Another article which you simply must read. Here's the lede ...
As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.
Dexter Filkins: "Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns" in the Times.
--Josh Marshall
So many articles get published every day. And it's a struggle to know which are the must-reads and which can be safely ignored. Read this one ... Jet Lag: How Boeing Blew It by Douglas Gantenbein in Slate.
--Josh Marshall
Richard Perle is now in<$Ad$> yet more hot water over the fact that he wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal supporting the tanker deal now at the center of the Pentagon-Boeing procurement scandal. The reason for the heated water, as we noted yesterday, is the fact that Boeing was a big investor in his 'Trireme Partners.'
But tucked away down in the final graf of this article on the story in the Financial Times is this little nugget ...
Internal Boeing e-mails portray a lobbying campaign the company undertook to have "friends on the Hill" and "think tanks" drum up support for the deal. One Boeing e-mail refers to an Op-Ed article in support of the company by retired Admiral Archie Clemins as being "ghost-written".
I'd say what we might have here is another thread pointing in the direction of the never-truly-busted-open OpEd Payola scandal, which we'll revisit soon.
--Josh Marshall
What a difference an ocean makes ...
The nation's job market continued to strengthen in November, with the unemployment rate falling slightly to 5.9 percent and payroll employment rising for a fourth consecutive month, the Labor Department reported yesterday.Washington Post, December 6th 2003
The US economy generated significantly fewer jobs than expected in November, according to government figures issued on Friday, damping hopes of a swift revival in the sluggish labour market.Financial Times, December 5th 2003
We cut-n-paste, you decide.
--Josh Marshall
I've gotten sort of out of the habit <$NoAd$>of linking to Paul Krugman's columns, largely because I think there's so much over overlap between our audiences that the links are redundant.
(In Venn Diagram terms, overlap in the sense of my little circle off in some out of the way part of his big circle.)
But Friday's column is a true stand-out for its unadorned enumeration of what's happening.
Note the last four grafs ...
Awhile back, George Akerlof, the Nobel laureate in economics, described what's happening to public policy as "a form of looting." Some scoffed at the time, but now even publications like The Economist, which has consistently made excuses for the administration, are sounding the alarm.To be fair, the looting is a partly bipartisan affair. More than a few Democrats threw their support behind the Medicare bill, the energy bill or both. But the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress are leading the looting party. What are they thinking?
The prevailing theory among grown-up Republicans — yes, they still exist — seems to be that Mr. Bush is simply doing whatever it takes to win the next election. After that, he'll put the political operatives in their place, bring in the policy experts and finally get down to the business of running the country.
But I think they're in denial. Everything we know suggests that Mr. Bush's people have given as little thought to running America after the election as they gave to running Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. And they will have no idea what to do when things fall apart.
I made a series of similar points in my column in The Hill this week, and many others are putting the pieces together too.
Now back to the Empire essay.
My kingdom for an empire ... essay.
--Josh Marshall
Some random thoughts about the Democratic primary race.
I had lunch today with someone who is not a politician but a fairly prominent Washington Democrat -- certainly not someone from the party's liberal wing. And in the course of answering a question, I said "If it [i.e. the nominee] ends up being Dean ..." At which point, with the rest of my sentence still on deck down in my throat, my friend shot back : "It's Dean."
It was effortless. He wasn't happy or sad about it. He wasn't trying to convince me -- more like letting me in on something I apparently wasn't aware of yet.
We went back and forth over the various factors that play into the race. But the conclusion was that Dean is just in the zone, hitting on every cylinder, doing almost everything right tactically, and having the added benefit of having tons of money. Plenty of candidates have money and go nowhere because they don't know what to do with it. But at least at the moment that doesn't apply to Dean -- and that's certainly related to the fact that the money itself stems from campaign ingenuity, thus creating a sort of virtuous circle of fundraising success.
(I also keep running into McCain types who are very into Dean -- something which is on one level pretty surprising, but on another not surprising at all.
