Victory Is...Negotiable

Gareth Porter
TomPaine.com

While U.S. President George W. Bush continued to claim a strategy for ”victory” in Iraq in recent speeches, his administration has quietly renounced the goal of defeating the non-Al Qaeda Sunni armed organizations there.

The administration is evidently preparing for serious negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, whom it has started referring to as ”nationalists,” emphasizing their opposition to Al Qaeda's objectives.

The new policy has thus far gone unnoticed in the media, partly because it has only been articulated by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the spokesman for the U.S. command in Baghdad.

The White House clearly recognizes that the shift could cause serious political problems if and when it becomes widely understood. The Republican Party has just unveiled a new television ad attacking Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean for suggesting that the war in Iraq cannot be won.

Renouncing victory over the Sunni insurgents therefore undercuts the president's political strategy of portraying his policy as one of ”staying the course” and attacking the democrats for ”cutting and running.”

Until recently, the administration treated the indigenous Sunni insurgents as the main enemy in Iraq, measuring progress primarily in terms of the numbers of insurgents killed and captured, and areas ”cleared” of insurgent presence. Administration officials portrayed Sunni insurgents as allies of Al Qaeda and referred to them as ”anti-Iraqi forces”.

The hard line toward Sunni insurgents remained even after the administration began last summer to put much greater emphasis on the ”political track” of attracting Sunnis into the new government. As recently as mid-November, briefings by the U.S. command described operations in Western Iraq as being against ”insurgents” — not against Al Qaeda or ”terrorists”.

But beginning in late November, both the U.S. command and the U.S. embassy began signaling a dramatic change in Washington's attitude toward Sunni resistance organisations.

On Nov. 24, the top U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, made a point of emphasising the command's understanding of the ”capabilities, the vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency—the foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists”.

He referred to the administration's ”deliberate outreach” to the ”rejectionists”, which would allow them to ”become part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

That same week, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced in an ABC interview that he was prepared to open negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, but not with ”Saddamists” or foreign terrorists. And in an interview with Time magazine, Khalilzad, referring specifically to Sunni insurgent groups, said: ”We want to deal with their legitimate concerns.”

Khalilzad then combined two major indications of a new willingness to accommodate the Sunni insurgents in the same sentence. ”The fault line between Al Qaeda and the nationalists seems to have increased,” he told Time .

Thus the image of the insurgents had been transformed from ”anti-Iraqi forces” to ”nationalists”. The conflicting objectives of the Sunni resistance groups and the al Qaeda-connected terrorist network were now played up rather than ignored, as in the past.

The clearest articulation of the change in policy to date, however, came in a U.S. command press briefing by Maj. Lynch on Dec. 8. Lynch was asked to what extent the insurgency is ”dominated or run by Baathists and rejectionists” and to what extent by ”Islamic fundamentalists”.

His reply avoided the question of which was more important and instead emphasised the difference between U.S. policy toward the Sunni insurgents and its policy toward Al Qaeda terrorists. Lynch said U.S. operations ”are focused on Zarqawi and his network”.

Then he made a crucial distinction. ”[W]e've made a conscious decision,” he said, ”to focus on defeating the terrorists and foreign fighters and disrupting the capabilities of the rest of the insurgents.” So his audience wouldn't miss the distinction he was making, Lynch added that ”the primary way to disrupt the capability of the rejectionists is through political engagement...”

”Political engagement,” as we now know from Khalilzad, means direct negotiations with the leaders of the insurgency. Lynch's answer had been carefully prepared ahead of time and reflected the new administration policy.

The new soft line toward the Sunni insurgents is a belated administration response to the conclusion of the U.S. military commanders in Iraq last summer that the Sunni insurgents cannot be ”defeated” and that there must be a political settlement with them.

Gen. George Casey, the commander of all multinational forces in Iraq, declared in an interview in late June that the conflict ”will ultimately be settled by negotiation and inclusion in the political process. It will not be settled on the battlefield.”

Significantly, Casey did not distinguish between U.S. and Iraqi forces in calling for negotiations, thus differing with Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. In a press conference that same day, Rumsfeld said, ”The coalition forces, the foreign forces, are not going to repress the insurgency,” implying that Iraqi forces would be able to do so.

Casey also suggested that the ”preliminary talks” that had occurred between U.S. officials and insurgents could lead to actual negotiations. That idea was quickly squelched by the U.S. embassy, evidently on White House orders.

However, a policy debate over how to handle the Sunnis obviously continued within the administration, with the U.S. military leadership in Iraq and Khalilzad pushing for real negotiations. It is now clear that the proponents of accommodation won the debate.

This does not mean that the White House has decided to give in on a timetable for troop withdrawal, which Bush just publicly rejected once again. As Seymour Hersh wrote in the Dec. 5 New Yorker magazine, a think tank source close to Vice President Dick Cheney says the president still believes he can ”tough this one out.”

