AMERICAN FUTURE

In 2000, Scott Ritter, who was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, appears to have had an epiphany. In an amazingly short period of time, his position on the political spectrum underwent a wholesale reversal. For lack of better terminology, he moved from the Right to the Left.

The latest evidence of his political transformation was reported this past Friday in The Forward. Reporter Nathan Guttman spoke with Ritter and published quotations from his latest book (“Target Iran”).

These excerpts from Ritter’s book indicate he has joined the Walt/Mearsheimer camp in arguing that American foreign policy has succumbed to the influence of Israel and the Jewish lobby in the U.S.:

The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.

Later in his book, Ritter says “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”

This isn’t what I’d expect to hear from a weapons inspector who was expelled from Iraq in August 1998 and who, later that month, said:

I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measured in months, reconstitute chemical and biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their nuclear weaponization program.

By the end of August 1998, Ritter had resigned from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). His resignation followed the failure of the U.S. and the UN Security Council to take action against Iraq for its refusal to cooperate fully with inspectors, as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1154.

In 1999, Ritter wrote “Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem – Once and For All.” In it, he again claimed that Iraq had obstructed the work of inspectors and attempted to hide and preserve essential elements for restarting WMD programs at a later date and criticized the U.S. containment policy as inadequate to prevent Iraq’s re-acquisition of WMD’s in the absence of inspections. However, he rejected the idea of regime change, which was then gaining currency in Washington.

In late 2000, a documentary on UNSCOM he wrote and directed was released. The New York Times reviewed his “In Shifting Sands”:

At the time of his resignation [from UNSCOM], he contended that Iraq remained a danger, insufficiently disarmed and ready to restart its nuclear and biological weapons programs as soon as the United Nations turned its back.

He has since reversed his position, as this film relentlessly demonstrates. Interviewing himself on camera, Mr. Ritter now says: ‘’Iraq is a defanged tiger. There’s much better things we could be doing with our money and our time besides pursuing a brutal dictator to the point of debasing our own moral and intellectual battles.’’

‘’In Shifting Sands,’’ which opens today in Manhattan, exclusively reflects that point of view. Using what seems to be home video of the inspection team at work—and there is some very dramatic material here in the tense confrontations between inspectors and Iraqi guards—Mr. Ritter builds his case that every nook and cranny of the country has been checked.

In a twist reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch, the archive of Mr. Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons program is found stashed in a shed at a pig farm. Mr. Ritter says he believes that these documents prove his contention that Unscom found most everything worth finding: every project referred to in the archive has been accounted for by the inspectors and neutralized, he says.

The Times then exploded a bombshell:

A wealthy Iraqi-American businessman, Shakir al-Khafaji, contributed $400,000 toward the making of ‘’In Shifting Sands.’’ According to a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Ritter has said that he thoroughly checked out Mr. al-Khafaji—‘’I called a reporter who has sources in the C.I.A.’’—and was confident he was not getting any quid pro quo from the Iraqi government. ‘’Shakir said he didn’t,’’ the article quotes Mr. Ritter as saying.

The Times review concluded by saying that “Such trustfulness would be an admirable quality in many walks of life. But in a United Nations weapons inspector, it seems out of place.”

The Telegraph—the most conservative of London’s major newspapers (not tabloids)—sees “a tiny chink of hope:”

Only the most grossly naive of onlookers could imagine that the execution of Saddam Hussein in itself will bring peace to Iraq . . . The conflagration of sectarian violence is presently raging beyond the control of both the Iraqi government and the Coalition troops.

What the demise of Saddam may do in the long term, however, is to sow a necessary seed of separation between those Sunni insurgents who have remained loyal to the notion of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime, and those who are religious extremists seeking an Islamic caliphate in Iraq.

Yesterday’s execution has definitively robbed the former group of a symbolic figurehead and any hope of a recognisable Ba’athist revival: if such insurgents could be coaxed down a political path in the future, the Iraqi government would be freed to concentrate its efforts upon containing foreign jihadists and religious fanatics.

That may seem a distant prospect, as Sunni and Shia gunmen and bombers continue to write their grim political dialogue in the blood of their fellow Iraqi citizens. But the death of a dictator, coinciding with the birth of a new year, may yet open up a tiny chink of hope.

The Times—London’s “centrist” newspaper—hopes that his fate “will help establish the principle that tyranny will be punished rather than appeased”:

The man responsible for the death of up to 1m Iraqis was not summarily shot by his conquerors, as has so often happened when a butcher has been toppled. Rather, he was put on trial in courts, which however flawed, were set up as part of a new constitution, alongside a democratically elected government.

To take a positive lesson from all this, perhaps the link between Saddam’s criminality and his subsequent execution will help establish the principle that tyranny will be punished rather than appeased. When foreign policy messages are mixed, it results in dangerous unpredictability . . . Firm, clear messages are not always successful but they are a prerequisite of success.

Saddam’s deposition can thus be seen as part of the intended message underlying US foreign policy: that enemies of freedom need to be deterred by seeing clearly the consequences of their behaviour. That policy is controversial. If, however, his fate acts in any way as a deterrent, then it would have a positive effect. Saddam, however, was too stupid even to understand the limits of his power in a wider world. Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator — responsible, too, for massacres of his countrymen — handed over his tyrannical rule in a smooth transition to his son. The reason why Assad died peacefully in his bed and Saddam died at the hangman’s noose is that Assad knew how to read the West and always kept one step inside the border of realpolitik acceptability; Saddam did not.

The left-wing Guardian asserts that Bush will “certainly look to exploit his demise” and Saddam’s death will have “little consequence on the various insurgencies racking the country.” Its editorial uses his demise as an opportunity to press for negotiations with Iran and Syria:

. . . if the death of Saddam . . . is to be a true turning point in Iraq, we need to grit our teeth and talk.

The Sunni insurgency in the west of Iraq relies on supporters within Syria for crucial logistic support. Every military historian knows that fighting an insurgency benefiting from a safe haven where fighters can rest and resupply is an impossible task. The Syrian regime is pragmatic – that is why it has survived so long. We need to be too.

The same logic applies to Iran. Tehran is the great winner from the Iraq invasion. Its greatest regional rival has been eradicated. Shia politicians with whom the Iranians have had links for years are in positions of power. Its agents have established powerful networks of influence. Only a regional approach to the Iraqi quagmire will bring any success. That of course will involve allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, but it needs to involve enemies too.

