From the New York Times, August 30, 2005
By Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The Air Force's top general said Monday that American warplanes would have to support Iraq's fledgling security forces well after American ground troops eventually withdraw from the country.

Gen. John P. Jumper, who is to step down this week as the Air Force chief of staff, predicted that American fighter and reconnaissance aircraft would continue flying missions over Iraq for a long time, until Iraqi forces are capable of fighting insurgents on their own.

"As I see the transition into the hands of the Iraqi military, I will continue to see the need for them to require the support from the air until they're able to set up their own ability to support themselves," General Jumper told reporters at the Pentagon. "And that's going to take a while, even after some future withdrawal of ground forces."

In an interview earlier this month, General Jumper was even more explicit when asked about the Air Force's future in Iraq. "We will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely," he said. "We have interests in that part of the world and an interest in staying in touch with the militaries over there."

American and other allied combat aircraft, including remotely piloted Predator drones, now fly about 50 close-air support and armed reconnaissance missions every day. Iraq's tiny air force consists of just a few cargo and reconnaissance planes; the main allied effort has been to rebuild the Iraqi ground forces.

A small number of the American planes are in Iraq, and if they remain there, they would have to be protected, probably by United States ground forces. But many American warplanes also fly missions over Iraq from other countries in the region.

In the wide-ranging interview with reporters on Monday, General Jumper said the loss of access to an important air base in Uzbekistan could be offset without hurting combat operations and relief missions in Afghanistan.

"We have plenty of alternatives," he said, without identifying them. "From a political point of view, I'm disappointed we've been asked to leave. From a mission point of view, we're going to get the mission just fine."

He also said that despite a decision last week by the military base-closing commission to keep Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota open and to delay the closing of Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, as well as to restore some proposed shifts of Air National Guard units, the panel approved about 70 percent of the Pentagon's recommendations affecting Air Force bases.

"That's still a considerable amount of change," General Jumper said. "I don't look at it as a severe blow. I look at it as getting actually most of what we asked for."

Four previous commissions each endorsed about 85 percent of the Defense Department's recommendations to close, consolidate or shift military sites. A Pentagon spokesman, Glenn Flood, said Pentagon analysts were still calculating the results of the panel's decisions last week.

General Jumper, 60, whose first day at the office as chief of staff was Sept. 11, 2001, will be succeeded Friday by the Air Force vice chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley.

Via AP, More Changes Said Likely to Iraq Charter:

The U.S. ambassador suggested Tuesday there may be further changes to the draft constitution in order to win Sunni Arab approval, saying he believed a "final, final draft" had not yet been presented.
[...]
"I believe that a final, final draft has not yet been, or the edits have not been, presented yet, so that is something that Iraqis will have to talk to each other and decide for themselves," Khalilzad told reporters.

The law says the version signed off on by parliament Sunday cannot be amended. But Khalilzad said the door could be open for changes declared as "edits" to the approved text. There was no official comment from the Shiite parliamentary leadership on whether it shared that opinion.

However, influential Shiite lawmaker Khaled al-Attiyah, a member of the constitution drafting committee, insisted that "no changes are allowed to be made to the constitution" except for "minor edits for the language."

Shiite leaders consider some of the Sunni objections — especially on federalism and references to the Baath Party — as matters of principle.

An Arab League official in Cairo, meanwhile, said Arab diplomats were urging the Iraqis to amend the constitution to strengthen references to the country's role in the Arab world.

Iraqi Sunni Arabs cited the phrase among reasons they rejected the draft, . Although the law forbids further changes in the draft, the stakes are so high that Iraqis may overlook legalisms in a bid for unity. A Sunni constitution negotiator urged all opponents of the constitution, including radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, to join a national front against the charter.

Khalilzad spoke alongside prominent Sunni leader Adnan al-Dulaimi, who urged Sunnis to reject the constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum as it stands. He also denounced the Shiite-led Interior Ministry for allegedly murdering Sunnis.

It was unclear if negotiations among the factions were actually under way. But the presence of Khalilzad with a respected Sunni figure was a clear sign the Bush administration has not given up on its campaign to win Sunni endorsement before the referendum.

"With regards to the constitution, as I said before, if Iraqis among themselves, in the assembly and those from outside, decide to make some adjustments compared to the draft that was presented three, four days ago, it's entirely up to them," Khalilzad said.

Let's set to one side the awkward detail that the draft has already appeared in the local newspapers and may already have started coming off the printing presses for public distribution.

What seems clear is not just that the Founding Fathers shtick isn't playing very well, in either Baghdad or Peoria. The US is understandably getting mighty uncomfortable being in the position of defending a constitutional process that's seen by many Sunnis, in and outside Iraq, as a declaration of civil war. And of building the capacity of an army and police force that are viewed as already engaged in "soft cleansing." Standing next to a Sunni leader, it's becoming harder for Zal Khalilzad to maintain even a figleaf of an "honest broker" role. Yet the grand irony is that the US military will be fighting "anti-Iraqi forces" to try to ensure security for Sunni voters to get to the polls to defeat the draft constitution.

Meanwhile, the Arab League is, of course, typically late to the party. And futhermore, if the Arab League actually wanted to be relevant to the whole process, they could focus a bit more on substance. The "Arab nation" issue is certainly important and hot-button, but the legitimate problems the Sunni negotiators had with the draft go to the structure of the country, their role in it, and whether the majority is going to steamroll them on a regular basis, not Arab identity. The Daily Star, no fan of Amr Moussa in any event, argues that the League's General Secretary and the League itself are worse than useless.

[Moussa's] current criticism of the Iraqi charter offers no tangible solutions and therefore does little to ease the volatile situation in the country. Given the fact that the only hope for Iraq at this crucial juncture is the political process, Moussa's statement, which undermines that process, only serves to fuel sectarian aggravations in the country.

Sadly, Moussa has never made an effort to take the Iraqis under the wing of the league. This paper urged the Arab League to become actively involved in the drafting of the Iraqi constitution by offering guidance, advice and expertise. Discussions over the draft charter could have taken place under the auspices of the Arab League, but the organization never managed to rise to the level of the challenges in Iraq. For months, as the debate over federalism and Arabism has been raging, the Arab League has said nothing. If these issues were of such great Arab concern, one wonders why Moussa didn't visit Iraq and meet with the various community leaders to urge consensus on the matter.

This inaction on the part of the Arab League is also nothing new. The league was silent when thousands of Sudanese were being slaughtered by government-backed militias in Darfur. It did nothing to help resolve the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia over their shared border, nor did it act to reduce tensions between Syria and Lebanon after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

A harsh assessment, yes. But unfortunately, a fair one. With Khalilzad openly taking the risk of keeping a crack open for some accommodation with the Sunnis, it remains to be seen whether outsiders like the Arab League can avoid the temptation to grandstand and instead play a useful role. Based on past performance, the odds aren't good.

Of course, if our pal Zal were listening to Jim Hoagland do his best Charlie McCarthy imitation, channeling the voice of Ahmad Chalabi, Zal wouldn't be making another "risky intervention" like the President so foolishly did last week with his famous phone call to Shi'a leader Hakim. Instead of sticking his neck out for Sunni participation, Khalilzad really ought to be joining in with the Iraqi spirit of democracy and self-governance. Instead of standing next to a Sunni leader, he ought to be signing on to the strategic alliance between Najaf and Washington advocated by another DC pundit, David Ignatius, who thinks Washington should place its bets on the Shi'a version of a "grand plan" for democracy, even if it does involve a bit more untidiness for another decade or two.

Count me a cynic, but I won't complain if Bush can relinquish his typical "we've got the votes so we call the shots" approach to politics and show some sympathy for the importance of consensus. More power to Khalilzad if, by tinkering a bit with the Iraqi democratic process, he can obtain an outcome that at least a portion of the Sunnis might be willing to endorse. Unfortunately for the US, its leverage is increasingly weak. And the position in which the US is finding itself is being dictated by local contending factions, not by US choice.

A couple of months ago, Joe Biden offered four options for the future course of the US engagement in Iraq: (1) stay the course/muddle through, (2) withdraw with or without a timetable, (3) limit US losses by throwing in with the Kurds and Shi'a, or (4) "do more, better." Biden was advocating steps he thought would make up the fourth option, but he recognized that the third option "may end up being our only option if we don't do the right thing in the near term." Increasingly, it's looking like Door No. 3 by default.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

UPDATED below on 8-29-05 for new coverage from the Economist

---

This is an update to the positioning and posturing over the draft UN Summit document I discussed in my earlier defense of John Bolton.

The Guardian's diplomatic editor is reporting that the Foreign Office is supporting the original draft -- and speaks for the EU as well, since the UK holds the Presidency these days. The headline and lede are couched in terms of Bolton and the US dynamiting "UN reform," but most of the complaints noted in the article focus on the Millennium Development Goals and the poverty/development agenda I discussed in the earlier post. The MDGs are just just one piece of a complex agenda proposed by Kofi Annan, but they can generate a lot of quotes from high-profile NGOs, especially in the wake of the Make Poverty History and Live-8 events in July, which received such visible support from Tony Blair.

