As a student of international affairs, I make it my business to follow some of the more significant publications in the field; particularly the official journal of the secret Illuminati world government, Foreign Affairs.  (For those readers who aren’t  John Birch Society alumni, the publisher is oft unjustly maligned Council on Foreign Relations.)

Anyway, when I opened my mailbox and took a look at the July/August edition of the journal, I was taken aback by the feature essay, penned by our illustrious Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleezza Rice and entitled “The New American Realism.” (At least, that is what is printed on the cover page, the formal title is “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World,” hearkening back to her 2000 campaign essay “Promoting the National Interest.“)  As I gazed incredulously at the bold-faced lettering and its soft blue background, I thought to myself “…’Saddam Hussein shelters al Qaeda’…’greeted as liberators’…’ending tyranny in our world’…do Dr. Rice and I have the same understanding of realism?”

According to Hans Morgenthau, one of the progenitors of classical realist theory in international relations:

For realism, theory consists in ascertaining facts and giving them meaning through reason. It assumes that the character of a foreign policy can be ascertained only through the examination of the political acts performed and of the foreseeable consequences of these acts. Thus we can find out what statesmen have actually done, and from the foreseeable consequences of their acts we can surmise what their objectives might have been. (Emphasis added.)

Morgenthau, of course, addresses the issue of a realist theory of politics, but it is generally understood that the praxis which grows out of that theory must be similarly fact based.  In other words, you get the facts (reality), think about your options (forseeable consequences), and take whatever action you think most likely to serve your interests within the consrtaints of political reality. To borrow from another great realist, “politics is the art of the possible.”

The strange thing about this “new American realism” proffered by Secretary Rice is that it is seemingly bereft of reality.  It is, among other things, self-contradictory:

For the United States, promoting democratic development must remain a top priority. Indeed, there is no realistic alternative that we can — or should — offer to influence the peaceful evolution of weak and poorly governed states. The real question is not whether to pursue this course but how.

[...] Democracy, it is said, cannot be imposed, particularly by a foreign power. This is true but beside the point. It is more likely that tyranny has to be imposed.

I’ll grant that there is a fine line between “promote” and “impose”, but my sense is that the current ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq lean more toward the latter.  And tyranny is supposedly the unnatural political system?  I have no love for authoritarianism, but I do recognize the fact that it has been the predominant form of governance for the last 10,000 years of human civilization.  However loathsome tyranny may be, to simply dismiss it as a political aberration is disingenuous.

On the Middle East:

For six decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, a basic bargain defined the United States’ engagement in the broader Middle East: we supported authoritarian regimes, and they supported our shared interest in regional stability. After September 11, it became increasingly clear that this old bargain had produced false stability. There were virtually no legitimate channels for political expression in the region. But this did not mean that there was no political activity. There was — in madrasahs and radical mosques. It is no wonder that the best-organized political forces were extremist groups. And it was there, in the shadows, that al Qaeda found the troubled souls to prey on and exploit as its foot soldiers in its millenarian war against the “far enemy.”

One response would have been to fight the terrorists without addressing this underlying cause. Perhaps it would have been possible to manage these suppressed tensions for a while. Indeed, the quest for justice and a new equilibrium on which the nations of the broader Middle East are now embarked is very turbulent. But is it really worse than the situation before?

Actually, yes, it is.  Under President Bush’s leadership the United States has traded “false stability” in the Near East for outright instability by unleashing the underlying political fricitons between Shia and Sunni Muslims, eliminating all the regional checks on Iran’s power, and backing an aggressive Israeli stance toward Hamas and Hezbollah that has proved counter-productive.

And those authoritarian regimes we used to back?  Well, they’re still in place; happily presiding over their people from Cairo, Riyadh, and Jordan.  Essentially, the only Bush accomplishment in the Middle East was moving the bulk of America’s regional military presence out of Saudi Arabia (and away from Mecca and Medina) and to Qatar; an action that probably could have been taken without all the other fuss.

On Palestine:

[...] The Palestinian people must ultimately make a choice about which future they desire, and it is only democracy that gives them that choice and holds open the possibility of a peaceful way forward to resolve the existential question at the heart of their national life. The United States, Israel, other states in the region, and the international community must do everything in their power to support those Palestinians who would choose a future of peace and compromise. When the two-state solution is finally realized, it will be because of democracy, not despite it.

