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A Failure to Think Right

I’ve had such negative thoughts about Iraq lately, it would appear (according to the White House) that I’m one of those people “pushing pessimism and lack of faith in the mission.” I thought I was criticizing those who have not fulfilled the mission they themselves proclaimed, but obviously, my mind ain’t right. And I wondered, maybe that’s just the problem. Maybe I haven’t been listening to the right voices. Literally. Maybe if I suck down a heaping dose of Republican Senators, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Novak, the government’s own “Iraq Weekly Status Report,” and even the contingency plans of the operational commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, I won’t be such a Gloomy Gus.

So I did. The result? Now I’m not only even more pessimistic, I’m “right” angry, too.

If you want to hear from the President’s party, this past Sunday they were all over the networks’ Sunday morning shows. And these Republican Senators did present a surprisingly united front … against Bush.

Leading members of President Bush’s Republican Party on Sunday criticized mistakes and “incompetence” in his Iraq policy and called for an urgent ground offensive to retake insurgent sanctuaries.

“The fact is, we’re in deep trouble in Iraq … and I think we’re going to have to look at some recalibration of policy,” Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We made serious mistakes,” said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has campaigned at Bush’s side this year after patching up a bitter rivalry.

McCain, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” cited as mistakes the toleration of looting after the successful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and failures to secure Iraq’s borders or prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country.

Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also criticized the administration’s handling of Iraq’s reconstruction.

Only $1 billion of $18.4 billion allocated by Congress for the task has been spent, Lugar said. “This is the incompetence in the administration,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Sen. John Kyl, like McCain an Arizona Republican, said, “Allowing the Iraqis to make the decisions not to go into some of these sanctuaries, I think, turns out to have not been a good decision, which we’re going to have to correct now by going in with our Marines and Army divisions.”

Reuters: “Republicans Criticize Bush ‘Mistakes’ on Iraq”

Meanwhile, “Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee said Monday he plans to support his party in November but may write in a candidate instead of voting for President Bush.”

When I see and read the “confidence” that the administration’s approach in Iraq has instilled in their fellow Republican leaders, I wonder — again — if I’m looking in the wrong place. So I turn to Victor Davis Hanson, one of the more hawkish thinking men in the world of columnists, to see what his “ear to the ground” is hearing.

A few conservative strategists — from the Financial Times to Edward Luttwak — have recently floated the idea of a strategic withdrawal from Iraq. “Exit strategy” is suddenly the realist buzz.

Given our successful removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent increasing chaos in the country, the idea may grow popular to re-declare “Mission Accomplished” — and then quietly leave. We have fulfilled our goals of ensuring that a Baathist Iraq no longer threatens its neighbors or the strategic Gulf states, and can now let Najaf fight Fallujah rather than both of them us. Or so the new wisdom goes.

Yet leaving unilaterally from Iraq would be a tragic mistake. We have already done something like that before — many times. What rippled out afterwards was not pretty [...] Leaving Afghanistan to its own misery after the Soviet retreat, not going to Baghdad in 1991, turning boats around from Haiti, or quietly ducking out of Mogadishu all were less messy in the short term, but in the long term left even greater chaos. The ultimate wages were the Taliban, 350,000 sorties for over a decade above Iraq, the current mess in the Caribbean, and terrorist havens and worse in Africa. We forget how often in history a perceived stumble or the half-measure only emboldens enemies to try what they otherwise would not.

We also have a moral stake in Iraq, whose people have suffered from 30 years of Baathist state terror and terrible fatalities in three losing wars. Our defeat of Iraq in 1991, our subsequent abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites to a wounded Saddam Hussein, twelve years of occupying Iraqi airspace, the corrupt U.N. embargo, and the recent final defeat of the Baathists brought untold misery to the Iraqi people.

In contrast, for the last year and a half, the United States has paid a high price to ensure the Iraqis a chance for the first humane and civilized government in the entire Arab Middle East. If it was callous to abandon the Shiites and Kurds in 1991, it is certainly right now to ensure that Saddam’s gulag is not superseded by either a Taliban theocracy or a Lebanon-like cesspool.

Victor Davis Hanson: “See Ya, Iraq?”

Great. While Hanson is as resolute is ever, he hears gathering rumblings of a “cut and run” — from his fellow “conservative strategists.” OK, getting a bit desperate now, we turn to the conservative conduit of choice, columnist Robert Novak. A consistently right wing pundit, who may sometimes play it a bit fast and loose, but always seems to do so with a predictable tilt to the right, and a big rolodex of conservative sources cultivated over many years.

So what the hell is this about?

Inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying: Ready or not, here we go.

Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out.

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

In private, some officials believe the mistake was not in toppling Saddam but in staying there for nation building after the dictator was deposed.

Robert Novak: “Quick exit from Iraq is likely”

First, I sit here staring at my keyboard, futilely seeking some properly expressive key to press (a symbol of a head emitting steam, with “shift” giving you a symbol of a head exploding). While doing so, I realize that in our current media-political world, you have to question the motivation, sources, and sanity of every soul claiming the title “journalist.” And Novak is suspect on all three counts.

But I have to wonder … WTF? Why would a right wing columnist with decades of experience dump such a story on his own side … if it doesn’t have at least a kernel of truth? The weirdest part is the predictions for the second term cabinet. Wolfowitz as Secretary of Defense? There can be only one person willing to ship that kind of pipe dream. At least one of Novaks’s sources (“some officials”) is Wolfowitz. He’s the only one who could possibly daydream that he’d survive confirmation hearings.

In the end, I guess I have to somewhat take Novak at his word. There are people in high places in the Bush administration who think we “must leave Iraq next year” and who “believe the mistake was not in toppling Saddam but in staying there for nation building after the dictator was deposed.” Whether that group of people includes George Bush remains to be seen. We sure won’t know before Nov. 2.

But I think the part that infuriates me most is the idea our mistake was “staying there for nation building after the dictator was deposed.” Because the numbers show we have made a fractional effort at rebuilding, and the fractions are publicly available. It’s embarrassing. It’s the reason the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar, was so hot he called it “incompetence.”

I kept hearing him and Senator Biden quote figures like 5 and 6 percent when they spoke of the pitiful amount of the appropriated $18.4 billion that’s actually been spent, and I wondered about those specifics. It turns out they were getting their numbers from the US Government, via the State Department’s Iraq Weekly Status Report [PDF]. So, like with Novak’s column, we have to somewhat take them at their word. And it turns out they were just giving us the sound byte summary, as the detailed breakdown is alternately embarrassing and infuriating.

In that PDF, if you scroll down to page 22, you’ll find a big fat table for the “Project and Contracting Office,” headed by bureaucratic terms like Appropriated, Committed, Obligated, and Disbursed. There’s really only two columns that matter, the one all the way on the left that totals up to the $18.439 Billion Congressional appropriation from last October, and the one all the way on the right that details where the money has been spent so far, as of September 1, 2004.

First, it should be noted that this money was appropriated just shy of one year ago, and there was never any intention for all $18.4 billion to be spent in the first year. But even in a project with a multi-year commitment, wouldn’t one expect at least a 25% expenditure of funds in the first year? And even if some of the categories in the breakdown might not come close to that theoretical 25%, shouldn’t there be at least a few that do. Or even exceed it?

The reality is stark and damning. The Senators (or the media) in the quotes above rounded off their figures to $1 Billion spent. But as of 20 days ago, the State Department reports $886 million has been spent of the $18.439 Billion appropriation … 4.8 percent. However, when you look at the breakdown, you see that over half of that small amount ($467 million) has been spent on “Security and Law Enforcement.” That’s about 15% of the $3.235 Billion that was appropriated to that budgetary item (and that was before the recent request to shift another couple billion dollars to this category).

That 15% expenditure of budget is the largest of any area. The others are shameful and appalling. Two obvious priorities since Day One are getting the power network rebuilt as well as the oil infrastructure. In the “Electricity Sector,” $5.465 Billion has been budgeted, but only 4% of that has been spent ($216 million). In the category “Oil Infrastructure,” 2.2% of the $1.7 Billion budgeted has been spent ($38 million).

And it gets worse. With elections a few months away, there’s a budgetary item of $451 million for “Democracy.” They’ve expended $23 million, about 5% (waiting for a more appropriate time than just before the elections, I guess). On the most basic items, like “Roads, Bridges, and Construction,” they’ve spent a mere $6 million (1.6%) of the $367 million budgeted. But two supremely important budget categories simply defy belief. On “Health Care” they’ve spent $2 million, 0.2% (that’s two tenths of one percent) of the $786 million budgeted. And they’re going to need that health care, because the in the big budget category of “Water and Sanitation” ($4.246 Billion), the $14 million they’ve spent (0.3%) won’t even buy every Iraqi a bucket and a plunger.

So if you strip away the partisanship and simply look at the numbers the Bush administration gives us, they’ve done 4.8% of the job they promised and budgeted. That is the figure that has angered their own party members in the Senate. Even given the first year charitability of “25% expenditures,” that means they’ve done one fifth of their job in the past year. But when I see that on an important budget category like Health Care all they appear to have done is dropped some pocket change through a hole in their pants, I lose my charitable view.

Senator Lugar calls it “incompetence.” It is exactly what I’ve been calling it for about a year and a half: unconscionable malpractice. And it has hardly changed in that year and a half. All we’ve heard is “Iraq’s future is bright,” “stay the course,” etc. But when you look at it by the numbers, it is so stark it can’t be denied.

But, hold on. Let’s say I ignore Novak’s odd outburst of leftist delirium, and focus on the shorter term, rather than how many US troops will be in Iraqi one year from now, or how few dollars we’ve managed to spend. Let’s say I still hold enough temporary suspension of disbelief within me to be convinced by the words of a ranking military man on the scene.

U.S. officials say that they are developing a strategy with the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) to take control of cities in the so-called Sunni Triangle that are currently ruled by insurgents. The strategy calls for a combination of military muscle and political negotiation, with Iraqi forces playing a key role. A major offensive is not expected until the end of the year, when the fledgling Iraqi army should be stronger, U.S. commanders say.

Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, operational commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, said September 6 that the “cancer” of anti-American militancy in places such as Fallujah would not be permitted to derail the elections. A contingency plan, Metz told the Los Angeles Times, is to bypass Fallujah — and perhaps other violent enclaves — and concentrate on holding elections in Baghdad and other population centers where hostility is lower.

Council on Foreign Relations: Iraq, Quelling the Insurgency

So. In the short term. Starting the same week we have our election, the Iraqis are supposed to begin opening stations around the country where people can register to vote. Perhaps 15 million people. You can imagine the potential for attacks on those stations. At some point in late November or very early December, it will be decided which areas of Iraq cannot be brought to “civil order” via the negotiations the Allawi interim government is trying even now. At the very least, Fallujah will probably have to be handled militarily. And it will be even uglier than last April.

At some point around January 1, it will be determined if those still rebellious areas are “beyond hope,” and no matter what has happened, elections will proceed. There will be a “campaign” of perhaps three weeks before the vote, under the most tenuous of circumstances, and then the election may be held in most of Iraq.

Would you be content with the result of an election this November in most of the US? Say, 88% of it? Just six states missing? An election just in the states where the current government had managed to establish civil order and control to their satisfaction? What kind of “mandate” would the winner of that election have?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The nature of politics is to promise grand things, but then deliver about a grand’s worth of things. But I guess I’m surprised that everyone seems either so blind to it or accepting of it. We were told they would topple a dictator, help Iraqis get started on rebuilding their economy and infrastructure, and provide the stability needed to foster democracy.

Well, we toppled Saddam, a Bonafide Good Thing, and he’ll a submit to a long overdue trial for his crimes soon. But whenever they found a true fiscal conservative in the Bush administration, they must have shipped them right off to Iraq, because we have spent money like Amish elders at a strip club. And the lack of visible improvement in the average Iraqi’s lifestyle that you get with a 4.8% expenditure of your budget provides a level of recovery and stability that may deny some Iraqis even the ability to vote in their first “democratic” election.

The “neo-con” vision (via Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc.) was to knock off Saddam to [a] show you don’t mess with Uncle Sam, in a way that Afghanistan apparently didn’t, [b] show you could do democracy in the Middle East, and thus pressure the ruler’s of Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc., and therefore, [c] use it as a launching pad for further change in the Middle East. A shining beacon of a Better Way.

That vision appears to me to be entirely discredited, but not in its conception, in its pitiful execution. It wasn’t even “half-assed,” it was “five-percent-assed.” With the consequences of their own actions and inactions, the Bush administration has shown [a] yes, you can mess with Uncle Sam, and inflict over 800 deaths and 5,000 casualties after Uncle Sam declares “Mission Accomplished.” And, [b] if things play out as expected, the “democracy” on view in “most” of Iraq this January will be viewed by many in the Middle East as a farce. Finally and causatively, [c], yes, you can topple a dictator’s regime “on the cheap” with the increased firepower, advanced technology, and courageous performance of a smaller than expected number of our military forces. But unless you follow on with the overwhelming force needed to secure what you’ve toppled, then you could end up tying down more forces for a longer time than if you’d upped the ante up front. Short term cheap, long term expensive. And with all the talk of withdrawal, well, Iraq won’t be much of a launching pad, will it? If we bail next year, what will your “shining beacon of a Better Way” become?

What we’ve done to the people of Iraq is the aspect that angers me most. But in addition, Bush has expended almost all of his capital as a leader, including the tragic chunk that fell into his lap on 9/11. In a second term, as he tries to disentangle from Iraq, we will face a foreign policy straightjacket. We will face the “If George wants it, I’m against it” factor, domestically and internationally. It’s already loud and proud today.

Michael Totten writes: “Bush is not a dictator (thank heaven). He can’t just do what he wants. He needs allies, not only in the Middle East and Europe, but also in Congress. Whether Bush lied about Saddam’s weapons or not (and I don’t think he did) he does not have the political capital to make a similar case against another regime in the future. If US intelligence shows the mullahs in Iran are nearly finished with nuclear weapons, you can bet your bottom dollar the Bush Administration will lay groundwork for pre-emption. And if Bush goes to Congress to ask for permission, or to the UN and NATO to ask for help, people will laugh. And it will be devastating.”

So I look to the right for a glimpse of the Bush future, and I find us in such an apparent hurry to get out of Iraq that we’re redefining the words “democracy” and “rebuilding,” plus unable to freely meet future threats elsewhere because much of Congress and many of our allies will laugh in our face, and point to the promises made in Iraq.

Everyone is very busy talking about how Kerry would be a much worse alternative, but few have paused to look at what the Bush administration is promising us for the next four years, and what they will realistically be able to do. On the issue of Iraq and our future foreign policy, even when I look at the “right” voices, the cupboard of offerings is depressingly bare.