“Toeing the Hardline”

The Guardian February 9, 2009

The election of Michael Steele to the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee has raised new questions in the ongoing debateabout the future of the Republican party. Does the outspoken former lieutenant governor of Maryland have what it takes to inject new life into the ailing GOP and lead it in a new direction? And could his status as a minority provide a new face for a party that looks increasingly out of touch with a changing America?

But while Steele-watchers look for clues about what direction the party will take under his leadership, there is another Republican on the rise: Mike Pence, the recently-elected chairman of the Republican Conference and vanguard of the hardline, back-to-basics Reaganism of today’s Republican party.

Pence, a hitherto little-known congressman from Indiana, has emerged into the national spotlight as one of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration. He spearheaded the GOP’s opposition to Obama’s stimulus plan, promising “overwhelming” Republican opposition to – what he called – the president’s “dusty old wish list of liberal spending priorities”, and appeared on major US cable networks to defend the Republican party line. Such was his antagonism to Obama’s spending measures that Pence even found himself defending Rush Limbaugh, after the radio shock jock ludicrously declared that conservatives had been forced “to hope [Obama] succeeds … to bend over, grab the ankles, bend forward, backward, whichever … because this is the first black president.” (Perhaps it is telling that Pence once referred to himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf)

Pandering to Limbaugh aside, Pence’s objections to Obama’s economic plan should come as no surprise: the congressman has made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of ‘big government’ attempts to rescue the economy, penning op-eds and appearing on national television to oppose both the financial and auto industry bailouts this fall. Last August, Pence even helped orchestrate a Republican sit-in on the floor of Congress after it had gone into recess, to protest the Dems’ refusal to overturn a moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

Pence’s conservative activism has paid off. Just two weeks after the election-day Götterdämmerung this November, he was chosen to chair the Republican Conference in Congress, making him the third-ranking House Republican and an influential agenda-setter for the country’s ‘loyal opposition’.

Pence’s rise in the party is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, his recent activity in the House may be a prelude for a run for the Indiana governorship in 2012 or senate seat in 2010; victory in either of these races would set him up to be a strong contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination (although his name has already been thrown around as a possible candidate for 2012). He’s already aconservative favourite, and his thwarted attempt in 2006 to usurp John Boehner’s position as House Republican leader may have been an early effort to achieve the kind of national prominence necessary to jumpstart a presidential run. Competing for a governorship or Senate seat would mean waiting just a few more years to do so.

“McCain’s Iraq Flip-Flop?”

The New Republic 9 June 2008

It will be interesting to see how–and if–the candidates adapt their policies on Iraq to take into account Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s announcement this week that his government will work towards a negotiated timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. McCain, for one–despite his attempts yesterday to do dismiss the relevance of Maliki’s statements to his Iraq policy–may have a big problem on his hands: As the folks over at Democracy Arsenal point out, the Arizona senator stated unequivocally in a 2004 Q&A session at the Council on Foreign Relations that the U.S. would be obligated to pull its troops from Iraq if requested to do so by a democratically elected Iraqi government:

[Peter] Peterson: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because if it was an elected government of Iraq and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.

In light of these earlier statements on his full commitment to Iraqi sovereignty on this issue, how can McCain now declare–without appearing to be a flip-flopper–that a U.S. pull-out will not occur “according to a set timetable,” even if the Iraqi government requests otherwise? And we thought Obama’s recent reconsiderations on Iraq wouldland him in flip-flop territory… 

“The Next Iraq?”

The New Republic 8 July 2008

While a recent deal in Lebanon between Hezbollah and the Western-backed government of Fouad Siniora may have averted the outbreak of all-out, Iraq-style sectarian conflict in the tiny Arab state, an article today on the Lebanese news-service Now Lebanon makes it clear how, in many ways, the current political conditions of Lebanon are disconcertingly similar to those of Iraq circa 2006: Its government is fractured and dysfunctional, simmering Sunni-Shia tensions threaten to boil over into widespread violence, and al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups operate freely within the country’s lawless zones (such as the massive Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon). To make matters worse, the article points out, the newly-emboldened Hezbollah may be gearing up for a show-down with the country’s Sunni Jihadist groups in Ain al-Hilweh, in a move that would bring Lebanon even closer to its boiling point:

“Hezbollah is seriously thinking about [the Ain al-Hilweh] camp as an entity that jeopardizes its influence…. They call it the Sunni army,” [says Al Hayat columnist Hazem al-Amin]. Such speculation, in addition to various developments throughout the country … has perpetuated fears that future tensions involving Hezbollah could descend into a violent Sunni-Shia conflict far more devastating than the clashes in May.

