The Idiocy - and Idiots - of US Energy Policy

Big kudos to the NYT and Nelson Schwartz for today's piece about US energy policy being "Asleep at the spigot." It has been indeed, with lots of blame to go around to our short-sighted politicians. They include Newt Gingrich - whose statement to the effect that America's cultural imperatives trump concern over oil supply should completely disgust all of us - and the late (but not lamented here) Jesse Helms, but also Michigan's Senator Carl Levin and Rep. John Dingell, who asserts that we Americans simply gotta have our cars big and powerful, trophies in our driveway, or as Gingrich put it, "cultural expressions."

But let's face it, we need to ladle plenty of that blame for our energy policy right into our own laps. There was a time, in the late 1970s, after the 1973 oil embargo, when Jimmy Carter tried to wake us up to the need for a more prudent and rational energy policy. I remember how impressed I was to see the US president actually go on television to ask us to drive less, turn down our thermostats, put on our sweaters. It was an era of 55 mph speed limits on our interstates, lots of VW Beetles and little Toyotas and Datsuns (now Nissan) and our roads; Americans trying to make a difference, to leave a smaller footprint. Sensible stuff. Rational stuff.

Then came the 80s and 90s. Reagan came in (and, we all said, America could now "stand proud." The price of oil came down, Detroit revved up the horsepower again, Jeeps and 4-wheel drives were suddenly cool. Then it was minivans for the American family - but they were soon way uncool, so then came the SUVs, then bigger SUVs, then the 1991 Desert Storm war made the humvee cool - so, GM decides, let's make a Hummer for the standin'-proud US macho-male consumer. And so it went. You tell me the US sucks up 25% of the world's oil supply? Hey, dude, so what? Besides, it's our culture! We're the nation of Richard Petty, and St. Dale of NASCAR! Besides, why should we give a sh*t about what the rest of the world says? C'mon, we saved all their asses in World War II, and then we won the Cold War and kicked the commies' butts, right? Screw em! They owe us!

And so it's gone. And here we are, where we are. Ford and GM are getting knee-capped, and with them thousands of autoworkers and their families, including kids whose families won't be able to come up with college tuition. (Say, maybe our energy policy has solved the military's recruitment dilemma!) Meanwhule, the asphalt in our used-car lots is crumbling under the weight of all those unsellable Ford Expeditions and Chevy pickups, sitting there (shall I say it?) "like a rock."

July 6, 2008

American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Correction Appended

JUST three years ago, with oil trading at a seemingly frothy $66 a barrel, David J. O’Reilly made what many experts considered a risky bet. Outmaneuvering Chinese bidders and ignoring critics who said he overpaid, Mr. O’Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, forked over $18 billion to buy Unocal, a giant whose riches date back to oil fields made famous in the film “There Will Be Blood.”

For Chevron, the deal proved to be a movie-worthy gusher, helping its profits to soar. And while he has warned about tightening energy supplies for years and looks prescient for buying Unocal, even Mr. O’Reilly says that he still can’t get his head around current oil prices, which closed above $145 a barrel on Thursday, a record.

“We can see how you can get to $100,” he says. “At $140, I just don’t know how to explain it. We’re surprised.”

For the rest of the country, the feeling is more like shock. As gasoline prices climb beyond $4 a gallon, Americans are rethinking what they drive and how and where they live. Entire industries are reeling — airlines and automakers most prominent among them — and gas prices have emerged as an important issue in the presidential campaign.

Ninety percent of Americans, meanwhile, expect the pain at the pump to pose a financial hardship in the next six months, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. Stocks now trade inversely to crude prices, and the Dow Jones industrials are in bear-market territory. Old icons have been written off, with Starbucks boasting nearly twice the market value of General Motors, which some on Wall Street say faces the possibility of bankruptcy.

Outside the thriving oil patch, it makes for a bleak economic picture. But it didn’t have to be this way.

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.

Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.

Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

SO despite the fierce debate over what’s behind the recent spike in prices, no one differs on what’s really responsible for all that underlying demand here for black gold: the automobile, fueled not only by gasoline but also by Americans’ famous propensity for voracious consumption.

To be sure, the American appetite for crude oil is only one reason for the recent price surge. But the country’s dependence on imported oil has only kept growing in recent years, undermining the trade balance and putting an added strain on global supplies.

Although the road to $4 gasoline and increased oil dependence has been paved in places like Detroit, Houston and Riyadh, it runs through Washington as well, where policy makers have let the problem make lengthy pit stops.

“Much of what we’re seeing today could have been prevented or ameliorated had we chosen to act differently,” says Pete V. Domenici, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a 36-year veteran of the Senate. “It was a bipartisan failure to act.”

Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the country’s biggest automobile retailer, is even more blunt. “It was totally preventable,” he says, anger creeping into his affable car-salesman’s pitch.

The speed at which gas prices are climbing is forcing a seismic change in long-held American habits, from car-buying to commuting. Last week, Ford Motor reported that S.U.V. sales were down 55 percent from a year ago, while demand for its full-size F-series pickup, a gas guzzler that was the country’s best-selling vehicle for 26 consecutive years, is off 40 percent. The only Ford model to show a sales increase was the midsized Fusion. A Ford spokeswoman says the market shift is “totally unprecedented and faster than anything we’ve ever seen.”

If the latest rise in oil prices isn’t just another spike — like those of the 1970s and 1980s — but is instead a fundamental repricing of the commodity responsible for much of modern American life, the impact of that change will affect everyone from home builders and homeowners in exurbs to corporate leaders, landlords and commuters in cities.

Although Asian consumers have begun emulating America’s love affair with the automobile, with the commercial booms of China and India playing pivotal roles in increased oil demand, the largest energy appetite in the world is still found in the United States. Home to only 4 percent of the world’s population, the nation slurps up about a quarter of the planet’s oil — and Americans’ daily use is nearly twice the combined consumption of the Chinese and Indians, according to an annual energy survey published by BP, the British oil giant.

Indeed, low-priced gasoline has long been part of the American social contract, according to Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican leader. While in office, Mr. Gingrich battled efforts to modulate demand through tools like increased gas taxes and tighter fuel standards, and he argues that voters won’t support such measures even now.

“They will work if you coerce the entire system and if you pretend the American people are Japanese and Europeans,” Mr. Gingrich says. “Our culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression.”

Perhaps, but on Capitol Hill, members of both parties now say they are furious with Detroit for fighting so hard, and for so long, against higher fuel-efficiency standards.

Though analysts say automakers who shoveled out highly profitable and highly inefficient road hogs like S.U.V.’s and pickups deserve much of the blame, they also criticize legislators who failed to provide an incentive for consumers to switch to fuel-sipping cars. Some politicians are quick to acknowledge the problem.

“We’ve got to fix it or our standard of living will change within a decade,” says Senator Domenici, who is retiring this year. “Oil was too damn cheap, it’s too high now and it’s going even higher. I hope I’m wrong, but the problem is, we can’t catch up soon enough.”

According to energy policy experts, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s — during the administrations of President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — that things began to go wrong.

Before that point, the country reaped the benefits of the first fuel-economy standards, passed in 1975, known as corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE. Between 1974 and 1989, the efficiency of a typical car sold in the United States almost doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon from 13.8.

LARGELY as a result, oil consumption in 1990 totaled 16.9 million barrels, basically on a par with the 17 million barrels consumed in 1980, even as the economy grew substantially. Oil prices were in the middle of a long downward slide that would take them from well above $30 a barrel in 1980 to a low of just under $10 in late 1998 and early 1999, interrupted only by brief spike in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

In 1990, Richard H. Bryan, a Nevada Democrat, teamed up in the Senate with Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, and proposed lifting fuel standards again over the next decade, with a goal of 40 m.p.g. for cars. Amid furious opposition from Detroit, liberal Democrats from automaking states, like Carl Levin of Michigan, joined conservative Republicans like Jesse Helms of North Carolina to block new CAFE standards. “It was one of the most frustrating issues in my Senate career,” says Mr. Gorton, who left the Senate in 2001.

