A few days ago Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Slate defending Ahmed Chalabi against various press criticism. One of Hitchens' points is the following ...
In news stories as well as in opinion columns, it is repeatedly stated that Chalabi hasn't been in the country for many years—or since 1958. This contradicts my own memory and that of several other better-qualified witnesses. They recall him in northern Iraq many times and for long periods in the 1990s, helping to organize opposition conferences and to broker an agreement between the opposing Kurdish factions.
The implication is that Chalabi is being slandered and falsely accused, that there is evidence he was in northern Iraq but that it is being covered up.
This statement is at best quite misleading.
You don't need to rely on anybody's recollection or witnesses. Everyone who has ever reported on or written about Chalabi -- friend or foe -- knows he ran an INC operation out of northern Iraq in the early-mid-1990s. When Chalabi was still supported by the CIA, he was running his operation from the part of Iraqi Kurdistan enjoying de facto autonomy under the protection of US-backed no-fly-zones. There's no mystery about this. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS.
People who are critical of Chalabi often say that he hasn't lived in Iraq since his adolescence. Often they'll add something like 'with 
the exception of a short period in northern Iraq protected by the US no-fly-zone', etc. Sometimes they don't add this.
But when they say this, the point they are trying to make is that he has never lived in Iraq as an adult -- with the exception of a short period as a would-be insurrectionist in Iraqi Kurdistan -- and thus that he enjoys none of the connections or familiarity with the country that one expects of an exiled opposition leader. This may or may not be a mark against him as a credible candidate for future political leadership or influence in Iraq. But it's certainly not an unreasonable point to raise. And the points it's meant to address are not nullified by a relatively brief period spent operating out of safehouses in northern Iraq.
Chalabi's period in northern Iraq is very good evidence of his willingness to put skin in the game, to put his own life in some danger in an effort to overthrow Saddam -- an important point in his favor. But it's not particularly relevant to the issue of when he went into exile from the country.
Hitchens is creating a false impression of mystery, cover-up and bias, when the facts on this point are clear to pretty much everyone.
--Josh Marshall
Press reports often uncritically repeat Ahmed Chalabi's claims that he has no ambitions for political office, let alone leadership, in a post-war Iraq -- notwithstanding the fact that this is widely known to be false.
This graf in an article in Saturday's Times is thus helpful ...
According to State Department and Pentagon officials, Mr. Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, has argued that he should head the interim authority. But several senior officials said that was unlikely.
I add the italics to make the point that this seems not to be some State Department slur.
Ahmed Chalabi thinks he should head the interim Iraqi government. Based on?
--Josh Marshall
In the words of the immortal Nigel Tufnel, there's a fine line between cleva' and stupid. And after reading the full transcript of Rick Santorum's remarks to the AP about homosexuality, it occurred to me that there's 
also a fine line between Christian conservative and porn-king.
Say what you will about Teddy and Barney and the rest of the liberal standard-bearers on the Hill, I don't think any of them has ever brought up "man on dog" sex in an on-the-record interview. (In the transcript, the reporter herself is obviously stunned and interrupts the Senator to tell him his comments are "sort of freaking me out."
More generally, I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan who said on his website that the full transcript is actually much more damning than the snippet that's been widely reported. Up until just a few years ago it was commonplace for people to say, why can we outlaw polygamy and yet have it be the case that outlawing homosexual sex is unconstitutional? When you get into topics like incest or pedophilia that's a different subject because everyone can recognize that these are issues involving non-consenting adults, and so forth. But presumably polygamy is a choice made by consenting adults. And yet we outlaw it. So it's a good question because it shows that even while most of us recognize a 'right to privacy' we nevertheless believe in a right to privacy that is shot through by deeply-held social value judgements.
When I first read about Santorum's remarks I found them objectionable. But I assumed that they were some form of a 'slippery slope' or reductio ad absurdum kind of argument, such as the ones above. But they weren't. In fact, the point he goes to great lengths to make doesn't even have anything to do with a constitutional argument. He's not saying, how can you make value-neutral distinctions between homosexuality and bigamy or incest. He is, as nearly as I can tell, making the positive assertion there are no distinctions. They are each "antithetical to strong, healthy families."