 

“Iran’s Next President”

The New Republic 3 July 2008

Given the amount of media attention paid to Iran and its infamous president in recent weeks, we would do well to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad might not be in power for much longer: Around this time next year, the Islamic Republic will be holding presidential elections, and–according to some–the incumbent Ahmadinejad could suffer a loss at the polls. Who might step in to fill his shoes? According to an article this week from the Tehran Times, former president and reformist Mohammad Khatami is considering entering the race, and has started to garner domestic support for his campaign:

Mohammad Khatami who was president from 1997 to 2004 has sent mixed signals about his willingness to run for the next year’s presidential election. In a short interview with reporters he said “I have retired”. However, in a recent visit to Oslo, Norway, he told reporters, “Unfortunately, in the political sphere there is no retirement … When we can be active, we will be active.”

“The Surge’s Misleading Success”

The New Republic 26 June 2008

While doubts about the wisdom of hiring a group of rag-tag Sunni militias–the so-called “Iraqi Awakening” or “Sons of Iraq“–to do our dirty work in combating al-Qaida in Iraq have long been common fare of skeptics of the surge, a new report just released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq,” gives official weight to these concerns. One of the first governmental reports to express ambivalence about the long-term commitment of these Sunni militias to U.S. goals in Iraq, it emphasizes normalization of the groups into mainstream Iraqi political and security bodies is proceeding at a snail’s-pace. Jobless, disenfranchised, and armed to the teeth, the “Awakening” militias could quickly become a nightmare for the Maliki government–and for our hopes to stabilize Iraq–if steps towards their incorporation into the Iraqi state are not promptly taken. Indeed, while critics have long worried that these groups could turn against coalition and Iraqi forces, the report suggests that this could already be happening:

Despite their relative success and growing numbers, during early 2008 some tribal security forces temporarily withdrew their support of [coalition forces] and the Iraqi security forces in Diyala and Babil provinces. Fraying relations between these groups and the Iraqi government in Anbar province caused a spike in violence in this area.

Even more worrisome, the GAO points out that our current “New Way Forward” strategy lacks a “cohesive plan” for how to forestall this meltdown. Until we come up with a blueprint for how to facilitate the transition of these groups from vigilante militias into committed partners in the Iraqi state, the report soberly suggests, our recent progress on security in Iraq–which has been afforded in great part by their cooperation–may be only short-lived.

“Climb Aboard The Bush Bus!”

The New Republic 25 June 2008

Walking past the AFL-CIO building on the way to work yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice a gaggle of union-supporters and other passers-by crowded around a massive tour bus plastered with pictures of President Bush. Organized by Americans United for Change (AUC), the “Bush Legacy Bus” turned out to be an enormous bio-fuel-powered mobile museum set to tour the country for the next several months and showcase an exhibit on the missteps and abuses of the Bush administration. The 45-foot, 28-ton glorified rock n’ roll tour-bus, I was told by press-secretary Julie Blust, would be road-tripping to 150 cities throughout the country, setting up shop mostly outside of Republican congressional offices, in order to remind Americans just how far the administration has taken the country off course (as if, with the president’s approval rating at 29 percent, this were necessary).

I was encouraged by a pimply teenage supporter to hop on the bus and take an “interactive tour” through the administration’s worst moments. At the back of the vehicle, a faux gasoline pump emblazoned with the emblem “G.O.P.–Grand Oil Party” stood nearby a glass display-case containing the Gortex boots and dog-tags of slain soldier Patrick McCaffrey. On the opposing wall, “The 3 R’s of No Child Left Behind: Rhetoric, Retreat, Renege” was scrawled in remedial handwriting. From another side, maudlin piano music (clashing mightily with the bus’s arena-rock aesthetic) wafted from a video-screen showing harrowed Katrina survivors in the Superdome.

