We Don't Even Have A Partner To Receive Aid

As a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of war go down, the Administration and Congress has talked of a "civilian surge" in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, providing more non-military and development aid to both countries. This was realized in the Kerry-Lugar bill, which gave $7.5 billion in aid over 5 years to Pakistan. It was one of Joe Biden's old bills that they repurposed, and would give an opportunity for the US to help Pakistanis out of grinding poverty and achieve some goodwill with them.

And Pakistan went apeshit:

The Obama administration's strategy for bolstering Pakistan's civilian government was shaken Wednesday when political opposition and military leaders there sharply criticized a new U.S. assistance plan as interfering with the country's sovereignty.

Although President Obama has praised the $7.5 billion, five-year aid program -- approved by Congress last week -- Pakistani officials have objected to provisions that require U.S. monitoring of everything from how they spend the money to the way the military promotes senior officers.

Their criticism threatens to complicate the administration's efforts in the region, where Pakistan's assistance is seen as crucial to the war in Afghanistan.

"Obviously, it demonstrates we've still got work to do," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said of the Pakistani criticism.

Kerry and Lugar tried to push back by calling out some myths being put forward by the Pakistanis. For example:

MYTH: The $7.5 billion (Rs. 62, 500 crores) authorized by the bill comes with strings attached for the people of Pakistan.

FACT: There are no conditions on Pakistan attached to these funds.

The $7.5 billion (Rs. 62,500 crore) authorized is all for non-military aid. These funds are unconditioned— they are a pledge of U.S. friendship to the Pakistani people. There are strict measures of financial accountability on these funds that Congress is imposing on the U.S. executive branch—not the Pakistani government, to make sure the money is being spent properly and for the purposes intended. Such accountability measures have been welcomed by Pakistani commentators to ensure that funds meant for schools, roads and clinics actually reach the Pakistani people and are not wasted.

MYTH: The bill impinges on Pakistan’s sovereignty.

FACT: Nothing in the bill threatens Pakistani sovereignty. Period.

This bill is an extended hand of friendship, from the people of America to the people of Pakistan. It will fund schools, roads, energy infrastructure, and medical clinics. Even when Americans are going through a deep recession and tough economic times, the United States is pledging $7.5 billion (Rs. 62,500 crore) as a long-term commitment to Pakistan. Those seeking to undermine this partnership, to advance their own narrow partisan or institutional agendas, are doing a serious disservice to the people of the United States and of Pakistan.

But this isn't going to be good enough. The real problem here is that the Pakistani people HATE the Americans, and any effort to infringe on their sovereignty will be met with this kind of anger, whether true or false. There are many in Pakistan who would probably want to be left alone rather than be given aid as a fig leaf for the destruction and death in the region. And disapproval of this package probably equals popular support across much of the country. In particular, the Pakistani army is angered by this, I would guess because so much of it is non-military aid, and they control a lot of the economy there. And remember, the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence is intimately linked to insurgent forces of the kind who may have blown up the Indian Embassy in Kabul, just like they did a year ago.

If we can't give money to Pakistan without an international incident, it says quite a lot about our prospects for controlling outcomes in the region.

Surprise Talks With Cuba

Tomorrow the US and other Western countries meet with Iran for diplomatic talks made more difficult by the disclosure of a nuclear facility in Qom. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the information out there about the facility, but nonetheless, it at least hasn't stopped the talks, although it's probably crippled them. On a couple other fronts, diplomatic actions are moving forward. North Korea has been offered direct bilateral talks on ending their nuclear program, as a preface to bringing them back into the six-party fold. That's further than we've gone with the DPRK in close to a decade, and perhaps could yield some substantive results. Meanwhile, a US diplomat held unscheduled talks with the Cuban government yesterday:

NEW YORK - A senior American diplomat has held unannounced, high-level talks in Havana with the Cuban government, three State Department officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday, raising hopes for a thaw in long-icy relations.

The talks were the first of their kind in years between representatives of the U.S. and Cuban governments, the bitter Cold War rivals among whom trust appears to be gradually building.

Bisa Williams, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, met with Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Dagoberto Rodriguez, visited an area affected by hurricanes in the Western province of Pinar del Rio and toured a government agricultural facility during a six-day trip to Cuba this month, the officials told AP [...]

One U.S. official described the talks as "respectful" and said they were more significant for having taken place, than for any substantive breakthroughs between the two sides, which have been at odds since shortly after former Cuban leader Fidel Castro marched into Havana on New Year's Day 1959.

"We were going over ground we haven't gone over for a long time," said the official. "Each side was taking advantage of the opportunity to size each other up."

I've said before that Cuba is the low-hanging fruit on the international diplomacy tree. The Obama Administration could pick up a quick and easy victory toward peace there if they just engaged. This unannounced set of talks is a sign that they might feel the same way.