Having said all this, I can't say that I'm surprised. I'm surprised he said it quite so clearly, not that he thinks it.
Now you have the President supporting Santorum and calling him an "inclusive man." For the reasons Eleanor Clift sets forth here, I guess the president doesn't feel it's possible to criticize Santorum -- which tells you a lot. But "inclusive"? I can think of a number of words he could have used. 'Principled'? Maybe they're bad principles, but he's principled. 'Deeply religious'? Okay. But 'inclusive'?
One thing that hurts politicians more than anything is saying things that make them sound ridiculous. Calling Rick Santorum 'inclusive' makes the president sound ridiculous.
--Josh Marshall
Thus saith ABC's John Cochran in a new story at ABCNews.com ...
To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy.Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.
"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."
...
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed everything, including the Bush administration's thinking about the Middle East — and not just Saddam Hussein.
Senior officials decided that unless action was taken, the Middle East would continue to be a breeding ground for terrorists. Officials feared that young Arabs, angry about their lives and without hope, would always looking for someone to hate — and that someone would always be Israel and the United States.
Europeans thought the solution was to get a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But American officials felt a Middle East peace agreement would only be part of the solution.
The Bush administration felt that a new start was needed in the Middle East and that Iraq was the place to show that it is democracy — not terrorism — that offers hope.
...
The Bush administration wanted to make a statement about its determination to fight terrorism. And officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target.
Other countries have such weapons, yet the United States did not go to war with them. And though Saddam oppressed and tortured his own people, other tyrants have done the same without incurring U.S. military action. Finally, Saddam had ties to terrorists — but so have several countries that the United States did not fight.
But Saddam was guilty of all these things and he met another requirement as well — a prime location, in the heart of the Middle East, between Syria and Iran, two countries the United States wanted to send a message to.
Hmmmm. I feel like I've heard someone else saying something like that -- and before it was cool! Definitely read the whole piece.
--Josh Marshall
A few weeks ago I sat down to read (and review) a book that I expected to like a lot. And then I didn't. I had that expectation because the subject is so rich (terroristic Islamism) and because I have such respect for the author (Paul Berman). The book is Terror and Liberalism. Here's my review in The Washington Monthly.
--Josh Marshall
"Shock and awe said to many people that all we've got to do is unleash some might and people will crumble. And it turns out the fighters were a lot fiercer than we thought. Because, for example, we didn't come north from Turkey, Saddam Hussein was able to move a lot of special Republican Guard units and fighters from north to south. So the resistance for our troops moving south and north was significant resistance. On the other hand, our troops handled it, handled that resistance quite well."
Who? President George W. Bush in an interview today with Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One. In the interview, he goes on to say that he wasn't worried because he had confidence in the plan.
Meanwhile, don't miss this report on the fall of Baghdad by Tim Judah in The New York Review Books. You know the story: the increasingly comical statements by al-Sahaf, the wildfire of rumor, the sudden collapse of the state, the looting. But like all good reportage this brings it to life, lets you experience some of it like you were there, lets you understand some of it.
Also, I've had a number of folks write in to ask recently for recommendations of books about the Middle East and/or Islam. Now, obviously, these aren't topics about which I can speak with any expertise. But I can suggest a couple that I liked and I felt I learned from. One is Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman by William Montgomery Watt. If I recall correctly this is actually an abridgement or condensation of a longer, more academically-oriented book. It's a biography of Muhammad and -- as such -- a history of the earliest origins of Islam. It's short, maybe a couple hundred pages (I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now. So I can't look at my copy.) and it's a couple decades old so I suspect it might seem a touch dated in some superficial ways.
Now, obviously the information in this book won't give you any better purchase on rebuilding Iraq, the Middle East generally, clashes of civilizations and so forth. But if you're looking to familiarize yourself with Islam this is obviously some pretty key info. I remember it as one of the better books -- better written, crafted and so forth -- I've read on the subject.
Also very worth reading is A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin. Almost every conflict in the Middle East for the last seventy or eighty years can reasonably be seen as the fall-out from or at least deeply tied to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. This is a really, really good book. One of those if you only read one book kinda books.