According to AUC President Brad Woodhouse, the “Bush Bus” was actually the AUC’s best idea for how to ensure that the administration would not quietly fade into history in its twilight months. Among other projects considered were a “Worst President Ever” statue in Crawford, Texas, a “Bush is a Bust” museum in Houston, and a miniature golf-course in Waco dedicated to the administration’s fiascos. (The landmarks would have made a nice complement to plans for the George W. Bush Sewage Plant in San Francisco.)

Why did the “Bush Bus” ultimately win? According to Blust, the museum-on-wheels would be seen by many more than a stationary exhibit and, as she put it, would prove quite the spectacle. Can’t argue with that: Perhaps only the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile could strike a larger profile cruising down the highway than the red-white-and-blue caravan, its exterior plastered with colossal images of Bush and a list of his greatest offences in large letters–”foreclosures, record gas prices, global warming, eavesdropping…”

I asked Blust if the “Legacy Tour” project was intended to emulate the great rock n’ roll bus odysseys of yore (perhaps pegged to the Grateful Dead’s recent endorsement of Obama). “It’s not really a rock n’ roll tour,” she said, a bit flustered. “[But] we’ll try to do as many drugs as possible. Wreck some hotel rooms.”

“Intelligence Failure: The Postwar Pipedream”

The New Republic 18 June 2008

Perhaps the most damning conclusion of the committee’s report on prewar intelligence is that the Bush administration failed to take into account CIA and DIA suggestions that post-invasion Iraq would require a significant long-term U.S. troop presence to quell violent Baathist attempts to return to power, al-Qaida-related terrorist activity, and inter-ethnic/tribal violence. Though this is not the first time such ineptitude has been reported, the committee provides a particularly searing indictment of the administration’s post-invasion planning.

On this score, the committee’s findings are largely a reiteration of the conclusions of its 2007 report dedicated exclusively to exploring the discrepancies between the administration’s postwar pipe dreams and the realistic assessments of the country’s intelligence agencies. According to both reports, “Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.”

Exhibit A: While Cheney in 2002 explicitly agreed with “Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami” that “after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ’sure to erupt in joy,’” contemporaneous DIA intelligence estimates held that most Iraqis would treat the “liberators” with “ambivalence,” and that “significant force protection threats will emerge from the Baathists, the Jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any US occupation of Iraq.”

Exhibit B: While Bush preached that Iraq’s people would soon be able to “share in the progress and prosperity of our time,” a 2002 CIA study suggested that “Iraq currently appears to lack both the socio-economic and politico-cultural prerequisites that political scientists generally regard as necessary to nurture democracy.” Furthermore, as the report details, the possibility of establishing a stable Iraqi democracy in the aftermath of invasion was predicted by the intelligence community “to be a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.”

Unfortunately, the report does not take into account the “many other sources of information available to policymakers that would inform their views about post-war Iraq”–i.e., the Ajamis and Chalabis whose utopian post-invasion visions had captured the ear of the administration. The report does seem to imply, however, that it was the concerns of these “other sources,” and not those of sober and nuanced intelligence estimates, that ultimately dictated how the administration envisioned the future of Iraq.

“Intelligence Failure: Bush’s ‘Selective Interpretations’”

The New Republic 17 June 2008

In glancing through the 170 pages of the report “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” one cannot help but be struck by a certain mad logic to the administration’s interpretations of prewar intelligence findings. Without conclusive evidence that Iraq had restarted nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, and that it had the wherewithal to deliver these weapons to the U.S. or to distribute them to al-Qaida and its fellow-travelers, the administration focused on certain minute, dubious details of intelligence findings that would simultaneously give evidence of major Iraqi WMD programs and explain why the existence of these programs had been so difficult to establish with certainty in the first place.