Doing Away With Those Inconvenient Civil Liberties

I still don't understand Mel Zelaya's game plan in Honduras, but it's pretty telling that the ruling regime, who staged a coup to remove Zelaya from office, immediately turned their thoughts to eliminating civil liberties the moment they felt any dissent toward their brazen action. Kind of tells you what kind of people we're dealing with.

The new restrictions, including a ban on non-authorized gatherings and a media clampdown, aimed to protect "the large majority of the Honduran population which is not engaged with groups of violent protesters," according to an announcement on national television.

The restrictions were announced on the eve of mass protests called by Zelaya for Monday, the three-month anniversary of the coup.

Zelaya has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy since his surprise return to the country last week.

The right, which has been praising the coup and chiding the President for "coddling" Zelaya, self-evidently history's greatest monster, will probably find a way to explain away the state-sponsored supression at work here. They always do. As Glenn Greenwald notes in a fantastic post today, they are the kings of moral relativism, having convinced themselves that violating international treaties and suspending laws and dealing in the weapons trade and stealing elections are fine for us and our allies, but reprehensible for those designated enemies of freedom and liberty. To quote Greenwald, "It's the adolescent self-love of believing that 'X, by definition, is good when I do it and bad when you do it.'"

Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Soldiers

According to Tom Andrews, the McChrystal strategy in Afghanistan would need just under that many to carry out the mission:

Embedded in General Stanley McChrystal's classified assessment of the war in Afghanistan is his conclusion that a successful counterinsurgency strategy will require 500,000 troops over five years.

This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Spencer Ackerman cautions against reading too much into the numbers, saying that they would include Afghan Army and police boots on the ground, which in McChrystal's ultimate vision reaches 400,000. So we're talking about 100,000 coalition troops for five years, which roughly correlates to current levels. However, the Afghan security forces that make up 4/5 of this commitment, which is aspirational and not concrete at the moment, are 90% illiterate, frequently desert their posts and simply cannot be relied upon as a fighting force.

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn't the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

In addition, maintaining a 400,000-strong security force would probably take three times the gross national product of the country at a minimum. It's naive to the extreme to assume that the Afghans will live up to the 400,000 end of the bargain, and similarly to assume that McChrystal would not seek reinforcements from American troops should the Afghan security forces falter. Putting the number 400,000 Afghan security forces on a piece of paper and expecting them to deliver in any meaningful way is as silly as expecting that they have a legitimate government to defend.

Which means that US military might and treasure will get dragged in once again to another futile war, with an escalation bringing mostly destruction to Afghanistan instead of development. It is for this reason - and maybe others - that the President may be rethinking such a commitment. Dan Froomkin has a superb post about how the President could actually lead on this issue by changing his mind.

Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that over the last several months, what's emerged when it comes to Afghan policy is a sort of consensus of the realists -- from across the political spectrum. The consensus: That our national interests in Afghanistan are pretty limited and that the harder we try to change things over there, the more resistance we face; that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire where escalation only leads to more escalation, not victory; and that what little we could possibly accomplish there is not worth more American blood [...]

Another important thing that could happen here is that, by fully explaining his decision, Obama could go a long way toward restoring a balanced and rational sense of what it means to "support the troops." Former president George W. Bush and his political henchmen used that phrase as a bludgeon to beat Democrats into submission on any issue even vaguely related to national security -- even when it actually resulted in putting the troops in greater danger. Most notably, Bush insisted that once troops had been committed to Iraq, he bore the responsibility to make sure they had not died in vain -- and that anything short of victory would be a betrayal of those soldiers who had already made the ultimate sacrifice. Democrats were way too terrified to demand a pullout from Iraq, even when they controlled Congress, for fear of being accused of undercutting our brave fighting men and women.

It would be a sign of strength and not weakness to base strategy on the available evidence, and change it when the evidence points in that direction. It may not get you far in the Washington commentariat and foreign policy establishment, where only bombing countries to smithereens and sending in every able-bodied man and woman in America halfway around the world are seen as serious and acceptable options. But it would reflect strength, nonetheless.

The McChrystal troop request should reach the Pentagon within days. So we'll see if the President bends to the will of the neocon-establishment complex, or makes his own assessment. The shitstorm that would ensue if he nixes the counter-insurgency strategy would make the health care town halls look like (actual) tea parties. So Froomkin's take provides a response that will need to be echoed.

Coming Around?

Maybe the Obama Adminstration's apparent abandoning of missile defense installations in Eastern Europe can signal a new way of thinking about national security, instead of relying on the old thinking.

Expect the usual shrieking from the wingnut gallery. No one could ever conclusively argue why these bases were a good idea; they were supposed to deter Russia, but at the same time weren't aimed at Russia, and couldn't possibly have stopped a Russian attack. They were supposed to defend from Iranian missiles, even though no one could ever figure out a plausible reason why Iran would fire ballistic missiles at Europe. Eastern European missile defense was, in short, insane; it was conceived by missile defense fanatics in the United States, and abetted by policymakers in Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted a clear signal of US commitment to their defense. The latter motivation was defensible; the former not so much.