Finally, there's Ataturk, the most recent major biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. I'm a fan of Ataturk's and a fan of this book. If you want to learn more about the origins of modern Turkey it's not a bad place to start.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday I mentioned an article coming out about the various exile groups vying for power in post-war Iraq, and how they each have their own sponsors in the United States government. The CIA, State, DOD? Everyone's got their horse. Here's the article by Eli Lake in The New Republic. Definitely take a look. It's important.
--Josh Marshall
Which is worse? That there are five or six different exile groups vying to control post-war Iraq? Or that each of those five or six groups is allied with a different arm of the United States government?
It's not quite that bad. But it's not that great an exaggeration either. We've touched on this in passing over recent weeks. But the divisions that bedeviled US Iraq politics through the 1990s haven't gotten resolved. And now they could become really acute -- especially since time is now of the essence. (Say what you will about the Iranians, they at least know who they're supporting.) Of course, the Pentagon is in league with Ahmed Chalabi's INC. For years the CIA has been backing the Iraqi National Accord headed up by Iyad Alawi -- basically made of ex-Generals and security types. State has its own theory. (To say that there is bad blood between Chalabi and Alawi is the vastest of understatements.) Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's envoy to the Iraqi opposition likes Adnan Pachachi. The list goes on and on. (The Brits had issues like this in their sojourn in Arabia and Iraq.)
It's the Beltway on the Tigris. Just as the divisions of Iraqi politics got played out in Washington during the 1990s, the reverse may happen now.
Tomorrow a really good article is coming out that unpacks this aspect of the story quite nicely. I'll link to it when it goes online.
Coming soon -- the backstory on that New York Times four US bases in Iraq story that Rumsfeld knocked down.
--Josh Marshall
The newsflash of the day is the surprising strength of clerically-based Shi'a groups in Iraq. Perhaps 'surprising' should be placed in edgy quotation marks, since the articles and columns appearing in today's papers are based on the comments of those who aren't surprised at all -- namely folks at State, CIA, the broader intelligence community, and region experts generally. The argument behind these critiques is not that the problem 
is insurmountable but that the planners of the war seem to have given the issue so little attention.
Take a look at "U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites," which is above-the-fold in the Post. The Times has a complementary piece on Iran infiltrating agents into southern Iraq to organize the Shi'a along lines congenial to Iran's religious and geopolitical interests.
The most interesting piece may be the column in the Times by Dilip Hiro. He explores the longstanding and distressing pattern by which in situations of anarchy or delegitimized governments, it is often the clerics who have the sole remaining base of social and political authority, and are best able to provide some measure of security and essential services.
We're still in 'too-soon-to-tell' territory. But the democratizers in the DOD camp are concerned about the situation with the Shi'as and how ably the Iranians have been playing the situation. They do have on their side the fact that the most senior and revered Shi'a clerics are not fans of the Iranians' theocratic model. There's also the counterveiling force of Iraqi and, more broadly, Arab nationalism. But will these be enough?
I still want to say more about Newt Gingrich's cartoonish performance at AEI yesterday. But for the moment I just want to discuss an interchange which Charles Krauthammer, another of the members of the panel, had with one of the questioners. (One of the most entertaining parts of the panel was the time when Gingrich's clownish, grade-school rhetoric became too much for Krauthammer, and he felt the need to pipe in with some clarifications.) A key question today is what we would do if the Iraqis elected an Islamist government. When a questioner posed this question to Krauthammer, he as much as refused to entertain it. While granting that it was a possibility, he said it was extremely unlikely since people had never freely voted for what he called 'totalitarianism.' (I think he called it an 'extreme hypothetical' or perhaps a 'radical hypothetical' -- I'll check my recording later to verify.) People in the audience tossed out the examples of Iran and Nazi Germany, which are at best flawed examples, since in neither case did a majority of the population vote for the government that came to power. But it has happened, exactly this, as recently as 1992 in Algeria. The Islamist party, the FIS, was winning what no one doubted was a free election when the military stepped in and annulled the results of the election. (The one saving grace in Iraq may be the inability of Shi'a and Sunni Islamist to come together politically, let alone religiously.)
In its own way Krauthammer's comment was the most disturbing part of the presentation since it was an example of the one thing none of us can really afford: the temptation to cling to ideologically-driven assumptions over observed facts.