For instance, the report makes clear just how crucial the existence of the supposed “mobile biological weapons laboratories” was to proving that Iraq had restarted its biological weapons program since the conclusion of the First Gulf War. The fact that these mobile bio-weapons labs could be easily moved throughout the country and hidden within “palm and date tree groves” provided the perfect explanation why there had been little direct observation of the supposed bio-weapons program since 1991. Of course, our knowledge of these mythical mobile-labs was tenuous at best, provided by only a handful of informants (one of whom was the famous “Curveball”), and post-war investigations proved that they had, in fact, never existed.

The same was true of the case for Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons program: Since intelligence could not determine conclusively whether Iraq had restarted such a program in earnest since 1991, the Bush administration based its case on scattered reports that Saddam had surreptitiously embedded his chemical weapons program into civilian chemical industries. Again, absent the existence of these dual-use chemical plants whose activities would evade outside detection, conclusively proving that Iraq had restarted a serious chemical weapons program would have been significantly more difficult. And again, the intelligence was proven wrong.

The most maddening instance of this selective interpretation of intelligence came in the administration’s attempts to argue that Iraq had both the capability and intent to use its WMDs against targets in the continental United States. Given very little evidence that this was true, the White House focused on limited and contradictory intelligence suggesting that Iraq was outfitting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with equipment for a chemical or biological attack. And when it was discovered that Iraq had attempted to purchase navigational equipment for its UAVs that contained maps of the 50 American states, it was reported that Hussein could be planning a major attack. According to prewar Air Force and DIA assessments, however, the UAVs were likely intended only for reconnaissance and the navigational software for “generic mapping” purposes. But again, when consideration of the full-range of evidence did not reveal any conclusive facts about Iraqi capabilities and intentions, the mere possibility of the existence of these retrofitted UAVs–as with the supposed mobile bio-weapons labs and dual-use chemical factories–was taken as indication that Iraq did, in fact, pose a clear and present danger.

While perhaps the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report does not reveal any shockingly new conclusions about the Bush administration’s manipulation of prewar Iraq intelligence, at the very least it affords one the opportunity to revisit these tragicomic intelligence debates, and to consider again how tenuous the administration’s interpretations of the available evidence on Iraqi weapons technology truly was.

“Intelligence Failure: Inside This Month’s Senate Report”

The New Republic 16 June 2008

The Senate intelligence committee released its two-part report this month exploring pre-war intelligence on Iraq and its use by the Bush administration. We asked James Martin, a Paul Mellon fellow at Cambridge University who writes on international security issues, to wade through the 172-page report for us. He’ll be guest-posting his findings here over the next few days.

Released only three days after the publication earlier this month of Scott McClellan’s damning indictment of the Bush administration, What Happened, new reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar Iraq intelligence seem to confirm the conclusions of the former press-secretary’s mea culpa: that the administration misused and misrepresented the findings of the intelligence community in the run-up to the war.

The findings of the first report, aptly named “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” strikes one now as rather anti-climatic–its conclusions having long since become common knowledge: “In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq,” writes committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), “Administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security.”

But while its conclusions are perhaps not breaking-news, the committee’s report is arguably the clearest and most direct presentation to date of the disconnect between what was known by the intelligence community in the run-up to the war and what was claimed to be true by the administration. On the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability, for example, the report analyzes in detail the White House’s willful disregard of the conclusions of the Department of Energy and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes claimed by the CIA to be part of Iraq’s supposed uranium enrichment apparatus were in fact being used for the purposes of a conventional rocket program–a point that was confirmed by the postwar findings of the Iraq Survey Group. And when confronted with CIA and DIA assessments that a purported meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in 2001 could not be confirmed, the administration continued to insist that such a meeting had taken place and that it proved high-level cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.

On the other hand, the report describes numerous instances of agreement between the intelligence community and the White House on the status of Iraq’s WMD program and Saddam’s ties to terrorism. On the question of Iraq’s biological weapons programs, for instance, the report argues that the administration’s public declarations were “substantiated” by available intelligence information. And, the report claims, the White House was on sure-footing in arguing for official Iraqi tolerance of the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaida-related terrorists within Iraq prior to the invasion.