We cannot just be the world's protector; heck, with our desiccated financial state, we can hardly be our own protector anymore. A more balanced multilateralism will reduce our military commitment globally and promote a more lasting peace. Bugging out of useless missile defense sites in Europe could lead to bugging out of, I don't know, the military outposts in 130 nations throughout the world.

Now, if we can apply this to Afghanistan, and actually think critically about the task at hand and how best to reach it, we may have something. Although, it appears the commanders will ask for another slow and steady escalation of 20,000 more troops. We have to break out of this kind of thinking.

Ahmadinejad's Inauguration Day

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term yesterday amid much protest and even more defiance.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term as Iran's president Wednesday while security forces battled hundreds of protesters chanting "Death to the Dictator" in the streets around parliament where the ceremony was held.

Key opposition leaders, moderate lawmakers and all three of Ahmadinejad's election challengers boycotted the swearing in ceremony. State-run Press TV said more than 5,000 security forces were in the streets around parliament and police with sniffer dogs patrolled the area after the opposition called for demonstrations to coincide with the inauguration.

Hundreds of protesters chanted "Death to the Dictator" before security forces broke up a demonstration near parliament, striking people with batons and blasting them with pepper spray, witnesses said.

The opposition has vowed to continue rolling protests. Iran society will never be the same, at least not until the regime either restores its legitimacy (through concessions or official violence), or is driven out.

And then there's the issue of engagement with the West, obviously strained even further by the arrest of three American hikers along the border with Kurdistan, who the Iranians have designated "spies." I do not hold high hopes for engagement, which is probably why the Administration is foregrounding the big stick in their public diplomacy right now:

The Obama administration is talking with allies and Congress about the possibility of imposing an extreme economic sanction against Iran if it fails to respond to President Obama’s offer to negotiate on its nuclear program: cutting off the country’s imports of gasoline and other refined oil products.

The option of acting against companies around the world that supply Iran with 40 percent of its gasoline has been broached with European allies and Israel, officials from those countries said. Legislation that would give Mr. Obama that authority already has 71 sponsors in the Senate and similar legislation is expected to sail through the House.

In a visit to Israel last week, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, mentioned the prospect to Israeli officials, they said.

I wonder whether this will actually backfire and punish those in the street who are battling the regime, while the hardliners manage to keep what refined oil can get produced and shipped for themselves and their cronies. A country that is already beating and imprisoning its own people shouldn't have much difficulty causing them more suffering. There's also the question of getting the world to go along with this.

The promise of Iranian engagement has been really wounded by this internal strife.

Slow Creep Back To The Bargaining Table

North Korea has consistently preferred bilateral talks with the United States over the six-party talks that have become the current framework. Now they have again asked for a one-on-one dialogue, this time as the only available diplomacy.

North Korea has again insisted it will not return to six-party talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programme.

But it hinted it was still open to "a specific and reserved form of dialogue", state media quoted a foreign ministry statement.

The statement did not elaborate on what form any new dialogue could take but Pyongyang has previously said it was open to direct talks with the US.

The US has said it will hold talks with the North within the six-party format.

Some analysts are seeing the statement as a sign that after a series of provocations to the international community, North Korea may now be ready to find a way to ease tension.

Hillary Clinton brushed this off on Meet The Press yesterday. But it does represent a step forward, of a kind, because earlier this year the DPRK would not agree to talks of any kind. So we're getting somewhere.

They want the respect of bilateral talks on an equal footing with the United States. If that means the release of political prisoners like Euna Lee and Laura Ling, and an equitable swap of ending the nuclear program for humanitarian aid and diplomatic relations, I don't really see the holdup.

Peter Bergen On Afghanistan

Stanley McChrystal, the COINdinista commander of forces in Afghanistan, still wants to push for more troops despite Obama Administration demurrals. He has jurisdiction over Afghanistan and not the big picture, so it's to be expected that he would argue for more troops to wage his personal war. The President needs to see the full extent of military policy, and must weigh costs and benefits. I personally believe we can do a lot more by reducing the corruption and lawlessness in the current Afghan government (including removing warlords who kill prisoners with impunity) and working toward economic development instead of playing Whack-a-Mole with insurgents that can be brought into the political process and an Al Qaeda faction that can be contained through local law enforcement and intelligence sharing.

That said, I am interested by Peter Bergen's assessment of the war.

But the growing skepticism about Obama’s chances for success in Afghanistan is largely based on deep misreadings of both the country’s history and the views of its people, which are often compounded by facile comparisons to the United States’s misadventures of past decades in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan will not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor will it be his Iraq. Rather, the renewed and better resourced American effort in Afghanistan will, in time, produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state [...]