Next Up: the administration's get-out-quick camp's stated desire to avoid the appearance of being colonizers or occupiers and why this is the most ridiculous sort of cop-out.
--Josh Marshall
"Zubaydi was picked up by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) exile group's militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, and turned over to the U.S. Central Command yesterday, the official said."
That's the third graf in Walter Pincus's piece in Tuesday's Post.
A couple days ago, Saddam's son-in-law Jamal Mustafa Abdallah returned from Syria and turned himself in to members of the INC 'militia'.
Then there's the headline in Tuesday's Washington Times: 'INC says it's closing in on Saddam'.
It's not too early to start asking just what's going on here. We already know that the Pentagon airlifted Chalabi and several hundred of his 'Free Iraqi Forces' into Iraq not only over the objections of many others in the administration but apparently without even notifying many of them.
The question everyone is asking today is whether the Pentagon -- and the Bush administration more broadly -- is going to try to install Chalabi as the head of a new Iraqi government or at least tip the scales decisively in his favor.
(My new column in The Hill this week discusses the Chalabi question, some of his background, and how this may all come back to bite us.)
I think it's clear that that is precisely what's happening. Is Chalabi's militia just getting really lucky grabbing all these guys? Or is the Pentagon working with him on these captures, making him privy to US intelligence, using his 'militia' as a proxy, or simply letting it be known that if you want to turn yourself in, they're the ones to go to?
More generally, Iraq is currently under US occupation. That means the US military is responsible for law, order and security in the country, as well as the apprehension of potential war criminals or former regime leaders. An occupying power usually doesn't look very kindly on self-declared 'militias' freelancing around the country trying to set up their own de facto authorities. The situation is different with the peshmergas in Iraqi Kurdistan since the Kurds have had de facto self-rule for a number of years. But under just what authority is Chalabi's crew operating? Under whose auspices?
If our plan is that the INC militia is to be the basis of the new Iraqi army -- as some suggest -- that makes a mockery of our claim that we're not favoring any particular leader.
Most of Chalabi's supporters in Washington understand that he has little support inside the country. They think, however, that he's earned a right to at least a shot at leading Iraq because of his work on the outside agitating for regime change over the years. On top of that, they believe that the sort of Iraq he'd help create would be the best both for the Iraqis and for us.
So what to do about the fact that he's got no constituency in the country and the fact that the Iraqis seem hostile to the idea of being governed by emigres? Well, the thinking goes something like this ... America's got a lot of stuff. Stuff? Well, money, water purifiers, electrical generators, medicine, you name it, all sorts of stuff.
But who becomes the conduit for that stuff? If that conduit happened to be someone like Ahmed Chalabi that would be a very good way of building up a constituency on the ground in the country.
If this is what we're up to, it's something that should really be debated.
--Josh Marshall
Rumsfeld Neo-Con Mau-Mau Guidebook, p. 46, "Powell Knock-Down Checklist"
1. Former government official (check)
2. Member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (check)
3. Fellow at AEI (check)
4. Willing to do a lot of media (check)
5 ...
--Josh Marshall
Okay, I admit. This is kind of cool -- at least to me. My college alumni magazine profiled me, or rather, profiled TPM.
--Josh Marshall
Over the last several months I've become widely associated with what might be called the 'botched diplomacy' hypothesis. (The Wall Street Journal Online, for what it's worth, disparagingly called me the "brains behind the Democrats' 'botched diplomacy' spin.") Well, now I'm getting some high-profile support ... from Newt Gingrich.
AEI had a big confab this morning at which Gingrich announced his support for precisely this argument. (His presentation was previewed in the Post this morning.) American diplomacy, he argued, has been an unmitigated disaster over the last several months.
Here's a taste ...
The State Department communications program failed during these five months to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States.
Only there's a catch. As the above quotation implies, the problem isn't with the Bush administration or 
its policies. It's all due to the meddling of the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The reason the Europeans and the Turks and everyone else turned against us isn't because of Bush administration policy. It's because the State Department and the particularly the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs refused to implement Bush administration policy.
The answer? Purge the State Department.
(Note to all members of the conintern: Stop zagging! Time to zig! (What's the reference? See Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 419) The inevitability-of-no-international-support party line is no longer operative. We're on to State Department betrayal. Crib-sheets for the new argument can be picked up at the AEI front desk, laminated wallet-sized versions available at ATR.)