Dan Becker, then a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, still remembers his shock when he saw Mr. Levin and Mr. Helms, diametrically opposed on most issues, walk amiably together onto the Senate floor to cast their votes. “This wasn’t East-West, right-left, or North-South,” he says. “But had we passed that bill, we’d be using three million barrels less oil a day now.”

That amount may not sound like much, given total global consumption of 85 million barrels a day, but it’s more than OPEC’s spare capacity now.

Mr. Levin didn’t return calls for comment. (Mr. Helms died on Friday.) But Representative John D. Dingell, the powerful Democrat from Detroit who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argues — as he did more than a decade ago — that tightening CAFE standards unfairly penalizes domestic automakers while rewarding foreign rivals who make more small cars.

Mr. Dingell, who has defended the automakers fiercely during his 52 years on Capitol Hill, decided to support the stronger CAFE standards last year. But he does not apologize for his longtime stance. “The American auto industry has sold the cars people wanted,” he says. “You’re going to blame the auto industry for that or the American consumer? He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe.”

A much more effective approach would be to simply raise taxes on gasoline, Mr. Dingell says, because higher prices are the easiest way to change buying habits. Some Europeans agree with this, noting that policy changes engineered through taxation can alter consumer choices without impeding economic growth.

Consumers overseas might not like higher taxes on gasoline, but they’ve adapted, says Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, the European energy giant. “A society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices,” he says. “It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

In Mr. van der Veer’s native Holland, for example, gasoline sells for more than $10 a gallon, with $5.57 of that going to taxes. Even in Britain, which has substantial North Sea production, gasoline sells for $8.71 a gallon.

A SUBSTANTIAL gas tax increase was considered during the administration of the first President Bush, recalls William K. Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency at the time. But it was whittled down in 1990 to just 5 cents after Mr. Gingrich and other conservatives in the Republican Party broke with the president.

“This was a stark lesson and people decided the gas tax was the third rail of public policy,” Mr. Reilly says.

Even as Congress idled when it came to tightening CAFE standards or substantially raising levies on gas, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 made offshore drilling yet another unpalatable option. “That caused a sea change and after that no one had any sympathy for the oil industry,” Mr. Becker says.

In 1990, three months before the effort to raise fuel-efficiency standards failed on Capitol Hill, President Bush issued an executive order making large swaths of the continental shelf off-limits to new exploration. That policy remains in effect today.

When Senators Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Frank H. Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, attempted to put together a grand bargain of opening up more of Alaska in exchange for raising auto efficiency in 1998, the two couldn’t persuade enough members of either party to go along.

“It was a no-action policy,” says Lee R. Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, who has had a ringside seat for most of the energy policy debates of the last 25 years. “By the time there is panic, people need to realize this: There is no quick-fix on this. By the time you panic, it is way too late.”

Still, many analysts argue that increased drilling alone is no panacea. They note that many of the oil giants don’t drill in areas to which they already have access. Exxon, in particular, has been criticized as spending too much to buy back its own stock and not enough on exploration. Chris Welberry, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, defends the company’s record, saying, “We are investing in our business at record levels — around $25 billion this year.”

In any event, added drilling is unlikely to generate sharply lower prices. A recent study by the federal government’s Energy Information Administration estimated that under the best-case scenario opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce prices by $1.44 a barrel by 2027. Drilling in broader swaths off the continental United States wouldn’t affect prices until 2030.

On the taxation frontier, President Clinton did manage to get through a small tax increase on gasoline — 4.3 cents — in 1993, but with oil prices hovering between $10 and $20 a barrel for most of the 1990s, conservation ended up on the back burner.

Indeed, President Clinton did propose a broader tax on energy consumption in 1993, but it died quickly when Senate Democrats rebelled, much as House Republicans derailed President Bush’s gas tax in 1990. Still, environmentalists like Mr. Becker remain disappointed with Mr. Clinton for not doing more in his first term when oil prices were low and Detroit was enjoying a recovery in profits after the lean years of the early 1990s.

Congressional Republicans made matters worse in 1995, when they attached a rider to a huge appropriations bill forbidding the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from spending any money to raise fuel standards. That law, in effect until 2001, made any change in CAFE standards impossible, says Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has pushed for better fuel efficiency.

As Paul Bledsoe, strategy director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, recalls it, “The 1990s were something of a lost decade for American fuel efficiency.” With oil prices low, consumers began snapping up pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, which were governed by less stringent fuel economy standards, thanks to a loophole in the original 1975 law. These carried higher sticker prices and profit margins, and both Detroit and foreign automakers were happy to oblige.

Although oil prices remained low through the 1990s, consumption patterns were taking an ominous turn. By 2000, daily demand reached 19.7 million barrels a day — nearly three million more than in 1990, a 17 percent jump in 10 years that wiped out much of the fuel savings that followed the energy crises of the 1970s.

Since then, global consumption has taken off, rising to 85.2 million barrels a day last year from 76.3 million in 2000.

In recent years, Mr. Reilly says that both the White House and Congress have passed up opportunities to call for higher gas taxes and fuel standards in the name of national security, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. “We could have, but we didn’t,” says Mr. Reilly, who describes himself as a moderate Republican. “It’s part of a long pattern in which Democrats and Republicans have not wanted to wade into this issue.”

BY 2001, oil prices were slowly creeping up, but few seemed to notice, perhaps because the march was slow and steady. By 2004, crude was at $37 a barrel and the next year it hit $50. With higher prices for oil, an increase in gas taxes was political poison, but Mr. Markey says support for new fuel standards was reawakening.

Nevertheless, his efforts to pass new fuel economy legislation in 2001, 2003, and 2005 went nowhere amid continued opposition by supporters of the auto industry on both sides of the aisle as well as many conservative Republicans. Although the United States had long ceased to be energy-independent — that era ended just after World War II — Mr. Markey says he believes the memory of plentiful domestic supplies created a different mind-set here than in Europe, where oil was generally scarce.

Other veterans of those battles cite lobbying by the domestic automakers as a main factor in the failure of Mr. Markey’s legislation. “The auto companies didn’t see the handwriting on the wall,” Mr. Schumer says. “The auto companies would go to people and say, ‘If you vote for CAFE standards, the auto plant in your district could shut down.’ They got the message.”

Representative Mike Castle, a Delaware Republican whose district includes plants owned by G.M. and Chrysler, adds that “nothing was ever said directly but it would go through the minds of members that Detroit might respond.”

“Sometimes, things don’t have to be said,” he added.

Susan M. Cischke, group vice president for sustainability, environment and safety engineering at Ford, says the recollections of Mr. Schumer and Mr. Castle are “way over the top — you don’t just pull up or put down auto plants.” Instead, she says, when lobbying on CAFE, “we talked with our friends and indicated what it did with jobs. You want support.”

Oil industry insiders say they remained on the sidelines during Congressional debates over CAFE standards, although legislators from oil states tended to vote against more rigorous rules.

In 2007, with oil at $82 and gas nearing $3, Congress finally approved the first big increase in fuel-efficiency standards in 32 years, requiring the fleet average to reach 35 m.p.g. by 2020. That will save one million barrels a day by 2020, but onetime CAFE opponents like Mr. Castle now say they wish that Congress had acted sooner. Since the 1980s, fuel efficiency has flatlined at 24 m.p.g., while vehicle weight has jumped more than 25 percent and horsepower has nearly doubled. In Europe, on the other hand, fuel efficiency currently stands at 44 m.p.g. and is slated to hit 48 m.p.g. by 2012.