Except that in 2006 Palestinians did exercise democracy and they voted for the party of war, Hamas.  But this didn’t count, according to Rice, because Hamas proved itself incapable of governing by, well, being Hamas (which usually entails blowing things up).  Thus, the U.S., Israel, and the secular Palestinian leadership, Fatah, refused to recognize the election results and general chaos ensued, with Hamas seizing control of the Gaza Strip and Fatah holding the West Bank.  Now, it looks as if even Israel may have recongized the unsavory politcal reality of Hamas’ popular appeal.

I could go on, but I think I have effectively communicated the tenor of the Secretary’s piece.  Essentially, President Bush and Secretary Rice have looked at the world and found grave threats to American security that can only be attenuated by carrying the banner of democracy to the far corners of the globe.  The only faults with this argument are that the threats are exagerated, the solution is unsound, and democracy is usually won only after several decades or more of gradual exapnsion of civil and political rights, won at great cost by courageous advocates of liberty in their native country – not by invasion.  But that’s old realism talking; Secretary Rice has moved beyond her foreign policy education to a new plane of (un)reality.

Who would have thought that the Near East’s beacon of secularism could be united with the region’s most notorious theocracy by something as simple as crushing another people’s aspiration to statehood:

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey and Iran have been carrying out coordinated strikes against Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, a top Turkish general said Thursday. It was the first confirmation by a military official of Iranian-Turkish cooperation in the fight against the rebels.

[...]

“We are sharing intelligence with Iran, we are talking, we are coordinating,” General Basbug said at a security conference in Istanbul, CNN-Turk television reported. “When they start an operation, we do, too.”

Of course, the story makes no mention of protests on the part of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, but then why would it?  Iraq’s state of disarray leaves it basically powerless in the face of its neighbors, capable of mere tongue-lashings even when Turkish ground troops violate its sovereignty. It is, for the time being, utterly dependent on the United States to protect its interests in such cases and Washington has no sympathy for the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) either.

Moreover, Iraq itself has little desire to lose territory to Kurdish separatism.  Though it would certainly rather not have Turkish and Iranian troops operating on its soil, such incursions are arguably less of threat to Iraqi security than the prospect of a large scale Kurdish secession.

From the New York Times this morning:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

[...]

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

It’s certainly a good thing someone is looking into this prodigal allocation of Defense Department funds…five years into the war.  Is this really all that surprising, though?  With almost $20 billion of reconstruction aid funneled to Iraq and Afghanistan through various federal channels, we are still left with a pair of shattered countries, each with crumbling infrastructure, desperate power shortages, and, in Iraq’s case, stagnant oil production.  Should we really be shocked that taxpayer money is being siphoned off to by Ahmed Chalabi a new diamond studded collar for his purebred Affenpinscher?  Okay, I may have made that last part up, but you get the idea…

It’s an all too familiar scenario from the 21st century urban battlefield.  An Iraqi soldier posted at the security barrier in Sadr City, Baghdad, is killed by sniper.  American military advisers are dispatched to rectify the situation.  Their solution: lase the building housing the sniper and blast it with a Hellfire missile.  This is but one example of the intermittent but fierce combat faced by U.S. troops in the city.  Quoth the New York Times:

The formal truce that was announced in the Green Zone with great fanfare on Monday has meant nothing here. Shiite militias have been trying to blast gaps in the wall, firing at the American troops who are completing it and maneuvering to pick off the Iraqi soldiers who have been charged with keeping an eye on the partition.

American forces have answered with tank rounds, helicopter rocket strikes and even satellite-guided bombs to try to silence the militia fire. On some stretches, the urban landscape has been transformed as the Americans have leveled buildings militia fighters have used as perches to mount their attacks.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, an official for the United Nations is speaking out about lethal raids by “foreign intelligence services” that are, in some cases, taking the lives of civilians with no accountability.  The official doesn’t specify details about these foreign agencies, but my guess is he refers to CIA or SOCOM missions targeting al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

If America’s chief interest in these two conflicts is finding and killing international terrorists who might otherwise strike the United States proper, this is all just fine.  However, if we intend to fulfill John McCain’s rosy scenario of a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan with minimal violence by 2013, we have another thing coming.  Dropping a 2,000 pound JDAM on a building in Baghdad to eliminate a sniper may be tactically expedient, but it won’t win very many “hearts and minds;” certainly not those of the building’s owners when they return, nor their extended family if they happened to be inside the building at the time.