And despite its new line on the insurgency, U.S. military operations are in fact still aimed largely at the Sunni insurgents rather than at Al Qaeda.

Nevertheless, the administration's abandonment of the goal of military defeat of the Sunni insurgents and willingness to negotiate with them betrays its ”victory” rhetoric.

Such negotiations would certainly have considerable impact on the domestic politics of the war. Such negotiations would become the new focus of public views of Bush's handling of Iraq. That would in turn increase the pressure on the White House to get the insurgent leaders to come an agreement. Meanwhile, the insurgents can be expected to insist that no agreement is possible without a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal.

The insurgents can also increase the pressure on Bush by making public their offer, reportedly made by insurgent leaders to Arab League officials in Cairo last month, to deliver Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to the Iraqi authorities as part of a peace agreement involving a U.S. timetable for withdrawal.

As more people in the United States, including members of Congress, understand that the Sunni resistance is not the enemy, but is the necessary ally in the elimination of Al Qaeda's ”terrorist haven” in Iraq, political support for continued U.S. military presence is likely to shrink even further. Why, it may be asked, should U.S. troops stay in Iraq to fight Sunni armed groups who are willing and able to turn in the real enemy in Iraq?

Thus the softening of the administration's policy toward the insurgents could set in motion a train of events that brings the U.S. occupation to an end much more quickly than now seems possible.

The New Machismo

Joan Vennochi
Boston Globe

It's macho time in America.

When Democrats challenge the Bush administration regarding its policy in Iraq, Republicans challenge their patriotism and toughness.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee released a new Web video. It features a white flag of surrender and this theme: ''Our country is at war. Our soldiers are watching, and our enemies are too. Message to Democrats: Retreat and Defeat is not an option." The video highlights recent critical comments about the Iraq war made by Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

In essence, to the GOP, ''staying the course" is a measure of strength and masculinity, whether or not the course proves to be successful. And some top Democrats buy into the thesis.

''When people feel uncertain, they would rather have someone who's wrong and strong than somebody who is weak and right," Bill Clinton said in a much-quoted speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in December 2002.

This ''wrong and strong" theory helped George W. Bush win reelection in 2004. This ''wrong and strong" theory continues to help Bush at a time of great doubt about an unpopular war in Iraq.

When it comes to national security policy today, only the most macho of men can afford to show their ''sensitive" side. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, can call for the country to renounce torture because of his personal credentials -- a POW who was tortured by the enemy during the Vietnam War. Others are labeled as weaklings and cowards if they suggest that stooping to the enemies' tactics is poor policy that so far achieved poor results.

Democrats who question administration policy regularly find their manhood under attack. It happened to Kerry during the last presidential contest, even though he was the Vietnam War veteran running against an opponent who served stateside in the National Guard.

Just last month, Vice President Dick Cheney thought nothing of questioning the backbone of Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat whose speech calling for a speedy withdrawal of troops set off a national debate. But Murtha, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, did not take Cheney's attack quietly. He shot back angrily: ''I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

Bush, sensing who had more machismo in this matchup, ended the hostile exchange by calling Murtha a fine man and a supporter of the military. But Democrats remain afraid of looking weak if they sound too antiwar; and the GOP is masterful at exploiting that fear, as the new RNC video demonstrates.

Take Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whose position on Iraq is no immediate withdrawal, no open-ended commitment to remain there. Her stance infuriates Democrats on the left, a consequence which delights centrist Democrats. Standing up to the peaceniks is not only cool, it's tough. It's another variation of the Clinton-Bush credo: Wrong and strong beats weak and right.

Charles Knight of the Commonwealth Institute, a public policy research center in Cambridge, has spent time analyzing what he calls the ''toughness discourse" in American politics, especially after 9/11. When it comes to national security, he says, ''tough" means ''using violence as a priority tool for international relations."

Backed into a corner by conservatives who equate ''liberal" with unmanly and weak, Democrats are buying into their opponents' definition. Accepting it means agreeing that a punch is the answer to every insult, that violence solves every dispute.

It is believing brawn always beats brains, a conclusion that defies logic, reason, and reality.

Toughness defined in a strictly physical way does not always achieve victory. Might does not make right, nor does it always make everything right. And it is not unmanly to say that.

Might makes right is the credo of the warrior. But there is simple power in right as might.

It is the power of great leaders in religion and politics, from Jesus Christ to Martin Luther King. Throughout history, brave men and women have taken the high moral ground.

Only in America today do we dare call them wimps.

Joan Vennochi writes regularly about national and local politics, and also covers issues relating to business, law and culture. Before joining the op-ed page, she wrote a column on the Globe's business page. She was City Hall bureau chief, State House bureau chief and covered national politics for the Globe. She began her career at the Globe as a researcher on the Spotlight Team, the newspaper's investigative reporting unit. She shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the team for local investigative reporting. She is a graduate of Boston University and Suffolk Law School.