“It’s a shame we’re doing this now instead of 10 or 20 years ago,” says Mr. Castle, who supported the legislation last year. “It was always my hope they would just do it without a mandate.” He adds that while he still opposes drilling in Alaska, “Republicans aren’t all wrong when they talk about increasing supplies of oil. There are opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Senator Domenici, the senior New Mexico Republican, agrees that it’s time to look at new supplies but is even more critical of Detroit. “They all said to us: ‘Don’t change CAFE. It’ll come when it’s supposed to.’ That’s baloney,” he said.

UNTIL last year’s vote, Mr. Domenici was an opponent of new fuel-efficiency standards, a stance he now regards as a mistake. “We were like everybody else,” he says. “We should have been more active on CAFE sooner.”

With Detroit again seeing profits collapse as sales of big cars plunge, Mr. Domenici says he is worried about the survival of the domestic automakers.

“They talked a good research game,” he says. “But let’s face it, little was being done. They are suffering the consequences and could go broke just like the airlines.”

What Congress didn’t or couldn’t do, the free market is now doing in the form of higher gas prices: forcing Americans into more fuel-efficient cars. Ms. Cischke of Ford says that in the last two months, “We have seen more of a shift in the market than in 20 years of CAFE. People are buying what they need.”

Unfortunately, the shift is happening too fast for a company of Ford’s size. That is among the reasons Wall Street expects Ford to lose more than $2 billion this year.

Congress, meanwhile, in its bid to explain the run-up in fuel prices, is examining the role of speculation and the increased flow of investor money into commodities. Most energy economists emphasize the fundamental issue of supply and demand, rather than market manipulation, but financial factors like the weak dollar are also exacerbating the situation. Stephen P. A. Brown, director of energy economics and microeconomic policy analysis at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, estimates that a little more than 20 percent of the price of oil today can be attributed to the dollar’s fall against the euro and other currencies.

Another financial factor behind the price rise that hasn’t been talked about much on Capitol Hill or elsewhere is reduced hedging by oil companies on futures markets, says Larry Goldstein, a longtime energy analyst. In the past, crude producers would offer buyers a portion of their energy output in future years in order to protect themselves if prices pulled back. But energy companies got burned as prices kept rising during the last two years and have since cut back on selling untapped production — forcing prices for energy futures even higher.

Now, the prospect of a perpetual climb in oil prices has become part of market psychology, which is notoriously hard to change. William H. Brown III, a former Wall Street energy analyst who now consults for hedge funds and financial institutions, says investors have become convinced that the White House and Congress are unlikely to do anything dramatic to bring down prices.

For example, a release of supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve after disruptions in Nigeria or Venezuela might have persuaded the market that Washington was on the case and shaken some complacency out of the market. “I’ve been a little surprised at what has not been done or what has not been talked about to get a handle on the consumer situation,” Mr. Brown says.

Others say that although the push to blame market speculators rather than discuss economic realities is likely to intensify on Capitol Hill as the presidential election draws near, they believe that what the world is confronting is a momentous shift in energy supply and demand.

“Speculation and manipulation are two different things,” says Mr. O’Reilly of Chevron. “Most of where we are is because of fundamentals and concern about the future.”

Jad Mouawad contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 6, 2008
An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06oil.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215363929-iOcqRoxCBRhSi4NISp/40w&pagewanted=print

The plight of Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria

IMHO, Mr. Kristof in the essay I've posted below has an excellent idea. And take note of these young, angry Iraqis who are being deprived of an education and are seeing their sisters being forced into prostitution just to survive because of this so incredibly stupid war that Mr. Bush and his entourage launched more than 5 years ago. They may be very ready and willing recruits into the ranks of extremist groups seething to attack the US and its allies. Honestly, put yourself in their shoes, and then ask if could you blame them for doing so.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/opinion/26kristof.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

June 26, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Books, Not Bombs

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

AMMAN, Jordan

The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.

Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.

Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about.

American hawks prefer to address the region’s security challenges by devoting billions of dollars to permanent American military bases. A simpler way to fight extremism would be to pay school fees for refugee children to ensure that they at least get an education and don’t become forever marginalized and underemployed.

We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies.

“My husband and I have decided to pull our three children out of school,” said Yussra Shaker, a college-educated English teacher who fled Iraq and went to Jordan when her 15-year-old son was shot in the leg in a kidnapping attempt. Ms. Yussra deeply believes in education, and her eyes welled with tears as she described the decision to withdraw her children because of school fees and beatings by Jordanian students.

“My children are very good students, and the teachers like them,” Ms. Yussra explained, “and so the local children beat them up even more.”

Ms. Yussra’s family is Christian, but most of those fleeing Iraq are Sunni Muslims — and some of them may have shot at Americans or brutalized Shiites in the ongoing sectarian conflict. One Sunni family I visited came from Falluja after their house was blown up, possibly by Americans, and they have decorated their leaking apartment with a huge poster of Saddam Hussein.

This family was composed of two wives of one man (who was back in Iraq, living in a tent) and their five children. The eldest son was a surly young man in his 20s who looked as if his preferred interaction with Americans might have involved an AK-47 in his arms.

Yet the family also has four small children and was nine months behind in its rent and in danger of being thrown out on to the street. I visited them at 2 p.m., and nobody in the house had eaten anything so far that day.

Iraqi refugees don’t get help in part because this is a problem that almost everybody wants to hide. Syria and Jordan worry that if the refugees get assistance, then they will stay indefinitely. The U.S. doesn’t want to talk about a crisis created by our war, and Iraq’s Shiite leaders don’t much care about Sunnis or Christians displaced by Shiite militias.

“It’s among the largest humanitarian crises in the world today,” said Michael Kocher, a refugee expert at the International Rescue Committee, which recently published a report on the crisis. “It’s getting very little attention from the Security Council on down, which we feel is scandalous and also bad strategy.”

It’s easy to blame the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Syria, for not being more hospitable to Iraqis. But those countries have, however grudgingly, tolerated the influx despite the burden and political risk.

Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan’s population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees.

In contrast, last year the United States took in only 1,608 Iraqis. European countries have done better, but they believe that America created the refugee crisis and should take the lead in resolving it.

“Apathy towards the crisis has been the overwhelming response,” Amnesty International said in a report last week.

We have already seen, in the case of Palestinians, how a refugee diaspora can destabilize a region for decades. If Jordan were to collapse in part from such pressures, that would be a catastrophe — and the best way to prevent that isn’t to give it Blackhawk helicopters, but help with school fees and school construction.

If we let the Iraqi refugee crisis drag on — and especially if we allow young refugees to miss an education so that they will never have a future — then we are sentencing ourselves to endure their wrath for decades to come. Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good.

