Is Alice-in-Wonderland a contagious condition?

Iraq Rebel Cities to Be Retaken in October - Minister
Wed Sep 29, 2004 11:19 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi forces will retake rebel-held cities in Iraq in October, Defense Minister Hazim al-Shalaan told Reuters on Wednesday.

"You wait and see what we are going to do. We are going to take all these cities in October," Shalaan said.

Yeah, but who's going to KEEP them?

FWIW, the FT says Iran 'liberator' bit too busy to invade this week

praktike - "I'd feel better about our this idea if I saw any evidence beyond the ravings of Perle and Frum that it is part of some kind of grand design for the region." Yes, there is rather an Underpants Gnome flavour to the apparent strategy here. I am willing to believe that operational concerns might require secrecy, and thus the spreading of disinformatsiya or silence, but I have my doubts on this one.

This raises a bunch of issues I've been thinking about re what you say you want and what you really want; what you say you're going to do and what you really intend to do. All with the idea of what responses you want from others, and what steps they're thinking about taking independently of what you do. Ye old chess match. (BTW, I hate chess, but I love these types of multi-party strategy games -- I think it's the 3-dimensionality that's lacking in chess and the fact chess is a zero-sum game. Much more fun to see how you can get others to do what you want and walk away happy rather than muttering about vengance under their breath.)

Every once in a while I try to put myself in Negroponte's place -- neither a comfortable nor enviable place, so I don't do it too often. If I were in his place, I'd probably want the US to be sending very strong, very mixed signals.

There are good reasons for sending a strong message that nothing will interfere with holding elections -- the line taken by Rumsfeld and Allawi version 1.0. Insurgents in one part of the country can't hijack elections for the rest of the country, so insurgents shouldn't think they can concentrate their forces in one area and put off elections for the entire country. (The one exception would obviously be Baghdad, which must be part of why the US military is really focusing its ground offensive on Sadr City before anywhere else.)

On the other hand, it's important to send a strong signal that the elections aren't just some pro forma show -- that the US is committed to meaningful elections, that are free, fair, transparent, don't discriminate against any group, don't privilege any group, etc. So we're willing to take on board the constructive inteventions of third parties -- whether the UN, Sistani, an international conference in November -- whatever. We're not just plowing ahead implementing "our" plan. (And BTW, the "plan" is owned by the UN and the Iraqis, so part of our posture is that we're just trying to create the security situation so that the UN can do its thing.) So Bush in the Rose Garden and Allawi version 2.0 has to emphasize elections that will be as participatory and representative as humanly possible.

Now if I'm a military commander in Iraq, the last thing I want to do is invade the no-go areas in the next couple of months. It will involve a huge amount of death and destruction, radicalizing the population across the country even further. And there aren't any reliable Iraqi forces -- police or soldiers -- to hold those positions once they're taken. But Allawi and I have to convince people we're ready and willing to do it if we have to. What I'd hope, if I were in the military's shoes, is that the polticial process of organizing the elections -- how the lists will be put together, how registration will work, and so forth -- will get started, and people will find lots of reasons why there are problems with holding the elections as they're currently designed, even if the no-go areas were stabilized. So as the time approached when I'd have to go into Fallujah militarily, there'd be a ground-swell from the Iraqi side saying "don't do it." We're going to have to rejigger the election process some other way. That requires more voices being involved than just the interim government's. So I'd be thrilled to hear Sistani is starting to raise some objections that would be hard to satisfy in a couple of months. And I'd not be too upset with the idea that there was going to be an international conference. If the conference comes up with a broad consensus on a different timing and method for the elections that means I don't have to kill a bunch of Iraqis, it's fine by me.

Since we didn't have elections 3 months ago when they might have addressed the legitimacy problem of the handover, their timing now is more symbolic than anything. More important substantively is the issue Sistani has indirectly raised about which parties and candidates are likely to be realistic contestants in the election. As I commented earlier, and Swopa picked up on in your link, Sistani seems to be quite opposed to the "national unity" list that the big parties appear to be negotiating among themselves. The first version of his displeasure, reported in the NYT, threatened a boycott, whereas by the next day the AP version backed off of a boycott threat. (See Sistani Raises the Ante - Elections Must be Representative.)

Although Sistani continues to emphaisze the timing, I'd hazard a guess that an election that didn't offer legitimate choices but did nothing but ratify the current guys in power -- the exiles who don't even speak with Iraqi accents anymore -- would be viewed as hardly better than no elections at all. It's not as if the unity list wouldn't give the Shi'a a majority of the members or would be dominated by secular Shi'a parties. The big Shi'a religious parties would have major representation. So he's got to be unhappy with the insiders agreeing among themselves that they keep each other in power.

Opening up the contest beyond the current government parties, however, truly opens up the implicit bargain with the Kurds. If Sistani says it needs to be rejiggered for the Shi'a, and others say adjustments have to be made to get some Sunni participation, what are the bets that the Kurds will hold to their current agreement with no guarantees of the power-sharing they negotiated in the TAL?

But we can't solve that one for them. If I'm Negroponte, I'd rather open up the can of worms and get the Iraqis screaming at each other, rather than me, and maneuvering openly rather than have a small group of insiders rigging things for themselves behind closed door. Otherwise, any result will be blamed on me as the puppet-master, even if I truly had nothing to do with a specfic outcome. If the process opens up, any delay can be blamed on the Iraqis not able to get their act together. I can always throw my weight on one side or another, or buy off one group or another, as the to-and-fro proceeds without openly sponsoring a specific group. Of course, since my lords and masters want to get re-elected in November, I'd want the screaming match to hold off until after Nov 2.

Even more challenging along the lines of what do I say I want, what do I say I'm going to do, and what do I really intend, is the whole question of withdrawal. Edward Luttwak (who's brilliant in a crazy kind of way -- I had a strategy seminar with him that was great) has proposed that we announce a reasonable withdrawal timetable. [It was in the NYT and IHT in August, so it's buried in their archives. I'll dig it out and do a piece on it] The idea is that our willingness to depart will stimulate the neighbors to get their acts together, because they'll find themselves horrified at the thought we're going to leave while things are a mess. He doesn't really use the Lebanon analogy directly, but it's along the lines of if you hang around in an openended fashion like the Israelis did, you lose total control of the situation, and the locals start taking you for granted and using you in their fights with each other and never get down to sorting things out.

In any event, it's as usual with Luttwak an attempt to think out of the box. And if ever there was a need for out of the box thinking, this is it. Because we've put ourselves into a nasty little box.

I think this is a time to scrap national parties and go for fully legitimate district based elections. The future Iraq civil war will be based on having national parties, instead of local ones.