The Guardian adopts a breathless US-against-the-world frame for the story, with the UK leading the fight against the Bush/Bolton forces of evil.

Britain will join an international alliance to confront George Bush and salvage as much as possible of an ambitious plan to reshape the United Nations and tackle world poverty next week .

The head-to-head in New York on Monday comes after the revelation that the US administration is proposing wholesale changes to crucial parts of the biggest overhaul of the UN since it was founded more than 50 years ago.
[...]
A wide range of organisations, from aid groups to the anti-arms lobby, voiced dismay about Mr Bolton's objections yesterday and expressed concern that the summit may end in failure.

The Make Poverty History campaign said there was a danger that the millennium development goals, the original reason for holding the summit, would be reduced to a footnote.

A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. "Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch," the source said. "He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world."

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, "are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan".

The spokesman said it was "important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits", such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.

He stressed that a lot of negotiation on the draft still lay ahead. "There is a long way to go before leaders meet in September." [emph supplied]

I certainly agree that it would be bad form for the UN Summit to "row back from" prior international resolutions, especially at the instigation of the US. But the draft looks to me like another attempt to go over a great deal of old ground where the Bush Administration has refused to budge in the past, including as recently as July. Blair and Gordon Brown did their best in the runup to Gleneagles to armtwist the Bushies on a host of items near and dear to their heart, such as Brown's debt relief mechanism. And the whole world watched the cliffhanger negotiations on the infamous climate change language. I certainly don't agree with the Bush Administration's positions on many of those topics, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the US is backtracking.

So what are the Brits up to? After their experience trying to get agreement from the Americans on the Gleneagles agenda, it would seem unlikely that they actually expect the US to change its position on a host of items in the context of the UN Summit. So perhaps a bigger game's afoot.

Tony Blair and Condi Rice both have explicitly embraced a two-pronged global strategy for dealing with the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism: unapologetically going after the "bad guys" while offering a longer-term vision of a hopeful future to the less-developed parts of the world. But where the Bush Administration focuses almost exclusively on political freedoms and "democracy" as the cure for a troubled world, Blair has a much fuller vision of what is required for dealing with global issues and the challenges of interconnectedness. Hence the two centerpieces of his EU Presidency: his major Africa initiative and a commitment to getting a deal on global climate change that goes beyond the Kyoto paralysis. But whereas the Bush approach is determinedly a set of US-led or managed initiatives, Blair has been reemphasizing the importance of multilateral institutions and networks of relationships. Without setting himself up as in opposition to (or as Chirac would have it, balancing) the US' hegemonic ambitions, Blair has been demonstrating an alternative model of global leadership which is more attractive to many countries as well as to interest and advocacy groups which are often vocal opponents of US policies. In this context, helping the US to isolate itself in another high-profile context may suit Blair's agenda.

Annan's original proposal for the UN Summit was to try to strike a "grand bargain" that (1) met the concerns other countries have about US policy (most notably but not exclusively in the security domain), (2) produced concrete reforms in areas where the US, along with many other countries, believes the UN needs a major overhaul, such as the human rights commission and the bureaucracy in New York, (3) gave a more formal leadership role to countries that are major powers and more voice to the South more generally, and (4) provided an impetus for initiatives where there is a general willingness for the UN to take a greater role, such as in peace-building.

The prospects for such a bargain were never very good, if only because the bargain over Security Council membership has become so contentious. And it is unlikely that a grand bargain would be achieved without that issue being resolved. But even on other issues, the shape of any such bargain had been lost in the blizzard of detail in the draft UN Summit document as it stood before Bolton's red pen.

If the approach to negotiating the draft is to continue to bargain over details in a massive document, there are two possible outcomes, which really depend on the other countries, especially the Brits: either the well-known US objections will be accommodated without too much fuss, or the US will be isolated but the actual reasons will be lost in minutiae. In the first case, the summit will be declared a "success" by the politicians (and the NGOs will moan and wring their hands), and in the second, it will be declared a failure. In neither case is it remotely probable that the UK will get the US to sign off on anything close to the current draft. And in neither case are we likely to see anything approaching Kofi's "grand bargain" of reform.

Bolton has proposed scrapping the massive detailed document and going to a short-and-sweet set of principles which could in fact resuscitate the "grand bargain" approach. This would be high-risk because it would highlight potential disagreements that would be hard to paper over with pages on pages of obfuscatory prose. But the US could also be betting that such an approach might keep the US from being isolated because it would highlight potential faultlines among those who are currently signing on to the massive draft -- since the current draft is as much a comprehensive wish list as a set of actions and would not involve significant adjustments to their own policies nearly to the same degree as it would impact US policies.

So what are some of the possible outcomes? Here are the four that seem to me most likely. "Success" that produces a document that doesn't mean much or change much of anything. "Failure" of a mishmash of topics, with the US isolated and blamed for the "failure" on process grounds (i.e. Bolton intransigence). "Failure" of a "grand bargain," with the US isolated and blamed for the "failure." "Failure" of a "grand bargain" but in its place an agreed "agenda for the future" -- with the US not isolated and nobody taking "blame" -- just a consensus that Kofi's ambitions for achieving a "grand bargain" were premature, and by the way, his term is just about completed anyway and he's damaged goods because of oil-for-food, etc etc.

It seems to me that Bolton would like to achieve the fourth outcome, or if that's not doable, the first. What I'm wondering is, which outcome would Tony Blair prefer?

UPDATE And here's the FT's leader on Saturday. The FT passes along the (UK) version of the story I questioned in my earlier post -- that to everyone's surprise and consternation, Bolton threw a fit about the lengthy document upon his arrival in New York. But the FT does acknowledge that US positions on a number of items aren't exactly news, and that it's a bit more complex than strictly the US-against-the-world. The piece is worth reading as a pretty good summary of what some of the fusses are about and what the US would like to see as "UN reform."

Eventually, warned that this would let other states off the hook of the many US-inspired commitments that they dislike, Mr Bolton sat down yesterday with his UN colleagues to haggle over hundreds of US amendments.

They mostly focus on measures and institutions the US has consistently opposed elsewhere, such as the International Criminal Court and the nuclear test ban treaty which the US has either refused or failed to ratify. The US is also opposed to the pledge for rich countries to spend 0.7 per cent of their national wealth on aid; most Americans believe US aid is far higher than this, and the Bush administration does not want to remind them it is actually far lower.

In the same vein the US apparently wants to delete reference to the UN's Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, when the original aim of next month's summit was to review progress towards them. [As I discussed earlier, I have considerable sympathy with the US position now that the MDGs have morphed into a sort of Trojan horse for development initiatives I personally would not support] Astonishingly, given the loud US allegations of recent genocide in Darfur, Washington is fretting at language that would urge permanent Security Council members not to use their vetoes to block action to halt genocide and other war crimes.

On this, however, China is as opposed as the US. Earlier this summer, Beijing joined Washington to thwart more states joining them permanently on the Security Council. Other recent developments also augur ill. The failure of last May's Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference has cast gloom on any further initiatives next month to check the spread of nuclear weapons. By contrast, the Group of Eight summit's relative success at Gleneagles on debt forgiveness has created the equally erroneous opposite impression on aid: that little more needs to be done. [And indeed, further discussion of debt relief, as well as the contentious debate with the US on the impact of debt relief on the balance sheets of the IFIs, is undoubtedly part of the agenda for the IMF/World Bank annual meetings just after the UN Summit, so its reappearance on the UN agenda, other than to indicate that further work is being undertaken, is somewhat mystifying.]

Still on the agenda for the UN summit are many US priorities that deserve support and success. They include reforms to give Kofi Annan's UN secretariat more management responsibility but also to make it more accountable, the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, reform of the UN's human rights machinery and an international convention to define and outlaw terrorism. But to have a chance of securing these goals, the US and Mr Bolton need to take account of others' concerns. In all negotiations, taking requires some give.

Still, I'm curious whether Blair really expects Bush to "give" something new, and if so, what.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Economist offers the most balanced view I've seen so far. Describing the US reasoning for deleting explicit references to the Millennium Development Goals and how that fits within the "grand bargain":

September’s summit, billed by the UN as the biggest gathering of world leaders in history, was originally to be a five-year review of the 2000 Millennium Summit, the most notable product of which was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These include worthy aims such as halving abject poverty and achieving universal primary education by 2015. As desirable as these goals are, there seems little hope of achieving the panoply of policy objectives embedded in the MDGs; the UN itself is already complaining about the lack of progress.

The proposed American edits to the document remove nearly all references to the MDGs, referring instead to more vaguely-worded “internationally agreed development goals”. In place of the MDGs, America wants to put more emphasis on the “Monterrey Consensus”, the result of a 2002 summit in Mexico that concluded that developing countries need to take more responsibility for their own growth by fighting corruption, improving the investment climates and otherwise making their countries more hospitable to economic activity.

Such market-friendly ideas have become the vogue not only in America but among the non-governmental organisations fighting desperate poverty around the world. They have belatedly recognised that tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past decades have utterly failed to curb extreme poverty in much of the world, especially Africa. Those countries that have made the greatest strides against poverty, most notably India and China, but also countries like South Korea and Taiwan, have done so largely by making their own economies suitable for investment and growth.

But developing countries, many at the UN and many rich-world governments too believe that substantial aid is required as well. For reasons of geography and history, they argue, Africa is in a “poverty trap” that no amount of internal reforms will solve without aid. Thus the draft summit document included a call for rich countries to aim to give 0.7% of their GDP in assistance.

It is this kind of language that America wants removed. In a slightly defensive letter to other ambassadors sent on Friday, Mr Bolton said that despite its deletion of every reference to the MDGs, America did in fact support them, so long as these were taken to mean outcomes (e.g. halving poverty) and not inputs (such as the aid target, which America never agreed to). The blizzard of negative publicity last week may have put some pressure even on America’s fierce ambassador.

The diplomatic problem is that the countries of the developing world—represented by the “G77” group—see a strong focus on aid and the MDGs as their price for agreeing to the rich world’s—especially America’s—agenda. These priorities include an overhaul of management and oversight within the UN’s own house, to prevent, for example, fraud like the recent and humiliating oil-for-food scandal. The developing countries may only agree to proposed American reforms like this if tempted by a promise of significant and predictable aid flows. If the Americans are going to propose 750 amendments, the G77 might respond in kind.

This explanation -- that the US opposes the implied "inputs" that have become attached to the MDGs, not the goals themselves -- is consistent with my previous analysis. In its explanation of the inputs vs outputs argument, the Economist points solely to the "percentage of GDP" commitment for aid flows, which the US has long rejected. But getting rid of the GDP commitment would be an easy change to make -- simply strike the provision containing the commitment -- and would not require removing references to the MDGs themselves. By contrast, the far more elaborate set of proposals embodied in the Sachs report are tied directly to the MDGs, so I still think those are some of the main "inputs" the US is trying to kill.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

Well, not exactly. I am not a John Bolton fan, to put it mildly. But I actually think Bolton's getting a bum rap over the the recently leaked "mark-up" containing the extensive US comments on the draft declaration for the UN Summit.

Given Bolton's record, it's not surprising that the US mark-up is being characterized as a Bolton special:

• John Bolton is doing exactly what his critics expected of him. He is sticking it to the world. . .hard and nasty. (Steve Clemons sitting in for Josh Marshall at TPM)


• John Bolton is the perfect messenger for the blunt challenge Washington has thrown down to the international consensus. (Guardian)


• America's controversial new ambassador to the United Nations is seeking to shred an agreement on strengthening the world body and fighting poverty intended to be the highlight of a 60th anniversary summit next month. In the extraordinary intervention, John Bolton has sought to roll back proposed UN commitments on aid to developing countries, combating global warming and nuclear disarmament. (The Independent)


• While Bolton ludicrously talks about seeking a "strong consensus," the objective is rather obvious: strong dissensus all around. [Hence, talking about the merits of this or that proposal totally misses the point. The proposed changes are tactical fig leaves fog sabotage.] (Stygius)

The extensive scope and degree of detail of the mark-up (some 750 comments, hardly a paragraph in 32 pages left untouched) -- especially in areas that appear non-controversial (at least by comparison with Kyoto or the ICC) -- have given rise to speculation that Bolton is off the (Condi) reservation again. Clemons, citing a briefing for NGOs held by Nicholas Burns and Philo Dibble, reports that Burns and Dibble were vague and seemingly unforthcoming in explaining why the Millennium Development Goals had disappeared from the US' preferred language. Clemons speculates that the civil wars within the State Department have begun, reasoning that Burns and Dibble couldn't shoot down Bolton in public, but they didn't support him either. Similarly, Stygius notes a NYT article at the time of the Bolton recess appointment, citing State Dept insiders' claims that the UN reform agenda had been proceeding well in the absence of a permanent ambassador. Based on Bolton's patterns of past behavior, Stygius understandably draws the following conclusion:

John Bolton wants to escape the cage that's been built around him. Thus we see him emphatically trying to inject himself into a reform process that is already well underway, one controlled by those within a Bush Administration that have deliberately (and pragmatically) excluded him in the interests of UN reform.

I've taken a quick scan through the mark-up (pdf) provided via Steve Clemons. And I've looked with somewhat greater care at the development sections that seem to have provoked quite a bit of comment, especially the deletion of language regarding the Millennium Development Goals. I have quite a different take on the draft and the US position.

I was indeed shocked and dismayed, but not by the majority of US comments. Rather, I was flabbergasted that whoever has been shepherding the document through the bureaucratic process had thought that a draft at this late date, which had so many items that directly contradicted long-standing US positions -- including on topics that had just received world-wide attention at the Gleneagles G-8 summit -- had the remotest chance of survival.

Let's focus first on process. The Guardian offers two possible explanations for this state of affairs.

The US delegation says it was raising its objections informally at meetings to discuss the draft, and was forced to circulate its blunt list of deletions and additions only after those objections were ignored.

The account provided by European officials at the UN explains the late timing of this intervention by turmoil inside the US foreign policy establishment. For the first seven months of this year, as the draft was being hammered out, the US had no full permanent representative at the UN. John Danforth retired in January, and the White House's attention was focused on persuading the Senate to confirm John Bolton. A career diplomat, Anne Patterson, led the delegation in the interim, but reportedly received little political guidance from Washington.

When Mr Bolton arrived this month, finally forced in by the president with a temporary executive appointment, the change was dramatic. The leadership shifted from a non-political diplomat to one of the most ideological and partisan US permanent representatives in recent history.

Let's be clear, folks. A large number of the proposed changes would require no, I repeat, no political guidance from Washington. They are no-brainers, pure and simple, for anyone representing the US in international fora. Many are on points where representatives from other countries familiar with the issues would know good and well that the draft language was a non-starter for the US. Not just for the Bush Administration, but for prior administrations or for a considerable majority of the US Congress.

The explanation offered by the US delegation, as reported by the Guardian, is plausible. The account provided to the Guardian by "European officials at the UN" is not. Unless, that is, what the officials meant when they said "little political guidance" was that State told Anne Patterson not to throw a public tizzy-fit until Bolton arrived on the scene.

Now for some substantive comments. Let's leave to one side the absolutely clear-cut non-negotiable US positions on hot-button issues -- such as Kyoto and the ICC -- where the positions in the draft were not couched in terms that could conceivably obtain US endorsement. Let's just focus on the development and poverty agenda, where it's already clear from the press comments that the proposed US changes will be viewed by some (especially NGOs and undoubtedly many developing countries) as backtracking on some sort of grand global consensus.

Some of the proposed additions or deletions are undeniably chippy -- the US substituting its preferred formulation that publicizes its own programs or philosophies rather than use more generic language that would incorporate a wider variety of approaches that have broad support in the development community. A wordsmith would have few difficulties coming up with language that is widely acceptable to both the US and the original drafters in many of those cases. Some of the changes are stylistic -- toning down the sweeping generalities and grandiose sentiments but more accurately reflecting the reality of what the document represents and is likely to achieve in practical terms (e.g., "all" is invariably struck; "recognize" and "resolve" are often substituted for "agree" and "commit"). Even after the US' proposed amendments, however, it's a pretty ambitious laundry list of hopes and dreams.

But if we take a large step back from the specific clauses and look at the overall thrust of the draft, it's easy to see why the US viewed it as troubling, to say the least. The draft is a major attempt to shift responsibility for defining and overseeing the development/poverty agenda, and controlling the resources for that agenda, from the current system of bilateral aid politics and multilateral institutions (especially the IMF and the World Bank) to New York. The alleged "backtracking" by Bolton on the MDGs should be seen in this context.

The draft for the UN Summit, before the US started whacking away with a red pen, covered a whole host of topics that are currently being debated within the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO (and occasionally the G-8, G-22 etc) -- such as debt relief and what it will mean for the capital structure of the lending institutions, changes in the architecture of the international financial system, coordination of national development and poverty reduction strategies with bilateral and multilateral assistance, improving the mechanics of aid delivery, the big Doha Round agenda. No one who included these issues in the draft for the UN Summit could have expected that these complex topics -- which have been discussed non-stop for years, with progress made incrementally, and which will be discussed for years to come -- could be brought profitably into the UN Summit process.

The proposed draft can only be fully understood if you've got a feel for the sort of debates represented by Jeffrey Sachs' gargantuan scheme to "end poverty in our lifetime." The scheme was set forth in a special report overseen by Sachs for Kofi Annan earlier this year that's an "action plan" for the MDGs. I am extremely uncomfortable with the entire Sachs approach, which is far too top-down (in the sense of planning, not necessarily implementation, and rapid scalability), too focused on box-car dollars, and much too heavy on actions directed at eliminating "poverty" rather than integrating more of the poor into a long-term positive-feedback process that promotes sustainable economic development. Caveat -- Sachs does have lots of interesting diagnoses of problems and specific ideas for ways to make drastic improvements in peoples' lives, his recent book is worth a quick read, and some of the specific chapters and Task Force reports that are components in the grand UN scheme are full of good insights.

It is my personal opinion -- and apparently the position of the US government -- that the world doesn't need more grandiose schemes. But it is not simply a matter of opinion that there is a complete absence of a "global consensus" on development and poverty reduction which the US (or Bolton) is purportedly opposing. In fact, it's an absolute canard to suggest that such a consensus exists. Surely the recent debates spawned by the attention to assistance in Africa at the recent G-8 summit should have made that clear to one and all. Reasonable people who are passionately committed to development and poverty reduction have major differences about what sorts of assistance or actions by developed countries are effective and desirable.

But in addition to my allergy to a development philosophy that's excessively "planned," overly concerned with fund-raising, and focused heavily on "poverty" per se, the biggest problem I have with Sachs' proposals is that it would put the UN in the driver's seat. As most fights over institutional arrangements, the Sachs proposal isn't framed as New York-centric in so many words. But the reality of the institutional agenda is plain to discern for anyone with experience in institutional battles when (1) the driving goals/metrics are "owned" by the UN (the MDGs), (2) the "coordinating" mechanisms are ten-year national development plans tied to the achievement of the UN-owned goals, (3) UN Country Teams are responsible for ensuring "coordination" of both bilateral and multilateral assistance, and (4) the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank) and regional development banks are supposed to derive much of their agendas from the MDGs. The Sachs' report's ten recommendations for transforming aid -- although accurately identifying several legitimate issues -- together if adopted would produce a major institutional power shift under the technocratic guise of clearer objectives and better coordination. The indicative, not mandatory, aspirational benchmarks that were the MDGs have become the vehicle for a nice little power struggle.

A shift in center of gravity from the specialized international financial institutions (IFIs) towards the UN in New York may appear to be attractive for a lot of NGOs, who think they'll be able to more readily influence the agenda and ensure "accountability" of the development institutions. It's also superficially attractive to developing countries that have less voice within the board rooms of the IFIs, where the donor countries have the greatest power, and the particular developmental flavor-of-the-year in the donor capitals will often have more influence on the type and timing of assistance than needs as perceived by recipients of that assistance. Indeed, the entire issue of inadequate voice of less-developed countries within international organizations, and the erosion of legitimacy of those organizations due to inadequate voice, is a very real concern.

Robert Keohane addresses the issue of "accountability" of the IFIs in a provocative article in the most recent issue of the Harvard International Review (Kennedy School) that focuses on "defining power" in international relations. Keohane's topic is "Abuse of Power: Assessing Accountability in World Politics." Unfortunately, the issue is not yet online. Here's some of the bit on multilateral organizations, which are the frequent object of wrath and scorn as "unaccountable," especially by NGOs.

Consider the entities conventionally held accountable on a transnational basis. The most prominent, judging from demonstrations, press coverage, and even scholarly articles are major inter-governmental organizations concerned with economic globalization: the European Union, World Bank IMF, and WTO. Champions of "more accountability" make these organizations major targets, which certainly have deficiencies in accountability and certainly do not meet the standards of accountability for the best-functioning democracies of our era. But ironically, these entities seem to be relatively accountable compared with other key global actors.

These economic institutions are internally accountable to states on the basis of authorization and support. States must create them and continue to fund them. Externally significant accountability gaps exist. Indeed, many poor people affected by the policies of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO lack any ability to hold the organizations accountable. Nevertheless, there is a vaguely held notion that these people should have some say in what the organizations do -- that the "voice of the poor," in the World Bank's words, should be heard. Many feel, then that these organizations should be externally as well as internally accountable.

Various NGOs purporting to speak for and promote principles that help affected people gain legitimacy on the basis of this widespread belief. One result of the endeavors is that the decision-making process of many multilateral organizations have become remarkably transparent. Indeed, in transparency they now compare well to the decision-making processes of most governments, even some democratic ones. When their process are not transparent, the chief source of non-transparency is governmental pressure for confidentiality.

But the decentralization and discord characteristic of world politics mean that these organizations cannot keep secrets very well. ... Leaders then spend much of their time answering charges that are made against their organizations, and seeking to persuade constituencies that the organizations are actually constructive, responsive, and legitimate.

These organizations are therefore anything but "out-of-control bureaucracies" accountable to no one. Indeed the real problem appears quite different. A large number of would-be principals, led by a variety of NGOs, demand accountability. But the NGOs are weak compared with governments, to which these organizations are chiefly accountable. When they lose the battle due to their institutionally weak positions, NGOs condemn the organizations as "unaccountable." [emph supplied]

Keohane doesn't directly raise the other accountability question at the heart of many debates over the roles of NGOs and the newly-fashionable "civil society" organizations -- who elected them? This is a critical issue, because advocacy groups by their very nature are not effective vehicles for accommodating conflicting interests. The "accountability" problem presented by NGOs themselves may be equally applicable to governments of developing countries in which the interests of substantial portions of a country's population may be poorly represented in the political system. But that particular accountability challenge is not central to those who would hope to use the UN to shift the power equation within the world of development assistance, since state sovereignty is a core principle of the UN system.

The "accountability" wars are not some minor skirmish. Sebastian Mallaby, in a September 2004 Foreign Policy article (sub req'd) took on the potential negative effects of NGOs on the developmental effectiveness of the multilateral institutions. This was a major theme in Mallaby's recent biography of James D Wolfensohn, in which a recurring critique of Wolfensohn's tenure as President of the World Bank was that he tried too hard to meet the insatiable agendas of NGOs. I would agree, while noting that in the process, Wolfensohn did help institutionalize a far more transparent process of considering a range of impacts of the Bank's projects on interests -- whether poor or indigenous peoples, minorities, or the environment -- that are often poorly represented in the political systems of developing countries. Listening to the "voices of the poor" and focusing on "pro-poor" ways of implementing reforms or building new projects has been "mainstreamed" in World Bank practice. Wolfensohn's emphasis on meaningful local partnerships was also a useful corrective for an institution renown for its arrogance. A similar sensitivity to a broader agenda of interests is belatedly beginning to be felt at the IMF, in part a recognition of the excessively narrow approach to macroeconomic adjustment that the Fund pursued in the Asia crisis, as critiqued most famously by Joseph Stiglitz. Heterodox policy approaches are also finding far more congenial homes within both institutions over the past decade. So these institutions can and do reform and reinvent themselves as they learn from experience and as the world changes around them.

Shifting the development agenda from the IFIs in Washington to the to-be-created UN development apparatus in New York is the last thing that should be embraced if aid effectiveness is a priority. Although considerable progress has been made in making UNDP a more dynamic and efficient UN agency, no one would confuse its experience, expertise, or intellectual leadership with the IFIs. There may indeed be a need for expanding the UN's own development capacity within Country Teams that deal with a host of closely intertwined development issues in the political, social and economic areas. There is certainly a need to reduce the number of separate aid organizations that governments in developing countries must deal with. And coordination to avoid overlapping and conflicting projects is always an objective. But assigning a coordinating role, and having the MDGs drive the development agendas, is a recipe for a bureaucratic nightmare. The objective of UN reform is to get the UN to focus on the things it does well, or that no one else can do, and reorganize its bureaucracy to address those tasks. Not to add on new tasks that are already in the reasonably capable hand of other institutions.

Setting to one side whether a shift in apparent power and influence over the development agenda would benefit the poor in developing countries, such a shift would be a Pyrrhic victory. Keohane's conclusion applies equally to NGOs and developing countries who demand more "accountability" from the multilateral institutions:

Certainly some real benefits could result from making the WTO and the IMF more accountable to a wider range of interests and values. However, we should be alert to the prospect that the political result of such a shift would be a reduction of states' interests in such organizations. If states get less benefit from international institutions, they will be less willing to provide resources and to accept demands on them., through these institutions, for accountability. The ultimate result of such well-meaning moves, therefore, could be a weakening of the accountability, limited as it is, that multilateralism imposes on powerful states. Those who believe in accountability as a way of limiting abuses of power should work to build support within powerful, rich countries for acceptance of more effective and legitimate multilateral governance to achieve human purposes, and for the increased external accountability that is likely to follow.

Agreeing with US criticisms of the UN draft on development doesn't mean that I support the Bush Administration's approach to foreign assistance (or the Bush Administration's policy on many of the other controversial items in the UN draft such as arms control). There are a host of changes I would like to see in US policy toward foreign assistance writ large, especially but not exclusively as pursued by the Bush Administration. Among a long list of things I'd like to see changed by the Bush Administration (recognizing that these are not necessarily unique to either the Bush Administration or to Republicans) -- an insistence on an extremely limited set of tools that fit their ideological biases; a defense in every possible circumstance of intellectual property concerns of US multinationals; a predeliction for bilateral over multilateral approaches (and the leverage/blackmail that often entails); the habit of setting priorities or attaching conditions to aid that please narrow vocal domestic constituencies (especially ethnic diasporas and religious groups); the inability to build lasting coalitions in Congress for long-term programs and international organizations; and their trumpeting of grand "innovative" schemes that promise billions and deliver nada. Unfortunately, not only is the Bush Administration unlikely to change its approach to foreign assistance significantly, even if it were willing to adopt the changes outlined in the draft UN Summit document, those changes wouldn't be for the better.

Unfortunately for the US' diplomatic position, Ambassador Bolton is the wrong person to be making the case for how and why the UN Summit draft needs to be changed. Stygius makes an excellent point -- the draft UN document as it currently stands is exactly the wrong sort of document for a major summit.

From the sound of it, a 39-page declaration of resolutions strikes me as utterly insane, drowning all of the urgent priorities in a sea of diplomatic ejaculation; but the immediate point is that waiting until just before a conference starts before deluging everyone else with proposed changes is a tactical maneuver to castrate the entire project before it even starts.

And that's the problem the US now has with Bolton in this position, because everyone assumes that he's simply engaging in obstructionist tactics. His reputation is such that he has little credibility presenting the American criticisms of what is claimed to represent a broad international consensus, even though such a consensus is bogus.

It is far too easy for those who would like to see the US squirm to make the US look bad via Bolton. I won't go so far as to say that those managing the drafting process at the UN set him (and the US) up with malice aforethought, but the more paranoid could make a case for that, since the inevitable result is going to be a great deal of finger-pointing and blame-casting. And who do you think the rest of the world is going to believe -- John Bolton and George Bush? Riiiiight...

---

A follow-up post on this story, how it's being played out in the press, and speculation about the role of the UK, here.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

Justin Logan, sitting in at Unqualified Offerings, has fun with the pro-war folks who remain fantastically (in all senses of the word) upbeat about what the war in Iraq has wrought, no matter the evidence. He points specifically to Reuel Marc Gerecht's recent "don't worry" commentaries on the likelihood that Sharia law will have a prominent place in the new Iraq.

Gerecht's performance this weekend on Meet the Press has attracted considerable attention:

DAVID GREGORY: Fast forward to this morning. Gentlemen, we put this on the screen from The New York Times. "[American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay] Khalilzad had backed language [in the constitution] that would have given clerics sole authority in settling marriage and family disputes. That gave rise to concerns that women's rights, as they are annunciated [sic] in Iraq's existing laws, could be curtailed. ... [The] arrangement, coupled with the expansive language for Islam, prompted accusations from [a Kurdish leader] that the Americans were helping in the formation of an Islamic state."

Mr. Diamond, is that a change of position?

LARRY DIAMOND: It would be, I think, a substantial change if it's true. We need to wait and see what exactly is true. All of these are just reports. Let me say, I don't think we have--and I think Reuel would agree with this--we don't have the power anymore to foreclose this, to veto this. We're not a veto player there anymore. But neither do I think the United States should be endorsing it. And I think our clear stand should be in favor of individual rights and freedoms, including religious freedom, as vigorously as possible. So I hope the ambassador on the ground is standing up for that principle.

MR. GREGORY: Mr. Gerecht, the consequences of this?

REUEL MARC GERECHT: Actually, I'm not terribly worried about this. I mean, one hopes that the Iraqis protect women's social rights as much as possible. It certainly seems clear that in protecting the political rights, there's no discussion of women not having the right to vote. I think it's important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States, it was a democracy then. In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they're there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective. [emph supplied]

I will give Gerecht this -- he's a bit more credible on this score than the johnnie-come-latelies who have recently discovered that Sharia law doesn't matter. For more than a year on the "expert panels" circuit, Gerecht has been making the case for aggressively supporting democratization in MENA, not just in Iraq, even though it will most likely involve Islamist parties gaining significant political power. And he's also been one of those pointing to ">Shi'a jurisprudential traditions (of which Sistani is a leading example) as in many ways more promising than Sunnis' in helping Islam to come to terms with the 21st century.

Gerecht argues against the sort of policies pursued with respect to Algeria when the government halted the electoral process as Islamist parties were winning victories at the ballot box. He argues that political transformation will not happen through liberal reformers taking over -- they won't get the votes -- or hoping that the current entrenched authoritarian regimes get hit by a bolt of enlightenment and suddenly transform themselves into liberal systems. Instead, transformation to a more democratic order will only occur if the Islamist politicians and clerics are made part of the system.

Gerecht is of the "give them enough rope they'll hang themselves" school. Leading Islamist political groups in most countries right now don't really have a platform -- they're mostly just opposing the current regime with vague calls for a system based in Islam which would magically be more harmonious and virtuous. Gerecht's theory is that when the Islamists have to face the hard facts of governing, they'll also have to face the reality of keeping voters happy. So democratic accountability will serve to moderate the Islamist parties over time.

I have a lot of sympathy for the broad approach of bringing the Islamist parties into the system rather than continue to try to marginalize them -- that's just putting off the inevitable and increasing the odds that when regime change finally happens it will be violently revolutionary with decades of turmoil to follow. I have also long shared Gerecht's admiration of Sistani. I must add, however, that I think Gerecht puts an excessively high premium on political freedoms relative to other freedoms.

But I'm far less relaxed about the mechanisms by which Sharia law is incorporated into a system -- it's hard to keep it limited to just dealing with "social" rights and freedoms. The temptation becomes great to have the clerics involved in the "judicial review" of the whole shooting match, which is what the really critical debate has been about over the past few days in Iraq. It's all well and good to say that the system has to be consistent with Islamic law -- the key is who decides and under what mechanism. Billmon, in his recent series on the realpolitik of Iraq's constitutional process, details the threat of a slippery slope to theocracy when clerics start getting rights of "judicial review."

The other Iraq-specific objection I have to Gerecht and his fellow-travelers is that Iraq is decidedly different from other countries in the region on the women's rights front. It's one thing to take a gradualist approach to securing and expanding women's rights as the political, social and economic cultures evolve. For example, some Arab "feminists" have had more success achieving changes in women's status laws through an appeal to Islamic principles than Western-style liberal concepts. But it's another thing altogether to take a giant leap backwards, as is being proposed in Iraq, and expect women to start all over in a gradualist process. If the proposed reversal of women's legal status is accepted, it will serve as a strong rationalization of the severe extra-legal restrictions and intimidation that, since the US invasion, have been increasingly felt across all spheres of women's lives.

Gerecht seems to think that as long as women have some minimal rights of political participation, they'll be able to eventually demand and reclaim the legal, social and economic status they enjoyed under the previous regime. But he ignores how, once the overall status of women has declined and their ability to protect themselves reduced, those minimal participatory rights to which Gerecht refers are unlikely to be very effective vehicles for making themselves heard.

Butterflies and Wheels provides the example of this problem in practice -- this week's local elections in the North Western Frontier Provinces in Pakistan. Women are legally entitled to vote, and in fact over a quarter of the candidates are women. But tribal elders took it upon themselves in some areas to ban women from voting. The national government seems to have tried to intervene to halt the denial of women's suffrage, but one would expect that there was a significant suppression of women's participation, and a number of irregularities were noted in women's (segregated, of course) polling places.

Even where women's participation is not so severely circumscribed, it's a giant leap to assume that they will be able to effectively reclaim through the political process their prior status and freedoms. A recent study of women in parliaments in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia identified a number of reasons why they have had "little legislative or political influence." First, of course, is that in most such legislative bodies, they represent a small percentage of total members. But other factors are also involved that won't be "cured" simply by mandating a certain percentage of seats go to women.

• Second, female MPs tend to avoid focusing on gender-related legislation such as women's labor rights and family laws, and instead direct their efforts to less controversial [read safer] matters....
  
  
• Third, because most women MPs belong to the ruling party, and in some cases have gained their seats through presidential appointment, they overwhelmingly support regime policies and rarely challenge the government through questioning ministers or a vote of no confidence. [This has certainly been the case for most of the women who won seats in Iraq's interim parliament as part of the national electoral lists, and it would be surprising if that pattern did not continue under the new constitution .]
  
  
• Finally, women do not coordinate among themselves on legislation, further diluting their influence. [Lack of coordination is not surprising, given the second and third factors identified above.]

If the clerics dominate "social" law and acquire strong influence over the legislative and judicial systems, then whatever pretty "equality of rights" language may be contained in the constitution will be worthless window-dressing. "Just be patient little ladies" or "go spend decades fighting to get back what you used to enjoy" isn't an adequate response.

We're looking at a tragedy, quite simply. Larry Diamond is almost certainly right -- the US doesn't have a "veto" anymore. The outcome may, by now, be unavoidable. And in the great grand "perspective" of trying to tamp down the further spread of inter-tribal warfare, sacrificing the lives of the women of Iraq may be collateral damage. But Larry Diamond had the good sense and basic humanity to hope that the US would not endorse this "compromise."

Gerecht & co should be ashamed of themselves for so lightly dismissing the terrible costs that will be borne by Iraqi women in the years ahead.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

And now, moving back from politics to policy again. One of the interesting points about Juan Cole's "plan" that I linked to previously is the distinction he makes between withdrawing US ground forces based in Iraq and total disengagement. He sees an ongoing need for American military support for the Iraqi government and to deter an all-out "set-piece" civil war.

Rob Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money, in reviewing Cole's proposals, raises a good caveat on the limits to the efficacy of US air power as a guarantee.

Some similar thoughts on a "withdrawal-lite" that provides for continued engagement has been offered by Daniel Byman of Georgetown/Brookings. Brad Plumer discusses in a series of posts here, here and here.

And Kevin Drum chimes in that we have to take the risk of a failed state or civil war seriously. The debate should therefore be over how best to achieve what I've called "mission damage control." He argues for his preferred approach -- an announced timetable.

UPDATE: Fafblog has the definitive cunning plan. Check out those permanent bases!

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

Further on the Iraq front, shifting now from US policy to domestic politics. The Armchair Generalist picks up on press coverage of Democratic disunity on the Iraq war and how it benefits the GOP. Frustrating, agreed. A fatal flaw, not necessarily.

I'm less concerned about Democratic disunity than is the Washington press corps, which loves the "Democrats squabble" script. The main threat from disunity isn't the failure of Democrats to offer an alternative "plan" (the favorite prescription of the punditocracy, see Social Security). Rather, the threat of disunity is only if Democrats waste their ammunition on each other rather than keep it aimed squarely on Bush.

The best candid version of this argument is Digby's "pincer" strategy earlier cited by Eric Martin as an interesting perspective on the political gavotte.

I think that we are seeing a Democratic pincer movement that is going to fatally squeeze the Republican policy. On the one side we have the growing Cindy Sheehan withdrawal movement, very emotional very compelling. It's the right argument, but its main purpose is to weaken Bush --- there is no chance in hell that it will force a complete troop withdrawal. On the other side he has the Democratic establishment calling for more troops and a greater effort to gain international support. Bush cannot do that either. He is trapped. All he can say is "stay the course" which is not adequate to win and ensures that we lose slowly and painfully.

I'm sorry to have to reduce this to politics. It is an absolutely horrible situation that should have been prevented and wasn't. That was our failure. But it has happened and it is what it is. The only thing we can do is ensure that Republicans are held accountable for this failure and prepare the ground for the future. If I thought we could convince the GOP to do anything different, I would put politics aside and say that we should all work together. But that is clearly impossible. They will not listen. They will not admit that they've made any mistakes.

Rodger Payne at Duck of Minerva takes Digby's insight one step further. He explains the merit of advocating escalation as a way of peeling the "Jacksonians" away from their unconditional support of the Bush Admin. It's a way of demonstrating that the Bushies aren't really "fighting to win" -- a mortal sin in the Jacksonian scheme of things. Given the practical impediments to escalation, it's a strategy that's hard to sustain, but it's an interesting way to get past the key first step -- overcoming the "denial" stage that the President's policies are working. Payne's proposal also suggests how Democrats can join their voices to Republicans critics in attacking the objectives and conduct of the war -- a good way to counter attempts by the White House to use Iraq as a wedge issue.

Finally, I continue to try to make the case that "withdrawal" vs "stay the course" is a phony debate, and it's one to be avoided by opponents of the Bush Admin's conduct of the Iraq war. The real challenge is to shift the discussion to how best to achieve the mission -- which has already become one of damage control, despite the rhetoric of the President and Vice President -- while at the same time holding the Bush Admin accountable for the mess they've created.

From the perspective of damage control, the steps being taken by DOD and State in recent months reflect on-the-ground reality and are for the most part moving in the right direction. The risk of a widening gap between rhetoric and reality is that major decisions, such as the constitutional drafting process, will be driven by White House political imperatives rather than best judgments of what's good policy. [caveat -- there are credible arguments for pushing for a constitutional draft on schedule, but the White House's need for "progress" quite naturally raises unhealthy suspicions -- both by Americans and Iraqis -- that US politics are dominating the Iraqi constitutional process.]

As I've argued for months, Bush is out on a limb. I agree with Digby -- since Bush can't admit mistakes, all he can do now is ramp up the "noble cause" and "stay the course" rhetoric. Where I disagree with Digby is that I think the Bush Admin policymakers have already abandoned the "stay the course" strategy -- they're trying to stage manage a gradual withdrawal while minimizing damage to US interests, with an occasional photo-op to boost the claim that "we're making progress" and the phony "stay the course" strategy is working.

With his recently announced schedule of Iraq speeches, Bush will certainly try to turn the war into a wedge issue a la Vietnam. He may succeed again, but it's not going to be nearly as easy as it was in the 2004 elections. The portion of the public that can be mobilized with standard flag-waving is declining, not just because the news from Iraq has been depressing but because the stated objectives (freedom on the march and the 9/11-flypaper theory) are less and less credible. With the growing rhetoric/reality gap, the old arguments aren't going to satisfy an American public that is getting increasingly frustrated, whether they think withdrawal or escalation is the better direction to go in.

I'm not sure what sort of Democratic "plan" would serve to both unify the Democrats and counter the wedge politics of the White House. And I don't think one's necessary. There's an old principle that when your political opponent is drowning in public, don't throw him a lifepreserver by shifting attention off him and onto yourself. Surely the Democrats can remain united on two core arguments against the Bush Admin: competence and credibility.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

As the past week or so of high-volume debates about Iraq has demonstrated, you don't have to have been a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq to be equally wary of the consequences of a withdrawal of US forces, whether you're Juan Cole or Dan Darling. As we've argued repeatedly on this site, the "withdraw" vs "stay-the-course" debate is artificial, although that may be the inevitable way that it's framed for partisan political purposes. The real challenges are how to manage the US military presence, which will inevitably decline in sheer numbers over the next several years, and American diplomatic and reconstruction efforts in order to minimize the risks of Iraq descending into the anarchy of a failed state or a full-scale civil war.

It may come as somewhat a surprise that Sunni political figures are talking about the same issues and sharing similar concerns. Although usually presented in the US media as implacable opponents of any US presence, Sunni leaders aren't necessarily clamoring for rapid withdrawal or even a timetable for exit. That's the picture painted by Robert Collier in the San Francisco Chronicle (via Steve Clemons).

"It's impossible for them or us to fix an exact schedule" for troop withdrawal, said Isam al-Rawi, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a group of 3,000 Sunni clerics. "That is not the important thing right now. There are other steps that are much more necessary to calm the situation."

Largely unnoticed amid the U.S. political debate, al-Rawi and other Sunni leaders close to the insurgency have reached tacit consensus over the broad outline of an interim program to reduce the violence, stabilize the country and thus enable the U.S.-led coalition troops to begin a gradual withdrawal. While differences remain on some points, there is wide agreement on these steps:

• A troop pullout from most urban areas and an end to military checkpoints and raids [...]
  
  
• Overhaul of the Iraqi Army and National Guard. Although the White House and Democrats alike say they want to turn over security duties to the Iraqi Army and National Guard as soon as possible, Sunni Arabs point out that these two institutions are almost completely composed of members of their ethnic enemies -- the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite militias. "These people want to humiliate the Sunni," al-Hashimi said. "The Army and National Guard must be professionalized. They cannot be dominated by members of the party militias." [...]
  
  
• Release of prisoners. The number of Iraqi prisoners in American military custody has grown rapidly in recent months, with as many as 15,000 Iraqis behind bars, according to U.S. estimates.
  
  Military officials have admitted that many of the prisoners have simply been swept up in neighborhood roundups. Because there is no formal trial process, the process of vetting prisoners and releasing those found innocent is very slow. Military officials have reportedly expressed worry that the sprawling prison camps are serving as recruiting camps for al Qaeda and the most extremist insurgent groups.
  
  "There are many thousands of prisoners and there is no transparency, there is no accusation list," said Wamidh Nadhmi, the leader of the Arab Nationalist Trend, a secularist group that boycotted the January elections. [...]
  
  
• Amnesty for pro-Baathist, radical Islamist and hard-line nationalist groups, while excluding al Qaeda [and Ba'ath party leaders with blood on their hands such as Saddam Hussein].[...]
  
  
• Negotiations with the "resistance." Sunni leaders have frequently met with U.S. officials in Baghdad to try to coax them to talk with the guerrillas. They draw a line between what they call the "resistance," by which they mean Iraqi fighters who attack only U.S. and Iraqi troops, and the Sunni extremists linked to al Qaeda who have spread terror with car bombs and suicide attacks against Shiite civilians.

Of course, some items on the list aren't exclusively in the control of the Americans. In fact, a close reading of media reports over the past several months suggests that the sentiments of US military commanders on the ground aren't opposed to the items on the Sunni list, at least in broad principle although the devil is always in the details. There's also a substantial overlap between this list and an interesting set of quite specific proposals from Juan Cole today. Like an earlier discussion of options by Brad Plumer, Cole's proposals help sharpen the definition of US objectives and various approaches to meeting those objectives.