Iraq's Ever More Complex Politics

I've appended below some excellent analysis and commentary from an astute long-time observer, Helena Cobban; and be sure to check out the links to the pieces by Juan Cole, David Ignatius, and Spencer Ackerman. Cobban makes an excellent point here, along with Reidar Visser (who has been arguing for months that most Iraqis do not want the kind of partitioning of their country that so many US pundits have been advocating), that some important players in Iraqi politics are trying to pull together a movement across sectarian divides, but the Bush people keep playing to the ISCI-Hakim-Maliki axis and to the Kurds. Each of those groups wants de facto soft partition, with a Shiite super-region in the south and a mostly autonomous Kurdish region in the north. In effect, this allows Bush to keep Iraq divided but under the fiction of a central government that, in reality, cannot exist without US support and military muscle. Among the upsides: the Kurds are chomping at the bit to make deals with any and all to pump their oil. The US companies are chomping at the bit to get at those riches. What's standing in the way? Among other things, nationalist groups in the Iraqi parliament who want to see Iraq's oil resources under the control of a real, empowered (vs. lackey to the US) Iraqi central government.

http://justworldnews.org/archives/002942.html

Iraq roundup: SOFA, Maliki in Iran, etc

Posted by Helena Cobban at June 7, 2008 11:40 AM

So Maliki's party has now split. (Also, see here.) One delicious aspect of this development-- from the anti-occupation point of view-- is that it's former US puppet-in-chief Ibrahim Jaafari who has led the split, taking about 10 members out of the present PM's party and into the new "Da'wa National Reform" trend, which has allied itself with the new Iraq-nationalist (i.e. anti-SOFA, anti-US-occupation and also somewhat anti-Iranian) bloc that has been put together by the Sadrists and others.

Does this mean it is definitely curtains for the Bushists' attempts to force a longterm SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) on the Maliki government before they leave office? Probably.

Juan Cole writes today about the split in Maliki's party,

It is really quite remarkable that a sitting prime minister should preside over a schism in his own party, despite his control of billions of dollars in patronage.

Apparently, al-Maliki has been maneuvered by the Bush administration into a position where he has virtually no popular or party support, and is left with Washington has his only anchor.

But wait. Washington, it turns out, is not Maliki's only anchor! Because guess where-- in this moment of extreme political threat for his premiership-- he is headed today!

You likely already guessed: Iran.

Maliki's decision to rush off there at a time of such great political tension at home hilariously demonstrates two things:

(a) the degree to which the Bushists have been losing control of the situation in the Iran-Iraq theater; and

(b) the degree to which there is now an increasingly strong convergence of interests between Iran and Washington inside Iraq, as both sides face the increasing strength of the Iraqi-nationalist trend.

Okay, regarding the convergence, see this piece that the ever-well-informed David Ignatius will be publishing in tomorrow's WaPo.

In it, David is trying to plumb the thinking and intentions of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qods (Jerusalem) Force.

David writes, somewhat grandiloquently, that

it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.

Grandiloquent, because while Soleimani might be more powerful in Tehran than Ahmadinejad, both of them are clearly outranked both on paper and in terms of actual decisionmaking by "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i.

Still, Soleimani is not inconsequential.

So here's David's methodology. He relies almost wholly on the hearsay accounts of someone he identifies only as "an Arab official who met recently with [Soleimani]." For what it's worth, my money for the source is on the ever-agile Ahmad Chalabi, who I believe has some kind of a job-title that could enable one to describe him as an "official."

(Chalabi snake-oil again, she groans, clutching her brow in disbelief? This can surely lead nowhere good... )

Well anyway, David does nothing whatsoever to reassure us that Chalabi is not the source...

So here, for what it's worth, is what David's un-named Arab tells us about Soleimani's current thinking:

Soleimani is confident about Iran's rising power in the region... He sees an America that is weakened by the war in Iraq but still potent. He has told visitors that U.S. and Iranian goals in Iraq are similar, despite the rhetoric of confrontation. But he has expressed no interest in direct, high-level talks. The Quds Force commander prefers to run out the clock on the Bush administration, hoping that the next administration will be more favorable to Iran's interests.

"The level of confidence of these [Quds Force] guys is that they are it, and everything else is marginal," says the Arab who meets regularly with Soleimani.

Toward the end of the column David concludes:

The question for Soleimani-watchers is how he will play his hand in the growing confrontation over Iran's nuclear program. The Bush administration seems to have decided on a course of escalating pressure against Tehran during its remaining months in office. The Iranians, while maintaining a tough line on the nuclear issue, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon, appear wary of an all-out confrontation.

So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can't be sure. You think America can't afford to play chicken in an election year, but you can't be certain of that, either. You think Iran is on a roll, but you know how quickly that advantage can be squandered by unwise choices. You know that Arabs, even in Iraq, have become peeved at what they see as meddling and overreaching by Tehran.

So you watch and wait. You give ground where necessary, but you prepare to strike back, as devastatingly as possible -- and on your own terms, not those of your adversary.

Sort of inconclusive as an ending, I feel. If David's source is Chalabi-- or actually, regardless of the identity of that near-native informant-- then one needs seriously to probe what his goal is in passing on this "information" to David. One also needs to probe David's goal in publishing this piece.

Regarding Chalabi, the best explanation for the invasion-inciting role he played so brilliantly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is that he was in good part on the Iranians' pay-roll in those years, when he was inveigling the Americans into toppling Tehran's old nemesis Saddam Hussein, and that he looked forward to being installed as the new leader in Iraq with the support of both Washington and Tehran.

First part worked. Second part didn't. Here he is again?

What is the current game-plan of this ever-shifty manipulator? Who knows?

Meanwhile, back to the Iraqi political system. I am very grateful to Reidar Visser for having added the following additional commentary to what I posted on JWN here yesterday, about the discussion with the two Iraqi parliamentarians:

the list of signatories to the letter you linked to with Iraqi parliamentarians protesting is extremely interesting. It consists of the same parties that have been trying to put together a cross-sectarian alliance ever since 2006, despite the formidable disadvantage of having an opponent (the Maliki government) which receives all the backing of the Bush administration, while they themselves have almost zero support in the outside world.

In October 2006 they tried to defeat the law for implementing federalism, but failed by a small margin. In January 2008, they produced a robust statement calling for a negotiated settlement of Kirkuk (instead of an early referendum) and criticised Kurdish attempts to circumvent Baghdad in oil contract dealings. The high point came in February 2008, when they managed to press through a demand for early provincial elections during the parliamentary debate of the non-federated governorates act, despite the determined opposition of the Maliki government.

Today, they are trying to prevent attempts by Kurds and ISCI to manipulate the electoral process for the upcoming elections – attempts that include suggestions to create an electoral law that would prevent the use of “open” candidate lists (whereby voters can focus on individuals instead of parties).

Visser also asked this extremely important question:

The big question is, when the Bush administration gives all its support to the opponents of this alliance – the Maliki government and the Kurdish–ISCI axis, why is it that the supposed creators of “alternative” US policies in Iraq, the Democrats, are focusing all their energies on outbidding Bush in this regard, by signalling even stronger support for the “soft partition” minority of Iraqis led by Barzani and Hakim?

Would it not be more logical for them to reach out to this nationalist parliamentary bloc, which despite its difficult situation (its enemies are supported by both the US and Iran) could now be a real majority, and could certainly have a great potential if it just received a little help from the outside world? This is a fantastic initiative by the AFSC, but one wishes it had come from American politicians eager to craft an alternative Iraq policy instead…

Visser is absolutely correct to put the Democratic Party in the US on the line like this. I guess if pushed, many Democrats might give strong weight to Israel's longstanding preference for Iraq not to re-emerge as a strong and capable unitary state...

I guess what I'm hoping, though, is that the visit to Washington by MPs Ulayyan and Jaberi has succeeded at least in opening good channels of continuing communication between them and all the political forces here in DC.

By the way, here is another account of the parliamentarians' visit here, by the strongly leftist-leaning (except on Israel) reporter ,Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman met the MPs at two events different from the one I attended, and I believe he also reported on their appearance at the House Subcommittee on Wednesday.

Ackerman's account there has much of interest in it. It is fuller than the account I blogged yesterday, and is completely consonant with what I heard. That's good. It means the two MPs stayed consistently on-message during their time here.

