As refugees from Saddam Hussein’s terror took to the streets of Sydney yesterday – to protest the US occupation of Iraq – quiet, if not peace, was descending on their homeland.
Just as the US has alienated most of its international support, it is in the process of alienating its Iraqi support as well. I have long felt that for freedom to be appreciated it has to be earned. It’s pure Milton Freidman – if you don’t pay for it, you don’t value it. Right? The problem the US faces is the Iraqi people haven’t earned their freedom. The US has delivered them from Saddam, but the Iraqis didn’t have to fight for it – they have yet to create their own liberation story.
Increasingly, to the man in the street, the fight for freedom in Iraq is becoming a fight to oust the US occupier.
While officials and rightists continue to characterise the Iraqi fighters as extremists, even terrorists, the evidence is mounting that they have significant and growing public support. Even moderate members of the Iraqi Governing Council are now criticizing the US approach to democracy in Iraq.
So what is that approach? Here's (registration needed) one Pentagon official’s version from the New York Times:
Our challenge is to win their hearts and minds, to convince them that a better Iraq is in their future. But the challenge in that is to convince them while they're shooting at us and we're shooting back.
And here’s how it works on the street from Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Paul McGeough:
When the GI challenged him, Sadeer tried to explain in his limited English that he entered the hotel routinely. But he was barked at, shoved away and then belted on the foot with a rifle. He used to slow in traffic to greet the US troops. Now he has turned: "Americans bad for Iraq - too many problems."
Leaving the hotel on foot, we had to go through the same streets to get to his car. I tried to explain our movements to the officer in charge of a US tank unit, but we were greeted with a stream of invective.
As I thanked the officer for his civility and moved on, one of his men fell in beside me, mumbling. Asked to repeat himself, he exploded: "Don't you f---in' eyeball me."
Nodding to his officer and raising his weapon, he shrieked: "He has rank to lose. I don't. I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf---er!"
Sadeer had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans.
If you are wondering where the strategy is in all this you are not alone. Now that plan A (Iraq as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East) is well off track, George Bush simply doesn’t have a plan B. From here on everything that happens in Iraq will be based on limiting political damage at home in the run-up to the election.
A couple of days ago I was asked if I thought the insurgents could win. My immediate reaction was “no”. Of course not. But I’ve had a rethink and it comes down to what “win” means. Just as the US rewrites its goals so does the Iraqi resistance. If their aim is to expose the occupation as a military imposition, the raw use of force against militants and civilians alike, then they can certainly succeed. If their aim is to force the US to act as an oppressor rather than a liberator, they can and are succeeding there too.
And what’s the likely outcome? Try this:
The grimmest lesson of Fallujah? Will any democratic government we could conceivably leave behind in Iraq be strong enough to stop Sunni towns like Fallujah – filled with well-armed, well-trained America-hating young men – from becoming ongoing hotbeds of terrorist plotting? The lesson of recent events in Iraq would seem to be a pessimistic one in this regard. (You'd need a strong, non-American military force able to thoroughly police Fallujah and Tikrit. But the Iraqi national forces haven't exactly proven to be a mighty hammer. And the Sunnis, in a loose federal system, seem unlikely to want to crack down on their own.) ... That's true even if the Marines are able to completely clean out the current Fallujah "vipers' nest" – something that also looks increasingly unlikely, given the political pressure for a cease-fire. ... It means that the Iraq War – even if we basically succeed in nation-building – could result in the creation of a new series of towns that - like the towns on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border – are a terrorist Petri dish.
The incompetence of the current administration is also increasingly being laid bare. A lot of words have been spent talking about who is toughest on terror – the Democrats or the Republicans. Both will have to look and be tough on the issue to win the next election. But it seems a bigger issue could be who is the most competent. Without management competency any amount of toughness will mean nothing. That’s the point Mark Steyn missed when he wrote this in The Spectator recently:
If you want to argue that the Clinton team had a better policy on gay marriage or the environment, that’s one thing. But when you suggest they were stronger on terrorism, and you put Gore, Albright, Cohen and Berger on one side of the screen and Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice on the other, it’s no contest.
Personally I’d put Albright up against any of Bush’s men for toughness. I had the honour to see her in action opposite Vlad Putin in a press conference a few year’s back. She was, shall we say, Churchillian. Clinton was a known workaholic. Despite finding time for cigar antics, he was absolutely on top of the key issues of his time. You can’t say that for Bush.
As to Berger v Rice, well:
As it turned out, the FBI did very little while Rice went off to concentrate on the big issues of missile defence and China. Meanwhile, reports coming in from FBI field offices warning that suspicious Middle Eastern men were attending flight schools around the country escaped the notice of the FBI director and his counter-terrorism team.
By contrast, the commission has heard, when a lower "spike" of terrorist threats was picked up by Bill Clinton's White House, the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, personally called in the Attorney-General and the heads of the FBI, CIA and every relevant agency. A plot to bomb Los Angeles airport was thwarted, albeit with a good deal of luck.
However, Rice saw dealing with the domestic agencies as a job to be delegated.
Slate's Fred Kaplan draws this conclusion:
One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
It looks as if it’s time for Rumsfeld to be sidelined as well. As the months have worn on the tough guy has begun to look surprisingly lost. He’s gone from being the driver of Iraq strategy to being almost totally reactive.
Retired General Barry McCaffrey is being extraordinarily polite in suggesting:
We should also transfer authority for security policy in Iraq from Rumsfeld to Secretary of State Colin Powell because the most important tasks are now diplomatic.
Hmmm, Powell actually knows a thing or two about military matters as well, which would be refreshing.