The similarities between the Taliban and the Vietcong end with their mutual hostility toward the U.S. military. The some 20,000 Taliban fighters are too few to hold even small Afghan towns, let alone mount a Tet-style offensive on Kabul. As a military force, they are armed lightly enough to constitute a tactical problem, not a strategic threat. By contrast, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army at the height of the Vietnam War numbered more than half a million men who were equipped with artillery and tanks, and were well supplied by both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. And the number of casualties is orders of magnitude smaller: in Afghanistan last year, 154 American soldiers died, the largest number since the fall of the Taliban; in 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, the same number of U.S. servicemen were dying every four days. Estimates of the total civilian death toll in Vietnam are in the low millions, while estimates of the total number of Afghan civilian casualties since the fall of the Taliban are in the thousands.

Nor has the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan been anywhere near as expensive as Vietnam was—in fact, that’s in part why American efforts have not met with as much success as they could have. During the Vietnam War, the United States spent almost 10 percent of its GDP on military spending. Today’s military expenditures are somewhere between 4 and 5 percent of GDP, and of that, Afghanistan last year consumed only 6 percent of the total expenditure, while Iraq sucked up some five times that amount.

I think a lot of Bergen's points are stuck in the world of a few years ago in Afghanistan than in today. He says Karzai is still relatively popular - that has waned. He says that Afghans still welcome US troops - that is less clear now. He says we have not made a major troop commitment - but it's growing, and McChrystal wants it to grow even further. He says that more troops will reduce airstrikes and civilian casualties - but precisely the opposite has happened so far. He says the Taliban don't have the manpower to take over the country - and on this point he's right, but that's not necessarily an argument for staying. Rather, the Taliban have their Pashtun strongholds which will be hard to defeat, and the rest of the country's ethnic factions will be hard for the Taliban to co-opt. That's a stalemate - or in other words, a quagmire.

Bergen does criticize policy toward Pakistan, which is of course the elephant in the room as it relates to Afghanistan policy, but thinks that militants there have made fatal mistakes and are seeing the citizenry turn on them. I actually kind of agree with this, but whether the Pakistani military, a powerful force in the country, is fighting the homegrown Taliban while aiding and abetting the Afghan version is of concern.

I think Bergen's article is worth reading to test assumptions and challenge biases, but I was left unconvinced. If Obama holds firm to a policy against future escalation, I may be persuaded.

Neogtiations In Honduras

Some better news out of Honduras. After a meeting between ousted President Mel Zelaya and Secretary of State Clinton today, a diplomatic agreement has been brokered, though I don't think it will be entirely smooth.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Tuesday accepted a U.S.-backed effort by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to mediate an end to the political crisis in Honduras and said talks with his rivals would begin on Thursday.

"Our first meeting is set for Thursday, in Costa Rica," Zelaya, told Honduran radio from Washington, saying he would meet the "protagonists" of the June 28 coup that ousted him.

But Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, faces mediating between sharply opposed positions.

Zelaya said that his reinstatement as president was "nonnegotiable," adding of the talks, "What this is is not a negotiation, this is the planning of the exit of the coup leaders."

In Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, who was appointed president by Honduran lawmakers after the coup, also said he accepted Arias as a mediator, but added his government maintained his position that Zelaya could not return.

If you can squint and sort of see the outlines of any deal, let me know. But dialogue can bear fruit if given enough time and backing. You could see some sort of deal where Zelaya gets to serve out his term (which has less than a year left) in exchange for a vow not to change Presidential term limits. And then the people of Honduras get their elected leader and can choose another one. Obama made a good statement:

"America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected president of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies," Obama said in a speech in Russia.

"We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not," he added.

Sounds reasonable to me, which is why he'll get endlessly attacked for "siding with Castro and Chavez."

McNamara And Afghanistan

If any situation in the world right now shows in stark relief the failure to learn the lessons of Robert McNamara it's the escalating war in Afghanistan. Six more troops died in clashes today, and with both the increased numbers as well as a continuing offensive in Helmand Province in the south, we can expect more. This Reuters report gives a good sense of the difficulties with the current strategy:

The mullah's message was blunt. We don't trust you and if you don't earn our trust, our first meeting will be our last.

With that, he stood abruptly and walked out of his first "shura," or council meeting, with U.S. Marines.

U.S. forces who have moved deep into formerly Taliban-controlled territory in southern Afghanistan this week say they are here to stay and will not leave until they have improved the lives of ordinary people [...]

The elders listened, clicking their prayer beads. Then Mullah Zainuddin, the village's religious leader, listed their demands.

They want the provincial authorities to allocate more water for their irrigation system. They want a health clinic, and they want a school. Produce these things or leave us alone, he said.

"I do not trust you. There have been international forces that have come through the village and promised schools, promised clinics. When you are already (delivering) that, then I will trust you," he said.

"We are out of patience here. If you do not do these things and solve these problems, we will leave this village. We will fight: every man, woman and child, we do not fear death."

