This article of yours stimulated some interesting observations when you posted it in the Tacitus diary. The reactions went in several different directions that I've spent quite a bit of time today responding to. So I thought I'd bring over my part of those discussions to chez Nadezhda.

The first is with Irving, regarding his repeated claims that the sort of thing the article describes in Tikrit is actually going on all over the place.

The second and third are followups to reactions to your terrific comment that "Boss Tweed" didn't seem to be contemplated by the neocons' "Wilsonianism." The initial reaction was Ken White's, who focused on your remark to highlight the need to take cudgels to bureaucratic inertia. The second reaction was alk's, which posited that the "Boss Tweed" scenario (an "autocratic thug" in her words) may in fact be one of the outcomes contemplated by the neocons if they understood that institutional change comes in sudden bursts rather than on a gradual, smooth trajectory. Her metaphor for this type of change is evolutionary theory's "punctuated equilibrium."

I didn't think the discussion had continued. Thanks for picking up the slack and making me sound more articulate than I actually am!

Irving at Tacitus has repeatedly claimed that the sort of pragmatism driven by facts-on-the-ground, which is illustrated by the 1st ID in Tikrit, is the rule, not the exception, throughout the US military's operations in Iraq. I have been quite willing to believe him based on moves the military has made since late May-mid June. I am concerned, however, that there are several key factors that are making it difficult to be optimistic about the overall success of this approach, even though I believe it is the only approach likely to produce signficiant positive results.

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Response to Irving:

I've believed you before, and it's clearly the right approach. You can't kill them all. Much better to co-opt the ones you can, marginalize the less dangerous ones, and the ones you'll have to kill eventually, either do it now or push them into more limited no-go areas.

But we're far from being "out of the woods" yet. Probabilities are still high that the result will be one of Chatham House's bad-case scenarios -- civil war or regional conflagration.

Four basic problems so far:

• There are too many places where this needs to be done for the size forces we have in Iraq -- We're appearing to begin to address this problem by triaging our attention more explicitly. I'm not despondent but instead very relieved that we're identifying areas we don't pretend to control. Call them off-limits but keep the pressure on through stand-off weapons. Make it more difficult for these places to become comfortable sanctuaries, but reduce the amount of damage to your own forces, the friendly Iraqi forces, and Iraqi civilians.
  
  If they're still no-go by the elections, as Allawi said today, tough sh*t. That's not going to stop the elections for the rest of the Iraqis. And the citizens of the no-go areas can't claim that the elections were "unfair," because they were the ones who couldn't/wouldn't work with the US or the government to run the guys out of town who kept them from participating.



• There's not enough direction by the Iraqis themselves of managing the carrots and sticks. When a new US unit comes to town to take over from a prior unit that enjoyed some local success, the new guys seem to have to reinvent how they're going to handle the situation. They don't just move in and keep working for the Iraqis the prior unit was supporting.
  
  You may disagree, but it seems the most significant flare-ups have come at handovers from one unit to another (especially one branch of the armed forces to another, but that's a story to look into on another day).I don't think it's just the "not invented here" syndrome. When the US officers are managing the patronage system and doling out the punishments directly, which may be very effective at co-opting the populace, they're relying on personal relations. They've got to create a system that works when they're gone -- first, when they hand things over to another US unit, and ultimately when the US is gone altogether. [BTW -- I'm not including the "handover" to the Fallujah Brigade in the list of lack of success, since that was a political gesture, not a realistic attempt to put the Iraqis in charge.]



• There hasn't been sufficient success in building a network of co-opted people who will remain reasonably reliable when the US isn't there. You can't just rely on one guy, because he's too easy to take out. The only way a large enough group will "stay bought" is if they've got ongoing interests in the success of an orderly government in Baghdad (or at least in the province).
  
  Knowing they risk the US coming back in with guns if they don't "stay bought" is one ongoing incentive, but they may be presented with much more compelling immediate incentives in terms of direct threats by insurgents once the US isn't present anymore. A future risk that the US might punish them, versus a certainty that they or their family are going to die tomorrow -- well that's a tough calculus for the US strategy to try to go against.
  