The impassioned minority views of some of the committee’s dissenting Republican members–Senators Kit Bond, Saxby Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr–focus on these areas of agreement, and argue that charges of dissimulation on the part of the administration are weakened by the fact that prominent Democratic members of Congress relied upon the same intelligence information in drumming up support for the war. If the White House was lying, they claim, then what were Kerry, Edwards, and Clinton doing?

But as Dan Froomkin at the WashPost points out, the fact that Congress “bought the administration line” does not necessarily mean that the two were operating on a level playing field: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you’ve engaged in a propaganda campaign,” he writes, “by noting that it worked.”

It’s likely that the administration had access to more intelligence on Iraq than Congress, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has recently argued, although the extent of its knowledge remains unclear. Unfortunately, the Senate committee report takes into account only a handful of official intelligence estimates and excludes from consideration “less formal communications” between the White House and the intelligence community that undoubtedly contained even more details on the status (or non-status) of Iraq’s WMD programs. A more comprehensive investigation into these other intelligence channels would help clarify what information exactly was available to the White House and what to Congress, and the extent to which we can rightfully accuse the former of having lied to the public about the reasons for going to war.

“How Iraq spawned wider terrorist chaos”

Salon.com 14 April 2008

As experts long warned, Islamic militants steeped in urban warfare against U.S. troops in Iraq have expanded their violent campaign beyond Iraq’s borders.

[credit: James Martin]

On the outskirts of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, the jagged ruins of Nahr el-Bared rise over the Mediterranean Sea. Once one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps and an urban center of more than 30,000 people, Nahr el-Bared today recalls images of Berlin or Dresden from 1945 — its buildings blasted to rubble from endless mortar and machine-gun fire and its main thoroughfare reduced to a graveyard of hollowed-out foundations and burnt wreckage. Since its founding 60 years ago in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the nascent state of Israel to neighboring countries, Nahr el-Bared had grown into a modest-size city that boasted one of northern Lebanon’s most popular markets. Today, its muddy roads are choked with the skeletons of automobiles, its few scattered residents living in ramshackle garages and shanties, or in the crumbling debris of what were once apartment buildings lining its streets.

Nahr el-Bared’s destruction owes much to the spread of militant jihad to and from U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Back in early 2005, Porter Goss, then head of the CIA, warned Congress that the war would spawn a new breed of Islamic militants who would “leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.” Middle East experts have long warned that U.S. actions in Iraq would stir up a deadly hornets’ nest, with consequences potentially spreading throughout the region. On a trip into ravaged Nahr el-Bared this January, what I saw and heard there confirmed those dark predictions.

Nahr el-Bared, whose name in Arabic means “cold river,” was destroyed in the summer of 2007 in heavy fighting between the Lebanese army and the previously little-known Fatah al-Islam — an al-Qaida-linked group of international Sunni extremists that emerged in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps in the aftermath of Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel. The fighting began in May 2007, when Fatah al-Islam militants slaughtered Lebanese soldiers on the outskirts of Nahr el-Bared, prompting a massive military retaliation. In the battle that ensued, the heavily armed and well-funded extremists — many of whom had come from fighting U.S. forces in Iraq — managed to hold back the Lebanese military for three months, using tactics they had learned in the urban war zones of Iraq.

“Fatah al-Islam was part of a group that was with Zarqawi in Iraq,” says Ahmad Moussalli, an expert in Islamist movements and a professor at the American University in Beirut, referring to the erstwhile head of al-Qaida in Iraq killed by U.S. forces in June 2006. “By virtue of fighting in Iraq, they learned many techniques for fighting a regular army. They were very well trained in urban warfare.”

What’s worse, adds Hilal Khashan, a colleague of Moussalli’s at the American University in Beirut, Fatah al-Islam’s fighters may be the first of a new generation of extremists to expand their fight beyond Iraq. Their suicidal stand at Nahr el-Bared could signify the beginning of a new era of international Islamist violence, Khashan says, brought about by an exodus of battle-hardened militants from places like Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul.