New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gets it at least partially right with his latest column:
We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don’t believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq — a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
. . . .
In short, America’s opponents know just what’s at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America’s ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.”
I think this is exactly right. Iraq is and always has been the strategic linchpin of the Middle East. The Bush administration reignited the war on Iraq in part for this reason. They knew that the Middle East would continue breeding and sending terrorists to the US until one got through with a nuke, or smallpox, or something comparable, and that the euphemistic “War on Terror” (really, war on radical Islam) could not be won on defense. The only way to stop the terror attacks was to go on offense and win the war on radical Islam in the home of radical Islam, the Mideast.
So far, so good. It is with his conclusion that I think Mr. Friedman starts to go off the rails:
We may fail, but not because we have attracted terrorists who understand what’s at stake in Iraq.
Still with him.
We may fail because of the utter incompetence with which the Pentagon leadership has handled the postwar. (We don’t even have enough translators there, let alone M.P.’s, and the media network we’ve set up there to talk to Iraqis is so bad we’d be better off buying ads on Al Jazeera.)
I think it is far, far too early to characterize the occupation as utterly incompetent. Here, I think that Mr Friedman is playing the unreasonably expectations card, discussed here. I invite you to imagine the kind of prewar preparations that would be required to implement an occupation to the standards that Mr. Freidman would apparently consider minimally acceptable. I submit that, at a minimum, the war would have had to be postponed for years while we trained “sufficient” troops to speak the language and navigate local customs.
We may fail because the Bush team thinks it can fight The Big One in the Middle East — while cutting taxes at home, shrinking the U.S. Army, changing the tax code to encourage Americans to buy gas-guzzling cars that make us more dependent on Mideast oil and by gratuitously alienating allies.
What the hell does the US tax code have to do with winning hearts and minds in Iraq? Mr. Friedman seems to be implementing the unwritten rule of NYT editorials – whatever is wrong in the world can ultimately be traced back to the Bush tax relief bill.
As for shrinking the US Army, I don’t have the foggiest idea what he is talking about. Certainly the Pentagon’s budget is growing, for good or ill. He could be confusing the dramatic cuts put in place by President Clinton, or he could be intentionally misrepresenting Rumsfeld’s plans to restructure the army, which include outsourcing administrative jobs. In any event, it is not at all clear that we need a bigger army to win the war on Islamic extremism; we may only need a different, smarter, more flexible one.
One casts about in vain for allies that would make much of a difference in the occupation, as far as I can tell. Sure, it would be nice to share the burden, but America’s shoulders are broad enough if it has the will, and the list of countries that could make a positive difference is precious short. Basically, you’re looking at NATO, and maybe the Japanese. It sounds like the UN honcho who just bought it (due to the UN’s incompetence in, yes, functioning in an occupied country) may have had something to offer, but he’s gone now, isn’t he? The UN in general is not well thought of in Iraq, I gather, and personally I don’t think the Russians or the French would be well received, given their past business with Saddam. The list of useful allies who aren’t already on board is pretty effing short, and you note that Friedman doesn’t give any specifics here.
Still, half right is big step up for most NYT columnists, although Friedman admittedly has more flashes of sentience than many of his colleagues.
What you fail to understand in Mr. Friedmans column is something that is, in fact, monumentally important; PERCEPTION. No, it’s not important here in the States. We’ll see the task through the same eyes either way. Where it matters is the perception out there – anywhere you go beyond the shores of the USA.
Multinationalizing the occupation and administration of Iraq will substantially change, in the minds of peoples across the globe, the legitimancy of the effort.
Spare me your rants against the UN. It’s the easiest thing in the world for us to denigrate it (much of it well deserved, I agree) because we don’t need it. “What have they ever done for us?” is a question most Americans will ask. When you’re the most powerful military and economic power on the planet, there’s not much, directly, they can do for you. The rest of the world isn’t in the category; the 95% of the worlds population. Indirectly, they a lot for us. They provide a venue for discussion and a framework for international cooperation – when they’re not politically gridlocked, that is. And from the viewpoint of an Arab, or a Brazillian, or an African, or an Indonesian, their sanction provides something all important in their eyes, legitimacy. Like it or not, that how they see it. We may need the UN, but they feel they do.
The simplist way to take the wind out of the sails of those fanning the flames of resisance in Iraq is to get the UN involved.
If you doubt that, check out the views of average Iraqis (as reported in the press) on the UN bombing. Even self-proclaimed anti-American occupation resisters were shocked and outraged at the UN attack. THEY know that attack was aimed at hurting them; hrting Iraqis. It’s had a profound effect on how they view this whole guerilla campaign. What before had seemed to them meer American propaganda, that terrorists/Ba’athists were behnd the sabotage, now they begin to see that may well be true. Why? Because the UN, the pipeline attacks, the attack on the Jordainian embassy were all attacks that do nothing to hurt the occupiers and hurt only Iraqis and stir chaos. Even the uneducated and illiterate there can see that. That bombing may well prove a watershed event.
Internationalizing the administration of Iraq will recast the light in which the average Iraqi, and the average Arab sees this. All for the betterment and increased likelyhood of success there. That will be good for us all, whereever we live.
Bringing in the UN is good, as long as the UN doesn’t gain too much control of the effort. The UN’s record of actually solving problems when in charge is abysmal. Not that even internationalist Bill Clinton didn’t let the UN control the war against Serbia.
The UN, in spite of its image in much of the world, is a deeply dysfunctional organization.
I’m curious what you guys think about this:
U.S. recruits Iraqi spies
I think that Friedman realizes that, as a New York Times columninst, he has to toss some red meat to his reader base in the form of Bush bashing.
After a whole column of basically touting the Neo-Con party line about vital connection between rebuilding Iraq and fighting terrorism, he had to turn around and separate himself by suddenly borrowing a few lines from his stable mate, Paul Krugman. As a liberal and and a “Middle East Expert,” he’s gotta maintain his street creds – no sellin’ out.
I get the feeling that he only half believes the assertions of the last paragraph. He’s trying to forge a path for liberals to support the effort in Iraq. I wish him luck. If he can get broader support, and spread the understanding of the importance of facing down the terrorists, I wont begrudge him a few throwaway lines in the last paragraph. It’s better than 90% of the uncomprehending defeatism in the rest of the mainstream news.
Don’t forget antiwars can’t be reduced to Islamofascists & Saddamites (read: the evil menacing the Holy USA) only: the overwhelming majority of the 195 countries that make up for the World, too, were against Bush’s war, not France alone. This is why confusing the US blatant aggression with a “war (that) is about Western powers, helped by the UN” is gross lying. Likewise, putting tolerance, women-rights & pluralism on a par with a unilateralist (UN law scoffed), hypocritical (lack of casus belli + resulting change of casus belli), hazardous (unpreparedness) decision made by a clique all too linked to oil & other corporate interests, is sheer propaganda.
BEFORE THE WAR, the USA was told in every language & manner possible that its illegal war WAS a threat per se, not a remedy to an inexisting one (lack of WMD in Iraq). NOW, AFTER THE WAR, the USA is realising it won’t win the peace & will merely be considered an incompetent occupier, which it is. Now the USA knows -& so does the whole World- it has no way out but an a posteriori “vindication” of its own mistakes. Hence the rationale about Islamofascism (which is clearly existing) in Iraq (which is not, or, more precisely, which had not been until the USA brought disorder there & purposely refused to manage the situation through firm diplomacy instead).
Everybody understands, even ”the Russians or the French”, that the USA is about to lose the face, thus yielding a major psychological advantage to our common enemies & to the detriment of all western nations, including ”the Russians or the French”. There’s a feeling in the US that there’s Schadenfreude, in France for instance, every time a US soldier gets killed. That’s obviously wrong & abusive. No one is happy when the US is losing: it’s only a further step towards greater dangers. For the ones it is intended for (“the axis of weasels”), the make-believe Schadenfreude syndrome is all the more untenable as the US won themselves a terrible reputation of cynicism as they financed & helped Saddam’s war against Iran, including through WMD acquisition. The names are the same in the XXth & XXIst centuries: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush (one single patronym shared by a nepotist, George II, & a president George I).