Ever since that whole elective office gig didn't pan out, Gingrich has been casting around for a new angle. And this would seem to be it. Gingrich's rhetorical palette remains about the same as ever: red, yellow, orange and hot orange. So we'll of course be saying much more about this.
--Josh Marshall
Sometimes the best short-n-sweet bit of information for the day is contained is Chris Nelson's staccato, rat-tat-tat run-down of the day's events that introduces each day's edition of The Nelson Report. Here's today's ...
Kelly on the way to Beijing for N. Korea meeting, Bush meets again today on Syria. What each has in common is role of Colin Powell in urging diplomacy, and Bush's willingness to listen. Rumsfeld & DOD hawks were ready to send troops into Syria "in hot pursuit" before Bush said "no". And Rumsfeld was against holding the Beijing/DPRK talks, until Bush said "yes", at Powell's urging. Then the hawks tried to substitute Bolton for Kelly, the approximate equivalent of a MOAB, but Powell prevailed. So, reports of Powell's demise exaggerated…for now. Question is, are the "adults" really in charge (the optimist's view) or is Powell the guy who grabs the steering wheel when the bus driver hits 100 mph?
Also, do not miss this article from the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on the apparent breakdown in talks between Arafat and Palestinian PM-designate Abu Mazen. The deal-breaker, it seems, is that Mazen is demanding the 
authority to dismantle Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades and other Palestinian paramilitary groups, and also make Mohammed Dahlan head of security.
It's not clear that the short-term outcome here is going to be a good one. Arafat is apparently now reaching out to other potential prime ministerial candidates -- presumably ones he can reliably control. But the deeper story seems very positive: the emergence of something like conventional politics, the open vetting of the crucial issues and thus the possibility of democratic accountability. More than anything else, it's the splintering of unitary power within the Palestinian authority and the possibility of having the crucial political questions hashed out with some degree of openness rather than by violence and opaque factional in-fighting. This is important. And, potentially, good news for everyone.
--Josh Marshall
On the off chance that you woke up this morning in too buoyant a mood and need to get depressed really quickly, then you won't want to miss this piece ("Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit From Iraq") in Monday's Washington Post.
As the title implies, the article is built around blind quotes from various senior administration officials arguing that we should, after all, try to get out of Iraq as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
It's true that this is the kind of piece you put together by going to every administration official who's eager for an early exit. But the fact that the author apparently got so much material from 'senior' administration officials is a very bad sign.
Here's just a listing of some of the choicest quotes and snippets ...
Senior administration official on the post-war plan: "I don't think it has to be expensive, and I don't think it has to be lengthy. Americans do everything fairly quickly."...
Senior administration official: "The president's goal is to leave Iraq on the road to prosperity and security and democracy -- or at least give them a fighting chance of it."
...
Former Sec Def James R. Schlesinger: "This is going to be a very tricky course that we are on. Many people who have the right vision about what should be accomplished do not, as of now, recognize how much of a commitment in time as well as money this is going to require."
...
Pentagon and White House officials disagree with such warnings. One senior defense official questioned whether 75,000 troops would be needed even in the near future, saying the U.S. military force that deposed Hussein's government was not much larger. Some government functions could be turned over to an interim Iraqi government in a matter of months, the official said. Even the need for a new Iraqi military force could be obviated by moving U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters south toward Baghdad, the official suggested.
You only have to study Iraq for about an hour and a half to understand that the idea of turning the policing of Baghdad over to Kurdish peshmergas is just a tragic joke.
The subtext of the whole piece is, "It's gonna cost a lot more than we thought, it looks really complicated, so let's just give them a good running start, send over a few water purifiers, and then get the hell out."
What's so depressing about this article is that none of the difficulties which are now carted out as excuses for pulling out quick were at all unexpected. For months, reluctant hawks were saying, 'Yes, go in, but only if you're willing to commit to the sort of long, expensive effort that can insure a good outcome.'
At least some senior administration officials seem willing to toss aside all the grand rhetoric just a couple weeks after the major battles stopped. Just to complete the morality tale, the ones now holding out for a concerted push for reconstruction and democratization are the folks at the State Department -- the ones the hawks at the Pentagon long accused of opposing efforts to democratize Iraq.
