'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Beware of chaos--and the wounded neocon tiger

Just how deeply has the U.S. national-security establishment (and therefore, its ability to make rational decisions on national-security issues) been damaged by the accelerating confusion marking the conduct of its policy in Iraq and elsewhere?

My first answer is that the damage goes far beyond the few Military Police and Military Intelligence units at the epicenter fo the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. (This, even on the day that the WaPo has published some of what seem to be the shocking photos and videos of Abu Ghraib torture that were shown to lawmakers earlier this week, as well as a collection of sworn statements from former detainees, collected as part of an internal military investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses as long ago as January 16-18.)

Policy on Iraq, in general, is in evident turmoil:  

• The question of who--at the highest levels of the chain of command-- commanded and authorized the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib continues to be both revealed and very revealing.  Today's WaPo has a good story by Brad Graham that spells out that Rumsfeld himself was the one, in late 2002, to explicitly authorize the first use of abusive interrogation tactics in the Gitmo branch of the Global Gulag (from where, many of them were later transferred by Gen. Geoffrey Miller to the Abu Ghraib branch).  The NYT has a good story about how interrogation techniques developed and used in the Afghanistan branches of the Gulag were transferred to Abu Ghraib--along with a good, short timeline showing some of the key decisions along the way there.
  
• The President of the quasi-puppet Interim Governing Council got effortlessly blown up near the gates of the US Imperial Compound in Baghdad earlier this week.  Meanwhile, the question of who commanded and authorized the raid against the home and office of IGC member and close (until two days ago) Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi remains shrouded in mystery. US-trained Iraqi Police were directly involved, along with US agents not in uniform who were identified as belonging to the FBI and CIA. But what about the US military, which is supposed to be running the whole occupation? Where were they on this?
• There is zero evidence that the Bush administration has any plan at all--let alone a workable one--for how Iraq will be governed after June 30th, a date that is only 40 days away.  (For a few really macabre cheap laughs, go check out the 'Countdown to Sovereignty' website the CPA has put up.)
  
• Meantime, Reuters is reporting that "U.S. troops pounded Shi'ite militia in the holy city of Kerbala on Friday [i.e., today] in a bid to crush insurgents whose demands for Americans to leave Iraq are gaining support among Iraqis frustrated with the occupation." (emphasis by HC there). This reporter, Sami Jumaili, also noted that Moqtada al-Sadr was able to slip out of Najaf to nearby Kufa to deliver his Friday sermon there.
• The big question of who is currently making the decisions regarding the use of US power in Iraq remains very mysterious. It was mysterious back in early April, when someone-- Bremer? Feith? Sanchez? Or even, as reported, the President himself?-- made the disastrous triple decisions to (1) force an escalation in Fallujah, (2) force an escalation against Moqtada, and (3) align strongly with Sharon on his unilateral plan for the Palestinians. It is even more mysterious today, especially since Generals Sanchez and Abizaid are nowhere near the theater of operations but rather, back in Washington ...

(Time to exit that bulleted list there, since I'm getting to the crux of my argument.)

Okay, so we see that primarily because of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Sanchez and Abizaid are back in DC. Evidently, while there, they will be engaged in intensive discussions about the upcoming (phantom) "transition"... But who will they have them with?

Who, in short, is in charge of this process?

Yesterday, Rumsfeld--who is formally the "boss" of these two guys in the normal chain of command--shephereded a visit they made to the White House, to go visit the "commander in chief". Secretary of State Powell, meanwhile, was headlining the opening of a meeting at the State Department at which diplomatic "sherpas" from a number of un-named countries were just starting to discuss the content of the UN Security Council resolution that will be needed as an essential part of any even-half-workable "transition to democracy" process inside Iraq.

His comments there were quite interesting, and extremely important. Indeed, getting the political/diplomatic part of the transition right is the only way to head off complete and total disaster in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East over the months ahead. Powell's comments to the gathering of international sherpas were, however, notably under-reported by the major media.

Another very shocking question that needs more examination: how do they hope to be able to explore all the many extremely serious diplomatic issues involved in crafting this resolution, and to get the resolution through the Sec Council, in time for the UN to be able to make all the preparations that will be needed if it is to play the serious political role required of it starting July 1?

Are Powell, and behind him the serried phalanxes of all the neo-cons in the Bush administration, just setting the UN up for failure there?  

How can that be avoided?

Not an easy question to answer... Though I think we all need to be totally aware that it was the Bush administration that got the world into this mess, and that should bear the whole responsibility for the current chaos, suffering, and failure.

However, recognizing that fact does not provide many of the actual answers on how to deal most effectively with this whole transition issue...

It is not only in Iraq that the neocons' unconscionable hijacking of US national-security decisionmaking has had multiple, extremely destabilizing consequences:

• Palestine is of course another major case in point; one that, moreover, has its own well-known resonance throughout the whole of the rest of the world.  
• The tattered state of US-Europe relations is another glaring example.
• Instability in East Asia also looks considerably more possible now, after the Pentagon "strategists" decided they needed to pull ten percent of the American tripwire force out of South Korea, to send them over to Iraq... 
• The culpable imperial over-reaching in Iraq has also had terrible effects on stabilization efforts in Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In general, I think it is good for the world system, and for the true longterm interests of the US citizenry within that system, that the criminal follies of the neocons' imperial over-reach have been revealed so fully and so (relatively) fast within Iraq. But so much pain and suffering has been inflicted along the way-- on Iraqis, on Afghans, on Palestinians, on Israelis, on the families of US soldiers killed or mutilated in a totally unnecessary war, and on the long-term ability of the US government to fund basic educational and health services for its citizens...

Still, right now, I am most concerned that a way be found for the leaders of the United States to negotiate new "rules of engagement" between the US and the rest of the world: new rules in which the US is recognised as a leader in world affairs, but not the leader; new rules in which the basic rules and norms of the international order are applied equally as between the US and the other nations of the world, with no allowance for any "exceptionalism" by any party.

So my concerns in this process of  the broad renegotiation of Washington's engagement with the rest of the world are as follows:

1. Can we think of the Bush administration as ever being capable of participating in good faith in such a negotiation? (Answer: definitely not, if it continues as currently configured; just possibly, if Powell were made VP and all the neocons were swept off to sit out the rest of their days in Gitmo with bags over their heads.)
2. Does John Kerry present himself convincingly as someone who could successfully undertake this vital task? (Answer: he hasn't done so yet.)
3. Finally, have the major institutions of US national-security decisionmaking and national domestic decisionmaking been so badly harmed that it is almost impossible to think of any national leader being capable of acting rationally in this domain? (Answer: quite possibly.)

This latter possibility is one I have just recently started to entertain. The neocons, their allies, and what they project as their "vision" are still very powerful in national life, including inside key national institutions and in broad segments of American public opinion. I do not see them as individuals who will just calmly admit, "I was wrong", and go home or take up a less harmful and less powerful occupation. They are a deeply wounded tiger and can lash back at all the rest of us inside the US and around the world in ways that may not be at all rational, and are impossible to predict.

Indeed, given the current, very evident, chaos and confusion in the command of the levers of US power in Iraq and elsewhere it will be particularly easy for dedicated groups of neocons to create chaos in Iraq before or after June 30th, or indeed elsewhere.

So we all need to be careful and very wise in the way we deal with the neocon leaders.

Just think, for a moment, how their dreams have all been shattered over the past 12 months. Twelve months ago, they were at the pinnacle of their power and influence-- swaggering across the whole of Iraq with their plans for massive privatization and for the installation of their vaunted pal Chalabi as ruler; rudely threatening Iran and Syria that "they would be next"; laughing at the concerns of "Old Europe"; confident that their overthrow of Saddam would bring about warm Iraqi-Israeli relations and a rapid end to the Palestinian intifada...

Oh, where are those dreams now? Dissolved on the shit-stained buttocks of a sodomized Iraqi man whose fate was, at the end of the day, the logical consequence of the neocons' desire to impose their vision on the rest of the world, by force if necessary.

Yes, where are their dreams...

But more to the point, how can we all, calmly and rationally, now set about fashioning a world in which the desires of any group of fanatics to impose their visions on the rest of the world by force finally have no place? That, I think is our current task.