The LA Times reveled some insight on what we can expect mid-September in the report on the presidents "surge" in Iraq. It also reminded anyone remotely paying attention that the mid-September report--misleadingly referred to as the Petraeus-Crocker report--will be a political document written for, and only for, misleading the US audience into a continuation of failed policy.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

One would hope that the frame "Petraeus-Crocker" would disappear, but it won't. One would hope people will see through this report, but they won't. For a quick reminder, here is what the President said, and has been saying of the much anticipated mid-September report. This is from his July assessment of "progress" in Iraq:

I will repeat, as the Commander-in-Chief of a great military who has supported this military and will continue to support this military, not only with my -- with insisting that we get resources to them, but with -- by respecting the command structure, I'm going to wait for David to come back -- David Petraeus to come back and give us the report on what he sees. And then we'll use that data, that -- his report to work with the rest of the military chain of command, and members of Congress, to make another decision, if need be.

That frame should end as well. This is not David's--David Petraeus' report, it is this administrations spin of Petraeus' mid-September briefing.

If you think back, the July "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report" that claimed that "satisfactory performance" on nearly half of the proposed benchmarks was so fundamentally flawed that I doubt the White House can flaw it any more this time around. They set a fake bar, way too high, and now they won't be able to reach past it while still seeming realistic. They may have burned themselves (why they did this is a mystery, as they stated repeatedly that the July report came "a little less than a month after the full complement of troops arrived" in Iraq). Still, the bottom-line remains as plain as day. The premise was to "surge" in order to clear, hold and build. In that time political reconciliation and momentum was to be generated. We've done some of the former, but none of the latter. Prospects of this changing are slim to nil.

This Presidents mid-September report will be a farce. The LA Times cites internal debate as such:

"There were some in the drafting of the report that said, 'Well, we can claim progress,'" the administration official said. "There were others who said: 'Wait a second. Sure we can claim progress, but it's not credible to ... just neglect the fact that it's had no effect on the ground.'"

Another tactic they are considering is to make Petraeus and Crocker visit Congress in a private congressional briefing and having Secretary Rice and Gates talk to the full Congress in the public domain. It's going to be all spin. An alternative to the Presidents mid-September report on his "surge" is the early September report carried out by the Government Accountability Office that will be apolitical and pragmatic not political and misleading.

Labels: foreign affairs, foreign policy, Iraq, surge, WoT

This comes from a post at National Security Intelligence by Tom Quiggin (his work was celebrated here) and Sir Richard Dearlove. The post was the first in a pair that argue that secrecy, while necessary in certain circumstances, can in fact hinder the counter terrorism process, among other things... I'll leave interested readers free to read the posts but want to archive the "rules" here and comment. They write...

Louise Richardson, author of The Roots of Terrorism, spells out six rules for countering terrorism to which we can add a seventh. They are:

• Have a defensible and achievable goal;

• Live by your principles – don’t be goaded by the terrorist into behaving differently;

• Know your enemy, intimately;

• Isolate terrorists within their own communities;

• Engage others in countering terrorism with you;

• Have patience and keep your perspective – be prepared for the long-term;

• Build a process which is unambiguous and can function strategically and operationally and in is open-ended.

In order of appearance... I don't think eradicating terrorism is a "defensible" goal. Limiting it and starving it of sustenance is better. President Bush seemed to be on the verge of getting this in his recent press conference when he said "[i]t matters to the security of people here at home if we don't work to change the conditions that cause 19 kids to be lured onto airplanes to come and murder our citizens." He was speaking of Iraq here so he still hasn't comprehended the fact that Iraq is precisely the condition he is referring to.

"Live by you principles." Good God we have lost that round. PATRIOT ACT, FISA, unilateralism, torture, habeas corpus...

"Know your enemy." What is the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? And a Kurd? What is the difference al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and al Qaeda of 9/11 and all the other al Qaeda outfits. The difference between al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and a Baathist insurgent? They are not all the same and saying they are is lowest common denominator drivel for the masses and does nothing for the war and much for propaganda.

Isolate to terrorists. That's hard to do, especially when your actions facilitate there survival. They are everywhere, anywhere; but at the same time nowhere.