Copyright 2005 Boston Globe

Skewed Idea of A Free Iraqi Press

Tim Rutten
Los Angeles Times

If another 10 Marines had not been killed Thursday outside Fallujah, this would have been the week to note that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's preening gamecock persona finally has realized its comedic potential.

Ever since 9/11, Rummy — as he is affectionately known to his dwindling band of admirers — has alternately cowed and wowed large segments of the Pentagon press corps with an exaggerated blend of sarcasm and strut straight off the music hall stage. On Tuesday, for example, he stood in front of the briefing room microphone and — with a straight face — cited Iraq's new free and independent news media as one of the U.S. occupation's success stories.

"The country … has a free media," he said. "It's a relief valve…. There's a hundred-plus papers." The punch line to this inside joke is that some substantial number of those papers turn out to be on the secretary's payroll.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, while the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development have spent millions of dollars training Iraqi journalists and encouraging the establishment of an independent news media to distribute their work, the Pentagon has shelled out millions more to bribe the same reporters and broadcasters to run phony news stories produced by the U.S. military and distributed by a private American contractor, the Washington-based Lincoln Group. Its head, conveniently enough, is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer.

Friday, the Senate Armed Services Committee went into closed session to hear testimony on exactly what the Pentagon was up to in Iraq. Even White House spokesman Scott McClellan expressed a kind of convoluted concern over the program's implications.

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch — the U.S. military's top spokesman in Baghdad — defended the program because the Al Qaeda murder gang's local thug-in-chief, Abu Musab Zarqawi, "is lying to the Iraqi people" through the media. According to Lynch, the United States doesn't lie. "We don't need to lie. We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact."

Well, maybe not entirely.

The New York Times, for example, got a look at a story the Lincoln Group prepared this week for placement in Azzaman, one of Baghdad's leading "independent" newspapers. It warned Iraqis not to heed the opinions of foreign journalists because the "Western press and frequently those self-styled 'objective' observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation."

Maj. Gen. Lynch notwithstanding, that's hardly the Joe Friday school of reporting.

Beyond the sheer perversity of claiming credit for establishing a democratic Iraq while systematically manipulating its electorate's information and corrupting its ostensibly free press, there are a couple of other sinister implications here.

One has to do with what will happen in Iraq, after the inevitable U.S. withdrawal. As retired Gen. William E. Odom, who headed the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, recently said, leaving "a pro-American liberal regime in place" is "just impossible…. Imposing a liberal constitutional order in Iraq would be to accomplish something that has never been done before. Of all the world's political cultures, an Arab-Muslim one may be the most resistant to such a change…. Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military's institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation."

Subverting the Iraqi press and corrupting its editors and reporters puts Baghdad's civil society just that much further behind the curve and makes it all the more likely that a new Saddam Hussein will rise from the rubble of occupation.

Then there's the issue of whether the U.S. government's covert propaganda can be quarantined off-shore, as it was in the depth of the Cold War, when the CIA bought journalists and subsidized anti-Communist publications across Europe. In the era of the Internet, when online commentators and publications routinely link to sources around the world, how long will it be before the Lincoln Group's fabrications insinuate themselves into the columns of the American press?

When propaganda is laundered through cyberspace, informational blowback is a real possibility. The Pentagon's subversion of Iraqi democracy may just as easily become subversion of our own.

At the end of the day, there will be a strong tendency to write off this whole planted-story episode as nothing more than forgivable over-zealousness under pressure by the commanders on the scene or perhaps the isolated misconduct of rogue contractors. Neither explanation will suffice, since this shabby affair is all of a piece with the administration's conduct of the entire Iraqi conflict.

It began with the willful misrepresentation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and then proceeded through the cover-up and justification of torture and abuse of prisoners, to the deliberate suppression of information concerning Iraqi civilian casualties that now appear to number in the tens of thousands.

Add to all that the continued exaggerations and wishful thinking that passes for official appraisals of the situation on the ground and a suspicion emerges that brings to mind Henry David Thoreau's defense of circumstantial evidence. There are situations that lend it decisive weight, he argued, "as when a trout is found in the milk."

This week, David Halberstam — whose monumental reportorial exegesis of the American debacle in Southeast Asia, "The Best and the Brightest," grows more pertinent by the day — pointed out that the real peril attendant on the construction of these informational Potemkin villages is that the U.S. officials who build them ultimately come to believe their own fabrications. It happened in Vietnam, and these days, any sober soul who listens to President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Rumsfeld speak about Iraq is bound to feel that we've all been down this road before.

"It's a culture of being loose with the truth," a senior U.S. defense official told a Knight Ridder correspondent this week. "We'd better stop it or we're going to end up like did in Vietnam."

Maybe we already have.

As each act of official self-deception compounds on another exercise in deliberate deceit, it seems more and more likely that whichever reeking bag of misfortune the wretched Iraqis are left holding by this turn in their unhappy history, Americans will recall George W. Bush's military misadventure in the Middle East as the war to make the world safe for mendacity.