  Simply relying on "negative incentives" are insufficient to get a core group of locals -- who reinforce each other -- to "stay bought." Where are the positive incentives? Can the Baghdad government start managing the handouts of goodies to make it more attractive for the locals to stay on the government's good side? Are there pet projects of a tribal leader or the equivalent of a "city council of elders" that Baghdad could reward but, if they stopped cooperating, could yank? Can handouts be managed by central ministries on the basis of "the public good" rather than to friends, relatives and political allies?
  
  Given the importance to Iraq as a whole (and thus to the US) of obtaining participation by the lion's share of the country in the political process, an explicit awarding of carrots for good behavior would not offend either Iraqis or the US public/Congress. The current situation, which is totally non-transparent on both the US and Iraqi sides, just stirs up suspicion of favoritism, corruption and conspiracies.



• Most important missing ingredient -- we're missing an ION Drive. I quote you from last month:

  A constant pressure forever and always pushing towards a single vision no matter how slow or how imperceptible the effort. It's in the thousands of constant little decisions, seemingly unrelated yet always decided in the context of a single vector. A thousand mile journey made with little noticed single steps. While not always the right approach, it seems to be the most, or maybe best, approach in solving some of the most daunting tasks of the Age. Nature uses it to throw-up and then tear-down mountains--and to carve Grand Canyons.

  The ION drive in Iraq shouldn't be "liberation=freedom=democracy" and "freedom is on the march." That's all about the US, not about the Iraqis. And that's been the problem all along. It was billed as "our war on terrorism" but the success of the adventure is all up to what the Iraqis themselves wind up doing. Remember, they get a vote too. /li>

I've been saying this since I started coming to [Tacitus in May], so I probably sound like a broken record. Our goal is not to kill terrorists, and our role is not to build a democracy. It's to help the Iraqis create a system that allows them to live together in a reasonably orderly fashion so that they can get on with building their economy, their society and their own political system. Hopefully without too much interference from their neighbors and without too much spill-over disruption across the rest of the region.

Tony Cordesman from CSIS, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, made a key distinction between idealism and achievable objectives. He stresses that an excess of idealism may not just get you into the wrong fights, it can get in the way of reaching your goals once you're in a fight.

The US cannot afford to rush into - or stay in - any conflict on ideological grounds. It cannot afford to avoid any necessary commitment because of idealism. What it needs is informed pragmatism. One simple rule of thumb is to stop over-simplifying and sloganizing - particularly in the form of "mirror imaging" and assuming that "democratization" is the solution or even first priority for every country. The US needs to deal with security threats quietly and objective[ly] on a country-by-country and movement-by-movement basis.

This "informed pragmatism" -- informed by understanding the people you're trying to assist, by some practical experience, and by American values -- is what the guys on the ground you talk about are doing. They isolate and marginalize rather than blow away. They're distinguishing between why this guy will just as happily shoot them as look at them and why another guy might cooperate with some Ba'athists but not some foreigners. Or why these Shi'a are worth defending in a low-level civil war that's going on. They differentiate objectives and tactics based on their knowledge of what's happening on the ground and their close collaboration with Iraqis. That's why they're succeeding in a series of small, incremental, quiet steps.

But there's no ION drive. The goals of what the guys are trying to do on the ground isn't being sung from the top, and all the way up and down the ladder. One of the main purposes of the ION drive is to ensure a reasonable degree of consistency across a host of actors making lots of distributed decisions on the basis of local rather than central information. That means it's important that we're reasonably consistent in what we say and what we do from the top down. Another purpose is to leverages our efforts because our unity of speech and action prepares the ground vis a vis others who watch us and listen to us. We get to our goals faster because we don't rely exclusively on act directly on other people or their self-interest calculus -- we also influence them.

Instead, what do we get? "We will defeat our enemies." "Freedom is on the march." "We will honor the fallen by completing their mission" -- what mission? to help Iraq get on its feet so we're out of there as soon as humanly possible because our continued presence is destabilizing? or to wipe our enemies off the face of the earth? or to establish a base of operations to move our defensive perimeter from the East Coast to Baghdad? What a confused and confusing mishmash.