Actually there is something of a gathering stream of Iraqi pols visiting DC these days. This is one of the collateral benefits of the administration here having undertaken its essentially colonialist project in Iraq in the name of "democratization": That makes it hard for them to suppress all these outreach efforts inside the US by a wide range of Iraqi voices.

New president inaugurated in Lebanon. Can Bush keep his hands off?

As this report/analysis makes clear, Lebanon is not out of the woods, by a long shot. The opposing sides remain armed and intent on asserting themselves. Also telling here will be whether the Bush administration, which indeed suffered a defeat with Hezbollah's vindication in this deal, will take a clue, lie low, and let the Lebanese and interested regional parties try to work out a modus vivendi, or try to shake things up in its insistence that its war against "terrorists" (i.e., Hizbollah, Iran, Syria) takes precedence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/25/AR2008052501135.html
General Takes Office As President Of Lebanon
Vote Marks Symbolic End Of Government's Crisis

By Anthony Shadid and Alia Ibrahim
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 26, 2008; A12

BEIRUT, May 25 -- Lebanon's parliament elected the army commander, Gen. Michel Suleiman, as president Sunday, filling a post vacant for six months and bringing a symbolic if tenuous end to the country's worst crisis since the 15-year civil war ended in 1990.

The vote for Suleiman was virtually uncontested, already agreed to in a deal negotiated in Qatar last week that ended an 18-month confrontation between forces allied with the government and the opposition led by the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah. Postponed 19 times, the election marked the first step in reconstituting what had looked more and more like a failed state in past months: an unfilled presidency, a cabinet deemed illegitimate by the opposition and a parliament that had not met since 2006.

After Suleiman's election, by 118 votes of 127 possible, a flag-waving crowd that had gathered in his home town of Amchit erupted in cheers. Fireworks detonated over Beirut, cars blared their horns and church bells tolled. Staccato bursts of celebratory gunfire rattled across a capital that, less than two weeks ago, witnessed pitched gun battles redolent of civil war.

"I call upon all of you, politicians and citizens, to begin a new stage that is called Lebanon and the Lebanese," Suleiman, who forewent his military uniform for the civilian suit of a politician, told parliament. To repeated rounds of applause, he said the country had paid dearly for what he called national unity. "Let us preserve it hand in hand."

The deal that brought Suleiman to power represented another setback in the region for the United States, which has long sought to isolate Hezbollah, a group backed by Syria and Iran. Under the agreement, Hezbollah and its allies will have veto power in the coming cabinet -- the group's demand since the crisis began after a war with Israel in 2006 -- demonstrating its clear role today as the single most powerful force in Lebanon.

The vote represented a rare moment of consensus across the political, social and ideological divide that still fractures Lebanon -- from the country's posture toward Israel to which foreign patron will play the greatest role in Lebanese politics, long vulnerable to regional crises. The foreign ministers of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and France attended the parliamentary session, as did the emir of Qatar, who was seated at the podium of parliament in recognition of his government's role in the negotiations, which nearly collapsed twice. In a telling sign, the United States was represented only by a congressional delegation.

"This last crisis ended with a winner and a vanquished," said the emir, Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani. "The winner is Lebanon, and the vanquished is the feud, and this needs to be clear to all -- today, tomorrow and forever."

Streets in the capital and elsewhere Sunday were awash in Lebanese flags and posters celebrating Suleiman's presidency. "The leader, the president," one read. "Congratulations, Lebanon," said another. Weary of almost continuous crises that have beset Lebanon since former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated in a 2005 car bombing in Beirut, many residents, regardless of their stance on the crisis, have greeted the agreement and election of Suleiman with relief that the country averted civil war, consolation perhaps muted by frustration that the confrontation lasted as long as it did.

Reservations have surged at hotels here, the stock market has rebounded and life has returned to a downtown paralyzed by an 18-month opposition sit-in.

Often heard in Lebanon, though, is the idea that the country has embarked on a truce, and no more. The question of Hezbollah's arsenal remains pressing for government supporters, who tried to address the issue in the Qatar talks. Suleiman is expected to lead a dialogue over the issue with rival leaders.

The cabinet will remain in power through next summer, when parliamentary elections are expected to again enshrine in power the same leaders, some of them veterans of the civil war with almost-feudal influence over their followers.

Suleiman, 59, was appointed army commander in 1998, when Syria still exercised tutelage over Lebanon. He rose through the ranks of an army that, particularly in the 1990s, worked closely with Syria and Hezbollah, which fought a guerrilla war against Israel in southern Lebanon until its withdrawal in 2000. He emerged as a candidate of the opposition, then drew on the backing of government supporters to fill a post vacant since the term of Emile Lahoud, a Syrian ally and former general, ended in November.

Both sides had their grievances with Suleiman: The opposition was critical of the military for shooting on protesters in January; government supporters were angry at what they saw as the military's acquiescence in allowing fighters of Hezbollah and its allies to enter predominantly Muslim West Beirut this month, where they routed government-backed militiamen in hours, forcing the government into the eventual compromise.

"The gun should only be pointed against the enemy," Suleiman said. "We will not allow it another direction."

Rebuilding US foreign policy

The new president come 2009 will be faced with a monumental task in rebuilding America's role as a significant player in Middle Eastern developments, not to mention international relations in general, thanks to Mr. Bush and his pals. On the other hand, much of the world may welcome a new US approach that stresses global cooperation over Bush's unilateralism (which boiled down to US-firstism, as it were) especially in a new era blooming with possibilities of massive instability that may have global repercussions: global warming, the threat of food shortages, intense (potentially violent?) competition over increasingly scarce and costly resources like petroleum and natural gas, as well as the ongoing threat from groups like al-Qaeda.

But what will the US be able to bring to the table if the world wants to sit down and work out consultative, cooperative means of dealing with crises? Because of the world's awe of the US's military might, trust in the stability of the US economy (and dollar), and confidence in the efficacy of the US's diplomatic outreach and experience, the US had traditionally been counted on as both leader and ultimate enforcer - the "backstop," as it were, to keep crises in the ballpark. But now, the US economy is being pummeled onto the ropes: foreclosed mortgages, plummeting dollar, skyrocketing fuel prices (which, in my own home area, are contributing to a new round of teacher layoffs and possible school closings), US automobile manufacturers on life-support (Ford Motors just yesterday announced a cutback in US production; nobody's buying those Explorers and Expeditions anymore), national assets being gobbled up by China and the new "sovereign wealth funds" of petrodollar-rich nations.

As Strobel's essay (below) suggests, the confidence in US diplomacy is toast - thoroughly scorched toast, at that - thanks to the idiocy and arrogance of Mr. Bush's policies (and the sense of divine mission that impelled them), with a major assist from Condi Rice, who (as Elizabeth Bumiller's recent biography of her makes clear) has likely been the least qualified, least substantive (as opposed to stylish), and least effective national security advisor and secretary of state in the modern era. As for its military might, the US still possesses overwhelming firepower and technology-based weaponry, as well as a massive nuclear deterrent. But its land forces are in crisis: overstretched to the point of recruiting undereducated social and psychological misfits (and worse) to fill its ranks, and demoralized by the effects of multiple combat tours, stop-loss measures by its Pentagon commanders, and the refusal of increasing numbers of the Army's field and non-commissioned officers to re-enlist. Meanwhile, residents of Iraq's cities and villagers in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and now the world, thanks to the testimonies of "Winter Soldiers" and countless journalists) have learned that soldiers and contractors from the United States of America - a country long respected around the world for its democratic, humane values - have the prerogative of inflicting on them and their families sudden, indiscriminate murder, be it by an overreacting Marine patrol, the cowboys of a Blackwater security squad, an Air Force pilot in his (or her) F-16, or even a soldier, in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee at the ready, obliterating them and their families with a drone-borne Hellfire missile by pushing a button on a console on an air base in Colorado. The brutal termination of their lives is chalked up as "collateral damage" in the fight to eliminate the "bad guys" (many of whom are, after all, nationalist resistance fighters whose chief aim is simply to expel foreign occupiers - and their allies - from their homeland); their killers remain unknown or, if identified, largely unpunished. The US military is indeed still feared, and because of that fear, respected, but the larger point is that, where it once was seen as the agent of a nation that used its military might to fight for the Good, it now is perceived across much of the globe (and increasingly, here at home) as that nation's avatar of wanton destruction and domination.