Americans face a difficult decision about the conflicts in which we are now engaged.  If we decide that democratic state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan is truly in our interests, we must realistically assess what accomplishing this will entail.  It will mean a long-term commitment for years to come.  It will mean recruiting more troops for the Army and Marine Corps and putting them in harms way; essentially expanding the “surge” and making it permanent.  It will mean changing tactics by drawing on the successes of those American units that have worked with local officials, successfully blending the military and political, to secure their areas of operation.  It will mean all of this, but it will still will not guarantee victory.

On the other hand, we could scale back our objectives and simply focus on attacking the terrorist threat in both countries without regard for the broader political implications of our actions.  This path, too, has its risks and comes with no assurance of success.  The only thing of which we can be certain is that if we maintain our present compromise approach of using excessive firepower to make up for deficiencies in personnel, we will neither build democracies nor secure America when our wars come to an end.

This week media attention has been fixated on a suitably dramatic pseudo-event that could have been lifted right out of Daniel Boorstin’s The Image. I speak, of course, about the testimony delivered by General David Patreus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Iraq War before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The hearings had all the hallmarks of a Congressional media event; administration spokesmen trying to defend the cause, dueling Senatorial personalities trying to win points for their political campaigns, and incessant television coverage.

In reading the newspaper reporting on the hearings, I was struck by a couple of graphs in the New York Times today:

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration had abandoned the benchmarks as a strict standard of progress because establishing a secure Iraq would also depend on factors other than political and military progress.

Over two days of testimony, General Petraeus repeatedly was asked to explain the conditions that would allow further withdrawals, but he answered that they were not based on some easily defined measurements.

Asked for elaboration, the senior administration official said, “It’s a very hard concept to explain publicly because it doesn’t feature a sort of setting of the dial. It features what we call a running assessment.”

First, we decided that the war was not militarily winnable and we could only succeed by fostering progress on the political front within Iraq, which is where the 18 benchmarks came from. Now, it seems the benchmarks are out. So military progress isn’t enough and political progress isn’t enough and our assessment of whether we’re winning isn’t based on any established metrics. Are they serious? How is the United States supposed to interpret the impact it’s having in Iraq if not by concrete political and security standards? Should we just let the Iraqi’s text in votes for which side they think is winning?

Then, of course, there is the strange contradiction between General Patreus’ recommendation to place a hold on draw downs of American troops from Iraq and President Bush’s expected decision to return to regular 12 month tours of duty. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Granted, our servicemen and women have gone truly above and beyond the call of duty in Iraq and deserve to be treated fairly. But where does the President expect to get the troops to carry out the mission?

I think Dr. Andrew Bacevich put it best in his own remarks before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday: “The choice is one that we can no longer afford to dodge: it’s either less war or more warriors.” And I don’t see anyone out there pitching a new draft…

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s offensive against Shia strongman Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army shows no signs of letting up and is increasingly drawing in American forces, according to the Washington Post. U.S. armored forces, spearheaded by Stryker APCs and backed up by attack helicopters have been dueling with militias in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.  Americans are also increasingly involved in supporting the Iraqi army as it fights in Basra, coming to the rescue when the Iraqi’s are in danger of being overrun. Word has also come out that more than 1000 Iraqi soldiers and police either sat out the fight or deserted, prompting a worried Maliki to rush in reinforcements  This as the Iraqi security forces are supposed to be demonstrating their self-sufficiency. .

Meanwhile, questions are being raised about why Maliki undertook this offensive in the first place.  This might sound like a rather odd line of questioning, but it is surprisingly apropos since the Prime Minister didn’t bother to consult with the U.S. at all before launching the attack, so we don’t really know the answer.  A growing number of observers have concluded that Maliki has “fired the first shot in the Iraqi elections” and is seeking to liquidate a major rival in Iraq’s Shi’te community, namely Sadr.  This view has been lent some credence by the PM’s threat to freeze Sadr out of the elections if he does not disarm.

In summation, the situation appears to be that the elected head of government in Iraq has used state security forces to further his personal political goals by eliminating a major rival; either through combat, or by forcing him to give up his militia (and thus the source of his power).  So much for political reconciliation.  Not that Sadr is the kind of leader you’d want in charge of Iraq, but it would have been nice if Maliki had tried approaching the problem with a little more tact, a lot more cooperation, and significantly fewer 5.45×39mm rounds.