It's hard to read this article and not get the sense that at least some big players in the administration had never really thought seriously about what they were getting us into. Or, if not that, that they're cynical almost beyond measure. I always feared that we'd get into Iraq on the sparkling vision of Paul Wolfowitz and then govern it with ethics of Richard Perle and the parsimony of Mitch Daniels.
If this article is any sign ... well, you know the rest.
--Josh Marshall
At a Passover seder a few days ago I was talking to an Israeli emigre who told me there was a long-abandoned oil pipeline connecting the Iraqi city of Mosul to the Israeli port city in Haifa. The pipeline was built by the British in the 1930s and 1940s. But it was shut down in 1948 when the Brits quit Palestine and the state of Israel was born. It's sat unused for more than half a century.
The implications of reopening such a pipeline under the auspices of a pro-American Iraqi government were obvious to me immediately. But I didn't know if the idea had yet gotten much serious attention.
It turns out that it has. Quite a lot, actually. The issue was first raised by Israel's Minister of National Infrastructure at the end of March. His comments were reported in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. Here's a more recent piece from Janes (the British defense industry news publisher) and another in Sunday's Guardian.
The Guardian piece not only confirms that this is being actively discussed in Israel, but also that the Israelis are discussing it with US administration officials as well as members of Ahmed Chalabi's INC. (Add to this, Richard Perle's statement last month that Chalabi "and his people have confirmed that they want a real peace process, and that they would recognize the state of Israel. There is no doubt about that if they come to power."
This captures what's at the heart of my deepest misgivings about this whole endeavor we're now embarked upon: fatal overreach on the part of American policy-makers. It's an overreach with multiple causes, none of which will lead to anything good.
I'd like nothing better than to see a pro-Israeli government in Baghdad. It would be great if they could start pumping oil from Mosul through Jordan to Haifa. Same goes for a "real peace process." But what is the chance of any of these things happening in the short term and the new government of Iraq actually being democratic?
What sort of government in the Arab world, born of what is at best the iffy origin of an American invasion, would kick things off by establishing warm relations with Israel and opening a pipeline to sell Iraqi oil to the Israelis? The answer, I'd imagine, is one that won't last a second longer than American troops are on the ground.
There are those who think that Arab hostility toward Israel is largely the product of corrupt, authoritarian governments that divert popular unrest into rage against Israel. I think there's a degree of truth to that argument. But even if you grant the point, which I do only to a limited degree, it's still quite possible that that antipathy will persist long after the corrupt, authoritarian governments who fed it leave the scene.
It's already clear that our credibility and Arab perceptions of our motives are extremely poor. To make this democratization project work, we will really have to be, as the old-timers say, purer than Caesar's wife. If we treat Iraq simultaneously as a democratization project and as grab-bag to fill out our geopolitical wish list, then we're heading for disaster.
We hear a lot, and rightly so, that this effort is going to require patience. Usually that's meant in the sense of patience to stay involved in Iraq's affairs for a very long time. But we're just as much in need of patience to achieve our most desired ends in the region. If we don't have it, if we try to squeeze this orange for every quick advantage, we really are heading for disaster.
--Josh Marshall
"There is a role for the Islamic religious parties, including Shia religious parties," said Ahmed Chalabi this morning on ABC, "because they have some constituencies. But they are not going to be forcing any agenda or any theocracy on the Iraqi people."
Some constituencies ...
I don't how large the Shi'a parties' constituencies are. The answer likely turns largely on definitions. Are we talking about Shi'a parties based largely on group identification or those committed to the imposition of a theocratic state?
Whatever the answer to that question, what's clear is that they have some constituency in the country and that Ahmed Chalabi has no constituency in the country -- so long as you exclude the several hundred who flew into the country a couple weeks ago. And yet he's the one we're hearing from.
To the extent that he gains a constituency it will likely be by leveraging his connections to American capital and political players. (The fairly consistent report from journalists on the ground is generalized Iraqi resistance to leadership by exiles who've spent most of their lives outside of the country -- a phrase that is quickly becoming a code-word for Ahmed Chalabi.)
Ironically, this is a replay of the last dozen years. Through the 1990s, Chalabi had very little support in the Iraqi exile community -- let alone in Iraq. The key exile groups maintained their membership in Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, largely because he was a conduit for money and access to the US government. The INC billed itself as the umbrella group representing the breadth of the opposition, when in fact it had become little more than a shell. The other groups, nominally joined under the INC umbrella, began meeting in separate ad-hoc arrangements for precisely the purpose of sidelining Chalabi.
Chalabi advocates claim this was the work of the State Department, trying to undermine Chalabi. And there's some truth to this. But to the degree it was true it was largely because they believed he was an obstacle to getting the rest of the groups together to actually do something beside lobby Washington (we'll discuss later why State and the CIA don't like Chalabi).
Now the US media (and perhaps various players in government circles) seem to be falling into the old trap -- giving disproportionate weight to Chalabi because he speaks good English (and talks -- more broadly -- the language of the West) and has a thick 202 area code rolodex.
--Josh Marshall
Just a short note on the WMD search. Here's a clip from an article at Time.com ...
The failure to turn up anything to date raises two possibilities, neither one good, says Joseph Cirincione, chief of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "It may be that there aren't as many weapons as the President said, in which case we have a major intelligence failure, a huge embarrassment for the President and a huge blow to U.S. credibility—and that's the good news," he says. "The other option is that there are as many weapons as the President feared, and they're no longer under anyone's control."
That sounds like a distressingly good point. But as these searches go on it seems to me that it would be terribly misguided not to bring the UN inspectors back into the country. Since we fought a war to get at Iraq's WMD there's no reason why we shouldn't run the search entirely to our own liking and dictates and to suit our own needs. But having the UN inspectors there along for the ride, as it were, will serve a critical function: namely, giving the search credibility.
Now that we've had a few false alarms with would-be WMD finds, when we do come up with something there will be lots of people around the world who will think we planted whatever we find. Frankly, not a few people in this country will be suspicious. Whether that's fair, or reasonable, or rational is really beside the point. If and when we find this stuff it will be critical to our interests and goals that as many people as possible believe us. At the moment, having some of the UN inspectors involved seems like a good way of accomplishing that. And I haven't yet heard what the downside would be -- save for pique and payback.
--Josh Marshall
Here is a key part of America's strategic vision for Iraq coming into focus. According to this article in The New York Times, the Pentagon is expecting to secure long-term access to four key Iraqi military bases. One's near Baghdad; the others are near Nasiriya, the pipeline leading to the Jordanian border, and in Iraqi Kurdistan. As we've noted earlier, Iraq is quite literally in the center of the Middle East. It borders almost every major country in the region. And isn't that far from the two others -- Israel and Egypt. (Remember, we've also secured a series of robust basing arrangements with several of the tiny emirates that line the Arabian Peninsula.
Consider how this changes our reliance upon and stance toward the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In addition to their oil, much of our security relationship with the Saudis has been based on our need to project force against and counterbalance Iraq and Iran. With the Iraqi government out of the picture, our need to counterbalance them disappears. And if you want to project force against or counterbalance Iran, Iraq is a much better place to do it from than Saudi Arabia.
What this adds up to is that most, if not all, of our geostrategic interest in Saudi Arabia evaporated over the last month. If the Saudis give us grief or won't cut off terror money to various bad-actors we have a much freer hand to squeeze them.
Of course, they still have the biggest amount of oil, which is no small matter. But even some of that leverage may be fleeting. I'm not writing from home this evening. So I don't have access to the precise percentages. But Iraq's known oil reserves are quite large. And it is widely believed that if the country's oil industry (which has been in a dilapidated state for many years) was opened up to more modernized, state-of-the-art technology, those reserves could actually turn out to be much greater than is currently known.
What this means is that while Iraq's reserves may never be as great as Saudi Arabia's, they may be large enough to diminish some of the Saudis' commanding hand over the international oil market.
Now, combine all this with the fact that many in the Bush administration (and out of the Bush administration, for that matter) think that Saudi Arabia is the ground zero of international terrorism, the terror purveyor state par excellence. To this point, our ability to muscle the Saudis on the terror question or even undermine the regime itself has always been limited by our need for their assistance geostrategically. But if the administration gets what it wants in Iraq, all of that changes.
--Josh Marshall
