by hilzoy
I write a post on Iraq, and, of course, as soon as I post it, I run across three more interesting stories. One:
“The sight of Saddam Hussein haranguing the court that sentenced him to death last week in Baghdad may have done little to slow his trip to the gallows, which looks ever more likely to come early next year if the appellate court, as expected, moves swiftly to uphold the sentence.
But Mr. Hussein’s outbursts served to remind many Iraqis, even those who hated him most, of something they crave in the rudderless nightmare Iraq has become under his successors: a strong leader, able to forge a nation from the country’s fractious ethnic and religious groups, and to end the current wave of sectarian bloodletting that, left to build on itself, could ultimately match the mass killing that characterized Mr. Hussein’s psychopathic years in power.
It is something ordinary Iraqis say with growing intensity, even as they agree on little else. Let there be a strongman, they say, not a relentless killer like Saddam Hussein but somebody who will take the hammer to the insurgents and the death squads and the kidnappers and the criminal gangs who have banished all pretense of civility from their lives.
Let him ride roughshod, if he must, they say, over the niceties of due process and human rights, indeed over the panoply of democratic institutions America has tried to implant here, if only he can bring peace.”
So much for that clever idea of building a democracy that could serve as a model for the Middle East.
Two (via TPM):
“With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.
The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says. (…)
Abbas Beyat’s joined the line outside Baghdad’s central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad.
The family had already paid a $60,000 ransom to an intermediary who then disappeared with the money.
“There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies,” Beyat, 56, said, describing the scene inside the morgue.
“The clerk told me to dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I found him,” he said. Like many of those abducted, Hussein Beyet bore the marks of torture, with holes from an electrical drill visible in his skull, Beyat said.
Others never find their loved ones’ bodies at all.”
People tattooing their names and phone numbers on their thighs? Digging through piles of corpses to find their relatives? Hold those details in your mind as you read my third article:
“Within the confines of the policy board, Adelman became blunt about his disenchantment with the Pentagon’s management of the war. At the board’s meeting this summer, Adelman said, he argued that the American military needed a new strategy.
“I suggested that we were losing the war,” Adelman said. “What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, ‘What’s the alternative? Because what we’re doing now is just losing.’ ”
Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn’t take to the message well. “He was in deep denial—deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, ‘Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.’ He got upset and cut me off. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went right on with it.””
In a meeting a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld asked Adelman to resign from the Defense Policy Board, an the grounds that he had become ‘too negative'”
“And then I said, ‘I’m negative about two things: the deflection of responsibility, and the quality of decisions.’ He said he took responsibility all the time. Then I talked about two decisions: the way he handled the looting, and Abu Ghraib. He told me that he didn’t remember saying, ‘Stuff happens.’ He was really in denial that this was his fault.” Adelman said that it struck him then that “maybe he really thinks that things are going well in Iraq.””
“Maybe he really thinks that things are going well in Iraq.” “We can’t lose the war in Iraq.” Wrong. We are losing the war in Iraq; we have already lost it. It was, as Rumsfeld said, lost in America. Specifically, in his office, and Cheney’s, and Bush’s. A lot of Iraqis, and a lot of our soldiers, have paid the price for Rumsfeld’s delusional ideas about how to fight a war. He himself has yet to pay any. (And I don’t think his resignation counts: he had already served longer than most Secretaries of Defense who do not turn two wars into disasters.)
*** UPDATE: Despite what it says at the bottom of this post, it was written by me, hilzoy. I had been removing spam, and I must have forgotten to log out of the admin account. Moe has no responsibility whatsoever for this post, and would probably disagree vehemently with it.
“And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq.”
May I suggest that Rumsfeld was showing Adelman what a conversation with the President would look like, without actually saying so?
He himself has yet to pay any.
Jail time in Germany.
Just a nitpick, but you must be posting under the admin login cause it has posted by Moe Lane at the bottom.