“The UN in general is not well thought of in Iraq, I gather, and personally I don’t think the Russians or the French would be well received, given their past business with Saddam”.
That’s an additional example of the ease with which the US systematically avoid its own flaws & lies (financing Saddam’s war, including WMD – betraying the Shiites – opposing the UN inspections which had Iraq removed Iraqi WMD – then pretending there were WMD – finding a more convenient casus belli once the war’s over – rushing over oil…). We can’t be bad, so evil must be on ”the Russians or the French”, not on us. How poor a sophism…
“(…) the euphemistic “War on Terror” (really, war on radical Islam) could not be won on defense. The only way to stop the terror attacks was to go on offense and win the war on radical Islam in the home of radical Islam, the Mideast”.
Yes, but why Iraq? And why not –say- Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or even Iran, three more immediate & dangerous threats than Iraq, already plunged in advanced decrepitude? Could it be the Iraqi target was a more farcical show for FowNews & CNN to broadcast?
Now it has been said that French opposition to war is equating to dhimmitude, eg: a sweet surrender to Islamofascism. The amalgam is unstoppable: there’s a Muslim minority in France, & France is always to surrender at once, so France is getting willingly, profoundly Islamicised. A reformulation of that: Munich attitude with Ben Laden. A variant on the same theme: France is obsessively jealous of the USA & greedy with her interests in Iraq, she’s also a dirty, immoral country, so France didn’t hesitate to stab the US in the back. Reformulated: failure combined with hypocrisy.
Again, this is brainwashing machine. Not reality. If reality were to be so, it’d be so simple. And simplism is really what Bush is desperate for.
“Multinationalizing the occupation and administration of Iraq will substantially change, in the minds of peoples across the globe, the legitimancy of the effort”.
Alleluiah!!! This IS really true. And multinationalising the non-war approach to get rid of the WMD was precisely what the UN had been successfully delivering before His Highness, George The Second, decided to do otherwise.
“The UN’s record of actually solving problems when in charge is abysmal”
Perhaps if a certain rogue State had refrained from sabotaging UN performance & showed true involvement (including paying its dues in arrears it’s still owing to the UN), problem-solving could be a UN record.
Actually, I think we’d have pulled out of the UN ages ago if it weren’t in NYC… where it’s ever so easy for the NSA to do sigint.
A bargain at twice the price.
BTW, Mr. Kodiak: You should consider starting your own blog as you obviously have much to expound upon and do write fairly well. I may agree with almost nothing you say, but you do it fairly clearly. Comment sections are not really an appropriate place for very long, multi-page expositions.
Whether intended or not, Friedman has laid out a potentially more successful route for Democratic hopefuls. Any thinking Democrat has to realize that the Dean policies may be able to win at the DNC in an orgy of choir-preaching… but haven’t a hope in hell of putting a Democrat in the White House.
Lieberman is a far better candidate for them if he could only cut lose from the forces dragging him into the pit with the other losers. Perhaps Friedman is showing him the way out.
Man, Kodiak needs to lay off the caffeine.
Really So Elf had nothing to do with France’s opposition, even spreading all of the money to the government people.
Or Russia, who did not want America to see the Made in the USSR on the side of the barrels of WMD.
It has been pointed out many times that America and the UK supplied not even a million dollars worth of equipment, yet Russia almost half a billion with France and Germany not far behind.
This is a war of ideals. Their idea is to have Shia law in all of the world, to replace Man-Made law with the Law of Allah.
Saddam backed the Palistinians, giving them free scholarships to Iraq colleges, money to suicide bombers and probably money to terrorist organizations like PLO, and others.
He had to go and go he did. Now the other countries are waking, Iran will soon fall internally, SA will change and so will Syria.
Mr. Madison, I don’t think this bothers anyone (either that, or nobody wants to face this):
U.S. Recruiting Hussein’s Spies
Occupation Forces Hope Covert Campaign Will Help Identify Resistance
By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 — U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former president Saddam Hussein’s security services underscores a growing recognition among U.S. officials that American military forces — already stretched thin — cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating truck bombing of the U.N. headquarters this past week, the officials said.
Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior U.S. official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits. While U.S. officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Hussein’s rule, they assert that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises….
Agreed – Kodiak, start your own blog! I like reading your stuff and even though most of the time I dont agree, you write well and can really hold together a point.
Your wasting your talents being the trolling contrarian on Samizdata – firstly you’re not getting the audience you deserve, and secondly, as mentioned before, comments sections arent the optimum place for lengthy posts.
Friedman’s charge of “utter incompetence” is directed at the civilians in charge of the Pentagon. Strictly speaking, the charge is inappropriate. Many errors in Iraq have been committed by military officers; most errors are magnified in media coverage that focuses only on areas of violence; and some major errors were the product of the same poor prewar access to good intelligence that has caused such trouble with reference to Iraqi WMDs.
By press accounts much of the prewar planning that was done focused on the urgency of preventing food shortages, which had been a problem in Afghanistan and before that in Kurdish Iraq in 1991; Gen. Garner, who had overseen aid distribution in northern Iraq then, was named the first head of OHRA largely for this reason. As it turned out, food shortages have not been a problem, Garner’s expertise was not needed, and the problems that did develop were those he did not plan for. No one before the war appears to have predicted that the Iraqi electric system would be in the shape it is, or given thought to how to replace old, badly maintained equipment of European design in a timely manner. No one appears to have forecast the splits in the Shiite community that have taken much effort to manage, or that practically the whole state apparatus in Iraq would desert.
It is fair to say that some of these mistakes represent a degree of incompetence. But some of them are just mistakes. It cannot be said too often that the situation in Iraq is unlike anything the United States or any other country has faced in recent history. Hindsight is easy, and occasionally valuable, but the fact is that in a case like this we have to expect that some things will go wrong precisely because hindsight by definition is not available before one has to deal with a problem.
Now, having said all that….the specific charges Friedman makes, about the shortage of translators and the poor media network used by the coalition forces to communicate with Iraqis, are to all appearances absolutely accurate. No more than he can I imagine why these could not be seen as potential problems before the war, or why anyone would miss the possibility that not being able to communicate intentions and objectives to the people of an alien culture might put allied soldiers at risk.
I prefer to think of this as the product, not of incompetence but of wishful thinking: about how an occupation force would be received, about the need to use propaganda in a postwar environment, perhaps most of all about the ability of Arabs to understand on their own what building a stable democracy requires. If Mssrs Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are guilty of this, as I think they are, they are not the only ones.
Kodiac,
You write well and passionately, but it´s all disconnected from reality – from what actually happened.
There was an evil and murderous tyrant killing his people and sttirring war and trouble in the whole region, and you, with France Russia and Gremany proposed to do, and did – absolutely nothing about it. Many nice words about what a wonderful legitimate organization the UN is, but consistent obstruction of any effective action. The above did nothing but support Saddam for many years, and traded with him and took advantage of his petro-money. When action was proposed by the US through the UN they blocked that, preffering to keep Saddam in power.
This is what happened in reality – your version of the events is totally false.
Kodiak,
You mad fool. Which way is it?
1. There were no WMD’s and therefore the war was unjustified, as per your quote:
“BEFORE THE WAR, the USA was told in every language & manner possible that its illegal war WAS a threat per se, not a remedy to an inexisting [sic] one (lack of WMD in Iraq).”
2. Or rather there were WMD’s, as per your quote:
“[T]he US won themselves a terrible reputation of cynicism as they financed & helped Saddam’s war against Iran, including through WMD acquisition.”
You mad, mad hate-filled lying fool, you.
As for those of you commenters promiscuously praising his writing, C’MON! He’s all over the place, he writes fairly poorly, and he’s overgenerous with the anti-US boilerplate. In other words, I doubt he is sane.
Sheesh!
Uh, oh, do we have a quagmire in the Ivory Coast???
2 phrench soldiers were killed.
Get out while you can, Kodiak.
However, unlike phrench indochina, we’re not so inclined to take over this time.