As the world faces a terribly uncertain future as a new president is inaugurated in 2009, then, what reason has it any longer to look to the US for leadership, even with the promise of a new president in January, 2009?

http://www.sacbee.com/111/v-print/story/963571.html

Analysis: In week of dramatic Mideast developments, Washington was largely reduced to watching

By Warren P. Strobel - McClatchy Newspapers
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, May 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – In a week of dramatic developments in the Middle East, the most dramatic of all may have been the fact that the United States, long considered the region's indispensable player, was missing in action.

As its closest allies cut deals with their adversaries this week over the Bush administration's opposition, Washington was largely reduced to watching.

More painfully for President Bush, friends he has cultivated – and spent heavily on – in Lebanon and Iraq asked the United States to remain in the background, underlining how politically toxic an association with the United States can be for Arab leaders.

Over the past few days:

• The Lebanese government, which has received $1.3 billion and political support from the Bush administration, compromised with the Hezbollah-led opposition, giving the Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group, which Washington considers a terrorist organization, a greater role in running the country.

• Israel ignored U.S. objections and entered indirect peace talks with Syria through Turkey, another longtime U.S. ally.

• The U.S.-backed Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deployed military forces to Baghdad's Sadr City slum under an agreement that specifically excluded U.S. troops.

• Saudi Arabia, a crucial oil supplier and long a major buyer of U.S. weapons, is quietly closing what could be a multibillion-dollar arms deal with Russia, according to a U.S. defense official.

State Department officials scoffed at the notion that the United States has been relegated to the sidelines.

Private analysts and some foreign diplomats, however, said leaders in the Middle East, both friend and foe, are now calculating with an eye to the era after President Bush – who visited Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt this month with little visible effect.

Others said that by refusing to talk to adversaries and using bristling "with-us-or-against-us" rhetoric, Bush has cut his administration out of the game. Under Bush, U.S. diplomats have had few substantive discussions with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which in 2006 won elections that the White House had pushed for.

"In that sense, we've dealt ourselves out of the picture," said Richard Murphy, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Syria and an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration.

Three years ago, Lebanon was a symbol of the kind of Arab democracy the Bush administration envisioned. A Western-backed reform movement, spurred by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, drove out a generation-long Syrian military presence and made electoral gains against Syrian-backed factions such as Hezbollah.

But every year since Hariri's death, America's sway in Lebanon has diminished and Hezbollah's has increased.

An 18-month political stalemate erupted in violence this month, with Hezbollah and its allies taking over much of Beirut but stopping short of laying siege to the government.

The strategy paid off this week, when Arab mediators in Doha, Qatar, negotiated a peace agreement that fulfilled Hezbollah's three main goals: keeping its vast arsenal intact and untouchable; winning veto power over all government decisions; and tweaking election laws to better reflect the growing Shiite population.

U.S. and European powers could do little but watch. Murphy, referring to Lebanon, said: "Maybe we didn't do quite enough, and said too much."

Similarly, in the talks between Israel and Syria, it was Turkey that stepped into the role of "honest broker" once played by the United States.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Bush were aware of Israeli-Syrian contacts in recent months, U.S. officials said. But they made little secret of their deep skepticism about the worth of talking to Syria, which Bush has shunned far more than any of his recent predecessors.

"It's like I'm from Missouri. … Show me," the State Department official said.

Israel, though, appears to have decided that it's worth trying to peel Syria away from its larger patron, Iran, which is also Israel's principal adversary. For its part, Syria seeks to retrieve the strategic Golan Heights, which it lost to Israel in the 1967 Mideast War.

Into the vacuum stepped Turkey, a large, pro-Western Muslim nation that has strong ties to Israel and Syria. It gained credibility in the region for refusing to allow U.S. troops to use its territory to invade Iraq in 2003.

"Turkey has carved out the middle ground," said Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East Center in Beirut. "It's a success story."

The proposed arms deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia is yet another example of a country trying to make inroads on traditional U.S. turf. Russia's state-controlled arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, has been marketing aggressively in the Arab world, according to a senior State Department official. News reports from Moscow value the deal at $4 billion, although U.S. officials said it might be smaller.

---

Go to: Sacbee / Back to story

Dana Milbank's excellent piece on neocon darling Doug Feith

IMHO, on-target assessment of the failings of the execrable Mr. Doug Feith. Frankly, I was disappointed when Georgetown gave him a faculty spot. It's somehow reassuring that they've chosen to dump him. He'll probably wind up making deals as a lobbyist - maybe for AIPAC? - or as a new "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/24/AR2008042403481_pf.html
Iraq War Is Everyone Else's Fault, Feith Explains

By Dana Milbank
Friday, April 25, 2008; A03

Mistakes were made. But not by him.

Doug Feith, the No. 3 man at the Pentagon before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, has come in for his share of blame for the failures there -- in large part because he led the Pentagon policy shop that badly misstated the case for war and bungled the planning for the aftermath. Gen. Tommy Franks called him "the dumbest [bad word] guy on the planet." George Tenet of the CIA called his work on Iraq "total crap." And Jay Garner, once the American administrator in Iraq, deduced that Feith is "incredibly dangerous" and, "He's a smart guy whose electrons aren't connected."

Now Feith, whatever the state of his electrons, is showing just how dangerous he can be. He's written a book designed to settle the score with his many opponents in the administration, and in a book-launch event last night at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he pointed his finger every which way but inward.

He argued that former secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were the ones who failed to challenge the logic of going to war -- not him. He suggested that Powell, Armitage, Franks, former Iraq viceroy Jerry Bremer and even Feith's old boss, Donald Rumsfeld, should be blamed for the postwar chaos in Iraq -- not him. He blamed then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for the way she operated ("fundamental differences were essentially papered over rather than resolved"). He accused the CIA of "improper" and unprofessional behavior. And he implicitly blamed President Bush for not cracking down on insubordinate behavior at the State Department.

Yet at the same time, Feith told the CSIS crowd that he disapproved of the "snide and shallow self-justification typical in memoirs of former officials," or what Feith cleverly called the " 'I-was-surrounded-by-idiots' school of memoir writing." Feith pointed out that he supported his account with 140 pages of notes and documents. And yet, in his hour-long panel discussion, Feith seemed to be of the impression that he had, in fact, been surrounded by idiots.

There was, for example, the question of the campaign waged by Feith and his section of the Pentagon against the CIA when the agency argued that there was no evidence of al-Qaeda having ties to Saddam Hussein. "The CIA and the intelligence community should not be shading intelligence," Feith lectured. But the self-justification missed the obvious point: The CIA was correct.

As he has promoted his book this month, Feith has continued to say things that suggest an ongoing electron disconnect. On "60 Minutes," he made the straight-faced claim that "I don't think we needed to" make weapons of mass destruction part of the case for war with Iraq.

And he assigns blame freely. Disbanding of the Iraqi army? He blames that on Bremer and Rumsfeld. "The first time I heard the idea, it came from Ambassador Bremer when he was on his way to Baghdad. I didn't sign off one way or the other."