I was reminded of this when I read this post by Eric Alterman about John Kerry's campaign -- a meditation on a meeting Kerry held recently with Alterman and a bunch of other journalists, intellectuals and scribblers at Al Franken's apartment in New York. The broader theme was reconciling Alterman's belief that Kerry could beat President Bush and could even be a great president with the reality that Kerry's campaign appears to be disintegrating in New Hampshire. And because New Hampshire, essentially everywhere.
Alterman says Kerry ...
still has the problem—perhaps unsolvable—of how to break through to Dean voters in the short amount of time he has left when the media has their storyline already and no candidate gets to say anything that lasts more than a few seconds.
And how!
I like Kerry -- I find the smarm attacks on him revolting. But, in a situation like this, it's really hard for me to see how you can recover the support of voters that you once had in New Hampshire, but then lost.
I think Clark clearly has momentum. But he'll need a lot of momentum to make a fight of this.
Edwards and Lieberman? Somewhere between off the map and non-existent.
I find myself torn because I see great promise in the resurgence of energy among grassroots Democrats -- something that has made Dean's campaign possible, but which he himself has also significantly helped to catalyze. The novel methods of fundraising and networking are extremely important -- something that Dems allowed to atrophy literally decades ago. And I definitely think that the going models that Democrats have in DC just aren't working, demonstrably aren't working.
Yet my wariness remains -- on various counts.
Of late, a lot of folks, playing off the McGovern analogy, have started talking up the Goldwater one. Perhaps the Dems lose this one, but it's a campaign that germinates into a political realignment one or two or three elections later.
Maybe.
The problem is that I'm not sure we can afford another four years of this. And I don't consider that hyperbole, but cold fact. Plus, I think Bush is beatable.
--Josh Marshall
"The hawks' whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn [Iraq] into a self-governing democracy--that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can't really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's regime is a steel beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not."
Still ugly, still apt.
--Josh Marshall
All in the Family ...
President Bush named James A. Baker III, the <$NoAd$>former secretary of state, as his personal envoy to Iraq today to help the country grapple with its debt problem."Secretary Baker will report directly to me," Mr. Bush said in a statement, "and will lead an effort to work with the world's governments at the highest levels, with international organizations and with the Iraqis, in seeking the restructuring and reduction of Iraq's official debt."
New York Times, December 5th 2003
Saudi Arabia will withhold the $1 billion in loans and credits that it pledged last month for Iraq's reconstruction until the security situation is stabilized and a sovereign government takes office, U.S. and Saudi officials said.
Los Angeles Times, December 1st 2003
Baker is one of the Saudi government's chief supporters in the US. His law firm, Baker Botts, is now representing the Saudi government in the $ 1 trillion law suit filed against Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the 9/11 attacks by the victims' families. Baker also serves as senior counsel and partner in the Carlyle investment group, which is a financial adviser to the Saudi government.
Jerusalem Post, August 15th 2003
For more than three decades, Saudi Arabia has sought to influence American politicians, often through investment in American business. While they have occasionally sought out Democrats, they are far more comfortable with Republicans -- and in particular, with Bush Republicans. At the moment, for example, the kingdom's defense attorney in a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims happens to be James Baker, that ultimate Bushie whose resume includes stints as Secretary of State and Treasury. (Mr. Baker's last big court case was Bush v. Gore.)
New York Observer, August 11th 2003
A fine illustration of this Washington tradition took place at the capital's Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Sept. 11, 2001. On that day, former secretary of state James Baker, former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci and a parade of other former government officials convened at those swank quarters to attend the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group, a private investment company known for putting lucrative business deals together for the Saudi royal family (and also known for its roster of all-star advisers, including Baker and the elder George Bush). Among those gathered to schmooze with Washington's power brokers was one Shafiq bin Laden, a Saudi captain of industry whose brother would slaughter thousands of Americans before the conferees broke for lunch. The meeting, notes Robert Baer, whose Sleeping With the Devil catalogs many others like it, "was the perfect metaphor for Washington's strange affair with Saudi Arabia."
Washington Post, July 27th 2003
I'm not a Saudi-basher. But it seems to me that there's some difficulty with this appointment.
--Josh Marshall
We'll be talking more about this in coming days. But there are more and more signs of the IRS and other arms of the federal government taking a conspicuous interest in the finances and political spending of Democratic-leaning organizations.