This flag-waving and chest-thumping also doesn't match anything actually happening in Iraq -- both the bad news and the good news that you think doesn't get reported. The ION drive shouldn't create credibility gaps -- they can be pretty near fatal to those vectors you're so fond of.

Success in this venture requires ongoing, credible communication of a combination of clarity of purpose, determination, and common sense. But none of this is being communicated. That's what we should be selling at home and abroad.

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In his response to me, Irving claimed that there is indeed an ION drive there in Iraq pushing along much the lines I described. He dismissed the contradictory signals from the WH as simply a matter of their being terrible at explaining all this to the public.

Irving took issue with the way I used the term "co-opt" and made a very important clarification.

The negative reinforcement comes not from the US but from the terrorists. It is they who are devistating towns, setting up roadblocks--and interferring with economic business in the areas. Clan & Tribe leaders are trying to play all sides against each other. Try this thought...you can make a point by NOT engaging the terrorists. In many instances the tribes would like nothing better than to make a profit off of both sides...and like certian politicians, avoid making a decision. If town leaders are enjoying a certian economic prosperity due to the "new" Iraqi economic conditions, and some of the most profitable businesses are kind of shaky in an Islamic Religious kind of way, then pulling-back and letting some fundamentalists impact business...can help some people get off the fence. Is that co-option? Or letting folks see the light of certian possibilities?

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My further response:

Setting aside your claim about ION drives being in place, you make a very good point about what you choose not to do being as important as what you choose to do.

Fallujah is also an example where "holding back" is a more effective weapon that head-on assault. They united against the foreign invaders, but there's little that holds the various groups together in a sustained fashion. Already considerable falling out among thieves. A story on that very point, which undoubtedly warms your heart, appeared in today's LA Times:

No longer directly confronting U.S. forces, Coleman said, the rebels had been fighting among themselves, pressured by the U.S. bombing.

"When we attacked in that city, all the various factions that are represented ... coalesced in a marriage of convenience -- and, basically, designated us as the common enemy," Coleman said. "They were arranged in a very tight, 360-degree circle, all faced outward at us, and they were all willing to engage us in the fight."

Absent the U.S. presence, the colonel said, intense opposition has arisen to the hundreds of foreign fighters -- mostly from other Arab nations -- who are said to have concentrated their forces in Fallouja. Reports indicate efforts to impose a Taliban-like Islamic regime there, with women forced to wear veils and religious authorities passing civil judgment.

One indication of the factionalism, Coleman said, is the frequent nighttime gun battles in town -- confrontations that do not involve coalition forces.

"There are many nights in the city when we are doing absolutely nothing there, and there's a lot of activity," he said, noting that in the spring all fire was aimed at coalition forces. "Those same people are now shooting at each other."

Perfectly consistent with the differentiation, triage, marginalization, isolation tactics I tried to describe. Understanding whose cooperation the Iraqi gov't needs, whose disruption needs to be squelched, and what their hot buttons (both positive and negative) are.

I was focusing on the military actions, which was the subject of praktike's "winning ugly" post. Every one seems suicidal that we've finally admitted we don't control all of Iraq, that we've adopted isolation tactics, and we're not going to try to secure all of Iraq at once. I think it's great. Thought they were mad to take on Fallujah the way they did in the first place, with no real Iraqi allies there and the causus belli the death of 4 Americans. The results were textbook predictable, and I note that via the LA Times yesterday, Lt Gen Conway agrees but Gen Sanchez apparently did not.

Najaf was a completely different story. Whether the US was responsible for lighting the match both times is neither here nor there. We were quite deliberate about taking steps to separate friend from foe as much as possible. We were intervening on the side of the good guys in an intra-Shi'a war. And we made the point that we'd intervene again if someone tries to take over by force.