"This is our last speech, and if you can't solve these problems, we will not have another shura. We will not sit like this again and talk with you," he said. He then got up and walked away, leaving the Marines to finish the shura without him.

Suddenly, a Marine could be heard up the road shouting "stop!" and pointing his rifle at a man driving a motorcycle with two women hidden in burqas sitting behind him on the bike.

The Marine summoned an interpreter. Afghan police searched the driver and allowed the motorcycle to drive on. The village elders and the other Marines holding their shura watched the tense incident in quiet.

"I know you think you are here for our security. But you have come here to disturb us," said one of the elders, Hajji Baluch. "The women on the motorcycle were on their way to a clinic."

I can jut tick off the McNamara lessons and apply them here. We have exaggerated the dangers of a largely local Taliban insurgency, which cannot harm the United States if we use proper law enforcement and intelligence methods. We seem to lack an understanding of the desires of the Afghan people, weary from decades of war and distrustful of foreign presence that has brought them nothing of substance. "We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values," a direct quote from McNamara. We use high-powered military equipment to blast our way to a victory on paper but fail to recognize the limitations of that approach. We have not hashed out a debate on the merits of escalation in public and with the support of the Congress. We have changed course into a high-intensity counter-insurgency mission after explaining that the goal of the war was to deny Al Qaeda safe havens, and the two are only tangentially related. We have not yet recognized the limits of American involvement to bring peace and security to Afghanistan. And,

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

Afghanistan is maddeningly complex. Its relations internally among the ethnically diverse factions and with its neighbors across borders are not well-understood. And after seven-plus years of failed promises and millions of tons of ordnance, we must understand that our skills and abilities as a superpower cannot solve every problem. Nor does every problem want to be solved. Such is the conundrum in Afghanistan.

The Best And The Brightest

Robert McNamara died today. McNamara was a smart guy, a business type who rose up through the ranks to run the Ford Motor Company after working at the Pentagon during the firebombing of Tokyo. Kennedy pulled a reluctant McNamara out of Detroit and back to the Pentagon in 1960, and he sought to manage it with corporate precision. But this precise structure and its focus on measurements crashed against the shoals of the Vietnam War. Night after night, McNamara would stand before the press in his rimless glasses, looking very much like Don Rumsfeld would decades later, talking of body counts and targeted airstrikes and victory, disassociated almost completely from the realities of the ground and the futility of the enterprise. If you've seen "The Fog of War" you know that the pressure certainly got to McNamara, and he understood his mistakes after the fact (though he never took full responsibility for them). He directed subordinates to write the study that would eventually become The Pentagon Papers, hoping that future generations would avoid the pitfalls that he and his colleagues did in Vietnam.

Part of the framing of "The Fog of War" as well as one of McNamara's later books was the 11 causes and lessons that he listed coming out of Vietnam. It's worth listing them here again.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

If this isn't an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don't know what is. And although I'd like to think that some statesman could learn from these lessons and take America off such a self-destructive course, given the nature of the people who rise to power in this country I don't know if that's possible. Certainly McNamara's lessons represent the experience of a man who lived in the crucible and at least appears to have judged his actions against some moral set of precepts. But the peculiar dynamics of the political world, the need to act tough in foreign policy, the seeming inability for leaders to step outside themselves and view things through the lens of others, the narrow and incomplete renderings of history often at work, and of course the lure of money and power and the industry of war, resist politicians coming to any of these conclusions in the moment. We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't believe America is even wired to live up to them.

This is from The Fog of War, with McNamara talking about the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II:

Curtis LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.... But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

...Just to respond to this point about The Fog of War, which Robert Farley thinks "Morris let McNamara get away with far too much at too low of a price." Right near the beginning of the film, Morris inserts a line from McNamara about how you should always answer the question you hoped to be asked, not the question you were asked. This line colors the entire reading of the film. McNamara, for all his confessions in later life, was never a reliable narrator, and he tried valiantly to color his reading of history, leaving him blameless. It didn't work, and Morris knew it, so he presented the folly instead of attacking it. McNamara's lessons of war are important and can stand alone, but that doesn't mean I sympathize with him in any way. He spun until the bitter end. He earned his legacy of failure, and all the rationalizing and compartmentalizing in the world won't make a difference.

And That's That

Sadly, the biggest near-term result of the election strife in Iran is the end to diplomatic channels for the Obama Administration. I have no doubt that he still wants to talk with the Islamic Republic, but as a political reality, that's dead for now.

President Obama acknowledged yesterday that his hopes for a direct U.S.-Iran dialogue, one of his signature foreign policy initiatives, had been dashed for now by the Iranian government's violent quashing of protests over the disputed June 12 election.

Obama's proposed direct outreach to Iran dates to the 2008 presidential campaign. Even last week, well after Iranian police began beating and shooting at mostly young protesters, the president and his aides insisted that engagement was still possible.

Yesterday, however, Obama said there was "no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks."

Nevertheless, Obama said Washington would continue to take part in multination talks with Tehran over its suspected nuclear-weapons program "because the clock is ticking," a reference to the possibility that Iran in the coming years will acquire enough fuel to build a nuclear weapon. That's the approach former President George W. Bush adopted during his last six months in office.

I don't see what choice the President has. Clearly the right wing would pounce if engagement continued with an illegitimate government last seen beating and killing their own people. In the long run, however, the uprising of more moderate voices in Iran, which will play out over years, does strengthen the hand of engagement, and while I don't think Obama played a huge role in that, he is well-positioned to capitalize on it down the road.

The other part of this is that reducing countries like Iran to a caricature and preferring to bully them around than talk with them has led to a serious proliferation in their nuclear capability since 2000. I agree that acting like the repression inside the country didn't happen would be a mistake now, but that doesn't mean isolation and belligerence are somehow vindicated as a foreign policy.

Engagement With Syria

Here's something else that blew right by me a couple days ago - the US will send an ambassador back to Syria after a four-year absence.

Syria is an interesting case, the "swing vote" in the Muslim world, if you will. They have allied themselves with Iran on occasion, and certainly have meddled in Lebanon. But they've also shown a willingness to reach out toward the West. President Bashar al-Assad is a somewhat more liberal figure than his father, although he still cracks down on dissent and has been linked to the death of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But this return to the region reflects the President's general belief in engaging all countries to find areas of agreement. A unilateral pullout did not serve us well.

The loss of U.S. diplomatic leverage in the region -- because of opposition among many Arabs to the Iraq war and a perceived U.S. favoritism toward Israel -- has left a vacuum in recent years filled in large part by Iran. The decision to return the ambassador to Syria, senior administration officials said, represents the restoration of a sustained U.S. diplomatic presence in a secular Arab country central to many U.S. interests in the region.

"It did not make any sense to us not to be able to speak with an authoritative voice in Damascus," the senior administration official said. "It was our assessment that total disengagement has not served our interests."

If there were a legitimate partner for peace in Israel right now, this engagement would probably bear immediate fruit, as Syria and Israel were discussing a peace agreement over the Golan Heights as recently as late 2007. But as Iran implodes and instability potentially spreads, tipping Syria closer to the West, or even removing the standoffishness, changes the balance of power and will help lower the temperature of the US-Muslim relationship.

Obama: "Stop All Violent And Unjust Actions"

Via Nico Pitney:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples' belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

There may be an on-camera statement coming as well.

I think this is the right thing to do. The Iranian regime escalated through violence and murder, and the President must meet that escalation. Steve Clemons thinks this is Biden's influence, and he's been something of a liberal hawk throughout his career, so that's probably right.

....Sullivan:

2.04 pm. Some attempt at perspective. From what I can tell, the regime has shown a disgusting display of rank violence and murder, but they have not massacred hundreds. The uprising on the streets was also less overwhelming than in previous days, but that's obviously because they knew they could be gunned down. Mousavi is standing firm in demanding a nullification of the election. If the reports of even more intense rooftop shouting are true, then the people of Iran remain determined not to let this moment of democracy be taken from them. So we have the makings of a tense stand-off.

Watching the videos, I'm stunned by how many people are holding up cell phone cameras and taking footage.

The media is doing a better job today.

...opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi says that he has prepared himself for martyrdom.

...As expected, the Iranian regime has twisted this statement and earlier ones into a claim that Obama supports the uprising. Well, they were going to say that anyway. The question was always whether or not they would look like fools for saying it, and whether or not they would deserve the disapprobation of the President. And I think Obama's played this right.

You Probably Think This Song Is About You

Watching these Republicans yipping like a bunch of chickadees about revolution in Iran from the safety of their offices in Washington is starting to infuriate me. First off, these people don't have much of a clue about who they are supporting - Mir Hossein Mousavi supports the same nuclear program Ahmadinejad supports, and he is a true heir to the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini (I actually think he would still be an improvement, and could liberalize the Islamic Republic from within - but let's get real, we're not talking about making Dennis Kucinich the leader of Iran, as Obama recognized in an interview yesterday: "The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual positions may not be as great as has been advertised.") Second, they seem to have no sense of the consequences of their actions, brilliantly summarized by Les Gelb:

"Republican leadership calls for Obama to condemn Iran's election results and speak out for the demonstrators shows no knowledge of Iran whatsoever. If he did so, America would become the issue in Iran, not Ahmadinejad, and we would become the excuse and justification for spilling Iranian blood.

"These sniping remarks by Republican leaders also shows they put pandering to their right wing above American national security. Why can't they listen to their own real foreign policy expert -- Senator Richard Lugar -- and see and say that the U.S. must exercise restraint in our public statements for Iran's sake and our own."