His main regret, he told National Public Radio, was that Rumsfeld and Franks did not take seriously his wise and prescient memo warning about the need to preserve law and order in Iraq. He should have "pushed harder to get it onto General Franks's radar screen, to get it onto Secretary Rumsfeld's radar screen," he said.

Pointing so many fingers in so many directions, a man is bound to get confused -- as happened when Steve Kroft asked him on "60 Minutes" about his claim that the lack of troops contributed to looting in Baghdad. "I don't believe I raised the troop-level issue in that connection," Feith replied. Then Kroft presented him with the passage. "That's a fair point," Feith amended.

The title of Feith's book, "War and Decision," is printed across a blood-red cover. At last night's forum, moderator Ray DuBois of the CSIS pointed out that Feith, admirably, is donating all proceeds from the book to a foundation he's creating to help veterans and their families. Of course, money is not the object in this book; the 54-year-old son of a Holocaust survivor is eager to rebuild a reputation that continues to suffer for his role in starting the war. After his appointment to the Georgetown foreign-service school caused a ruckus among the faculty, the school decided not to renew his spot.

CSIS's Fred Ikle, one of the panelists, admired Feith's ability to point out, "honestly and delicately," that "this was not Rumsfeld's finest hour," and he praised the author's "subtle disclosure of the chronic insubordination in our government." But there was nothing subtle about Feith's blame-casting.

"The most serious analysis of the downside and risks of war was produced in the Pentagon by Rumsfeld and his top advisers, not by Colin Powell, Rich Armitage, George Tenet or other officials who are reputed to have been the voices of caution," Feith argued.

Then there was the "plan for political transition in post-Saddam Iraq" -- the lack of which caused the American occupation to unravel. "It was a plan that my office drafted, Powell and Armitage tried to delay, President Bush approved, Jay Garner began to implement and L. Paul Bremer buried."

It must have been very difficult being Doug Feith: correct all the time, and surrounded by idiots.

More birth pangs, Condi?

Tomorrow's NY Times quotes Condi Rice and Ryan Crocker with remarks that I'd find ludicrous, even comical, if their deceptiveness weren't masking with happy-talk the ramping-up violence in Iraq, specifically in Baghdad and Basra - and quite probably, as the LA Times indicates, Najaf. Ms. Rice is chirping up in a manner that has me afraid she's going to start making remarks a la her famous "birth pangs of a new Middle East" comment during the Israeli demolition of much of Lebanon's infrastructure (and hundreds of its people) when it went after Hezbollah there in summer of 2006. Specifically, she quotes Iraqi PM al-Maliki as referring to the heightening violence in Baghdad's Sadr City as a "political spring." She perhaps is channeling her putative expertise as a Sovietologist (by any academic standard, she was a very minor one) to associate what's happening in Baghdad with the famous "Prague Spring" of 1968. That, some of us remember, was a short-lived political liberalizing in Czechoslovakia that ended tragically when the USSR invaded the country. Or perhaps she sees US troops about to do the same thing if the Iraqi Shia nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr calls up his Mahdi Army forces to resist the US forces and the "Iraqi army" on the streets of Sadr City. Muqtada, by the way, now threatens full-out war. Condi, when so informed, said that she wasn't sure whether to take him seriously. This is the same Condi, of course, who was taken completely by surprise when democratic elections in the Palestinian territories brought Hamas to power in 2006.

My use of quotation marks around "Iraqi army" is deliberate, if you hadn't already guessed - and this is where I take issue with ambassador Crocker, whom the NYT also quotes as saying that to be a serious political player like the ISCI party, Muqtada needs to forswear his Mahdi army militia. After all, says Crocker, ISCI's Badr Force militia have largely joined up with the supposedly nationalist, sect-unaffiliated Iraqi Army - which in Crocker's eyes (or at least for public consumption for the compliant mainstream media, not to mention his bosses in the White House) seems to mean that, but, of course, they've renounced any ties to the leadership and agenda of ISCI.

I want to scream, "Who do you think you're kidding?!!" Unfortunately, thousands of Americans who are too pre-occupied with keeping their houses and/or their jobs, or maintaining their Facebook pages, will take some comfort from Rice's and Crocker's public optimism - and Sen. McCain will likely seize on their comments to bolster his candidacy.

I fear, though, that the bottom may be about to fall out, and I fear that thousands of Iraqis - and a lot of US troops - are going to pay the price. But if the bottom is indeed about to fall out, how fitting that it happen on Mr. Bush's watch.

Iraq troops in control of Basra?

So says the NY Times, which reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army forces to withdraw following attacks by Iraq army troops (remember, many of them are members of the Badr Force militia of Sadr's rival Abdul-aziz al-Hakim) and pounding by US and British artillery and air forces. In fact, the headline in the London Times is "British Guns Pound Basra". When I first spotted it I wondered if they were running one of those "On this date 91 years ago" kind of stories.

Meanwhile, US and Iraqi troops are savaging Sadr City in Baghdad, and Muqtada is threatening an all-out campaign if Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki doesn't rein in his forces. Very noteworthy here is the Iranian official reaction, which sides with Maliki vs. Muqtada, even though Iran has been providing support to the militias of both sides. However, Muqtada is - much more than al-Hakim - an Iraqi nationalist who wants to see a strong central government in Baghdad, which makes him a greater threat down the line to the Iranian regime's hopes of maintaining a strong influence over Iraq affairs. al-Hakim is much more interested in a loosely federated Iraq with a Shia super-state in the south that would have very close ties to Iran's mullahs.

Bush says no more troop cuts in Iraq

Mr Bush and his “legacy”
By John Robertson, War in Context, April 6, 2008

According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph our war-hero “Decider” president has decided that he will pull no more troops out of Iraq. According to the report, which cites Pentagon sources, he feels that showing such “resolve” will cement his legacy - which, he obviously assumes, is going to be an honorable one that will burn his glorious presidency indelibly into the pages of our national memory. A major contributor to his decision, moreover, seems to have been a report from another of our war-hero stalwarts, Fred Kagan, American Enterprise Institute all-star and an “intellectual” godfather of the “Surge.” Kagan is also a frequent contributor to William Kristol’s Weekly Standard (required reading for the - one would have hoped by now - discredited neocon faithful), where right up to the recent Basra humiliation he was serving up self-congratulatory pieces about the success of the Surge and declaring Iraq’s civil war to be “over.” Sorry, Fred, but most of the real experts (people like Juan Cole, Nir Rosen, and Patrick Cockburn - that is, people who know the country intimately, have lived there, and can read its newspapers) who’ve been reading the tea leaves suggest that, in the inimitable words of an American showman whose name I can’t recall, we “ain’t see nuthin yet.”

Please forgive me if I sound callous or flip by putting it that way, but by now it ought to be clear that the unfortunate people of Iraq have a long road to travel - and probably many years of suffering ahead - before they will be able to enjoy an existence graced by any consistency of peace, prosperity, and security. Surge notwithstanding, the Sunni Arabs of Anbar and elsewhere are no closer to being included in the governing of the Iraqi state than they were during the proconsulship of L. Paul Bremer, who marginalized them from the outset of the American occupation. The much-touted Sunni sahwa (”Sunni Awakening”) - to which the Bush-Petraeus “Surge” owed so much of its putative success - now seems, at best, to be hitting its collective snooze alarm while the US tries to keep these new militias, which are completely outside the control of the central government, paid off. Despite its ongoing entreaties, the Bush administration has been unable to convince the Shia-dominated Maliki government to incorporate them into the Iraqi army. Nor is that government making any appreciable effort to find them jobs to divert their attention and secure them some livelihood, and paychecks. It is likely only a matter of time before they bug out altogether and turn their newly obtained arms, equipment, and training on the people against whom so many of them were originally most intent on fighting in the first place: the US occupation forces and their Shia Badr Force allies.

Meanwhile, the sun seems to be setting on the hope-filled halcyon days of the Kurds’ autonomy in Iraq’s northeast, in which they were able to bask only because (after years of being sheltered and nurtured under a US-enforced no-fly zone) they supported the US invasion right down the line, while the US could point to them as Iraq’s model of stability and potential. But now the US has shown itself all too willing to sell them out when a stronger, more potentially useful ally, Turkey, put its marker down in this new “great game.” Notwithstanding the protests of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Turkish forces only recently completed major incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan to go after the PKK; only days ago, for the umpteenth time, Turkish warplanes flew bombing sorties into the region; and the Turkish republic’s leaders have reserved the right to violate the sovereignty of the KRG (and, by the standards of anybody’s interpretation of international law, the sovereignty of the state of Iraq) when and if they deem it necessary (which, given the current turmoil in the Turkish government, also translates to “politically expedient”). And as if the threat from Turkey weren’t enough, the future stability of Kurdistan faces what is perhaps an even direr threat: the possibility of civil war among Kurds, Arabs, and Turks over the ultimate control of the city and region of Kirkuk.

And speaking of civil war, it’s pretty safe to say that the violence of late March in Basra and Baghdad was only a taste of what might be in store for Iraq’s largely Shia south and center, where the scions of the powerful and prestigious al-Hakim and al-Sadr clerical lineages (along with smaller groups like the Fadhila party in Basra) are vying for political control (and in Basra, control of Iraq’s vital oil exports) as provincial elections, scheduled for October, approach. Their respective leaders - Abdulaziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr - control well-armed and inspired militias (respectively, the Badr Forces and the Jaish al-Mahdi, or “Mahdi Army”) that fought each other viciously in the holy city of Karbala only a few months ago, and in Basra and Baghdad only recently. Thanks largely to the intervention of Iran (which was spearheaded by a “terrorist” Revolutionary Guard general), Muqtada agreed to a truce, not to be mistaken for a peace treaty. Simply put, the two militias hate each other. Add then to this very combustible mix that Muqtada is the leader of a huge popular political movement that claims the support of hundreds of thousands of the poor Shia of teeming slums like Sadr City in Baghdad, and of hundreds of thousands more in Iraq’s second largest city, Basra. He has called upon his followers - and other Iraqis who want the US occupation out of Iraq - to come together next week for a million-man march. That march was originally set for the holy city of Najaf, a stronghold of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), the Shia political movement led by Abdulaziz al-Hakim. Now, however, Muqtada has decided to stage the march in Baghdad.

Keeping a lid on the tensions that will be bubbling in Baghdad next week will be the job of the Maliki “government.” This is, of course, the same Maliki government that was recently humbled by its failure in Basra and that appears ever more dysfunctional, hunkered down in the “Green Zone” (beyond which it exercises little real control) and confronted with a divided, often absentee parliament. The army Maliki commands has proved itself largely unreliable and ineffective, often including members of the Badr militia whose loyalties to the state are suspect or forced to rely on Kurdish peshmerga who are loath to be involved in inter-Arab conflicts. But it’s this army with which Maliki is entrusted with keeping a damper on the situation as Muqtada’s march approaches. Can we really believe they’re up to it?

No. Which is why US troops, air power, and special forces will be on the scene aplenty next week - and why, Mr. Bush has now decided, and why Gen. Petraeus will insist next week, they will need to be there for the foreseeable future. And it’s also why Mr. Bush will feel it justifiable and necessary to hand off the Iraq tinderbox to his successor. Given the current mood of US citizenry (of whom, a new poll indicates, more than 80 percent believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction), that successor will likely not be a member of Mr. Bush’s political party. But with a level of military effort no longer sustainable (as almost all of the top brass have insisted), and with the national economy swirling the bowl, that successor will most certainly have to begin to disengage the US from Iraq - and be left to hold the bag for the hubris, incompetence, and catastrophe of his predecessor.

Because, as US forces pull out, Iraq will most certainly fall apart even more, its misery and violence ratcheting up by several notches. With much more justification than Mr. Bush did last week, many across the world will proclaim it a “defining moment.” Some will proclaim that the American behemoth has been vanquished once and for all. Others, perhaps more reflectively, and dishearteningly, may surmise that whatever fires America might have lit for insisting on goodness and justice on the planet lie in cinders, if not altogether doused.

But Mr. Bush’s glorious page in our national memory will be completely up in smoke, wisps on the wind of history.

John Robertson is a professor of Middle East history at Central Michigan University and has his own blog, Chippshots.

About that "defining moment" in Iraq

Mr. Bush's claim last week that Iraqi PM al-Maliki's decision to take on the Mahdi army in Basra was a "defining moment" is coming back to haunt him. First, Maliki's own party, without his knowledge, undercuts him by sending emissaries to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general (and evidently a "terrorist" as defined by the US) in Qom to arrange a truce with Muqtada al-Sadr. Then, even though by all accounts his army did not do well against the Mahdi army, Maliki vows to keep going after them. Now, today, Maliki is telling his army to stand down.
A defining moment indeed.

Basra's aftermath

Very revealing story in today's Financial Times about the performance of the Iraqi army during the recent fight against the Mahdi army in Basra. It seems that as many as 1000 officers and men refused to fight, and now Mr. al-Maliki is threatening to prosecute and/or discipline them all. Meanwhile, he is now signing up Shia tribesmen by the dozen to enlist in the Iraqi army. US ambassador Ryan Crocker sees this as a measure of Maliki's strong leadership, and as evidence that the Shia tribesmen are moving to support his government in what Crocker seems to view as some major shift in the tide. Fortunately, the reporter (so unlike so many of his colleagues in the US mainstream media) does not restrict his reporting to stenography for US military and diplomatic spokesmen, but inquires into other possible reasons for this shift, to learn that a - perhaps the - major incentive here is a job, and a paycheck.

Meanwhile, the Sunni sahwa ("Awakening") forces, who've been demanding that they be incorporated into the Iraqi army, remain out in the cold - and they aren't happy about it. That, of course, spells even more trouble for Mr. Maliki, who seems determined to keep Sunni Arab elements from acquiring any significant influence in either the government or the military. Given the long years of Sunni domination and abuse of the Shia in Mesopotamia/Iraq, especially under the Baathist regime of Saddam, his reluctance in this regard is to be expected. But without some measure of significant Sunni inclusion, Iraq's current state cannot improve for more than the few months that band-aid solutions such as the "Surge" made possible.

And Mr. Muqtada al-Sadr still plans to have his million-man march on Najaf next week . . . .

Muqtada's million-person march

Reports today that Muqtada al-Sadr is calling for a million people to march on the Shiite holy city of Najaf next week, both as a show of political force and as a demonstration against the US occupation. The US-sponsored Maliki government is saying that it is more or less OK with it (even as its forces continue to surround Sadrist neighborhoods in Baghdad and US warplanes bomb Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra). But I fear that this proposed march has the potential to be the flashpoint that sets off the tinderbox. Najaf is controlled mostly by the forces of ISCI (Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim) and its militia, the Badr Force, which are extremely hostile to the Sadrists. Only a few months ago they came to blows in the other shrine city, Karbala, and the recent battles in Basra pitted the Mahdi Army of the Sadrists against the Iraqi army (with US ground and air support), many of whom were also members of the Badr militia. We can expect the feelings between the Sadrists and ISCI to be very raw when the march takes place.

And add to that the fact that the Sunni al-Qaeda forces will likely be planning attacks against the Shiite marchers . . . and that US forces will likely be nearby, on alert . . .