Only days after President Bush sung the praises of America’s troop surge in reducing violence in Iraq, things in the war zone have taken on a decidedly pallid cast.  On Sunday, the number of U.S. troops killed in action reached 4000 with several tens of thousands more injured.  Vice President Dick Cheney’s Iraqi excursion was greeted with a massive car bomb in Baghdad as well as mortar attacks on the fortified Green Zone in the center of the city.  Today, a barrage of rockets struck the American compound.  Meanwhile, in the southern city of Basra the ad hoc cease fire declared by Shi’ite militias under Moqtada al-Sadr appears to be breaking down.

None of this is good news, but the events in Basra seem especially troubling to me.  The outbreak of violence between the militias and Iraqi security forces (who will be left holding the bag once Britain finishes its withdrawal) indicates the lack of agency on the part of coalition forces in this war.  The relative calm in Iraq has been purchased with large sums of money and the tacit cooperation of several warring factions, notably indigenous Sunni fighters in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province and Shia militia men in the capital and areas south.  The tragic success of ethnic cleansing in dissolving many ethnically mixed neighborhoods has also played a hand in quelling the carnage.

While the addition of extra American troops may have been helpful, it has not succeeded in degrading the combat power of the various insurgent factions.  More importantly, I have seen no evidence that we have changed the political interests of these groups such that they would consider pursuing their objectives through non-violent means (assuming their objectives could even be pursued in such a way).  Neither has Iraq’s government made very much progress toward the “benchmarks” of sectarian reconciliation, enacting a hydrocarbon law, or constitutional revision.  My view is that the “peace” is a façade, and we may be witnessing the first cracks in the edifice.  It is too soon to tell whether the present flare up will endure or fade, but I fear it is only a matter of time before the pendulum of war swings in the opposite direction.

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and what a tumultuous five years it’s been. We have gone from toppling a crazed dictator with WMD, to lighting the beacon of democracy in the Arab world, to just trying to stave off an abyssal maelstrom of genocidal violence that would provide a haven for America-hating terrorists. With oil at $112 a barrel the other day, I even thought the administration might own up to its long-standing designs to feed global petroleum markets with Iraqi crude, but the price has dropped since, so don’t count on it.

All the major players in American politics had their own shtick for the occasion. The president, obviously, went on the defensive, asserting once again the importance of removing Saddam Hussein from power. The Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, each lambasted the war, though their speeches were somewhat overshadowed by the great race debate. John McCain added the dramatic flourish of a trip to the Middle East to highlight his case for a continued presence in Iraq, but then lost points for confusing al Qaeda with “extermists”…uh, well…other extremists, of the Shia variety. Even a few rowdy mobs hit the streets, communicating their view that war is a criminally irresponsible anachronism with at least the impact of a Dennis Kucinich speech.

Where do we stand in Iraq today? The recent headlines have been about the apparent success of the “surge”, with casualties down across the board. (Under 1000 civilian dead in February!) Of course, this neglects two key points. 1) The surge of 20,000 additional U.S. troops is unsustainable. Even our original force of 130,000 troops was barely sustainable. The surge will come to an end, and in fact this may already be in the works. 2) Success in containing violence owes a lot to the present cooperation of the local thugs who were responsible for most of it. Sunni “Awakening Councils” (think neighborhood watch with an AK-47 and hand grenades) grew tired of extremist Saudis telling them what to do and were more than happy to take American paychecks for kicking the foreigners out. Shia militias, too, have largely been biding their time and refraining from new attacks.

Don’t expect this to last…the interests of Iraq’s sectarian groups are very different from those of Washington. And then let’s not forget about those uppity Kurds and their disgruntled Turkish neighbors. The point is, I think the current calm is an illusion. Iraq is still a powder keg waiting to go off, and there isn’t much American military power can do stop it. For all the U.S. training and equipment it has received, the Iraqi military is even less capable of making a difference. (Anybody remember Vietnamization?)

There is one thing that this war is doing for America and that is draining billions of dollars from our treasury. The Nation has a great piece relating some of the opportunity costs of the $522 billion we’ve already sunk into Mesopotamia. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, the long term costs of Iraq could reach $3 trillion. Oh, and by the way…that’s all on credit. U.S. national debt is at $9 trillion and climbing (roughly 70% of GDP) which will come in a lot of handy down the road when we have to figure out a way to cover multi-trillion dollar shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security benefits. Basically what I’m saying is, this war thing may have been a bad idea…