This is why I answered your question sometime ago that we shouldn't go after Sadr personally. By not going after Sadr directly, but rather the hard core who keep fighting in Sadr City, we're splitting the Sadr-ites also. There's a lot of confusion reported among the more militant Sadr-ites about whether this "political participation" road is one they want to travel. So the folks who are doing the bulk of the fighting right now are mostly super-anti-government, or die-hard fundamentalists/Iranians, or hoodlums. But if there's even a whiff of a threat against Sadr, you see an immediate mobilization of the 10s of thousands at the mosques, and you've lost all that advantage of dividing and isolating and reducing the momentum of the fighters.

The problem that can't be tackled the same way is the true terrorism. If the Israelis can't stop the suicide bombers with their security system, we'd better be prepared for high profile, horribly gory events, over and over and over through the elections. Only way that will change is if and when the Iraqi population gets totally fed up with them, since the victims are Iraqi.

The danger from the terrorists is that, though they can't win, they can prevent the government from appearing reasonably effective and reliable. And that's enough to keep things very unstable and ready for a big blowup (e.g. Kurds re the constitution or Kirkuk).

Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality.

PS -- Not accusing praktike of going suicidal over the Pentagon finally admitting there are no-go areas. I believe he would take quite the opposite position -- that a little truth-telling is extremely constructive.

Two common themes in Ken White's remarks at Tacitus are (1) the guys on the ground are doing the right sorts of things and their biggest obstacle is a constipated bureaucracy that doesn't understand "just get it done; and (2) the guys at the top in Washington are on board with the approach being taken in Iraq, but they do a terrible job of communicating to the public what's going on.

In this post by praktike, "Winning Ugly," he remarks on an internal piece that seems to have been missing from the neocons' serene view of reverse dominos.

[The success of the 1st ID in Tikrit] suggests to me that Boss Tweed would be far more capable of rebuilding Iraq than Woodrow Wilson. Which reminds me of a key problem in neoconservative thought: there doesn't seem to be a well-developed theory of how power and idealism relate to one another. While the winning of Iraqi "hearts and minds" hasn't been much of a factor in any of our successes, money and old-fashioned power politics has been decisive.

Ken responded that the bureaucracy just didn't know how to do "Boss Tweed." And an exchange with other commenters followed regarding how what was needed was for Bush to just tell the government bureaucrats to "get it done." But that such an outburst was unlikely to occur before the election.

'fraid that set me off on a real rant about either the total cynicism or complete incompetence of the White House, and which would he rather it be.

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Too few Boss Tweeds and too many Wilsonian idealists is not a problem primarily of a prissy "idealistic" bureaucracy. I know on the military side of things there's been a total b*lls up in a lot of the logistics and cash flow -- not getting the right resources to the right places at the right times.

But on the civilian side of things, it's not been the petty procurement and accounting tyrants who have been the problem. If anything, the non-military side has suffered from a failure by some of the Admin's chief ideologues to follow some basic principles of standard contracting practices -- government or private sector. The guys in the OSD, who controlled the purse strings of the CPA, not State or anyone else, tossed around some whopping big non-compete contracts that didn't have the right TORs or the right people overseeing them. And they keep awarding new contracts to the same old guys.

If the leadership in the WH actually is on board with what's taking place on the ground, the disconnect between reality and rhetoric is absolutely astonishing. The whole week in NY was nothing but a martial version of Wilsonianism on steroids.

So what if George Bush says to the US Government, "just get it done" and they all snap to and start "doing it." Get what done? Freedom on the march, wiping the bad guys off the face of the earth, democracy -- what in that sloganeering is supposed to provide direction? And if it does provide some direction, it's sure not the direction Irving has been touting as the governing vector on the ground.

From this distance, the civilian side has been driven consistently by ideological decisionmaking at all the critical points until the handover, when the adults were finally put in charge in Baghdad. We're talking about plain old-fashioned applied common sense, which has been sorely lacking through most of the adventure outside the armed forces. That's not bureaucracy, that's a bunch of guys who did an end-run of the bureaucracy. If they'd used the bureaucracy the way it was supposed to be used, they might not be scrambling right now to try to explain where $8 billion of Iraqi oil revenue went to after it slipped through their hands.