When does it occur to the MSM that Bush, Cheney, snd Rumsfeld are all probably psychotic to one degree or another and shouldn’t have been allowed to run a toaster oven unsupervised, let alone a war?
The other day Charles Peirce at TAPPED gave us a great historical quote which included the following:
“nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve”
That’s Jeff Davis, the week of Appomattox, after the Confederates had retreated from Richmond. Utterly deluded.
Is there something in the DNA of the entire Republican/Southern/right-wing outlook that persistently confuses “exhibitions of resolve” with practical, effective action?
That can’t quite be the right description of the problem. Rumsfeld is no Southerner. And Monty Python’s Black Knight was not a Republican.
But then why is this deluded belief–that you can utterly botch a war, but win it by “exhibiting resolve”–so widely imprinted on a segment of American opinion?
How did we wind up with so many Reverse Roosevelts, with their endless bluster and their tiny sticks?
And how can we get our country back from them?
How did we wind up with so many Reverse Roosevelts, with their endless bluster and their tiny sticks?
I blame the MBAs. This is the MBA administration, after all. They’re acting like clueless CEOs.
MBA Administration?
Most CEO’s who screw up the management of their concerns only have to deal with a flow of red ink: the Bush 43 Administration’s incomptency has left us with a flood of quite another red fluid to have to deal with.
Rumsfeld’s behavior isn’t really that odd if you consider all the gibbering Shakespeare’s Kings did to themselves in the company of silent sentries from their interior blasted heaths.
Richard Nixon dropped the first person altogether on his way to being a crazy historical person.
I used to watch my father cut the lawn when I was a kid, his lips in some sort of nonstop but silent telling off of someone, probably someone at work … maybe it was me he was muttering about for NOT cutting the lawn.
Why, two weeks ago I declaimed loudly to myself (from the ramparts of my castle to the black, churning heavens), I thought, about the awful Rush Limbaugh, only to find out that I had been unconsciously typing my rant word-for-word into a Hilzoy comment thread. I scared the crap out of the cat.
Imagine my surprise when minions brought me his head! Limbaugh’s, not the cat’s.
The Custer character in “Little Big Man” comes to mind, still gibbering orders and battle plans to his already scalped soldiers at the bitter end.
They’re acting like clueless CEOs.
Only insofar as, say, Ken Lay was clueless.
My god. I thought that I had literally entered into a parallel universe when I saw Moe’s byline on this post. I was about to start poking myself with sharp instruments to see if I would ever wake up.
I’d have thought the “by hilzoy” part right under the title would have been a dead giveaway.
Too obvious, probably.
Two comments – first, that NYT article is a piece of propaganda. They imply that the US goal in Iraq was a democracy. In the real world, the US held elections after plan A (Chalabi) and B (several years of CPA control) had failed. Sistani offered Bush a choice between plan C1 (elections) and C2 (unleash the shiites); only at that point did Bush choose democracy.
My second comment – I’ve watched Rumsfield play that rhetorical questions game. If one doesn’t start with any assumptions about Rumsfield’s competancy, then I, for one rapidly figured him as a pure BS artist. His particular technique is to throw out a cloud of rhetorical questions,to hide the fact that he’s BS-ing.
May I suggest that Rumsfeld was showing Adelman what a conversation with the President would look like, without actually saying so?
LOL, although unconvincing since Bush never questions himself.
To comment seriously on Adelamn’s report of Rumsfeld’s strange interrogatory soliloquy, it is clearly a BS device as Barry points out. But at that late stage of the game and in the context of the meeting dexcribed by Adelman, it is probably something else; his own tortured inner dialogue inadvertantly leaking out — the one that allowed him to remain in such deep denial.
Would a viagra joke be uncalled for here?
“Let him ride roughshod, if he must, they say, over the niceties of due process and human rights, indeed over the panoply of democratic institutions America has tried to implant here, if only he can bring peace.”