Accept the help of others. Mixed bag. We went into Afghanistan with the international community, although some (Rummy and Cheney) wanted otherwise. Those two won the argument as we went into Iraq (with little genuine international support). Now we're begging for a larger UN presence. And you know what? We're lucky for it. If the UN had the belligerence of some in the Bush Administration they'd ignore us. Furthermore, we skip opportunities to try to incorporate enemies (Syria and Iran) into our effort. Without exploring this avenue we not only dump the precedent of talking to our enemies we leave a stone unturned.

Prepare for the long-term. Meaning don't use (the threat of) terrorism for politics. Short-term gains against terrorism often give terrorist a rhetorical card to use in the long-term (justification for actions and recruitment). It should be clear that the "long war" will not be won with a military. Especially without a viable political track. Iraq is making that painfully clear.

Open-endedness. best covered by Quiggin: "This will require training and practice exercises, as well as scenario planning and building capacity. Little point exists for working in stove pipes which merely come together, if at all, at the top level. Stated another way, we need to escape from the tyranny of the tactical and advance to a strategic, whole-of-government approach."

Labels: Afghanistan, counter terrorism, foreign policy, Iraq, WoT

Nick Thompson wrote a great Op-Ed in the NY Times early last week that I've just now had a chance to blog about (I was on vacation). It basically explores a strategy meant for the Cold War that would be a useful contribution to our current War on Terrorism. Many of its declarations are a common topic of discussion here at American Entropy. Some background first. The X article was a foreign policy prescription from the late 40s. It appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs and was later accredited to George Kennan (aka "X"). Kennan was the State Department’s policy planning chief at the time and wrote anonymously. Kennan's article was obfuscated and distorted from his intended meaning. Alas, he was incorrectly recognized as the father of the containment strategy; a title he denied. His basic argument was that the Soviet Union and its form of oppressive communist ideology was self-defeating; it offered nothing but oppression. Therefore, the United States could simply outlast it. Kennan warned that engaging the USSR and Communism, especially militarily, would offer nothing more than short-term political backslapping in the best case scenario. However, the mid- to long-term consequences were actually benefiting the USSR. An early version of blowback. Obviously our foreign policy in the post-X article years went awry as we escalated tensions with the USSR and Communism: Arms race, Vietnam, Latin America, etc... With that point I hope you see where this all comes together in the current context (the WoT).

Here is a cliping of Nick's NYT piece:

Today we face vastly different challenges from those the nation confronted right after World War II. Our enemy is dispersed; there’s a constant threat of suicide attacks; nuclear weapons can be hidden in suitcases instead of dropped from airplanes. Still, when it comes to overarching strategy, Kennan’s desired but never executed policy from 60 years ago offers profound wisdom for today.

Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.

Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.

A 21st-century rendering of X’s vision of containment would involve the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, an unambiguous renunciation of torture and an abandonment of the notion that our legal and moral norms don’t apply to the current struggle. Kennan believed we gave our opponents a propaganda victory each time we acted in a manner unfitting of our ideals.

“To avoid destruction,” Kennan concluded the X article, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

We can’t know for sure how his recommended, wholly political version of containment would have fared in the cold war. But we do know that a militant foreign policy didn’t lead to nuclear war and did, eventually, help bring about the collapse of Soviet communism. We also know that a strong offensive policy has yet to succeed against Al Qaeda.

Kennan died two years ago at the age of 101. One of his last public statements was a critique, in 2002, of the looming Iraq invasion. War, he said, was too unpredictable, and this one wasn’t worth it. As he wrote to Lippmann six decades ago, “Let us find health and vigor and hope, and the diseased portion of the earth will fall behind of its own doing. For that we need no aggressive strategic plans, no provocation of military hostilities, no showdowns.”

[UPDATE] I'm not really prescribing a "wait them out" strategy (and I don't know why it was quoted that way, those words don't appear in the post!) but a less confrontational strategy. More targeted special ops work, and less (unilateral) invasions and belligerence.

We were successful in Afghanistan using the Int'l Community, regional connections (including Iran) and special forces. In Iraq, we threw that success out the window and did exactly the opposite (though minor special forces were used). And now we are paying dearly for it.

Radical militant Islam has less to offer than Communism did. But we enable the spread of it with arrogant foreign policy and misguided doctrines. Had we sat back and/or used the Afghanistan model who knows where we would be today. Maybe (likely) not it Iraq and/or not in a worse position than we were in after 9/11.

Labels: FP, WoT