If there is a hell, Saddam has just joined Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others unfortunately too numerous to mention.

Not everyone is happy about it, among them being Human Rights Watch (HRW), which, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, “opposes the death penalty in all circumstances.”

In general, I’m against capital punishment because juries are sometimes wrong. But in Saddam’s case, there can be no doubt of his guilt. HRW states the obvious—that “Saddam Hussein was responsible for massive human rights violations,” but then says “that can’t justify giving him the death penalty, which is a cruel and inhuman punishment.”

According to HRW, then, there is no crime, however heinous, that warrants the death penalty. This is HRW’s axiom, and, by definition, there’s no way to prove the truth or falsehood of an axiom.

I have no illusions that Saddam’s demise will improve the situation in Iraq; in the short term, it may even fuel a spike in violence. However, I approve of his execution because it removes the possibility that an intensifying civil war, along with a draw down of the American troop level, could have eventually led to his capture. If he were to have fallen into the hands of the Shi’a, the barbarity of his death would have been beyond comprehension. If captured by the Sunnis, he would have provided hope for a restoration of Sunni control. Either way, sectarian warfare would have reached a new level.

You can’t beat this for insight into a complex situation:

Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.

Geez, I never would have thought of that.

Although the New York Times has words of praise for President Ford, it still thinks that his pardon of Nixon was the wrong thing to do. From its editorial:

. . . he judged, correctly, that his primary mission was to quiet national passions inflamed by war and Watergate — to end, as he put it, “our long national nightmare” — and in so doing to restore a measure of respect to the presidency itself. To that end he made several small gestures largely forgotten now but symbolically important at the time. He announced that he would be lenient to draft resisters, he opened the White House to people on Mr. Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he crisscrossed the country endlessly, speaking to groups large and small in an effort to open up an office that Mr. Nixon had all but closed to public inspection.

Yet his wish to heal led him to do something that reopened the very wounds he was trying hard to close. On Sept. 8, 1974, barely 30 days into his presidency, Mr. Ford announced his decision to give Mr. Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon.” The reaction was immediate, intense and largely negative. Mr. Ford had expected criticism, but not the outrage that erupted in Congress, in many newspapers and among the public at large.

This page, for example, condemned the pardon as “a profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act” that in a stroke had destroyed the new president’s “credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence.” The critics’ fundamental point was that a nation in which the law applies equally to rich and poor, the meek and the powerful, cannot exempt anyone, least of all a president, from the requirements of justice.

History has been more sympathetic to Mr. Ford’s argument that to allow Mr. Nixon’s prosecution to go forward, perhaps all the way to a trial, would have been profoundly destabilizing to a nation that was already in shaky health. In 2001, the trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library honored Mr. Ford with its Profile in Courage Award for the decision, which Senator Edward Kennedy, a onetime critic, described as essential to the restoration of national unity. When Senate and House leaders bestowed on Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, President Clinton — who had his own experiences with prosecutors — said the critics had been “caught up in the moment,” and that Mr. Ford’s decision had helped “keep the country together.”

Our own bottom line continues to be the same: that the nation is strong enough to endure almost anything but burying the truth. Still, Mr. Ford deserves to be remembered for more than the pardon. Marking the end of a national nightmare is no small thing. [emphasis added]

How did Ford’s pardon of Nixon “bury” the truth? What “truth” would the trial of Nixon have revealed? Would its discovery have been worth the costs—in particular, increasing divisiveness in an already divided country—of uncovering it? I think not.

I’m proud to say that I voted for Gerald Ford in 1976. Why? Because he pardoned Nixon, showing he understood that otherwise the “long national nightmare” would have continued and worsened. To put it simply and honestly, I hated Nixon’s guts. But vengeance, however sweet, wasn’t what our country needed. To his everlasting credit, Ford understood this, saving us from the trauma of a criminal trial that would have further weakened and divided us.

2006 hasn’t been a vintage year for the U.S. It hasn’t been as bad as 1941 or 2001, but this year, unlike those, hasn’t witnessed a surprise attack killing thousands of Americans. Instead, it’s been a year filled with events that have produced a malaise not unlike the one that afflicted America in 1979. I use the word “malaise” purposely, as it’s the label that was given to Jimmy Carter’s July 15, 1979 speech, during which he said:

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy . . . The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

Later in his address, Carter complained about politicians’ excessive partisanship and avoidance of sacrifice:

The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual. What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

One wonders what Carter’s speech would have been like if it had been delivered at the end of 1979. By that time, Americans were being held hostage in our embassy in Tehran and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. The repercussions of those events are still being felt.

Our economy is in far better shape now than in 1979—both unemployment and inflation are markedly lower. But partisanship is worse than it was then, and our government, unwilling now as it was then to level with the people regarding the need for sacrifice, is fighting a war that has meant the ultimate sacrifice for nearly 3,000 Americans. Add to this the concerns—justifiable or not—of many Americans that some of the measures taken in 9/11’s aftermath threaten their civil liberties and the widely-publicized decline in America’s international reputation, and it’s hardly surprising we’re experiencing a crisis of confidence that bears some similarity to the one Carter spoke of 27 years ago.

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Iraq—more specifically, the mismanagement of the war in Iraq—accounts for the current crisis of confidence. Numerous books, scholarly articles, and op-eds have described the Bush Administration’s mistakes, and my purpose here isn’t to summarize or dispute what others have said. Nor is it to critique the various recommendations—from the Iraq Study Group and others—regarding what should be the constituent elements of a revised American strategy to ameliorate the worsening situation in Iraq and, thereby, to create the conditions that will allow the U.S. to begin to reduce its footprint.

In my view, regardless of the ultimate outcome of our misadventure in Iraq, there are a number of long-term consequences, all of them negative, that are virtually certain to be felt. To a greater or lesser extent, all of them are the result of a war that has lasted far longer than the Bush Administration anticipated. These consequences, not the well-documented and analyzed reasons for the Administration’s lack of foresight, are my focus.

The several elections that took place in Iraq prior to 2006 provided the illusion of progress and hid the centrifugal forces that were unleashed by the war’s mismanagement. This illusion was shattered in 2006, as the elections were followed by more, not less, violence. In so far as the holding of free and fair elections is equated to democracy, the events of 2006 showed that, at least in Iraq, the road to democracy is littered with the debris of growing violence.

Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of the war’s faulty prosecution is that we’ll never know whether a properly managed effort would have resulted in a stable, democratic Iraq that could have served as a role model for other Middle Eastern states that have endured decades of authoritarian rule. Accordingly, we’ll never know whether a central tenet of the Bush Doctrine—that the transformation from authoritarianism to democracy would drain terrorism’s swamp—is true or false.

I purposely use the word “never” because I believe that our failure in Iraq is the death knell for the Bush Doctrine. It’s most unlikely that the question of the soundness of the Doctrine can be separated from the failure of its first application. It would take an extraordinarily convincing and brave future president to attempt to persuade the American people that the failure in Iraq was exclusively a failure of execution.

Speaking of the public, polls conducted between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the present show that more than half of those who now believe the invasion was a mistake initially supported it. While the initial erosion of support was probably the result of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, it’s my view that the unexpectedly long duration of the war—and the resulting unexpectedly large number of American casualties—accounts for the bulk of the disillusionment. While it’s true that the Abu Ghraib scandal had a significant impact on American public opinion, it’s essential to keep in mind that that scandal wouldn’t have happened if the war’s length had been as short as Washington anticipated. The mismanagement of the war caused Abu Ghraib both directly—through the lack of oversight and improper training of the guards—and indirectly—by extending the war’s duration.

In the U.S., then, the mismanagement of the war resulted in a crisis of confidence in the spread of democracy as the antidote to the disease of terrorism and in the claims of the Bush Administration regarding the war’s progress. The repercussions haven’t been limited to the U.S.

By late 2003, had the war gone as planned, the American troop level would have been roughly half of its level at the time of the invasion and the lives of the Iraqi people would have been at least reasonably secure. Instead, the American footprint was—and has remained to this day—essentially unchanged, and security has worsened. Most importantly from the perspective of both European and Muslim opinion, the elongation of the war allowed Abu Ghraib to happen. With the publication of pictures of American soldiers humiliating Muslims, whatever chance there was to stop the growth of anti-Americanism vanished. The Bush Administration was trashed throughout the world for betraying American values. The mismanagement of the war intensified the crisis of confidence in America that had been rising since the second half of 2002, when it started to be apparent that the U.S. was intent on toppling Saddam.

Earlier, I noted that elections held prior to 2006 provided a facade of progress, keeping the mistakes of Bush Administration at least partially hidden from view. The least violent days in Iraq have been days when voters were casting their ballots. If I were an Iraqi, this would make me wonder: if American and Iraqi forces can provide for my security on voting days, why can’t they do so on all other days? I would lack the knowledge that there are too few soldiers to provide security on a sustained basis. Because of the war’s mismanagement, the political (elections) and military (security) tracks have been out of synch. In the absence of a military footprint large enough to provide security, Washington hoped that elections revealing the Iraqis’ desire for and commitment to democracy would reduce the level of violence. Exactly the opposite has happened, creating a crisis of confidence among the Iraqis—in both their and our government, and in democracy.

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Even if President Bush decides to stick by his guns (literally and figuratively) and manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat, I believe that the doctrine that bears his name will be jettisoned by his successor, be he (or she) a Republican or a Democrat. The doctrine’s demise will mean there will be no further efforts to defeat terrorism by using force to spread democracy. Chastened by the cost in lives and treasure, a majority of Americans want to withdraw our troops from Iraq, a preference indicating a willingness to accept an ill-defined stalemate (or even defeat) in Iraq. As in the early 1970s, the spirit of our time is “Come Home America.” In the view of at least one pundit, “With hindsight we may see 2006 as the end of Pax Americana.”

Where does this leave us after Bush’s term in office is over? Barring an unpredictable event—in particular, a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or greater on U.S. soil—the signs point to a retreat to neo-isolationism, as happened after the Vietnam war.

No administration will use neo-isolationism to describe its foreign policy. Whether the next administration is Republican or Democratic, some other word or phrase will be invented to describe a policy that will amount to neo-multilateralism. Whatever it’s called, this policy will eschew military interventions carried out unilaterally or by ad hoc coalitions of the willing.

The central feature of neo-multilateralism will be an American rapprochement with the UN, a process that will be made easier by Kofi Annan’s departure. Many observers—here and even more so in Europe—will cheer this development, as Gulliver will be chained.

I won’t be among them. As most recently evinced by its inaction over Darfur and the watered-down sanctions against Iran (Security Council Resolution 1737), the UN Security Council is structurally incapable of confronting threats to humanity. Whether the issue is genocide carried out by Khartoum or Tehran’s nuclear weapons program, the Security Council epitomizes ineffectiveness. Given the agendas of Russia and China, there is no reason to hope that this will change.

Terrorist and militant groups, not just certain governments, will be among the primary beneficiaries of American neo-multilateralism. An America that’s tightly-bound to the UN will feel compelled to abide by the rules of international law. These rules are supposed to apply to all parties to a conflict but, in reality, don’t. The most recent example of the asymmetric application of international law was this past summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah. The vocal, widespread claim that Israel used “disproportionate force” wasn’t matched by outrage over Hezbollah’s installation of its rocket-launchers in civilian areas and its intentional targeting of civilians in northern Israel.

Like the UN Charter, the rules of war—in particular, rules of engagement—were agreed upon at a time when warfare meant fighting among states. That isn’t the type of conflict present in today’s world, nor is it likely to be in the foreseeable future. Instead, asymmetric warfare pitting a state against terrorist and militant groups will continue to be the most frequent type of violence.

As I discussed in considerable detail in an earlier post, the U.S., in order to minimize civilian casualties in Iraq, has conformed to strict rules of engagement. I concluded that post with these words:

Without maintaining that our forces have never deviated from these rules of engagement, it’s clear that our intent has been to fight a “civilized” war. From a humanitarian standpoint, this objective is commendable. However, fighting with one hand tied behind our back (to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam era) has undoubtedly resulted in greater American casualties and made it more difficult to prevail against an enemy that obeys no rules. The limitations, by enhancing the ability of the insurgents and terrorists to carry on the fight, have probably resulted in more, not fewer, civilian casualties. If our rules of engagement were formulated, in part, to present a better face to the “international community,” they have failed. Nobody has commended us for our good behavior.

The rules of engagement we’ve followed in Iraq raise an issue than couldn’t be more fundamental. If our twenty-first century conflicts are going to pit us (or, I might add, Israel) against extremist groups whose tactics know no bounds and we allow our conduct to be constrained by the dictates of international law, as defined by such multilateral institutions as the UN, we are condemning ourselves to fighting protracted conflicts that erode American willpower, as has happened with Iraq. If we give precedence to conforming to international norms over winning, it won’t escape the notice of militants, who will use every opportunity to weaken us.

The neo-multilateral foreign policy I foresee, because it will exclude unilateral American military interventions, means that interventions against terrorists and militants will rarely, if ever, take place. And when and if they do, the “international community” will employ rules of engagement that are advantageous to the instigators of violence.

Because the Iraq war has been so terribly mismanaged, the “Pax Americana”—a phrase that implies the ability and willingness of the United States to act unilaterally—may indeed be over. If it is, the only possible replacement is a “Pax United Nations.” Those who favor this change may live to regret it.

Every so often I find myself in agreement with a New York Times editorial. This is one of those occasions. Expressing its approval of enlarging the Army and the Marines, the editorial goes on to say that

There is no permanent right number for the size of American ground forces. The current size — just over 500,000 for the active duty Army and 180,000 for the Marine Corps — is based on military assessments at the end of the cold war. As the world changes, those assessments must be constantly reviewed. When the 21st century began, Pentagon planners expected that American forces could essentially coast unchallenged for a few decades, relying on superior air and sea power, while preparing for possible future military competition with an increasingly powerful China. That meant investing in the Air Force and Navy, not the Army and Marines.

Then 9/11 changed everything, except the Pentagon mind-set. During the Rumsfeld years, reality was subordinated to a dogma of “transformation,” which declared that with a little more technology, the Army could do a lot more fighting with fewer soldiers than its senior generals believed necessary.

Every year since 2001 has brought increased demands on America’s slimmed-down and dollar-starved ground forces, while billions continued to flow into sustaining the oversized and underused Air Force and Navy, and modernizing their state-of-the-art equipment. As a result, the overall Pentagon budget is larger than it needs to be, while the part going to overtaxed ground forces is too small.

Spot-on, New York Times.

From Reuters:

A U.S. federal judge on Friday ordered the Islamic Republic of Iran to pay $ 254 million to the family of 17 U.S. servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers residence at a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia.

The default judgment was entered against the Iranian government, its security ministry and the Revolutionary Guards after they failed to respond to the lawsuit, which was initiated more than four years ago.

In issuing the $ 254.4 million judgment in the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth concluded that the Khobar Towers attack was carried out by people recruited by Gen. Ahmed Sharifi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The truck bomb involved in the attack was assembled at a base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley operated by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards, and the attack was approved by Ayatollah Khameini, the supreme leader of Iran, the 209-page ruling found.

This Washington Post editorial describes it well:

THE U.N. Security Council took up the Iranian nuclear program this year to pressure Tehran to suspend its work on enriching uranium. But in the past few months, something entirely different has happened. While Iranian enrichment has continued with impunity, the Security Council’s deliberations have been hijacked by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, which is using them to protect its economic interests and portray itself as a global power capable of countering the United States.

The Security Council ordered Iran last summer to stop enrichment work by Aug. 30 and threatened sanctions if it did not. Tehran defied the binding resolution, and its hard-line president boasted that the West would be unable to impose significant penalties. Russia has proved him right: As of yesterday, it was still holding up a vote on a Security Council resolution, even though it had already succeeded in stripping the measure of its teeth.

The Bush administration, which has been relying almost entirely on multilateral diplomacy to prevent a nuclear Iran, originally proposed a set of modest sanctions, including a travel ban on senior officials, a block on exports to Iran of nuclear and missile components, and a freeze on the foreign assets of companies involved in nuclear and missile production. The idea was to escalate to tougher measures if Iran did not respond.

Instead, the administration has spent nearly four months seeking Russian consent for the initial measure, yielding again and again to Moscow’s intransigence. First, a large nuclear reactor being built for Iran by Russia was exempted from a proposed ban on nuclear imports, even though Tehran could someday use the facility to acquire plutonium for weapons. Next, European governments sponsoring the resolution were forced to drop the proposed travel ban—the only measure left that might have caused the mullahs some pain. Meanwhile, the administration agreed to support membership in the World Trade Organization for Russia, a concession Moscow made clear was necessary to obtain its vote.

Having surrendered on almost every point, European ambassadors announced that the Security Council would vote yesterday. But Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin said he still wasn’t ready. Some reports said he was seeking to water down the proposed freeze on foreign assets of companies directly connected to the nuclear program. Or maybe he was just demonstrating—again—that Russia can and will hold the Security Council hostage.

The result of this cynical policy is that any U.N. resolution against Iran will be a pyrrhic victory for the United States. The message to Tehran is not that it faces isolation or economic ruin if it fails to respect the Security Council’s order; it is that it need not fear sanctions. Hard-liners in Tehran who have been saying this all along, such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be vindicated.

Russia will look like a world power; Mr. Putin will have more reason to strut. And the Bush administration, which has not dared even to complain in public about Russia’s obstructionism, will look foolish. In fact, Mr. Bush has allowed a vital U.S. interest to be undermined by a government and a leader he should have ceased to coddle long ago.

Last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war was a proxy war pitting America’s ally against the Lebanon-based terrorist group funded by Iran. Now, according, to a report in the New York Sun, a new phase—this time in the Palestinian territories—in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran is beginning:

To counter Iran’s arming of Hamas, America will step up its training and arming of the Palestinian Arab president’s personal security services, the American ambassador to Israel said yesterday. The boost in arms and training is expected to pass easily through Congress this week in a proposed $90 million aid package to elements of the Palestinian Arab polity controlled by the president, Mahmoud Abbas. American counterterrorism officials are already training members of Mr. Abbas’s presidential guard at a facility in Jericho.

The newly trained forces, which could number as many as 3,000, would be deployed at the Rafah border crossing and the Karni crossing, two important Gaza checkpoints through which Israeli officials have said Kassam rockets have been smuggled into the Gaza Strip. But the training would also cover counterterrorism and police functions, according to one senior American diplomat.

[ . . . ]

The intended boost to Mr. Abbas comes as the war in Gaza between Hamas, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization and which controls the Palestinian Authority ministries, and Mr. Abbas’s party, Fatah, which lost to Hamas in last January’s parliamentary elections, is worsening. Fighting in Gaza has intensified in the last few days after Mr. Abbas . . . called publicly for new elections in a bid to unseat Hamas, which does not recognize Israel.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, recognizing that it was far too dangerous to confront each other directly, battled each other through and on the lands of third parties. Increasingly, the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is following the same script. If Iran isn’t prevented from joining the nuclear weapons club, the similarity will become even more apparent.

Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but the scent of bipartisanship is in Washington’s air. At long last, the President has decided that it’s “important and necessary” to expand the Army and the Marines. His justification:

The reason why is, it is a accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while, and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts and help us achieve peace.

Did Bush have a sudden epiphany? That’s not likely, as its been obvious for years that the ideological war would be long-lasting. If not an epiphany, what caused the about-face? Considering that his reversal of opinion came the day after Robert Gates was sworn-in as the new Defense Secretary, the answer is clear: it was Rumsfeld’s departure. The corollary conclusion is an unfortunate one: at least in public, Bush substituted Rummy’s view for his own. This, of course, directly contradicts Bush’s depiction of himself as “the decider.”

In any event, Bush’s change of heart on this essential matter puts him on the same page as leading Democrats:

• Loren Dealy, spokeswoman for Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who will be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said after Mr. Bush spoke that “Mr. Skelton has long supported the idea of increasing the end strength in both the Army and the Marine Corps. He still supports a proposal for that increase, regardless of where and who it comes from. He is happy that this is being taken seriously.”


• Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the incoming Democratic caucus chairman in the House, said, “Democrats have been advocating this for a long time and I’m glad the president is hearing our call.”


• Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “I am pleased President Bush has finally recognized the need to increase the overall size of our military. I have been calling for such an expansion for several years. While the Senate Armed Services Committee has heeded that call, the Bush administration has been unwilling to recognize the need for a long-term expansion.” Reed, however, warned that the battle over troop numbers is not over: “Now that the president is asking for an increase, he needs to follow through and put the money in the budget to pay for these soldiers. It is imperative that this administration step up and honestly budget for the long-term commitment they have made in Iraq. If the president doesn’t put forward a plan to pay for this in his annual budget request, then this announcement is meaningless.

A Washington Post editorial says that “Luckily there appears to be strong support in Congress for a substantial boost [in the size of the military], including from Democratic senators such as Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.).”

Bush’s position change also undoubtedly reflects his meeting last week with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the Times,

The chiefs argued that the nation must not let the military’s other capabilities lapse from commitments of personnel, equipment and money for Iraq . . . In particular, the chiefs expressed concerns that the United States must show enough strength to deter potential adversaries from aggressive moves based on an assumption that American power was bogged down in Iraq. That led to a discussion on the merits of expanding the military.

Among the individuals at that meeting was General Peter Schoomaker, Chief of Staff of the Army, who issued a statement posted on the Army’s official website. In his statement, Schoomaker described the problems faced by the Army:

Over the last five years, the sustained strategic demand of deployed combat brigades and other supporting units is placing a strain on the Army’s all-volunteer force, now being tested for the first time in an extended period of conflict. The dwell time between deployments for active brigade combat teams is less than a year. At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components, through remobilization, we will break the active component. Further, because almost all reserve component units have already been either partially or completely mobilized in support of the Global War on Terrorism, current mobilization policies and practices require the Army to rely on individual volunteers from the reserve components. This runs counter to the military necessity of deploying trained, ready, and cohesive units. In my professional military judgment, we must not perpetuate the mistakes of our past mobilization policies; the practice of soliciting individual volunteers got us to where we are today. In my view, we must deploy our force in cohesive units, not as individual volunteers. This will require us to remobilize units and reserve component Soldiers, and this position is strongly endorsed by our reserve component leaders. [emphasis added]

After asserting that “we cannot allow this condition to persist,” the General averred that we have three choices: “reduce demand; gain recurrent, predictable, and assured access to the reserve components; or grow the active component”:

The Nation must begin by acknowledging that these are increasingly dangerous times and realize that we are actually closer to the beginning than the end of the Long War. The first option is to believe our current high demand will shortly be reduced. However, the situation in the Middle East and rest of the world leads me to conclude we are on a new long term plateau of high operational demand, and in my view we are on a dangerous path that dictates we must increase our strategic depth, increase readiness, and reduce our strategic risk. It is ill advised for us to undertake additional strategic risks by assuming a future of significantly reduced demand . . .

Our second option, which I recommend, is to gain the necessary authorities to enable recurrent, assured, and predictable access to the 55 percent of the Army represented in the reserve components. Current policies restrict our ability to remobilize reserve component units, and, in my view, the current policies are more restrictive than need be under the law and hamper our ability to remobilize the best trained, best led, and best equipped units. If left unchanged, these policies will perpetuate the dilemma we are facing. Changing these policies is the most logical, efficient, and fastest way to rectify the current situation. Aligning mobilization policies with the law and the Army Force Generation Model will better enable us to meet the operational demand over the Long War and level the stress on the force.

The third option is to continue to grow the Army, most importantly the active component. Current demand on the force makes this a wise and prudent action. As you know, we have been working several years just to grow the active force by 30,000. If the Nation decides to further increase the size of our Army, it will take a significant amount of time and commitment from the Nation. Optimistically, we could add 6,000 to 7,000 Soldiers per year. Additionally, we will have to revise our equipment investment strategy and gain additional resources to support that strategy.

We are at a critical point in generating Army forces for this long war. In my view, our Nation should continue to grow the Army and fully use the reserve components as an integral part of the total force. To meet current operational requirements, we must make these decisions now, and I solicit your support.

Hopefully, having the President, key Congressional Democrats, and the Chiefs of Staff all agree that the number of soldiers and Marines must be increased represents the beginning of the bipartisanship that our country so desperately needs.

Soon after completing my post on the Iraq conundrum, I read well-composed words in Robert Beisner’s outstanding new biography of Dean Acheson that depict another, earlier conundrum, the stakes of which were arguably greater than the one we’re facing today. The following quote is from the beginning of chapter 31.