Let’s imagine a completely unfettered Iraqi government. Could this work? Would it result in a Shiite law and order dictatorship– a mirror image of Saddam’s Sunni one? While not ideal, it’s not hard to imagine the frustration Iraq’s citizens have…
Well, it’d also have to include mirror-image mass slaughter of Sunnis, and a non-mirror image mass slaughter of Kurds. The problems are that (a) the Kurds, from what I’ve heard, have been stockpiling hardware for just such an occasion, (b) the Sunni Arab states might not acquiesce to a Shiite slaughter, and (c) the Shiites don’t have the heavy hardware that Saddam did. The US has kept the Iraqi Army on a short lease, concerning tanks, artillery and aircraft.
Someone please explain.
The Democrats’ big line these days (just heard Senator Levin repeat it) is that we have to pressure the Iraqis into making tough political compromises by making it clear to them that we are not going to be there forever, implicitly that we are not going to be their security blanket.
First, this bothers me because it sounds euphemistic. What he really means is something like: We have to threaten them with the total chaos, bloodshed, and ethnic cleansing that could follow our departure in order to induce them to make compromises to avoid it.
Second, this bothers me because in light of the reality of the situation (as depicted in these articles), who can still pretend that we are any kind of security blanket? Sure, the situation might get worse if we leave, but, considering how bad things are, whatever incentives would be in play if we threatened withdrawal ought to be in play now anyway.
Third, does anyone have a clear idea of what these compromises would be that would achieve security, whether there are people in an appropriate position of power to effectively make them, and whether those people, if they even exist, are motivated to make them? I have no clear sense of this.
What I mean to say is that this piece of political speech functions as a prescription: Shape Up, Iraq, Because We’re Shipping Out! But because it is so vague, I have no idea what it is exactly a prescription for. Death squads don’t suddenly choose to drop their arms because an occupying army is leaving. Puppet governments don’t cease what looks to be an effort at ethnic cleansing when threatened with less oversight. Ethnic militias don’t disarm when faced with the prospect of less protection.
What scares me and offends me is that this — now coming from both sides of the aisle — is an effort to blame the victim, a way to absolve ourselves of responsibility for the matter.
And I really hate that.
Ara: just answering off the top of my head: I think people have talked about being concerned about things like: Maliki not having so much as begun to disarm the militias, the Shi’a not seeming interested in giving any ground to the Sunnis, etc. I don’t know whether it is in Maliki’s power to do these things: he presumably has to keep a coalition together, and might not be able to force these sorts of changes through.
But I think the line of thought goes: unless the Iraqi government at least tries to do these things, it’s all hopeless. Things might well get worse if we left, a lot worse, and possibly people are not making compromises because they are not yet staring into the abyss, really: they think we won’t let things get completely out of control.
And I don’t think the argument is that the militias will disarm if faced with our departure; it’s that people in power who are protecting them, or at least playing along with them, on the assumption that they can do so without having to take responsibility for the consequences, might try to bring them to heel, or at least withdraw some sorts of support that they need, if we made that assumption false.
I dunno. I suppose that some version of this — one that wasn’t cast as ‘blame the Iraqis’, but as ‘who knows; this might help’ — might work. I doubt it, but I’ve been wrong before. Maybe it would be more likely to work if we could somehow bring in Iraq’s neighbors, but why they should listen to us I have no idea. You need trust to make this sort of thing work, and there is no trust that I can see.
Probably, if I were trying this gambit — and I might, on the grounds that it’s probably worth trying anything — I would be thinking: we should probably redeploy in any case (where by ‘redeploy’ I mean ‘move somewhere close by where we can intervene in case of humanitarian catastrophe — could be a smaller number of troops concentrated somewhere in Iraq, could just be nearby, I leave that to people who know tactics better than I do, meaning at all) — but would not want to say so, since threatening people with something tends not to work if they think you’re planning to do that something in any case (though if people actually did agree to try, I’d probably delay redeployment for some finite period to give it a chance to work.)
I think we can pretend to absolve ourselves of responsibility, and I expect to see us trying to do that, but that’s just self-deception, and a particularly ugly kind. We are responsible. Period.