This isn't a simple matter of a stodgy old bureaucracy that needs to get their heads handed to them by the CEO. I hate to be cynical, but if I'm to believe you and Irving about the WH being part of the unity of purpose and tactics on the ground in Baghdad, Bush/Cheney and Karl Rove have decided to sell the world a bill of goods. They're not talking about what we're doing, and they're disguising the very objectives we are pursuing, because that wouldn't get the juices fired up and enough of the troops marching into the voting booths in November. It would also mean they couldn't accuse Kerry of undermining the morale of the troops by setting a target for withdrawal or for not being willing to "stay the course." It would become evident that this whole pissing match over who's got the biggest set or whose is longest is just a bunch of garbage.

Sorry, just don't buy that the guys at the top simply have a poor communication track record. One option is they believe what they say -- in which case they are idiots and, thank heavens, aren't really running things, but that's certainly no reason to keep them in office for four more years. Or they're running an incredible risk with a cynical charade -- conducting a highly iffy conflict out the backroom on terms totally inconsistent with campaign rhetoric so that they can win the election. If it's the latter and they do win, they (and probably us) will some day pay big-time one way or another. Things do have a nasty habit of coming back to bite you.

Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality.

praktike's response (posted originally on Tacitus Wed Sep 15th, 2004 at 06:06:28 AM EST)

You're right, but I do think there is a great deal of value in having a President who recognize what is possible and what isn't, and is willing to step in to break up roadblocks where necessary. From what I've read about Bush, he is the true believer in democracy and freedom and wonderfulness and at the same time someone who seems to need to punish the evildoers as we did in Fallujah. It's guys like Armitage and Blackwill and Powell who I see as able to make moral compromises where necessary to get the job done. As to Congress, Bush hasn't really done anything to get them to be constructive other than blustering about willpower and freedom blah blah blah. He'd be more useful if he were willing to simultaneously allay fears about corruption and use his bully pulpit to argue for the necessity of a pragmatic approach. I think he has to be able to tell people: "hey, folks, it's going to be messy and we're going to have to do some unsavory things in order to win."

I may have put this somewhat less thoughtfully down below, in my haste.

Moderation in pursuit of moderation is good, I think

(posted originally at Tacitus)

Yes, we need a good "ION drive" at the top

You can't kick people in the rear, whether in Congress or in the bureaucracy, and get the action you want if you've framed the goals in a way that's inconsistent with what you want them to do. It starts out with formulating realistic objectives, and "freedom on the march" and wiping out the bad guys are precisely NOT the driving priorities in Iraq.

But truth-telling would actually focus on what the Bush Admin does, instead of what it says it does. And that's a pretty big problem for them. It would turn the campaign into what an incumbent usually has to face -- a grade card on past performance. Which in turn would become a choice of whether George gets to take 8th grade over again.

Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality.

Re "grade card" for Bush performance

When I made the crack about repeating 8th grade, I had't looked at the Center for American Progress report just out. It's entitled Failing Grades: America's Security Three Years After 9/11. [pdf]

Exhaustive critique on all dimensions from homeland security to nuclear proliferation to impact on military readiness and the future of the all-volunteer forces. The specific tasks on the "what should be done" list is pretty short. Mostly, it's a fundamental attitude change they're calling for, which doesn't translate into a lot of "action items."

Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality.

(orignally posted on my tacitus diary entry)

The reason I said it didn't necessarily follow is that this isn't anything particularly new for the Iraqis; in many ways it's a reversion to a tribal system in which a weak central authority is forced to cut deals with local leaders in order to keep order. Even Saddam had to work this way in many cases; he respected the power of Sheikhs so much that if he had to kill a few members of a troublesome tribe, he would attempt to wipe them out because he knew they'd be gunning for him. So he cut deals wherever it made more sense to do so than it did to kill.

What this new pragmatism represents, I think, is a small chance to find partners in some capacity that will quell the violence and allow reconstruction and possibly elections to take place. The punctuated equilibrium metaphor only makes sense if this is in fact a new step on the way to somewhere better. If it is simply a return to the status quo ante or progress doesn't follow, the metaphor fails, no?