It is virtually impossible to change one part of the world without causing dangerous shifts in others, and in this, actors in world politics are sometimes like wallpaper hangers. As soon as they get one corner of the toll to stick, another unrolls, and they have to start over. Hanging new wallpaper—trying to make something close to what the world formerly looked like—while trying to get into the swing of new rhythms is especially hard, if not impossible. This is what American officials tried to do in the colonial and ex-colonial world of the 1940s and 1950s.

World War II dealt fatal blows to the British, French, and Dutch empires, and though postwar friction first emerged in Europe, Washington knew it would also materialize in the debris of those empires. The prospect posed two key questions. How could the United States assure that strategically important colonies, ex-colonies, or soon-to-be-ex-colonies would stay with the “west” and free of communist domination? And how could the United States secure them for the west without wrecking its relations with either the former European colonial rulers or those they formerly ruled? To put it another way, how could the United States, newly convinced it had interests to protect throughout the world, sort through empire’s wreckage without inadvertently stirring up new troubles that communists might exploit? As in the child’s game, Pick-Up Sticks, when players have first dropped their sticks, bits and pieces of old European possessions and protectorates lay strewn all over the floor, precariously piled in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

. . . Work on the third world pile continually produced confirmation of the law of unintended consequences. Trying to co-opt revolutionaries seeking independence and national identity with methods that would assuage allies usually antagonized both.

Iraq, of course, was part of the Middle East pile.

Seemingly without exception, every opinion on how to hasten the end of the Iraq civil war is based on one of these two propositions:

• Improved security is the precondition for political compromise.


• Political compromise is the precondition for improved security.

In other words, what comes first—the chicken or the egg?

Anyone who claims that he knows which of these propositions is correct is either a genius or a fool, with the latter being far more likely. Far more important, any American policy based on one or the other of the two propositions has a good chance of being wrong.

It follows, then, that American policy shouldn’t be predicated on either proposition.

What might be the elements of such a policy?

• The U.S. government should issue an ultimatum to Prime Minister Maliki. The ultimatum should state that the U.S. will enlarge its troop commitment for a designated period of time, subject to the following conditions: (1) our military actions will not be subject to review by the government of Iraq, (2) our rules of engagement will be eased, and (3) the Iraqi government will issue a detailed agenda for reconciliation negotiations that will begin simultaneously with the buildup of American forces.


• If the Iraqi government rejects the ultimatum, American forces will be immediately redeployed from Baghdad and other population centers to Iraq’s borders with Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. As I discussed in my “Quarantine Iraq” post of last August, the intent of this redeployment will be to prevent the ingress and egress of terrorists and the establishment of terrorist training camps. We will wash our hands of the civil war, leaving the Shi’a and the Sunnis free to kill each other, while acting in our national interest.


• If the Iraqi government accepts the ultimatum but the reconciliation talks fail to produce the promised results by the end of the designated period of time, we will redeploy our troops as described in the previous paragraph.


• If the Iraqi government accepts the ultimatum and the reconciliation negotiations are successful, we will begin the process of Iraqification, as described in the Iraq Study Group report and elsewhere.
  

The subject of the opening segment of this evening’s “60 Minutes” on CBS was the 50,000,000 pages of documents pertaining to the Holocaust that the German government recently opened to the public.

These excerpts from “Revisiting The Horrors Of The Holocaust” are from the CBS News website:

The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945 . . . the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.

The storerooms are immense: 16 miles of shelves holding the stories of 17 million victims – not only Jews, but slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To open the files is to see the Holocaust staring back like it was yesterday: strange pink Gestapo arrest warrants as lethal as a death sentence, jewelry lost as freedom ended at the gates of an extermination camp. Time stopped here in 1945.

Conversation with Udo Jost

[Correspondent Scott Pelley] walked through the evidence with chief archivist Udo Jost. He showed 60 Minutes a list of 1,000 prisoners saved by a factory owner who told the Nazis he needed the prisoners labor. This was the list of Oskar Schindler, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie. “Here are the 700 men and the 300 women whose names were on Schindler’s list,” Jost explains.

The 60 Minutes team also found the file of “Frank, Annaliese Marie,” better known as Anne Frank. It’s her paper trail from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen, where she died at the age of 15.

But most of the names here are of unknown people. While the Nazis did not write down the names of those executed in the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz, they did keep detailed records of millions of others who died in the camps. Their names are listed in notebooks labeled “Totenbuch,” which means “death book.” The names are written here, single-spaced, in meticulous handwriting.

“Here we see the cause of death: executed. And you can see, every two minutes they shot one prisoner,” Jost explains.

“So they shot a prisoner every two minutes for a little over an hour and a half?” Pelley asks.

“Yes. Now look at the date: it’s the 20th of April. That was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And this was a birthday present, a gift for the Führer. That’s the bureaucracy of the devil,” Jost says.

The devil is in the details – the smallest details. Pelley and the 60 Minutes crew were amazed to see the Nazis kept records of head lice.

“You can see the names and numbers of each prisoner, and the amount of lice that were found,” Jost says.

The Nazis couldn’t have disease spreading among slave laborers. “You can see he was a perfectionist. He even put down the size of the lice. Large, small or medium-sized lice,” Jost comments about the Nazi lice inspector.

Conversation with Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro helped pry open the archive. He’s Director of Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

“I’m curious. Why did the Nazis keep all these records? If they were gonna murder these people anyway, why keep the paperwork?” Pelley asks.

“Because they wanted to show they were getting the job done. So, in terms of people whose destiny was to be murdered, recording how well that was being done was very important,” Shapiro explains.

And those records make up the largest Holocaust archive anywhere. Run by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service was set up after the war to trace lost family members. Survivors could write for information, but there was a backlog of 400,000 unanswered letters. And neither survivors nor scholars got past the lobby.

“What was the stated reason for keeping these documents out of the public eye for more than 60 years?” Pelley asks.

“A respect for privacy of individuals was the most-often cited reason,” Shapiro says. “On the one hand, you had governments stating ‘We’re protecting people’s privacy.’ And on the other hand, you had those very people saying ‘No, no, we want the material to be open.’”

The 67 writers and researchers who attended Ahmadinejad’s conference should visit Bad Arolsen. They won’t, but if they did, they would undoubtedly claim that the documents are fakes—all 50,000,000 of them.

If you pay attention to the British press (as I do), you probably think that Muslims are the most likely targets of religious hate crimes.

Not so. From The Telegraph:

Jewish people are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than Muslims, according to figures compiled by the police. One in 400 Jews compared to one in 1,700 Muslims are likely to be victims of “faith hate” attacks every year. The figure is based on data collected over three months in police areas accounting for half the Muslim and Jewish populations of England and Wales. The crimes range from assault and verbal abuse to criminal damage at places of worship.

The Crown Prosecution Service report revealed that not a single person accused of an anti-Semitic crime had been prosecuted on a charge of religiously aggravated offending.

The Telegraph article did not say what percentage of the hate crimes against Jews were perpetrated by Muslims, or what percentage of such crimes against Muslims were perpetrated by Jews. I think I know which percentage is higher.

“’Realism’ in the Middle East means understanding that Syria and Iran won’t stop waging war against the United States and its allies unless they are given reasons to fear they might lose.”

Thus concludes an editorial in the Washington Post.

This call for a tougher line is prompted by the recent words and deeds of the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Palestinians:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presided over a convention of Holocaust deniers in Tehran this week, rousing them with yet another speech predicting the extinction of Israel. In Lebanon, the pro-Western government of Fouad Siniora hung by a thread, literally besieged in the center of Beirut by the extremist Hezbollah movement—whose attempted coup has been egged on by Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. In Gaza, attempts by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to reopen the peace process with Israel continued to be blocked by the most militant leaders of Hamas—who happen to be harbored in Damascus—and by a Hamas prime minister who just returned from Tehran.

Meanwhile, in Washington,

The Bush administration was bombarded by demands that it open unconditional negotiations with Mr. Assad and Mr. Ahmadinejad. Democratic senators are tripping over each other to have an audience with Syria’s chief gangster. A parallel clamor continued for a “grand bargain” with Iran’s mullahs.

The Post avers—correctly—that “The disconnect between the debate over the Middle East in Washington and actual events in the region could hardly be greater,” and that what is “urgently needed” is “decisive steps” to counter the extremists and to force them to pay a price for their aggression.

This is what the Post has in mind in its call for “decisive steps”:

Passage of a U.N. sanctions resolution against Iran—still pending three months after it was brought up—cannot be put off any longer; the administration should call a vote and force supposed “partners” such as Russia to choose. The Security Council should also be prodded to investigate whether Damascus has respected its resolutions calling for Hezbollah’s disarmament and an end to Syrian weapons trafficking. If Mr. Assad succeeds in blocking Lebanese government approval of a tribunal to try those guilty of the Lebanese political murders, the Security Council should establish the court on its own authority.

I don’t think these steps are very decisive. The sanctions against Iran being considered by the Security Council amount to little more than a slap on the wrist; the probability that they will cause Tehran to rethink its positions on its nuclear weapons program and its support of Hezbollah and Hamas is somewhere between slim and none, with the latter being more likely. Similarly, I have to question why threatening to have the Security Council set up its own court would lead Assad to abandon his effort to reestablish Syrian hegemony in Lebanon.

The Washington Post has the right idea. But its definition of “decisive” is deficient. If falls far short of providing the fear of losing that the Post longs for.

Robert Samuelson begins his op-ed in the Washington Post with these words: “With hindsight we may see 2006 as the end of Pax Americana.” In many parts of the world and in the minds of quite a few Americans, the reaction to such a development would no doubt be good-riddance.

In the remainder of his column, Samuelson talks about Pax Americana’s historical contributions to world stability and prosperity and sounds some cautionary notes regarding the consequences of its passing:

Ever since World War II, the United States has used its military and economic superiority to promote a stable world order that has, on the whole, kept the peace and spread prosperity. But the United States increasingly lacks both the power and the will to play this role. It isn’t just Iraq, though Iraq has been profoundly destabilizing and demoralizing. Many other factors erode U.S. power: China’s rise; probable nuclear proliferation; shrinking support for open trade; higher spending for Social Security and Medicare that squeezes the military; the weakness of traditional U.S. allies—Europe and Japan.

By objective measures, Pax Americana’s legacy is enormous. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear device has been used in anger. In World War II an estimated 60 million people died. Only four subsequent conflicts have had more than a million deaths (the Congo civil war, 3 million; Vietnam, 1.9 million; Korea, 1.3 million; China’s civil war, 1.2 million), reports the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. Under the U.S. military umbrella, democracy flourished in Western Europe and Japan. It later spread to South Korea, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In 1977 there were 89 autocratic regimes in the world and only 35 democracies, the center estimates. In 2005 there were 29 autocracies and 88 democracies.

Prosperity has been unprecedented. Historian Angus Maddison tells us that from 1950 to 1998 the world economy expanded by a factor of six. Global trade increased twentyfold. These growth rates were well beyond historical experience. Living standards exploded. Since 1950 average incomes have multiplied about 16 times in South Korea, 11 times in Japan and six times in Spain, reports Maddison. From higher bases, the increases were nearly five times in Germany, four in France and three in the United States.

It is fatuous to think all this would have occurred spontaneously. Since the Marshall Plan, the United States has been a stabilizing influence—albeit with lapses (the Vietnam War; the inflation of the 1970s; now Iraq). Aside from security, it provided a global currency, the dollar. It championed lower tariffs and global investment, which transferred technology and management skills around the world. It kept its markets open. It’s doubtful that any other major country would have tolerated present U.S. trade deficits (now approaching $800 billion) without imposing pervasive import restrictions.

To Americans, the lesson of World War II was that to prevent a repetition, the United States had to promote global stability. It had to accept short-term costs and burdens to avoid larger long-term costs and burdens. But the triumphalism following the Cold War fed overconfidence. Pax Americana would continue forever. It was “the end of history”—democracy and free markets would spread. The United States was a “hyperpower.”

The flaw in all this theorizing was to mistake strength for power. Statistically, the United States remains the world’s strongest nation. Its economy is the wealthiest, triple the size of Japan’s. Its all-volunteer military is the best trained and most technologically advanced. “No other state is building nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, stealth fighters or unmanned aerial vehicles,” writes Max Boot, author of “War Made New.” The United States has 12 carriers; Britain, the runner-up, has three smaller carriers.