Most establishment, mainstream Dems don't want to think this sort of thing is happening. But I've spoken to several in recent days who are starting to think that it is. The IRS, for instance, has just began a top-to-bottom audit of the NEA's (the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union) finances.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a question for you.
How many prominent Democrats has Charles Krauthammer not publicly diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. (Krauthammer has an MD and trained as a psychiatrist, though I'm uncertain how long, or even if, he practiced beyond his residency.)
Clinton's out of the running; Gore's out; Dean's out; presumably others too.
Just the kind of shrink you'd want to go to -- the kind who uses the expertise as a cudgel ...
--Josh Marshall
There's some interesting insidery stuff going on with an inter-agency tussle pitting -- contrary to form -- State and DOD <$NoAd$>against the NSC on Taiwan policy.
Bill Kristol and Gary Schmitt touched on it in a piece in the Standard on Tuesday. And in the Nelson Report this afternoon, Chris Nelson -- with his inimitable style and dazzling sources -- says the following ...
9. Finally for today, from last night's Report, we incorrectly stated that NSC Asia director Jim Moriarity spent all his time in Taipei before returning to Washington…sources say he also was sent to Beijing to personally explain the President's intentions in writing, privately, to Taiwan President Chen Shuibian.-- we don't know if Moriarity carried a "second letter" from Bush to President Hu…Loyal Readers who may have such knowledge are reminded that e-mail works both ways.
10. But feedback today confirms that while the State Department certainly supports the intention of the NSC in trying to reign-in Chen's efforts to push the envelope in redefining Taiwan's position vis a vis China…that State, including Secretary Powell, is very, very unhappy with how the NSC handled the Moriarity visit.
-- no one wants to admit this…but it turns out that Powell felt constrained to send Bush a letter reminding him of the acceptable ways to discuss what the U.S. "opposes", and why any changes in the mantra can themselves be de-stabilizing.
11. Sources familiar with the Bush/Hu letter confirm our Report last night, that it did use the "approved" or "time tested" language that the U.S. "opposes" unilateral moves by either China or Taiwan which might upset the peaceful status quo.
-- but evidence of the tactical blood bath over Moriarity's visit comes with word that National Security Advisor Condi Rice had to personally order Moriarity to read the draft Bush/Hu letter to Deputy Secretary of State Randy Schriver.
12. And even at this late date, the Bush/Hu letter having been delivered in Taipei, and, apparently, discussed in Beijing, State has not been given an actual text of what Moriarity put together for the President's signature.
-- does any of this really matter? After all, the bottom line is that both State and the NSC are on the same page when it comes to concern over the risks posed now, and in the future, by Chen Shuibian.
13. Our guess is that it does matter, in that the fight isn't merely tactical, but is fundamentally conceptual. Our guess is that Moriarity's effort reflects a Bush White House which continues to view all foreign policy through the prism of counter-terrorism (and, in Asia, this includes dealing with N. Korea).
-- recall that Bush's personal anger with Chen goes back to at least August, 2002, as we reported at the time, when even pro-Taiwan officials were furious with Chen for "upsetting larger U.S. interests" vis a vis China.
14. Despite Bush's letter, this issue is not going away, and is likely to get a good deal more "difficult", not the least because the growing support for Taiwan on Capitol Hill is fundamentally based on support for democracy writ large…and a basic innocence of historical appreciation of the reasons for the Cross-Straits dialogue.
-- as one DOD wag put it today, "What happens when Wolfowitz decides that if we support democracy for Iraq, we can hardly turn our back on Taiwan?" How Capitol Hill might play with that is anyone's guess.
We can discuss later the fact that the president's brother, Neil Bush, is now in business with the son of the former President of the PRC, Jiang Zemin, and Neil's recent 'summit' meeting with Taiwanese President Chen in New York.
Not that any of these things have anything to do with each other of course ...
--Josh Marshall
Okay, when can we all just admit that the Rosetta Stone of today's Washington (viz, the defense-intel -money-chase -homeland-security-lobbying mumbo-jumbotron) is the account book of Richard Perle's "Trireme Partners"?
Turns out now that Boeing (themselves now in a bit of military-industrial complex hot water) 'invested' $20 million too.
--Josh Marshall
Here is a frightening and revealing article about protests and threats from Israelis and Palestinians against the architects of the new 'Geneva Accord.' (See this post below for more thoughts on what the Accord represents.)
Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin, hideously, called it "a Swiss golden calf," and an assembly of rabbis said the authors should be "cast out from human society and brought to trial."
Meanwhile, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades denounced the Palestinian authors as "collaborators" and someone opened fire on Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo's home.
--Josh Marshall
A new TPM Featured Book: Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman by W. Montgomery Watt.
To specialists, it's no doubt dated, published as it was in 1961. But it's a short, concise and elegant account of Muhammad's life, the birth of Islam, and the religion's first decades.
An unadorned narrative with lots of informative detail -- I found it an excellent book and recommend it highly.
--Josh Marshall
My God! I am always a bit leery of Zogby polls because about as often as his polls are dead right, they're dead wrong.
But even if his numbers can be erratic, there's no ignoring his new poll out of New Hampshire.
Dean 42%
Kerry 12%
Clark 9%
Lieberman 7%
A thirty point spread. That's amazing.
Zogby also gives Dean a 26% to 22% edge over Dick Gephardt in Iowa. That's basically neck-and-neck. But it's always better to be a neck ahead than a neck behind.
What's really telling about those New Hampshire numbers is that Dean's number (42%) has been right about there for the last month, going by the last several public polls. (I looked at three public polls from November -- two gave Dean 38%, one gave him 44%.)
The difference is in Kerry's number, which continues to fall. That's the lowest number he's ever tracked at in the state, judging from a quick scan of public polls stretching back to last spring.
I think this state records thing in Vermont is making Dean look foolish and the gaffes (Soviet Union for Russia) don't help either. But for the moment at least none of that is showing up in the polls -- at least not the top-lines; I haven't seen any internals.
Also, see this analysis of the race from MSNBC. For the moment, the most consequential battle is the Dean-Gephardt fracas in Iowa.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, in case you haven't heard, Mike Allen has a story in the Post tomorrow. And the lede is that the big yummy Turkey President Bush was photographed taking to the troops wasn't actually going to get eaten. It was some sort of display Turkey, seemingly gussied for the photo-op.
On the one hand, who cares? The Clinton-test would lead me to that conclusion.
But you go down into the article and the other malarkey starts to add up.
Next there's the issue of the made-for-TV-movie British Airways fly-by that never happened. The White House, as we noted yesterday, changed the story. But British Airways says the new story isn't true either.
I love this bit of snide understatement from Allen's piece ...
"I don't think everybody was clear on exactly how that conversation happened," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.British Airways said it has been unable to confirm the new version. "We've looked into it," a spokeswoman said from London. "It didn't happen."
Unable to confirm ... didn't happen. I think we get the idea.
Then there's the choicest selection in the whole article ...
White House officials do not deny that they craft elaborate events to showcase Bush, but they maintain that these events are designed to accurately dramatize his policies and to convey qualities about him that are real."This was effective, because it captured something about the president that people know is true, that he really cares about the soldiers and gets emotional when he sees them," Mary Matalin, a former administration official, said about the trip to Baghdad. "You have to figure out how to capture the Bush we know, even if it doesn't come through in a speech situation or a press conference. He regularly rejects anything that is not him."
The explanation is worse than what's being explained. Fake scenes are good becaue they capture deeper truths about the president "that people know [are] true." That's classic. Sorta like how the Santa Claus story captures the deeper meaning of Christmas or that other story about the Stork.
Great.
--Josh Marshall
I had thought that the "Geneva Accord", an unofficial peace plan authored by Yossi Beilin (a prime architect of the Oslo accords) and Yasser Abed Rabbo (a Palestinian moderate and former PA cabinet minister), would end up as just one more well-intentioned irrelevancy that provided some momentary diversion from the butcher shop which is now Israel and the West Bank.
But now I don't think so.
First is the context in which this is happening.