Iran will likely complain about American intervention anyway - but the White House shouldn't give them a reason to do that, instead making them look paranoid and foolish in the eyes of their people. John Kerry gets this right:

Mr. McCain’s rhetoric, of course, would be cathartic for any American policy maker weary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hostile message of division. We are all inspired by Iran’s peaceful demonstrations, the likes of which have not been seen there in three decades. Our sympathies are with those Iranians who seek a more respectful, cooperative relationship with the world. Watching heartbreaking video images of Basij paramilitaries terrorizing protesters, we feel the temptation to respond emotionally.

There’s just one problem. If we actually want to empower the Iranian people, we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference. Iran’s hard-liners are already working hard to pin the election dispute, and the protests, as the result of American meddling. On Wednesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry chastised American officials for “interventionist” statements. Government complaints of slanted coverage by the foreign press are rising in pitch.

We can’t escape the reality that for reformers in Tehran to have any hope for success, Iran’s election must be about Iran — not America. And if the street protests of the last days have taught us anything, it is that this is an Iranian moment, not an American one.

In other words, Sen. McCain, Rep. Cantor, Rep. Pence, et al: SHUT YOUR PIEHOLES. The best way to help the Iranian people is to stay out of it. And you don't have to believe me, but practically every Iranian dissident and reformer who has had the occasion to say two words about this.

What does Ganji think of President Obama’s statements about Iran? “From my perspective, Obama has so far said he won’t meddle in Iran’s internal situation, and that’s a good, good approach,” Ganji said, but he added, “He cannot stay silent on human rights issues.” Clearly, Ganji thinks the Obama administration isn’t striking the right balance between non-intervention and humanitarian concerns. But that’s not to say that more active American support is welcome:

“Bush’s policies toward Iran and the Middle East were completely wrong. The result of Bush’s policy, it led to Iran gaining strength. Mr. Obama is trying to change the policy. If we can separate two points, we can actually drive to a good policy. First, Iran’s path to democracy and the people’s movement to democracy is for the people of Iran. No foreign country, either America or any other, should get involved in that process.

“Secondly, human rights is an international condition. When a country denies human rights for its own people, the entire world should punish that government. So the people of Iran will not want anyone to get involved in that. But what they expect from the world is to protest an Iranian regime from a human-rights perspective. This is a policy which I stand by.

“The Iranian people are saying the Ahmadinejad government is a coup d’etat government. They’re asking that no government accept the legitimacy of his government. This is what most people want, for no government to work with the Ahmadinejad government.”

We can delineate between being forceful on human rights and overtly calling for the overthrow of a foreign government. We learned the lesson with Bush that his belligerence strengthened the regime to the point that they thought they could get away with a stolen election and a brutal crackdown. The situation in Iran is by no means settled - the government and the Revolutionary Guard could react with extreme violence. But certainly, calls from the peanut gallery in the US aren't exactly helpful.

Back To The Well

Bill Kristol responded to Susan Boyle's loss on Britain's Got Talent by calling for strategic bombing in London. No, wait, this time it was North Korea, actually.

Kristol explained, "I don't rule out the possibility of us deciding -- and I think it might be wise for us to decide -- to knock out a few. They're apparently rolling a long-term missile to a base to test another one, long-range missile to test another one. You know, it might be worth doing some targeted air strikes to show the North Koreans, instead of always talking about, 'Gee, there could be consequences,' to show that they can't simply keep going down this path."

Brit Hume, on the same program, endorsed Kristol's proposal, but said he "can't imagine" the Obama administration actually launching a military strike on North Korea.

Matt Yglesias noted, "Kristol doesn't even attempt to say what he thinks this will accomplish. He just kind of tosses it out there for no reason because arguing that the United States should start wars is what he does."

Kristol and his merry band of he-men think that the United States can drop bombs on any nation it chooses without consequences. This is despite the fact that never in human history has such a consequence-free imperialism ever come to pass. If we "targeted" air strikes on North Korea (10, 20 million dead, depending on the breaks), they would bomb Seoul. And kill a lot of people. Indiscriminate projection of military force has brought us through failed wars over the past several decades and the death of hundreds of thousands. Bill Kristol views this as an inconvenience.

Besides, Robert Farley makes the point I've made for years. North Korea doesn't have a lot of money, and apparently their fissile material is finite. Every bomb they test equals one less bomb they have. So go ahead and test! You know how much kimchee they have to sell to scrounge up the cash for another weapon?

They Get Our News

I seem to remember a common complaint during the Bush era that Al Qaeda was watching our TV shows and paying attention to what Democrats have to say, and when they criticized the President, Osama bin Laden rejoiced and threw a party, so everyone had better shut up. That was a go-to argument for the right for a while.

I never much worried about Al Qaeda getting out their rabbit ears and watching C-SPAN. However, unquestionably leaders in Europe read our newspapers and consume our media. And when political leaders run a steady diet of pants-pissing missives about the big bad Guantanamo super-villains and how they can never set foot on US soil, small wonder that Europe, a key player in the White House's efforts to find settlements for detainees scheduled for release, wants no part of them either.