As the figleaf of "national consensus" among Iraq's major ethnic groups has dropped away in the final bargaining over the constitution, Sunnis are increasingly calling on the Americans to intervene to protect their interests. Via the CSMonitor today:

[Saleh Mutlak, a lead Sunni negotiator] says he'd despair completely of the process if it weren't for the help of a surprising new ally: the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad.

"Zalmay is the boss,'' says Mr. Mutlak, who himself has received death threats from members of his own community for participating in the process. "He's played a very good role slowing the other parties down, in talking to those who are asking for too much."
[...]
"We are not getting any impression that they are with this side or with that. We feel they are trying to help our side as much as the other side," says Iyad al-Sammarai, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political group whose leaders have been arrested by American forces in the past. "I'm sure [the US] has a feeling that if a constitution is approved only by the Shiites and Kurds, they will not get what they want. What they want is stability."

Still, Mr. Sammarai says it's unclear how much US pressure can bring in this process, or if the desire for fast results will lead the US to sign off on a constitution without Sunni backing. Iraq's interim parliament is at least nominally sovereign, though reliant on the protection of 130,000 American troops.

If the draft is approved by parliament over the objections of the Sunnis, they will try to defeat the constitution in the referendum. But that means getting their voters to the polls in the four provinces where they are a substantial majority.

But if the resistance prevents Sunnis from going to the polls at all, they won't be able to vote down an unsatisfactory constitution.

"We'll appeal to the resistance to let our people vote,'' says Shakr al-Falluji, a Sunni on the drafting committee. "Hopefully they'll listen."

It would be quite an irony if it takes US forces to protect Sunni voters from intimidation, not by Sunni insurgents, but by armed groups of Shi'a and Kurds in and out of the official security forces. But as power and interests continue to shift in a highly fluid and unstable environment, we should expect that the alignment of US interests with various Iraqi groups will similarly shift back and forth. In the best case scenario, Ambassador Khalizad and the US generals will be called on increasingly to side with one group over another, all the while trying to preserve a semblance of "honest broker" status. In the worst case, the US will be caught in the middle of a shooting war.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

Over at Winds of Change, Dan Darling has noted Sunday's Washington Post article by Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer that, to quote Dan:

basically concludes that the US has failed to achieve its political, military, and economic goals in Iraq and are now revising those goals towards more "realistic" expectations.

Dan's reaction is a lengthy cri de coeur that boils down to "Say it ain't so!" My response is, "Yes, at long last!" Although I sympathize with Dan's sentiments, I'm afraid his remarks illustrate just what a box the White House has created for itself as reality and election rhetoric have steadily diverged. Dan complains, with good reason:

No offense, but if the end-result (goal?) of this whole adventure is that Iraq is left in the hands of yet another dictator, even a benevolent one, I'm going to have to join the chorus of people asking why we've bothered to remain as long as we have. If we were planning to install yet another Iraqi dictator, couldn't we have at least stuck with Allawi, who if nothing else has been a steadfastly reliable CIA asset?

Now maybe all of this is a trial balloon that's being put out by somebody for reasons that are as yet unknown and maybe it's not. If it isn't, then this needs to be disavowed in reasonably short order (which it won't be even if it isn't for reasons I'll explain further down) and if it is then those of us, myself included, who have repeatedly argued in favor of remaining in Iraq in order to accomplish just that based on what we assumed was the administration's goals have every reason to feel betrayed.

Dan makes an impassioned case for why a "cut and run" strategy is dangerous for US interests. Given his personal focus on terrorist groups, he is particularly distressed by the notion that Al Qaeda would benefit from being able to claim to have defeated the US in Iraq. Without saying it in so many words, he also fears a sort of "Iraq syndrome" that would inhibit the US from intervening with force where necessary to deal with terrorist threats. In addition, he worries:

Another likely outcome of this process will be that the Arab reform and democratization project will be dead. The "Muslim democracy = Islamists" script has already been written for Iraq and will be held up as proof of the futility of democracy in the Middle East if not in the Muslim world as a whole.

For me, Dan's strongest argument, which he doesn't flesh out, is that leaving Iraq as a "failed state" would present a considerable threat not only to Iraq's neighbors but to the rest of the world.

The balance of Dan's remarks, and the bulk of his concern, address domestic politics and his fear that the Bush Administration and the GOP have concluded that politics trumps US interests in Iraq. He cites a series of posts that our co-blogger, Eric Martin, has published on this site [Liberals Against Terrorism], which offer plausible evidence that the US electoral calendar is influencing Iraq exit strategies.

Undoubtedly, some in the GOP hierarchy are political cynics who would like to time a reduction in troop levels with the 2006 elections. However, too much can be made of electoral politics. It would be a mistake to see the Post article as a trial balloon or the maneuvering of dissident bureaucrats within one part of the Administration or another. The recent rumblings in the media are, in fact, reflecting shifts to a more realistic and sober set of objectives -- shifts we've been tracking for a number of months. It may be news to the Post and the NYT, but not to close observers of the Bush's second term Administration.

As I argued earlier regarding the GWOT/GSAVE ruckus, the White House is "out on a limb" with its continued attachment to the politics of "war" all the while developing a far broader, longer-term and, shall we say, more nuanced strategy for combating the threats from Islamist extremism.

To mobilize a considerable part of the American public, Bush and his team oversold an idea that was questionable at the outset but has by now certainly outlived its usefulness. The Administration now has to engage in a sleight-of-hand -- it must shift goalposts and policies to ones that are far more realistic, promising and sustainable internationally, while maintaining the unquestioning loyalty of a critical domestic constituency whose support is premised on that core idea.

The President is facing an even more acute version of the same problem in Iraq. The original justifications for the invasion have gone by the boards, and the "feel-good" moments of being treated as liberators were long-gone by the time the Bremer/Sanchez duo departed Baghdad. The rationales used for the November elections were to transform the Middle East through a successful democracy in Iraq and to fight terrorists to keep them from attacking us at home. Neither rationale remains terribly satisfactory to a growing portion of the American public, as Dan outlines in his post.

A recognition of the need for clearer and more realistic objectives in Iraq, and of the urgent imperative to realign military, reconstruction and diplomatic operations with those objectives, appears to be shared across major parts of the Bush Administration's policy apparatus -- OSD, CENTCOM and State. One assumes NSC is at least participating in the rethinking and reorientation. But either the President is truly disengaged from what his key Cabinet officers and generals are doing, or the disconnect between rhetoric and reality has rendered their communication strategies brittle and increasingly vulnerable to any bit of bad news.

Pace Bill Kristol, it's not just that "Rummy doesn't want to fight to win." The generals know they've got all they can handle just to hold the finger in the dike until they can stand up an Iraqi security structure that won't disintegrate. It's not simply a matter of training. As General Barry McCaffery reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a month ago:

[M]uch remains to be done [with the Iraqi Security Forces]. There is no maintenance or logistics system. There is no national command and control. Corruption is a threat factor of greater long-range danger than the armed insurgency. The Insurgents have widely infiltrated the ISF. The ISF desperately needs more effective, long-term NCO and Officer training.

The generals are acutely aware that time isn't on their side -- the clock is ticking because the military can't sustain the presence it currently has in Iraq. The Number One threat or vulnerability McCaffery identified was:

Premature drawdown of U.S. ground forces driven by dwindling U.S. domestic political support and the progressive deterioration of Army and Marine manpower. (In particular, the expected melt-down of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve in the coming 36 months) [emph supplied]

Nor is State abandoning democratic values in preference for an arbitrary and artificial political timetable, pace Larry Diamond's sorrowful complaints. In the Post article cited by Dan, Diamond mourns: "We... don't have the time to go through the process we envisioned when we wrote the interim constitution -- to build a democratic culture and consensus through debate over a permanent constitution." Yes, as Eric, Swopa and others have pointed out, democracy can't be rushed and it's easy to be cynical -- it would be mighty embarrassing for the White House and mighty inconvenient for military deployment plans if the referendum and elections are postponed. But time truly is of the essence for the Iraqis as well. As Zalmay Khalizad said today on one of the Sunday newsfests:

"One of the big problems in the current situation in Iraq is that there is a lack of agreement about the future among the important Iraqi communities," he said. "And I look at the constitution as a national compact, an agreement among the various communities about the future."

Diamond's dashed hopes -- to "build a democratic culture" -- were predicated on the major groups committing to the broad outlines of the sort of basic compact Khalizad is talking about.

Further, until some core agreement can be reached, there's no hope in bringing critical portions of the Sunni insurgencies into the fold. Until a compact is reached -- which is sufficiently sustainable to survive the referendum process -- both the Iraqi government and the US military are pretty much engaged in day-to-day management of a low-intensity civil war. Delay is the enemy -- it benefits both insurgents and the political and economic groups using unsavory methods to vie for power within the new system. The constitutional drafting process is forcing the issues from the realm of political rhetoric -- demands and threats by leaders speaking to their respective communities -- to the difficult world of hard bargaining. They will likely not get everything thrashed out by Monday, and a postponement of the draft wouldn't be surprising. But they'll be a lot closer than they were and will have a better idea of where the ultimate dealbreakers are. Maybe they'll never get there and civil war is their only future. But before we worry about developing a democratic culture, the basic bargain has to be struck.

To return to the various sources of Dan's angst about realism intruding into Administration policy. First, isn't it time we face up to the fact that the Iraq war was never part of a "war on terror" nor was it about fighting terrorists in Iraq to avert another 9/11. This confusion, shared by an unfortunately large number of US troops, has probably been responsible for a number of the difficulties the US has faced as an occupying authority in treatment of civilians and detainees. The idea that we'd "rather fight 'em there than here" is both nonsense and morally repugnant, to put it politely. True, we are now forced to fight terrorists in Iraq. But that's not because we're preventing them from attacking the US, but rather because they're trying to prevent a functioning country from emerging. Of course, in the sense that the US has a strong interest in the future of Iraq, fighting the terrorists is protecting the US. And I share some of Dan's concerns about the manner in which the US withdraws from Iraq producing a psychological victory for jihadists. But those are not the ways that President Bush employs the claim that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terror.

Second, except for the Jacobins and dreamers, the war has never been about "the march of freedom" in the sense of creating a liberal democracy in the Middle East as a beacon to the region. I'm not one of folks who think that Muslims or Arabs can't be democrats. I for one wanted to see elections for an interim government as early as possible instead of the CPA taking total charge. I also welcomed the January elections as a critical but small step toward a better future for Iraq and Iraqis (although not, I might add, as a vindication of the decision to go to war in Iraq).

But I also recognize that reconciling the tensions among democratic institutions, freedoms, rule of law and cultural norms is a massive undertaking for any society -- the US itself is engaged in perpetual adjustments to manage those tensions. When you add to the mix the number of circles that the Iraqis have to square -- most notably regarding federalism and the role of Islam as a source of civil law -- we shouldn't be surprised at the way things are turning out. For me, the source of never-ending surprise is that so many Americans still think that they can dictate the results of what has to be a sustainable bargain among the Iraqis themselves.

Although not yet articulated by the President, the US now has far more focused objectives, which are starting to be reflected in policy on both the military and civilian sides. This isn't about the US "winning the war." It's about creating the basic conditions for Iraqis to make a decent life for themselves and not present a threat to others. The way I would define the strategic objective of the US presence in Iraq was well summed up by Gen McCaffery in his Foreign Relations Committee testimony:

The point of the US war effort is to create legitimate and competent Iraqi national, provincial, and municipal governance.

That may not sound like a glorious reason to fight. It doesn't sound like a "noble cause" that would satisfy Cindy Sheehan -- although maybe it would, if it were stated clearly. But it's actually an extremely ambitious goal, which to achieve will take enormous ongoing expenditure of blood and treasure as well as political and military resolve. As I discussed earlier regarding adjustments in counterinsurgency strategies, it will also require constant flexibility and adaptation of American strategic ends and operational means. And that's assuming the Iraqis themselves can come to a consensus on what sort of governance they want, or at least will accept.

In a great comment posted by jonnybutter, he warns me of the dangers of political naivete. But I'd nonetheless like to see Bush make the case I've outlined rather than remain trapped in his obsolete political rhetoric. It's what Joe Biden means when he says Bush needs to "level with the American people" before they lose patience. Unlike Biden, I wouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place. But now we're there, US interests are indeed at stake. We've got a long, difficult road ahead that will necessarily require adjustments. Thank goodness, US policies have been shifting to reflect reality on the ground.

My political concerns are the opposite of Dan's -- that Bush will "stay on message." Is America really going to be better off if the President and the antiwar folks manage between them to further polarize the Iraq war even though there's a significant common ground that could be built around the very policies his Administration is beginning to pursue? Bush is doing a disservice to the rest of his Administration, the troops and the country by clinging to meaningless sloganeering to maintain the loyalty of his base. There are centrist Republicans and large numbers of Democrats in Congress who don't buy the Bush rhetoric but are pleading to work with his Administration on realistic policies. My fear is that they will become increasingly isolated in the center -- treated as defeatists by Bush partisans and as out-of-touch hawkish elites who have betrayed liberal ideals by those who want out of Iraq yesterday. As a wartime President, Bush should be pulling people together by defining the true challenges and real limitations we face, explaining how and why our policies are adapting to circumstance, and specifying what we're really there to achieve. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see that sort of leadership out of this President.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

"Best Practices in Counterinsurgency" is the title of an article in the May/June issue of Military Review (pdf, published by CGSC at Leavenworth). It's written by a co-author of an Army study of Special Operations Forces during the first six months of Afghanistan. Kalev Sepp reviews 17 insurgencies over the past century as well as looks at features of 36 others and summarizes factors that tended to characterize successful and unsuccessful counterinsurgencies.

Other analysts and historians would undoubtedly come up with a somewhat different list, but it's a useful starting point for refining both goals and methods to achieve them. [For those who can't get enough of counterinsurgency more generally, the article is also a useful companion piece to Kingdaddy's ongoing series on insurgency strategies pursued by different types of revolutionaries.]

Successful

• Emphasis on intelligence.
  
• Focus on population, their needs, and security.
  
• Secure areas established, expanded.
  
• Insurgents isolated from population (population
  control).
  
• Single authority (charismatic/dynamic leader).
  
• Effective, pervasive psychological operations
  (PSYOP) campaigns.
  
• Amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents.
  
• Police in lead; military supporting.
  
• Police force expanded, diversified.
  
• Conventional military forces reoriented for
  counterinsurgency.
  
• Special Forces, advisers embedded with
  indigenous forces.
  
• Insurgent sanctuaries denied.
  

Unsuccessful

• Primacy of military direction of counterinsurgency.
  
• Priority to “kill-capture” enemy, not on engaging
  population.
  
• Battalion-size operations as the norm.
  
• Military units concentrated on large bases for
  protection.
  
• Special Forces focused on raiding.
  
• Adviser effort a low priority in personnel assignment.
  
• Building, training indigenous army in image of
  U.S. Army.
  
• Peacetime government processes.
  
• Open borders, airspace, coastlines.

With all the recent noise about the timing of US withdrawal from Iraq and the growing disconnect between White House rhetoric and what the US military is actually planning to do, the pundits are losing sight of changes that have been going on for some months that don't involve aggregate force levels or the simple metric of number of Iraqis trained. These changes are affecting both the work being done to build Iraqi security forces and the current counterinsurgency operational priorities of the US forces.

This checklist seems to me to capture a lot of the adjustments the US military has been making that have been emerging over the past nine months or so. From a broader policy standpoint of what the US should be trying to accomplish in Iraq and what resources are required, the list is also a handy guide for major vulnerabilities that may need addressing promptly or, unfortunately, may no longer be reparable.

Personally, I think we should applaud the adjustments the generals are continuing to make in Iraq -- and vocally encourage more of them. By now we already know about the disastrous consequences of trying to run an occupation on the cheap, refusing to plan for "winning the peace," and failing to remember lessons from other occupations and counter-insurgencies. Surely we don't need to point to every change in goals or methods as evidence of incompetence or worse. That just creates incentives for an overabundance of caution, not making changes when needed, and other CYA behavior.

The Iraq debacle will fuel debates for decades to come about when/whether/how to engage US forces in the future. But in the meantime, for what to do in Iraq now and in the coming years, we should be trying to get out of the current political dynamic, where both Bush supporters and opponents treat any deviation from plan as evidence of failure. The debate between "stay the course" and "withdraw" may be real at the political level but as a practical matter it's a phony one. As I've noted on a number of occasions, the Administration has been rapidly shifting goal posts (yes, adopting a lot of what Kerry was saying), but it's trapped in its own political rhetoric. We may relish watching the Bushies deservedly squirm, but just as hope is not a plan, neither is schadenfraude.

True, simply reacting to rapidly changing circumstances by devising a different "plan" every few months can deteriorate into chickens running around without heads. But adjustment to changing circumstances -- at both the strategic and operational levels -- is a good thing. Failure to adjust -- or failure to communicate adjustments to both the public and the troops who have to execute -- is unhealthy.

The dynamic nature of both policy and military strategy, and their interconnections, demands flexibility and adaptation. Pierre Lessard, in "Campaign Design for Winning the War... and Peace" (Parameters, Summer 2005) gives some historical perspective.

But even steady policy is no guarantee of a correspondingly unalterable military strategy. [...] Indeed, in World War II, Allied military strategy experienced no less than eight major decisions involving significant repercussions for theater- or operational-level commanders between 1942 and 1945, or about once every five months. Thus, military strategic objectives are rarely enduring, and campaign design must be sufficiently agile to adjust to their fluctuations.

A competent leadership (both civilian and military) should be clarifying its objectives and showing how it can learn from mistakes and adapt to changing circumstances. A responsible opposition should demand no less.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism