal continues,

On May 15, Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor, gave a speech revealing one of his ideas about politics. “I think,” he said, “there’s also a great utility in looking at game changers. What are the things that will allow us to fundamentally change people’s behavior in a different way?” Since Sept. 11, Rove has made plain that terrorism and war are the great game changers for Bush.

But while war may be the game changer for Bush’s desire to put in place a one-party state, forge a permanent Republican majority, redefine the Constitution and the relationships of the branches of the federal government, and concentrate power in the executive, Bush has only the rhetoric of “victory.” He has not stated what would happen the day after “victory.” Although a victory parade would be his political nightmare, now the absence of victory is his nightmare. With every proclaimed “turning point,” “victory” becomes ever more evanescent. He has no policy for victory and no politics beyond victory.

To a rightie, those who speak against purely military solutions to America’s foreign policy problems are “anti-military” and “self-loathing.” We liberals, they think, oppose the “very defense of the world’s one true beacon of freedom. … we do not own that freedom but are tasked with her defense and care by default.”

We liberals think that shredding the Constitution and allowing the chief executive to take on unlimited power and operate in near total secrecy is not the smart way to defend freedom. We think sending our mighty military halfway around the world to get bogged down in sand is not a smart way to defend the nation. Righties cannot understand that our problem is not with their high-minded goals, but with their stupid solutions.

Following up the last post — Dan Froomkin writes today,

President Bush’s exclusive focus on suicide bombers — “suiciders,” in his parlance — when asked about violence in Iraq yesterday once again suggests that he lacks a realistic sense of the current state of chaos in that country.

“That’s the — but that’s one of the main — that’s the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider,” Bush said yesterday in a brief public appearance with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Suicide bombings in Iraq do sometimes result in dramatic death tolls. And their aftereffects tend to show up more often in television footage than, say, the carnage wrought by secretive death squads.

But they’re hardly the main weapon afflicting either U.S. soldiers or civilians in Iraq today.

As anyone who monitors the situation in Iraq knows, a vastly greater threat to the 133,000 U.S. troops currently stationed there is posed by improvised explosive devices left along roadsides and elsewhere — and, to a lesser degree, by gunfire and mortar fire from armed insurgents trying very much to stay alive.

And as far as Iraqi civilians are concerned, the primary security threat these days comes from paramilitary forces committing widespread sectarian murder, unimpeded by anyone in authority.

Don’t miss “Armed Groups Propel Iraq Toward Chaos” by Dexter Filkins in the New York Times, discussed in the last post below.

Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but ask people with first-hand experience in Iraq, and they’ll most likely tell you that Bush’s emphasis on suicide bombings is at best way out of date, and at worst an example of his utter cluelessness.

Was Bush being accidentally or intentionally ignorant? It’s hard to know for sure.

Froomkin provides the transcript of yesterday’s remarks —

The question came from ABC News’s Martha Raddatz.

“Q The U.S. has the most powerful military in the world, and they have been unable to bring down the violence in any substantial way in several of the provinces. So how can you expect the Iraqis to do that?

“PRESIDENT BUSH: If one were to measure progress on the number of suiciders, if that’s your definition of success, I think it gives — I think it will — I think it obscures the steady, incremental march toward democracy we’re seeing. In other words, it’s very difficult — you can have the most powerful army of the world — ask the Israelis what it’s like to try to stop suiciders — it is a difficult task to stop suicide bombers. That’s the — but that’s one of the main — that’s the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider.

“And so I view progress as, is there a political process going forward that’s convincing disaffected Sunnis, for example, to participate? Is there a unity government that says it’s best for all of us to work together to achieve a common objective which is democracy? Are we able to meet the needs of the 12 million people that defied the car bombers? To me, that’s success. Trying to stop suiciders — which we’re doing a pretty good job of on occasion — is difficult to do. And what the Iraqis are going to have to eventually do is convince those who are conducting suiciders who are not inspired by al Qaeda, for example, to realize there’s a peaceful tomorrow. And those who are being inspired by al Qaeda, we’re just going to have to stay on the hunt and bring al Qaeda to justice. And our Army can do that, and is doing that right now.”

Suiciders?

Froomkin also points to “how Bush sets up a false straw-man argument in his response, between either measuring success by suicide bombing or by the ‘march to democracy.'”

Eric Alterman’s column today is a great accompaniment to Froomkin.

Former military man and present-day historian Andrew Bacevich on the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz attitude toward 9/11, here.

Yes, it was a disaster. Yes, it was terrible. But by God, this was a disaster that could be turned to enormous advantage. Here lay the chance to remove constraints on the exercise of American military power, enabling the Bush administration to shore up, expand, and perpetuate U.S. global hegemony. Toward that end, senior officials concocted this notion of a Global War on Terror, really a cover story for an effort to pacify and transform the broader Middle East, a gargantuan project which is doomed to fail. Committing the United States to that project presumed a radical redistribution of power within Washington. The hawks had to cut off at the knees institutions or people uncomfortable with the unconstrained exercise of American power. And who was that? Well, that was the CIA. That was the State Department, especially the State Department of Secretary Colin Powell. That was the Congress.

Meanwhile, Gregory D. Foster, professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University. wrote a brilliant op-ed in The Baltimore Sun a few weeks back [link broken]. Here are some excerpts:

Even as Long War rhetoric artfully circumvents such politically discomfiting terminology as “insurgency,” its underlying message should be clear: We dutiful subjects should be quietly patient and not expect too much (if anything) too soon (if at all) from our rulers as they prosecute their unilaterally proclaimed war without end against ubiquitous evil.

The intent of the message is to dull our senses, to dampen our expectations, to thereby deaden the critical, dissenting forces of democracy that produce political turbulence and impede autocratic license. Being warned here amounts to being disarmed – intellectually and civically.

President Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace; the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid; and the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, among other authoritative purveyors of received wisdom, all warn us that we’re embroiled in – and destined to be further subjected to – what is to be known as a Long War.

It would be one thing if such semantic legerdemain reflected revelatory strategic insight or a more sophisticated appreciation of the intrinsic nature of postmodern conflicts and enemies. But that is not the case. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the cynical view that America’s senior military leaders are willfully playing public relations handmaiden to their political overlords at the expense of a naive, trusting citizenry.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole explains how the armed groups from the Dexter Filkins article got their guns:

The BBC reports that the US gave a contract to a small private firm to import weapons for the Iraqi security forces. It brought in massive amounts of weapons from Bosnia. But the procurement process was complex and involved– you guessed it– subcontractors, and the weapons are hard to trace. It is very likely that a lot ended up in the hands of the guerrillas. What irony. A mania for the private sector has helped turn Iraq into Bosnian using Bosnian weapons. In this Iraq scandal, everywhere you dig you find bodies.

Professor Cole also says that the Sunni 16th Brigade in Dawra, which per Dexter Filkins became a pro-guerrilla death squad, “was a legacy of the Allawi government appointed by Paul Bremer and the UN, which had some serious neo-Baathist facsists in the security positions.” As explained in the last post, the 16th Brigade — a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — became a death squad for the insurgents. They were executing people who cooperated with the same government that set up the brigade.

Remember — as they stand up, we’ll stand down. (We’re bleeped.)