The Obama administration's push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

"If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?" said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. "If all 50 states in America say, 'Sorry, we can't take them,' this is not very convincing."

The scaremongering has legs, you see, and politicians everywhere being of a spineless nature, they don't want to face their constituents and explain why released Gitmo prisoners are terrorist masterminds to every portion of America but just fine for their country.

Funny how the same people who shrieked that Democrats were "making us less safe" with their words are now causing an international incident through deliberate lying and severely damaging an American President's efforts to improve foreign relations, huh? I guess politics doesn't end at the water's edge anymore.

Harry Reid has composed himself and acknowledged that some prisoners would be resettled in US prisons. Hopefully this constant agreement with the latest bedwetting scenario on the right has ended, and we can actually face our allies again.

Reconciliation Stops Insurgencies

The head of the Tamil Tigers, the only insurgent group I know of that has a nickname, has reportedly been killed, seemingly putting an end to the 25 year-old civil war. However, despite this there is still a Tamil minority and a Sinhalese majority, and if the central Sri Lankan government persists in what the Tamils believe to be repression, some new Velupillai Prabhakaran, a different rebel leader, will rise up in his place, and the guerrilla war will start anew. The Sri Lankans must understand that insurgencies sustain themselves through repression as an instrument of state policy, and to defeat an insurgency you must end the repression. The next few years, with no successor to the Tamil Tiger movement, offers an opportunity.

Matt Yglesias has similar thoughts.

Sweet Neocon

Hard to argue with Andrew Sullivan here. "From extending and deepening the war in Afghanistan, to suppressing evidence of rampant and widespread abuse and torture of prisoners under Bush, to thuggishly threatening the British with intelligence cut-off if they reveal the brutal torture inflicted on Binyam Mohamed, Obama now has new cheer-leaders: Bill Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Max Boot."

Importantly, the neocons never really offered a full-throated criticism of Obama. They always viewed him as someone they could deal with. Sure, Dick Cheney is out there on the margins, but his criticism must be understood in the context of his own culpability. And now he's spinning off into true tinfoil hat territory. Apparently there's a conspiracy against him on Iran. But really, the economic and religious right conservatives have led the way on opposing Obama - see the move by the RNC to rebrand the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist Party". On the key issue of empire and hegemony, Obama hasn't really disappointed them, as Sullivan notes above.

By adopting the cover-up of Bush Administration Constitutional abuses, Obama has implicated himself within them, and has therefore taken on Bush-era excuses (e.g. "This will hurt our troops") to justify the cover-up. And by continuing the war pose in Afghanistan, without so much as a plan, Obama has pleased the neocons who view the world as a battle to be fought rather than a collection of people to be engaged. And so we're seeing a good deal of unease among Hill Democrats over this right-wing mindset:

House leaders have yanked from an emergency military spending bill the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center, saying he had not provided a plan for the more than 200 detainees there. The White House has said the center will close by Jan. 22, 2010.

It is virtually certain that the Democratic majorities, with solid Republican support, will approve $96.7 billion in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other military operations.

But with votes in the House on Thursday and in the Senate next week, the discomfort among Democrats points to a harder road ahead for Mr. Obama and the prospect of far more serious rancor if conditions worsen overseas.

The unease, particularly over the war in Afghanistan, is greatest right now in the more liberal ranks of the Democratic caucus and is more evident in the House than in the Senate.

But American troop levels and war costs in Afghanistan will soar in the coming year, and party leaders, including Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, have warned that Democrats will most likely give the administration just one more year to get a handle on the military situation there before they start losing patience.

Losing patience - I know the feeling.

Iraq Violence Is Rising

The President made one mistake last night, when he talked about violence still being below the levels of "a year ago." Actually, with yesterday's attacks killing 47 it has risen to that level.

BAGHDAD — April was the bloodiest month for violence in Baghdad in more than a year, another sign that Iraq's security gains are beginning to reverse.

President Barack Obama acknowledged Wednesday night that violence has risen in recent weeks, but he said the levels of violence were still below last year's.

Calling recent bombings "a legitimate cause for concern," Obama said "civilian deaths . . . remain very low compared to what was going on last year."

But statistics kept by McClatchy show that in Baghdad alone, more than 200 people have been killed in attacks so far this month, compared with 99 last month and 46 in February, according to a McClatchy count.

The last time McClatchy recorded more than 200 civilian deaths in one month in the capital was more than a year ago, in March 2008.

To maintain credibility in foreign policy, Presidents must talk straight with the American people. There's a reason for the rising violence, and that's the failure of the surge to effect a meaningful political reconciliation, which is leading to an increase in sectarian violence. Obama could make that case, and tweak his Iraq plans to increase the diplomatic efforts to force those political solutions. In fact, by dispatching Hillary Clinton to Iraq last week, he's doing that. But he shouldn't minimize the scope of the violence in Iraq right now. That's disingenuous and distorting.