For all those who have eyes to see, a sea change has been taking place of late in Israeli public opinion. It's not that they are abandoning Sharon (not yet at least) or embracing Arafat. But there is a coalescing sense that the current situation isn't so much a get-tough policy as a state of perpetual bloodshed, which itself may be setting the stage for something far worse. Sharon has been just as hardline as he promised. And even more Israelis are dying than before, not to mention Palestinians.
The change has been most conspicuously signaled by a series of statements by current and former senior members of the Israeli military and security services arguing that the current policies simply aren't working.
The other significance of the Geneva Accord, as Michael Moran explains very ably in this piece, is that -- in a certain sense -- they put the lie to the purported intractability of the current situation. For all the rancor and hatred that has built up over the last three years (and it wasn't exactly a bed of roses before that) everyone pretty much knows what the final deal looks like -- and pretty much everyone knows that it looks a lot like what's included in the Geneva Accords.
So, it's not that it'll be easy to make this deal. But, in a certain sense, the two sides aren't really that far apart.
The other thing which I take some heart from is that Arafat and Sharon clearly feel threatened by this plan that has been put on the table. There have been demonstrations against it on the Palestinian side. Sharon has condemned it. And Ehud Olmert, the Vice Prime Minister, who represents almost all of what is immoderate and narrow-minded in Israeli politics, has been publicly scolding Colin Powell for considering meeting with Beilin and Rabbo.
And now, to his -- and the administration's -- credit, Powell is going to do just that.
And Paul Wolfowitz -- who also deserves great credit -- will be meeting with Beilin and Rabbo too.
We'll return to the significance of the Wolfowitz meeting in a subsequent post.
--Josh Marshall
Just added to the TPM document collection, Terry McAuliffe's letter to John Ashcroft calling for an investigation into the Nick Smith affair.
--Josh Marshall
Madeleine Albright, and a host of other American, NATO and European officials have testified at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. Each has done so in open court.
Wesley Clark has been called to testify later this month.
But the Bush administration is insisting that his testimony take place in near complete secrecy -- which is entirely unprecedented for high government officials and is normally reserved for individuals who fear retribution for their testimony.
(Court rules allow high-ranking government officials to have representatives of their governments' on hand who can step in and have particular questions answered in secret if they believe they may compromise national security interests or touch on classified information.)
Two explanations suggest themselves. One is more administration payback against Clark -- an effort to keep him out of the spotlight for political reasons. But a more likely and prosaic explanation is the administration's contempt for international law and legal institutions.
Administration officials demanded a similar level of censorship on possible testimony from Richard Holbrooke last year. And court officials, for now at least, decided not to call him at all.
So many bad motives to choose from, right? In this case, for them, it's probably a twofer.
--Josh Marshall
Revising and extending the president's remarks. And revising ... and extending ... And ...
During the president's quick trip to Iraq on Thanksgiving, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told the press of a scene straight out of a Harrison Ford movie in which a British Airways pilot made an in-flight identification of Air Force One and then had to be warned off the ID by some quick thinking officials on the airborne White House.
Well, that turned out not to have really happened.
Now the story is that a British Airways pilot radioed London, not Air Force One. But British Airways seems to be saying that that story isn't true either.
Can't we just cut to the chase and agree that it was on board the plane, as it streaked through the darkness over the misty depths of the Atlantic, that Bartlett decided that it would be a cool story to have appear in Woodward's next book?
I don't think anyone will come forward to dispute that.
--Josh Marshall
Here are two provocative and compelling pieces on what's happening in East Asia during our period of distraction. One by Fareed Zakaria in Tuesday's Post and another by Jane Perlez in Wednesday's Times.
--Josh Marshall
According to the Washington Post, US civilian and military authorities in Iraq have agreed to create an Iraqi paramilitary force numbering just under 1,000 men, composed of equal contributions from the militias of the five largest political parties in the country.
I hesitate to criticize this decision too readily because I can see the very difficult range of options we're dealing with. And I can see advantages of pursuing such a course: namely, having a corps of trained Iraqis to help put down the insurgents who are killing our soldiers and preventing any progress toward stabilization and democratization.
I'm convinced that the choice to disband the Iraqi Army was a bad idea, about which we should have known better. This, on the other hand, may be a bad decision that we must take because all the other options are worse.
But with all those qualifications put out on the table, I have to tell you that just instinctively this strikes me as a very bad idea.
As Ghazi Yawar, an independent member of the Council tells the Post: "This is a very big blunder. We should be dissolving militias, not finding ways to legitimize them. This sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people."
The reasons for not doing this are almost endless -- not least of which is the fact that these militias aren't exactly pure as the driven snow operations, and they are based in most cases on rival political factions that would probably be fighting each other if we weren't still there with a hundred and fifty thousands of our guys and gals. (Add to this the fact that the leaders of several of these parties are reaching for almost any expedient to perpetuate their power into the post-occupation period -- and this looks like an awfully good way to do it.)
At a deeper level, however, the issue here is one of power and the direction in which it is flowing.
The idea behind a successful occupation, reconstruction and democratization process -- whether it be in Japan or Germany or Kosovo or Bosnia -- is that you control not only the power of overwhelming force but the more granular and immediate forms of power we associate with police authority and basic civil administration.
It is only with that sort of control that you can hope to manage the sort of social and political reconfigurations -- always matters of the greatest difficulty -- that can ensure a more democratic and stable future for the country in question.
(Call this imperialism, or any other catch phrase, but if it's done competently and under the appropriate auspices I have no problem with it.)
But what is quite evidently happening here is that we don't have that sort of power. So we're having to go to other sources of force, authority and patronage to find it.
Only the groups we're going to -- in most cases factions based either on hucksters, or charismatic leaders or ethnic or sectarian loyalties -- are the ones whose power we're trying to curb or who themselves embody tendencies in the society which we are trying to reform. In such a state of affairs it becomes very difficult to see whether we're coopting them or they're coopting us.
When I first started reporting on Iraq almost two years ago I had a long conversation with a well-known Iraqi emigre who told me that thirty years of what he called Saddam's "excessive dictatorship" had so ground down all the elements of civil society and public life in Iraq that the only associations that remained were the most elemental ones -- those of ethnicity and sect, the hardiest weeds, which were the only ones that could withstand the scorched earth policy which was Saddam's rule. The truly national institutions and the other rudiments of civic life had simply been destroyed.
Ideally, a period of occupation or international administration can create a period of breathing space where such national and cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian institutions could emerge and provide a counterweight to these more destabilizing, centrifugal forces.
But instead of our mastering them, they appear to be mastering us.
As is happening on so many fronts the initiative is slipping from our hands, even though we try to portray the process as the product of our own policy and decision-making.
--Josh Marshall
In case you needed any more evidence that Ralph Nader has become the enemy of any hope of progressive change in this country, visit the new Nader 2004 Exploratory Committee website. Not much up there yet, but what more do we really need to know?
Or you can send your comments to the Exploratory Committee at this email address (info@naderexplore04.org) to let Nader and his associates know whether you think his potential candidacy would contribute to a good outcome in the 2004 election.
And if you want some dark comedic entertainment, see the Nader FAQ, which lamely tries to argue that Nader didn't help throw the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
Villainy, wrapped up in mendacity, with a little bow of hypocrisy on top -- always a delightful package ...
LATE UPDATE: Alas, as of Wednesday morning, they've taken down the FAQ -- I guess they didn't find it convincing either ...
--Josh Marshall
Juan Cole has some noteworthy observations about the ambush and subsequent firefight this weekend in Samarra. I've been puzzling over this for days now. It seems clear that this was a major development, but the facts remain terribly obscure. And without the facts, it's hard to know just what happened or what significance it has in the larger story.
What struck me first about the firefight were the reports that the insurgents were wearing the uniforms of the Saddam Fedayeen -- one of Saddam's more vicious paramilitaries. If true, that seems like a very big deal.
Guerillas seldom have much to gain by wearing readily identifiable uniforms, save for the psychological message it sends, both to their enemy (i.e., us, in this case) and Iraqi civilians. And the message seems one of audacity -- that they're willing and capable of confronting us as organized paramilitaries and not just by sniping and setting off bombs.
The initial reports suggested it was a pretty poor decision on the insurgents' part since the Army opened up with the full force of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and killed three or four dozen of the attackers.
But the more we hear about what happened the muddier the story gets. (See particularly the letter appended to Cole's post.)
In initial accounts the Army said that either 46 or 54 insurgents were killed. But battlefield estimates of how many of your enemy you kill are notoriously inaccurate --- and most often inflated. And the local hospital says it counted only 9 dead, most of them civilians.
As Cole notes, some of the discrepancy must be due to insurgents carrying their dead or wounded away after the engagement. But it's hard to figure that this accounts for all the difference. And in recent statements, the Army has downplayed the original reports that the insurgents were wearing the Fedayeen uniforms.
One other point that I haven't yet seen discussed in much depth is the precision and specificity of the information the attackers seem to have had about the mission to deliver those new bills into the city. I've heard some chatter --- though nothing as yet I've been able to nail down --- about suspicion in the Army about the security of information given to the CPA and/or the IGC.
In any case, this is a post about questions rather than answers.
I just don't think we have much of an idea what happened in Samarra. The initial reports seem to have come from soldiers who went into a very rough situation, found themselves in the midst of a horrific firefight, opened up with what are basically battlefield weapons and then pieced together what had happened from observations they collectively made while all of that hellishness was going on.
At this point, neither the Army's initial account of the number of dead or those provided by the local hospital seem particularly credible.
--Josh Marshall
Does Ray LaHood (R-Ill) know something we don't?
Yesterday, at an editorial meeting with a local newspaper, Lahood was asked about the impact of Iraq on next year's election.
LaHood replied that the US is on the verge of capturing Saddam and once that happens the resistance will collapse. When a member of the paper's editorial board asked LaHood if he knew something they didn't, the five-term congressman -- who sits on the House Intel Committee -- said "Yes I do."
So is LaHood just blowing smoke or does he know something we don't?
Put me down for smoke. But read this and make your own decision.
--Josh Marshall
Now that's odd.
When I flipped on my computer this morning, CNN was running a breaking news alert that Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri had been captured. al-Duri was not only one of Saddam's top deputies. He has also allegedly been a key organizer of the post-war resistance.
Now, twenty minutes later, no follow-up story, no alert, no nothing.
Looking at the other news sites, it seems that Kirkuk is rife with rumors that al-Duri was captured in a raid last night and that one member of the IGC, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, made a vague statement seeming to imply that he had "There was a major action against a highly suspicious objective last night in Kirkuk and it is very possible that Izzat Ibrahim has been captured or killed."
Did CNN jump the gun? Presumably we'll know more later this morning.
--Josh Marshall
A couple months ago I was in a book store in New York leafing through the latest offering from Laurie Mylroie, a book called Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror.
I've been thinking a lot about the book business of late and the all-important issue of timing. And with that in mind I couldn't help chuckling when reading over the liner notes and seeing gems like this: "Combining important new research with an insider's grasp of Beltway politics, Mylroie describes how the CIA and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."
Indisputable evidence ... Hmmm, you think, maybe this is a dust-jacket that could have used a touch of last-minute rejiggering.
(Amazon says the book came out on July 29 of this year. So you figure those lines were probably written a couple months earlier, just as they were tipping over the edge from mere foolishness to demonstrable ridiculousness, but not quite there yet.)
Of course, in some circles, the jarring nature of disconnects between claims and facts ain't quite what they used to be. But whatever you think of Mylroie's work (which posits Saddam's role in everything from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the Oklahoma City bombing to 9/11 to the Anthrax attacks), it has been extremely influential with the war-hawks who were the primary architects of our Iraq policy. And that's a frightening thought on a host of levels.
For more on Mylroie, her work and her influence, read Peter Bergen's new piece on her in The Washington Monthly.
--Josh Marshall
Alas, one for two. Today a three judge panel quashed subpoenas which would have compelled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Congressman Joe Barton to testify in the Texas redistricting (i.e., double-dipping) case.
--Josh Marshall
There were, of course, two instances this year of mid-decade redistricting that came, shall we say, straight outta Washington.
Because more seats were at stake and the process prompted more theatrics, the double-dipping in Texas got much more attention. But the same thing happened in Colorado. And today the State Supreme Court said the whole sorry episode was unconstitutional.
"If [congressional] districts," said the ruling, "were to change at the whim of the state Legislature, members of Congress could frequently find their current constituents voting in a different district in subsequent elections."
Now for the court case in Texas, where we're still waiting to hear whether House Majority Leader Tom DeLay will be able to avoid being deposed about his role in the redistricting battle.
--Josh Marshall
My posts have been sparse for the last few days in part because of the holidays but also because I am poring over a stack of books about empire for an upcoming essay. And with these various thoughts about empire swirling through head, reading this article about our ever-evolving Iraq exit strategy plan in tomorrow's Post is an exercise in sinking feelings and dark humor.
The essence of the story is that the plan for a political handover that we announced just weeks ago is already on the fast-track to dead letterhood.
And it's happening because the plan is being gamed by Iraqi political leaders who've clearly got more power on the ground than we do.
Our lack of effective power, as opposed to main force, of which we've got plenty, is what's pushing us to get out of the country in the first place. But our efforts to get out have further weakened our position, thus diminishing our ability to get out on our own terms. It's a vicious cycle, and as difficult to remedy as it is vicious.
Back on Wednesday the Post had a piece about how Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was largely responsible for scuttling our original plan to appoint the drafters of the constitution, rather than have them elected.
Now he's come out against the new plan for electing these folks through a complex series of town caucuses and called instead for direct nationwide elections.
It's pretty hard to fault Sistani's positions on democratic procedural grounds. But the bigger point, again, is our impotence in the face of his expressed views.
He's calling the shots; we're not.
And then there's the Interim Governing Council, the IGC.
The greatest deceit perpetrated by the architects of the war turns out to have had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction or ties between Saddam and al Qaida. The profoundest deception was the claim that the IGC was designed to be a transitional governing authority when in fact, as is now becoming clear, its true purpose was to provide a sort of dark, Falstaffian comic relief to balance out the ominous backdrop of postwar Iraq.
Much of the jockeying we're now seeing involves efforts by the IGC to perpetuate its power into post-occupation Iraq even though -- with the exception of the Kurdish faction leaders -- few of its members have any serious base of political support in the country or, to put it bluntly, any armies on hand for when things really get fun next fall.
So, while the real players jockey for position and await our departure, these boneheads are trying to use the paper power we've given them against us in order to hold on to authority even after we leave.
That's just great.
Here's a prime example ...
Even if the United States can broker a compromise formula, council members are still trying to retain their leverage by arguing that the council should remain as a second legislative body, the equivalent of a senate, an idea likely to ignite further controversy, Iraq experts warn. Alternatively, the council could try to slow the process, hoping to preempt the latest U.S. plan.
Their leverage ... Like I said, dark comic relief. We can't even get our puppets in line.
Undemocratic or imperfectly democratic upper houses of parliaments usually justify themselves by their partial remove from the bustle of democratic politics or their identification with national unity or ancestral wisdom or some such thing. Think the British House of Lords or at the turn of the last century the United States senate. Such arguments are always strained. But why the council we installed in the first months of the occupation should play this role is a little hard to figure.
And then another nice passage ...
One way or another, key council members are vying either to shape the transition or ensure the council remains intact and a powerful body, as the U.S. plan envisions. Because many of the 24 council members probably would not fare well in open elections, they pressured Bremer to establish an indirect three-step system to select a new national assembly, which in turn would pick a prime minister and cabinet, a process so complex that many Iraqis and U.S. experts doubt it will work.A former U.S. adviser to Bremer described the plan as "an insane selection system of caucuses, like the Iowa caucus selecting those who will vote in New Hampshire."
The U.S. plan effectively gives the Governing Council a kind of remote control because it will have the deciding vote in local caucuses that will pick a national assembly.
All of this adds up to the essential ridiculousness of the moment: On the homefront, the president is shaping his political campaign around the notion that we shouldn't show weakness and we can't cut and run. Meanwhile, it's clear to pretty much everyone in Iraq that we're doing both.
And they're acting accordingly.
--Josh Marshall