The trouble is that strength—measurable and impressive—does not translate directly into power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. Here, America is weaker.

Iraq has reminded us that religious and ethnic loyalties dim the appeal of democracy, freedom and materialism. Militarily, “asymmetrical threats” often neutralize conventional advantages, as Boot notes. Iraq has confirmed that, too. If Iran and North Korea become permanent nuclear powers, the U.S. military edge will decline further. Any action against either country would be tempered by the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Worse, other regional powers (Japan, South Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) may decide to go nuclear to have deterrence. A black market in atomic technology would almost inevitably follow—increasing the odds of terrorists acquiring a bomb.

The end of the Cold War probably reduced, not increased, American power. Without the Soviet threat, Europe and Japan felt less reason to follow U.S. leadership. China’s emergence is altering the world balance. In spirit, its economic policies are mercantilist. It subsidizes its exports with an artificially low exchange rate; it is seeking captive oil supplies. China’s policies are for China, not a stable world order.

America won’t retire from the world stage, but how active it will be is unclear. Iraq has reduced its national confidence and credibility. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are already twice defense spending. Generational attitudes are shifting. A poll of 18- to 24-year-olds finds that 72 percent don’t think the United States should take the lead in solving global crises, reports Paul Starobin in National Journal. “Today’s 18-year-old college freshman was still in diapers when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,” he writes. There’s little memory of the Cold War, let alone World War II.

Given the rampant anti-Americanism abroad today, the fading of Pax Americana may inspire much glee. The United States is widely regarded as an arrogant source of instability, blamed for many global woes—from greenhouse gases to Islamic militancy to unpopular globalization. No one can know what will replace Pax Americana, but with time, the people who now celebrate its decline may conclude that its failures were mainly those of good intentions and that its successes were unwisely taken for granted.

Food for thought.

Another war.

From the New York Times:

The inevitability of war hangs over Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-pocked seaside capital. But unlike the internal anarchy that has consumed the country for 15 years, the looming battle is now with Ethiopia, threatening to further destabilize the troubled Horn of Africa.

In the past week the increasingly militant Islamists in control of Mogadishu and much of the rest of the country have begun a food drive, a money drive and an AK-47 assault rifle drive, and have sent doctors and nurses, along with countless young soldiers, to the front lines.

For its part, Ethiopia, with tacit approval from the United States, has been steadily slipping soldiers across the border, trying to hold off the Islamists and shore up Somalia’s weak, unpopular and divided transitional government.

Though that government has been recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate authority in Somalia, its power barely extends to the municipal limits of Baidoa, the inland town where it is based.

The Islamist forces, on the other hand, seem to be very popular here, having defeated Mogadishu’s warlords earlier this year to pacify one of the world’s most murderous cities.

Their troops, which United Nations officials say are secretly getting weapons from several Arab countries and Eritrea, have encircled Baidoa and are vowing to wage war against the Ethiopian forces unless they leave. Ethiopian convoys have been attacked, and the Islamists recently skirmished with soldiers from Baidoa, with dozens reported killed. That taste of war seems to have whetted the appetite for more.

Analysts are unanimous that a full-scale conflict between the Islamists and Ethiopia, a country with a strong Christian identity, would be disastrous for Somalia, which is already suffering from severe flooding and years of neglect, and for the region as a whole, because neighboring countries may jump in.

American involvement:

Gen. John P. Abizaid . . . recently flew to Ethiopia to meet with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who had told American officials that he could cripple the Islamist forces “in one to two weeks.”

Walking a careful line, General Abizaid made it clear that a broad military invasion of Somalia could create a humanitarian crisis across the Horn of Africa, Centcom officials said, but did not tell Ethiopian officials to pull their troops out.

Indeed, some American officials say the United States supports Ethiopia’s military buildup because they feel it is the only way to protect the weak Baidoa government from being overrun, force the Islamists to the negotiating table and contain what they call a growing regional threat.

“Been there, done that” seems appropriate.

That, I think, is the essence of retired General Barry McCaffrey’s op-ed in the Washington Post.

At one end of the spectrum is Rumsfeld. If McCaffrey could make the out-going Defense Secretary walk across a bed of coals, he would (figuratively speaking, of course):

We are in a very difficult position created by a micromanaged Rumsfeld war team that has been incompetent, arrogant and in denial. The departing defense secretary, in a recent farewell Pentagon town hall meeting, criticized the alleged distortions of the U.S. media, saying that they chose to report a few bombs going off in Baghdad rather than the peaceful scene he witnessed from his helicopter flying over the city. This was a perfect, and incredible, continuation of Donald Rumsfeld’s willful blindness in his approach to the war. From the safety of his helicopter, he apparently could not hear the nearly constant rattle of small-arms fire, did not know of the hundreds of Marines and soldiers being killed or wounded each month, or see the chaos, murder and desperation of daily life for Iraqi families.

At the other end are the advocates of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, whose advice, if followed, would result in carnage:

We could immediately and totally withdraw. In less than six months, our 150,000 troops could fight their way along strategic withdrawal corridors back to the sea and the safety provided by the Navy. Several million terrified refugees would follow, the route of our columns marked by the burning pyres of abandoned military supplies demolished by our rear guard. The resulting civil warfare would probably turn Iraq into a humanitarian disaster and might well draw in the Iranians and Syrians. It would also deeply threaten the safety and stability of our allies in neighboring countries.

The General doesn’t exactly mince his words.

Here’s what he recommends:

First, we must commit publicly to provide $10 billion a year in economic support to the Iraqis over the next five years. In the military arena, it would be feasible to equip and increase the Iraqi armed forces on a crash basis over the next 24 months (but not the police or the Facilities Protection Service). The goal would be 250,000 troops, provided with the material and training necessary to maintain internal order.

Within the first 12 months we should draw down the U.S. military presence from 15 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), of 5,000 troops each, to 10. Within the next 12 months, Centcom forces should further draw down to seven BCTs and withdraw from urban areas to isolated U.S. operating bases—where we could continue to provide oversight and intervention when required to rescue our embedded U.S. training teams, protect the population from violence or save the legal government.

Finally, we have to design and empower a regional diplomatic peace dialogue in which the Iraqis can take the lead, engaging their regional neighbors as well as their own alienated and fractured internal population.

This sounds a lot more realistic to me than do the ISG’s recommendations.