Cindy Sheehan, Democratic Savior? Posted by David Adesnik

No matter what you think of her politics, you have to give Cindy Sheehan credit for staging one of the most brilliant pieces of political theater that Americans have encountered in a very long time.

Conservatives such as Michelle Malkin and Bill O'Reilly have blasted the liberal media for lavishing attention on an unworthy protest, but that hardly takes away from what Sheehan has accomplished.  After all, there are countless efforts made by anti-war protesters which don't result in this kind of coverage.  But Sheehan did a perfect job of framing herself as a lonely voice in the wilderness of Crawford, attempting to soften the heart of an American pharoah hiding behind the darkened windows of his limousine.  And as the NYT points out, Sheehan had the good luck (or perhaps the good sense) to stage her protest in the "slow news month" of August, when journalists are almost desperate for news.

But the broader question here for Democrats is not whether they can learn from Sheehan's tactics, but whether they should embrace her success as the foundation for a full-frontal assault on Bush's war policy.  Thus we come back to the question of what exactly Sheehan's politics are.  Although Sheehan hasn't been terribly consistent in her criticism of Bush, there is no question about what her politics are now: The war in Iraq is not a noble cause.  Pull out now before any more of our soldiers get killed.

In a certain sense, the question of whether or not to embrace Sheehan is same as the question Democrats faced in January of 2004: Should the party close ranks behind a charismatic anti-war firebrand or should it run to the center by adopting a more nuanced approach to the war?  My sense is that John Kerry's loss has led numerous Democrats to embrace the Sheehan approach.

For example, over at TPM Cafe, blogger cscs asks:

Cindy Sheehan has a simple question for the President:

Is Iraq a noble cause?...I believe Democrats who advocate a "stay the course" plan for Iraq have a responsibility to answer the same question.

So, is Iraq a noble cause?

This question generated 64 responses, almost all of which describe the war in Iraq as a manifest failure, both moral and strategic, that must be brought to an end right now.  Yet as one of those commentators pointed, leading Democrats such as Bill Clinton adamantly insist that we must stand by the people of Iraq as they embark on one of the most improbable and ambitious transitions to democracy in the history of the modern world.

Moreover, Clinton insists that one's support or opposition to the initial invasion of Iraq is absolutely irrelevant to whether we should stand by its people now, in their time of need.  That is the moral case for staying in Iraq and describing it as a noble cause.  Although Cindy Sheehan relentlessly speaks the language of compassion, she never seems to address the question of whether there are Iraqi mothers just like herself who are sending their sons out to fight an extremely dangerous war against Ba'athist and Al Qaeda terrorism and therefore deserve American support that will save many of their children's lives.

But in addition to the moral question of whether to stay the course in Iraq, there is the strategic question as well.  If we pull out of Iraq, then what?  This is another question that neither Sheehan nor her supporters seems willing to answer.  What if the low-grade civil war in progress today erupts into a full-scale bloodletting of the kind that took place in the aftermath of the first Gulf War?  And what if the Ba'athists and their Al Qaeda allies prevail in that war and transform Iraq into a staging ground for internation terrorists attacks, a la Afghanistan except with oil?

But perhaps the most important question for those who support Sheehan is not moral or strategic but partisan politcal.  The advocates of a pullout seem confident in their conviction that it is the moral and practical thing to do.  But what about 2008?

You can call Bush either stubborn or principled, but the bottom line is that he seems dead set on keeping tens of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq for as long as he is President.  And the Republican Congress seems to have few qualms about providing Bush with the necessary funds.  Recently, there has been widespread speculation in the media about the administration's semi-secret plan to pull out, but those stories never seem to pan out.

So what we are looking at for 2008 is another scenario, similar to 2004, in which American soldiers are fighting for their lives and the Democrats aren't sure whether the centrist voters that decide presidential elections will trust a Democratic party that continues to embrace its Vietnam heritage of demanding prudent withdrawals rather than investing ever more resources in the prospect of victory.

My intuition is that the response of centrists will depend on just how badly the war is going.  What the Democrats really need in order to make their anti-war stance both marketable and credible is for the army itself to turn against the war, along with a good number of prominent Republicans.  Otherwise, the GOP will once again be able to brand the Democrats as the party of appeasement and surrender. 

That is really what's at stake in the debate about Cindy Sheehan.  The Democrats have to decide whether they are willing to gamble their political future on the United States losing another war in the manner that it lost Vietnam.  Even opposing that sort of quagmire has had an enduring impact on the Democrats' reputation as guardian of our national security.  If democracy prevails in Iraq, the Democrats may find that they have cemented their status as the minority party of this generation. 

Bad, Bad, Sam Posted by Michael Osborne

Back in Cape Town, South Africa, after a stint teaching at the New School, I must report that, at least based on my observations here, everything you hear about the unpopularity of the United States in foreign parts is true.  As a native South African who has spent about half his adult life in the United States, I am still shocked at the virulent animosity towards America in so many of politically conscious people here.

Few of my friends and acquaintances in Britain have anything good to say about the U.S.   (A far from patriotic American friend who studied at Oxford tells me he will never forget how isolated he felt when the common room at his college erupted in cheers as the  Space Shuttle exploded on TV).  But my impression is that British anti-Americanism is largely the indulgence of the intellectual.  Here is the South Africa, many people with only a bare knowledge of (or interest in), international affairs love to hate Uncle Sam.

The evil of America is one of the few things upon which South Africans of  the left and the right can agree upon.   I vividly recall the fury evoked in whites by Jimmy Carter and, in particular, by his U.N. ambassador, Andy Young, when Young was regularly denouncing South Africa in the General Assembly.   So fervently was the U.S. disliked that the denouement of Carter's attempt to rescue the Teheran hostages was greeted with joy.   White South Africans nostalgic for the days of apartheid still have a vague sense that De Klerk's sell-out was due in part to U.S. pressure - a thesis with perhaps a germ of truth to it.  More fundamentally, some South African whites have always despised America as an upstart nation of half-breeds and mongrels.  Jews pull the strings.  Worse, uppity blacks hold high office. (It is difficult to exaggerate how the simple fact that a black women is Secretary of State of the most powerful county in the world must grate on some whites in South Africa, as on bigots around the globe; that she was appointed by Bush offers absolutely no comfort).

The South African left has its own reasons for disliking America.  Some stem from cold war politics.  The African National Congress in exile was closely allied with Moscow.  It went so far as to openly support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Also, it is widely believed (although I do not know whether it has been proven), that the CIA tipped off the South African government about the movements  of Nelson Mandela when he was underground in the early 1960's, leading to his arrest at a roadblock in Natal.

The "new" South Africa is self-consciously internationalist  in  orientation, owing in part to the role played by the international community in squeezing apartheid.  It has shown a strong commitment to international law. The South African Constitution  is the only one of which I am aware that mandates domestic courts to apply international law)    South Africa has enthusiastically embraced multinational efforts to address global problems, such as the Kyoto protocol.  That being the case, it is to be expected that Bush's unilateralism will not be applauded in Pretoria.  The antipathy of South African leaders towards the United States has in the past taken on a bizarre racial flavor: former President Nelson Mandela once suggested that Bush and Blair wanted to undermine the United Nations because Kofi Annan is a black man.   In the view of influential South Africans, the U.S, is the one true rogue state on the globe.   One respected commentator confessed a feeling of schadenfreude at the sight of the World Trade Centre towers crashing to the ground.   

Historical peculiarities aside, I suspect that South Africans despise the United States for reasons similar to those that animate dislike of America globally.  No one likes a bully.  And it can scarcely be denied that the Bush administration's foreign policy has cast it as the meanest kid of the block. 

Even if its substantive policies could be justified, the tone of statements in their defense would be unforgivable.  Bush's arrant "with us of against us" rhetoric is essentially a "bring it on" to foreign approbation.    And when not engaged in swaggering bluster, Washington defaults to hypocritical rationalizations.  ("Operation Iraqi Freedom")    A regular bully is bad enough.   A sanctimonious thug is beyond the pale.

That being said, hostility towards America long predates the Bush administration, and bears no necessary relationship to the virtue or otherwise of particular U.S. foreign policy.  The U.S. was excoriated for doing nothing to stop the Rwanda genocide in 1994.   But you can be sure that, if Clinton had dispatched Marines to Kigali, the very same critics would have lambasted the action as another imperialist adventure.   In one of the few positive steps the Bush administration has taken with respect to Africa, it has instituted a programme to spend $9-billion on HIV/Aids.   Does this initiative, vastly greater than offered by any other country, temper antipathy towards America?  Not a chance.  The angle picked up by the leading South African weekly, is that the program places too much emphasis on abstinence. 

The astounding depth of South African anti-American animus is made clear in the double standards routinely applied.   France last year intervened (without UN authorisation), in the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire, destroying the country's air force in the process.   The action drew no significant criticism here. It goes without saying that equivalent American action would have provoked a firestorm of protest.   Another example: The U.S. role in helping depose Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year was roundly condemned in South Africa (which had close ties with Aristide, who now lives in exile near Johannesburg)   But no-one seemed to notice that France, Haiti's former colonial master, co-operated closely with Washington in the de facto coup.   France remains the hero of multilateralism for its brave defiance of U.S. unilateralism on Iraq.

I find the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't quality of anti-American animosity frankly puzzling.  One thoughtful friend of mine admits that her antipathy towards America is based on an irrational aversion.  But most do attempt to justify their deep-set resentment, although in ways I do not find especially convincing.    Some, for example, point to the pitifully low level of U.S. foreign aid as a percentage of GNP.   I think this criticism does carry some weight; the percentage is the lowest of any industrialized nation.   But the point is difficult to take seriously from the mouth of a very privileged South African whose own lifestyle would be the envy of all but the wealthiest of Americans.   (Nor is the criticism tempered by an acknowledgment that in absolute terms the American contribution exceeds that of any other country.)    Other South Africans bristle at American cultural imperialism.  That is quite understandable.  How could South Africans proud of their country's indigenous art, music, theater and literature not feel embittered when worthy local plays of films run in empty houses, while the masses stand in line across the street to catch the newest excrescence of the Hollywood junk factory?

But at the end of the day, who cares if a lot of South Africans do not like America?   After all, Pretoria nevertheless maintains, behind the rhetoric, a very good  day-to-day relationship with Washington.  (It is not only in Arab autocracies that we find a yawning chasm between street sentiment and state policy).  South Africa has bent over backwards to help out in the "war of terror."  The Constitutional Court had to rap the government over the knuckles for hustling a suspect in the 1998 Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings onto a FBI-chartered plane waiting at Cape Town airport, without a smidgen of due process.   (Judge Sand sentenced Khalfan Khamis Mohamed. to life in prison).  Also,  Bush has praised President Mbeki as his "point man" on the subject of Zimbabwe. 

Still, I think the U.S. should be worried about its very bad name in South Africa.   Over the long term, even partially democratic governments cannot but be influenced by their people's views.  And if Washington cannot win hearts and minds in a country so far removed from the front lines of the "war on terror," it is difficult to imagine how it can secure them anywhere.

Is there an iron fist in the Democrats' velvet glove? Posted by David Adesnik

This post isn't about foreign policy per se, but it is about whether and how the Democrats' can retake control of issues they have lost, foreign policy being just one.  This morning, the WaPo ran an analysis column by Dana Milbank that asked whether Democrats lack the ability of the GOP to go for the jugular.

Milbank's case in point is the Democratic response to a patently dishonest ad by NARAL, which accused John Roberts of supporting those who bomb abortion clinics.  On Friday morning, the WaPo denounced the NARAL ad in an editorial entitled Abortion Smear.  Also on Friday, liberal columnist EJ Dionne dismissed the accusations against Roberts as "outrageous".  Then, the NYT editorial board joined the chorus as well.

According to Milbank's analysis column, this sort of liberal self-flaggellation provides a stark contrast to what happned last summer, when,

Amid similar criticism against another controversial ad, most Republicans brushed aside demands to repudiate Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Milbank has chosen his words carefully, but still leaves a somewhat misleading impression.  While refusing to condemn the Swift Vets, top Republicans, including the President, were also extraordinarily careful not to say anything that might have been construed by the media as an endorsement of the Swift Vets' accusations.  (I confronted this evasiveness first-hand when I, along with other bloggers, interviewed RNC chairman Ed Gillespie last summer at the GOP convention in New York.)

Did Bush have a moral obligation to condemn the Swift Vets explicitly?  Or would have expecting such a condemnation from Bush amounted to demanding that he play by the same rules to which Milbank attributes the Democrats' weakness?

Either way, the adamant refusal of Bush, Gillespie and others to say anything positive about the Swift Vets demonstrates that there clearly are lines that the GOP will not cross.  Depending on your perspective, you can chalk this up either to a sense of fair play or to the realization that the media would have eviscerated Bush for saying anything positive about the Swift Vets.

Thus, the question to ask is not whether the Democrats should abandon their ethical standards, but whether they should adjust them slightly downwards in the name of expediency.  Before endorsing such a notion, I think it is important to point one critical difference between the Swift Vet and NARAL offensives.  As Kevin Drum astutely observes,

The Swift Boat folks were able to manufacture uncertainty by focusing on an event that was genuinely hard to gather facts about. It was something that happened over 30 years ago...

The NARAL ad, conversely, focused on an event in which the facts were well established and every news organization in the country was able to figure out within hours that the charges against Roberts were dubious at best. Sure, partisans could have stuck with NARAL, but the court of public opinion matters, and the NARAL ad was so easy to fact check that there was never any chance of winning in that court. That's dumb politics.

Although Kevin states unequivocally that he believes the Democrats to be morally superior to the GOP, his observation about the sheer stupidity of the NARAL ad explains why Milbank and others are wrong to chalk up the Democratic backlash against NARAL as a sign of weakness.

But there are other cases in point.  According to Milbank

In June, Democrats demanded that Bush aide Karl Rove apologize for saying that liberals wanted "therapy and understanding for our attackers." Rove refused to apologize, and Republicans leapt to his defense. Just before the Rove episode, Republicans demanded an apology from Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the number two Democrat in the Senate, who likened U.S. treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to techniques used by Nazis. Democrats joined in criticizing Durbin, who eventually delivered a tearful apology on the Senate floor.

I think this example begins to get at the question of whether Democrats should go for the jugular when attempting to re-establish themselves as the party of national security.  I certainly think Rove's comments were appalling.  Yet Durbin brought Hitler (and Stalin) into play.  As Kevin would say, that's dumb politics.

From a longer-term perspective, the Democrats need to ask themselves whether it is possible to attack Bush's foreign policy more viciously and more effectively without slipping into a position, such as Durbin's, that can easily be labeled as anti-American or unpatriotic.  As I see it, the problem isn't that Democrats are afraid to bare their fangs, but rather that the party is so divided that it can't agree on how to attack Bush.

The left wing of the party would be glad to aggressively cast the war in Iraq as another Vietnam, but the centrist wing of the party is committed to promoting democracy in Iraq regardless of whether the invasion was justified in the first place.  The centrists would be glad to attack Bush more forcefully for his failure to win the war in Iraq, but that would imply that America should commit more resources to the confict, rather than pulling out (as the Vietnam analogy suggests).

The bottom line is that unless the Democrats can speak with one voice, turning up the volume will only create static instead of taking the national security debate back from the GOP.

HOWDY PARDNER! Posted by David Adesnik

My name is David Adesnik and I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Signer and the rest of the folks here at Democracy Arsenal for having me as their guest this coming week.  The rest of the time, you can find my opinions posted over at OxBlog, where I started blogging in September 2002, when the blogosphere was still young.

Of course, I'm not a professional blogger.  My day job for quite some time now has been as a graduate student in international relations, working on a dissertation entitled "Reagan's Democratic Crusade: Rhetoric and the Remaking of American Foreign Policy."  My home university is Oxford, although I have spent the past two years in the United States because of my research.

As everyone at Oxford could tell, I am most certainly not British.  I am a New Yorker born and raised and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Politically, I am adrift.  Five years ago I was a staunch liberal who barely understood how any intelligent American could vote for George Bush.  Now I am an independent.  What hasn't changed is that I am committed as passionately as ever to promoting democracy across the globe.

When it comes to democracy promotion, I find it hard to fully identify with the approach of either the Democrats or the Republicans.  Although I consider President Bush's Second Inaugural Address to be a historic (and sincere) statement of American idealism, I have often found his administration's implementation of those ideals to be lackluster at best.

On the other hand, I find it hard not to be ashamed when a Democratic presidential candidate such as John Kerry says that we should be closing firehouses in Baghdad instead of in Ohio.  I firmly believe that this sort of narrow and selfish approach to national security is why so many Americans considered George Bush to be the stronger candidate this past fall.

Like the folks here at DA, I look forward to the day when the Democratic Party rediscovers the idealism of Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who both understood that our national security depends on both military supremacy and an unflagging commitment to democratic ideals.

So enough about me.  I hope can put up some posts this week that live up to the incredibly high standard set by the regular contributors to this blog.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that I cannot think of any other blog whose authors have demonstrated such an impressive knowledge of the way things work in Washington.

Finally, I just want to say that I will read all of the comments attached to my posts very carefully, because I have learned a tremendous amount from my audience during my time as a blogger.  Without such an intelligent audience, us bloggers would be nothing.

Federalism in Iraq Posted by Michael Signer

On the fast-breaking topic of Iraq's constitution, and whether the nation's ethnic regions ought to be incorporated in the new constitutional structure, more developments today. 

A long time ago, I posted here on Leslie Gelb's thoughtful and thought-provoking proposal for a  three-state Iraq, where Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni states/regions would be incorporated into a federalist system with a strong, but constrained, federal government (as in the U.S.)

In response, Greg Djerejian engaged in some good old-fashioned demagoguery, writing, "Oh, and can someone please inform Michael Signer that ethnic partitioning is not a "quintessentially American" value.  Thanks."

Well, jeez!  It's terrific to know that we can all engage in a considered discussion on the intricacies of constitution-making without being called bigots!  I'm very confident that with this level of thought, America will be able to support the fragile new constitution (and state) of Iraq. 

With friends like these, who needs...

This would be offensive if it weren't silly.  To allege some sort of liminal invidiousness  (or whatever Greg was talking about) in response to a calm suggestion of  a federalist solution is the sort of stuff for which the blogosphere is rightly maligned.

Let's take a step back.  First, keep in mind that this is a "nation" that was cobbled together from scraps of the Ottoman Empire.  And nations are generally defined as self-identified ethnic groups.  Whether or how people self-identify is extremely hard to judge, or push around, from the outside.  We've seen this throughout human history.  If Iraqis self-identify as three ethnic groups, it hardly falls to Americans to judge them for it.  Our interest lies in creating a stable, secure state -- ideally a democratic one. 

But in their neocon zeal to make Iraq a sort of Walden II for proto-Wilsonian fantasies of pure Americana, removed from the need to deal with annoyances and local complications (like the American left), the Bush Administration has been pushing one-size-fits-all solutions to Iraq. 

This doesn't make sense. 

Now, there are further developments along the lines of whether the Southern Shiite area of Iraq should be treated as a state in a federalist solution.  Belgravia Dispatch, are you gonna take the bait?  Huh?  Huh?

Here's the story, as reported by Juan Cole: 

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has made his move. Giving a speech in the holy city of Najaf, he demanded that the nine southern Shiite-majority provinces be allowed to form a regional confederation that would deal with the central government in Baghdad. This confederation would mirror the "Kurdistan" confederation of northern provinces already established. The southern confederation, which some call "Sumer," in honor of the ancient civilization of that region, would make a claim on some percentage of the petroleum revenue coming out of the Rumaila oil fields.

Al-Hakim has split on this issue with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who earlier, at least, is said to have opposed the plan. He has also split with his coalition partner, the Dawa Party, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, which prefers that the central government continue to deal with each of the 9 provinces separately.

Although Dawa got the prime ministership and so has a special interest in retaining the prerogatives fo the center, SCIRI won most of the provincial elections in the south, dominating their governing councils. Since SCIRI believes that it can continue to be dominant in the Shiite south, it is essentially making a claim on provincial resources and power, denying some portion of them to the central government. It cannot be good for the prospects of the approval of a permanent constitution to have a major split develop within the United Iraqi Alliance (which has a majority in parliament and groups Dawa and SCIRI) on this issue.

As Professor Cole is rightly noting, constitutional design rarely achieves perfection.  It's a product of balance and negotiation.  Federalism was a compromise for America in 1787, later re-balanced during the Civil War and afterward.  The same appears to make sense for Iraq.  Al-Hakim is hardly going to stop in his drive for a Shiite region; and what can America do to oppose him (even if it were the right thing to do?) 

In other words, the "three state" solution appears to be in the offing, whether it offends our sensibilities or not.  The right answer may be to accept the trending toward the regional/federalist solution, while doing what we did here in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and other places where constitutionalism has taken root:  build up a legal culture of independent and rule-based lawyers; make the federal government strong and secure; establish judicial review; build and enforce as many checks and balances as possible. 

The right answer is that whatever begets stability in this fractious country deserves our praise, and our support -- not our demagoguery.

Commandeering the Language of Defense Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Today I had the chance to catch up with a DoD big picture thinker--who works closely with all aspects of defense transformation.  Our conversation gave me some ideas about why now is the time for progressives to take over the lexicon of defense.  "Transformation" is one of those words that has made the Pentagon a modern day tower of Babel.  It is a chameleon word that changes depending on the circumstances.  This might be why I couldn't find it in the Joint Electronic Library (if anyone can find it, the ice cream is on me). 

The term has been around almost ten years now: On Dec. 1, 1997, the National Defense Panel report, “Transforming Defense – National Security in the 21st Century,” was sufficient to establish the concept.  This panel, remember, was established to report in concert with the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review. (Wouldn't it be great to have such a feedback mechanism in place today?) 

In fact, there exists an entire office at the DoD that works to get some traction on this concept:  The Office of Force Transformation--led until recently by Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski--and now without an appointed director.  Cebrowski upped the ante, making concept freaks practically grow antennae by defining transformation as “those continuing processes and activities which create new sources of power and yield profound increases in military competitive advantage as a result of new, or the discovery of, fundamental shifts in the underlying rule sets"  (Yes, that IS where Tom Barnett got that jargon)

This is dense, but full of great potential in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the OFT has been behind the adoption of some innovative hardware --like micro satellites and a millimeter wave area denial weapon (another question for the lexicon hunters, if it is non-lethal, should it still be called a weapon?)  I think their most important contribution has been pushing forward activities that would make even a veritable humanities geek feel at home in the Pentagon. 

"Transformation" in its very heart must be more about human resourcefulness than hardware.  In today's rapidly changing environment, only well schooled individuals truly have quick response and adaptive capabilities.   Sexy hardware concepts can be overtaken by events (like the Navy's DDX destroyer, coastal firepower isn't too helpful 400 miles inland). The glacial pace of weapons procurement makes it a miracle every time a plane or ship pops out without arctic lichen attached to it.  In contrast, people can change direction in seconds.

OFT knows that professional military education can't wait years to integrate today's lessons. In order to boost this much needed adaptation, OFT has created "transformation chairs" in almost every military service school.  They also co sponsor a seminar series and essay contest--last year's was "Rethinking the Principles of War" This year's will be "Rethinking a Theory of Victory".

These sorts of big picture initiatives provide the foundation for operational policy prescriptions: more language training, more Foreign Area Officers, more civil-military co training, more anthropologists at DoD. They also point to the need for  a new OFT Director to be appointed as soon as possible.  My friend said that last year a DoD anthropologist (the only one there) organized the best conference he'd ever attended--on understanding adversary culture.  This makes a huge difference.  In theater, the transformation curve for DoD is pretty steep. My colleague who was deployed to Iraq as a Marine last year told me that when he was there, his company had no knowledge of resident Arabic language speakers--one fellow Marine--an Iraqi American-- rose to the occasion.  If the DoD leads on these communication priorities, many will follow. (David Kay's inspection group in 2002 had only one Arabic speaker, for example).  I remember seeing an AP clip last year that reported how US troops--trying to get people to leave an area were misunderstood when declarations that the area was "risky" was interpreted by locals as promises of "whiskey" --nothing a little arabic "hooked on phonics" wouldn't cure.

Reading the Tea Leaves, Homefront Edition Posted by Heather Hurlburt

We’ve had a barrage of bad polling numbers for the President on Iraq and national security (as well as domestic issues) in the last week.  It's worth walking through them together and sifting for nuggets:

Newsweek's poll gives Bush a 34% approval rating for his handling of Iraq, his lowest-ever and first time below 40%.  50% of respondents said troops should be home now or within a year [with 12% volunteering “now” even though Newsweek, oddly, doesn’t ask about immediate withdrawal!]

USA Today/Gallup does ask about immediate withdrawal, and gets one in three respondents to say it's a good idea.  This one has the most creative questions -- 57% also say the war in Iraq has made the US "less safe."

A few days earlier, an ABC poll gave Bush 38% approval on Iraq and noted that the fall-away in support was strongest among Midwesterners and young men and women without a college education – some of the folks who’ve been his strongest supporters up to now and who are disproportionately likely to know members of the Armed Forces or be veterans themselves.

Things to note and ponder before you get too excited (or as you decide how to focus your excitement):

Two-thirds of ABC poll respondents described Bush as “strong and likable” even as 6 in 10 described the country as “headed down the wrong track.  Folks who still don’t understand why it’s a bad idea, as well as flat-out wrong, to go around asserting that “Bush is stupid,” please take note. 

E.J. Dionne's analysis Tuesday includes a point that should be food for thought for activists and ’06 candidates alike: “Americans, said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, don’t want to ‘relitigate the war.’”

The national security gap is out there as big and bad as ever.  What does Bush get his highest marks for?  Homeland security, per the Newsweek poll (51% approval, with energy, environment and Social Security all below 40%).

Lastly, before you get too excited about peeling off Midwesterners and young folks on national security issues, read  this account of recent focus groups held with mostly non-college –educated Midwesterners and Southerners.  It’s damning on the national security deficit progressives face, and grim in documenting how this subset of voters assumes that leaders who share their conservative cultural values will also share their economic concerns.  The authors also remark on the level of detail at which Americans want to engage these issues, something that the foreign policy establishment and our beloved fans often forget – “they didn’t talk about troop levels… [but] They have a clear sense of where Congress should be focusing its efforts.”

What’s encouraging – if progressives pay attention – is the two specific ideas for making up ground on security policy that came up in focus group discussions.  One is veterans’ benefits; participants were very aware of cuts to veterans’ funding and urged a firmer commitment to keeping the promises made to America’s veterans.  The second is energy policy:  participants strongly favored “an ambitious effort that combines public and private resources toward” the goal of decreasing our debilitating dependence on foreign oil.

Not to Praise Arms Control, But to Bury It Posted by Heather Hurlburt

It's August, so all the best news is quietly released on Fridays, while most of us are plotting our weekend escapes.  For last week, kudos to Sam Nunn and his band of hell-raisers over at the Nuclear Threat Initiative for highlighting the State Department's proposal to consolidate/abolish most of its arms control offices.

NTI's story notes some of the complexities involved.  Yes, the world has changed, as Dr. Rice said back in March.  NTI even gets John Isaacs of Council for a Livable World to say that

I don’t know that it makes that much difference. Whether the administration is good or bad on arms control or proliferation doesn’t depend on how they organize the State Department but how the top leaders are thinking and what they plan to do.

But much as I agree that some radical thinking is due on arms control, I'm with Darryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association when he says that "form does affect substance."

It's not that I think that the soon-to-be-eliminated Special Negotiator for Chemical and Biological Weapons was going to change President Bush's mind about the merits of inspections to search for bioweapons in the next three years, for example.

But, if there's no path for smart people to make careers thinking about arms control, where are new ideas going to come from?  And the next time we need regional arms control to end, diffuse or prevent a conflict, where's the reservoir of expertise going to be?

You don't need a huge arms control bureaucracy for this.  But you do need to see arms control as more than an anti-terror tactic, which is the mindset these changes convey to me.   

And how bizarre/cynical is it to to combine the office that promotes missile defense (here, buy/borrow/host our anti-missile missiles) with the office in charge of preventing the dissemination of missile technology?

Senator Lugar says that this reorganization will result in more funds for Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction programs.  But c'mon, these programs keep 40,000 weapons scientists fed, working and less likely to sell their expertise to the highest bidder.  They verifiably dismantle weapons and safeguard vulnerable materials.  AND they get 1-for-1 matching funds from our G-8 partners.  And State has to hold an arms control fire sale to fund them? 

I'm with Rep. Allan Mollohan, who agreed that our arms control establishment had problems, but said of the proposed changes that "the prescription amounted to killing one of the patients."

Now back to our regularly-scheduled August daze.  But watch to see whether Nunn-Lugar funding really rises, or just flatlines.  And when the weather cools down, and we need arms control regimes on the Korean Peninsula post-agreement, or after a Kosovo-Serbia final status agreement, or maybe one day around Kashmir; or we decide that maybe the 104 countries that have accepted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are on to something; or decide that maybe inspecting for bioweapons is a good idea after all, don't go ask State for help.

That's so 20th-century.

A Step Back for Women’s Rights in Iraq? Posted by Michael Osborne

The WMD’s turned out to be a mirage in the desert.   The country America invaded to stop terrorism has become the world’s prime incubator of terrorists.   So what remains of the Bush administration’s rationales for Operation Iraqi Freedom?  In a word: Democracy.  The constitution, to be finalised next week will allow Iraqis to live in federal harmony.  Iraq will take its place in the community of free nations.  And the new Iraq will be the catalyst for a democratic revolution across the Middle East.  Human rights, peace, freedom (and free markets), will spread throughout the Arab world.

Of course the administration's adversaries, unshakably  committed to the view that no good could come from America’s hegemonic adventure, are not buying this.  They dismiss the entire constitutional exercise as a sham, forced upon Iraqis by a rapacious imperialist, motivated by greed for oil, construction contracts, markets, and geopolitical interests.  Naomi Klein, like many others in the anti-war movement, is convinced that any constitution drafted under U.S. occupation is illegitimate.  Writing in The Nation, Klein bravely proposed that, rather than adopting a new constitution under the heel of America, Iraq should revive parts of its 1970 Provisional Constitution.   

For present purposes, I will assume, with Klein, that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was animated by the most diabolical of motives.   But I will also assume, contra Klein, that there is nevertheless a possibility that, under its new constitution, Iraq may in the medium term emerge somewhat better off than it would have been but for the deposing of Saddam.  (That opens up an interesting question: How would we evaluate an intervention motivated by avarice and defended by pretext -- which ultimately, perhaps by the cunning of history, turns out to yield what is generally recognised as a positive outcome for the victims of the aggression?  It is arguable, for example, that American intervention in both World Wars was animated by imperialist ambition, cloaked in Wilsonian idealism, and justified, in the case of the second war, by the pretext of Pearl Harbor.  But that broader debate is for another day.)

The slender prospect that Iraq may yet turn a corner for the better has been offered some support by commitments from Iraqi leaders that the new Iraqi constitution will protect the fundamental human rights of all Iraqis.   It is easy to dismiss reliance upon such promises as naïve.   Yet some encouragement may be drawn from the fact that the aspirations of a substantial part of Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis – albeit not the minority Sunnis  – do appear to be represented, albeit imperfectly, in the 71-member committee which has been drafting the country’s permanent Constitution.  (The constitution is due to be unveiled on August 15, and subject to referendum in October, in advance of the election of a new government under its aegis in December.)   

But the frail hopes of those who believed that the new constitution might herald a brighter future have been badly shaken by recently released drafts, under which women will be subject to the patriarchal law of Sharia.    Anita Sharma (July 22), laments that “even the hollow justification for the intervention in Iraq -- to free people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and in particular the women of Iraq, has turned out to be just an excuse”.    Baghdad women have also spoken out against the drafts.  The London Times Online quotes Masoon al-Denuchi, the Deputy Minister of Culture and president of the Iraqi Women’s Group, as remarking: “Unfortunately we don’t have a militia . . . [t]he only thing we can do is lobby and talk and talk and talk.”    And although the U.S. has gone to lengths to avoid creating the impression that it would dictate terms, Zalman Khalilzad, the new US Ambassador, recently weighed in, saying that: “A society cannot achieve all its potential if it does things that . . . weakens the prospects of -- half of its population to make the fullest contribution that it can.”   

The interim constitution, enacted last year under close U.S. supervision, acknowledged Islam as the official religion, but only "a source of legislation."  It encouragingly provided also that 25% of legislative seats be reserved for women.  Alarmingly, however, the draft of the permanent constitution leaked on July 25 envisaged that Islam would be "the major source" of legislation.  That has now apparently given way to an agreement that Islam would be “a main source of legislation." The new draft’s language on the subject of women’s rights offers little comfort: "The state guarantees the fundamental rights of women and their equality to men, in all fields, pursuant to the provisions of Islamic Sharia.”

Only Antonin Scalia (will Iraq ever be blessed with such a jurist?), would assume that anything will in practice turn on scholastic distinctions between a “source,” a “major source,” and a “main source.”  Still, it is becoming evident, if there was ever any doubt, that the Iraqi constitution will fall far short of guaranteeing the civic equality of women.  In one form or another, Sharia law will apply in most civil matters, including inheritance, marriage and divorce, and perhaps other areas of civil status.

All of this resonates with the great paradox that bedevils America’s announced policy of pushing democracy in the Middle East.  In principle, the U.S. believes that the key to transforming the region is democracy.  Yet there are reasons to think that America may not be happy with the actual outcome of democratic elections in Arab countries.  The United States was not displeased when the army overturned the democratic wishes of the Algerian people, as expressed in the 1992 election, widely believed to have been won by the Islamic Salvation Front.  America’s professed enthusiasm for democratic reforms in Riyadh will be sorely tested if what emerges from the first Saudi election is a fanatical theocracy.   As Suzanne Nossel (July 19) wrote, “letting countries alone to set up their own democracies can open the door for infringement on principles we hold dear, even to the point of undermining what we see as precepts fundamental to democracy.”  Clearly, the venerable (Iraqi?) adage, “beware of what you wish for” applies with full force here.

That irony aside, I think there is an argument to be made that an external attempt to impose democracy upon a country in the grip of dictatorship is not illegitimate.  The claim that sovereignty trumps imperialism rings hollow when used as a shield by a regime that denies any form of self-government to its own people.  That being said, I think it is going a bridge too far to presume to bestow not just democracy in the broadest sense, but a particular kind of democracy -- the liberal model.  Effectively, that would be to insist that counties like Iraq adopt not just the rule of law and entrench fundamental political rights, but also adopt a panoply of civil rights not enjoyed even in the U.S. until relatively recently.   The particular  variety of democracy that has triumphed in many counties around the world in the past quarter century is in practice a relatively “thin” model.  That model often offers little more than the  formal right to vote.  (Far from ideal, but a good start. The institution of a “thick” democracy -- encompassing full social and civil equality -- is an incomparably more ambitious project.  If that be so, I think that to dismiss the Iraqi constitution because it falls short of the highest liberal standards is not a good idea in the present circumstances.)

I say that for a number of reasons.   First, difficult though it may be for liberals to swallow, it appears that the democratic will of the Iraqi people demands some form of what they would call patriarchy.  And it is not just Iraqi men who would find it very difficult to embrace gender equality..  As Greg Priddy (July 20), observed, it is a mistake “to assume that there aren't … a significant number of women who . . . have fully internalized, the dominant patriarchal system of values”.  The editor of the Baghdad magazine Our Eve, Ethar Mousse is quoted, as saying that equality could lead to “corrupting Western influences.”  Liberals will dismiss this as a misguided worldview.  It is, they will say, the ideology of generations of patriarchy; as such, it can be discounted.  But that would be to embrace a liberal variety of Lenin’s false consciousness argument.   Our advocacy of democracy is revealed as a pious sham if it does not entail acceptance of outcomes we loath.  And it does not help to point to other Arab countries with relatively secular private law systems.  Priddy (July 29) reminds us that “many of the provisions of Egyptian law which conflict with Islamic law . . . are highly unpopular there, and would almost certainly be repealed by a legislature elected by a real popular vote.”

Second, as a practical matter the consensus necessary to get an Iraqi constitution enacted will likely be unattainable if we demand the embrace of civil rights utterly alien to the culture.   I must disagree with Michael Signer (July 29), when he suggests that the U.S. is making a mistake by insisting that the August 15 deadline be met, and in his argument that the finalization of the constitution be delayed until better protection for women’s rights are incorporated.    (Signer gives no indication as to why he believes that more liberal elements in the National Assembly would come to the fore if only given more time.)    As for Sharma, it is not clear the United States should do if the drafting committee stubbornly declines to build in women’s rights.  Exercise a veto?  Appoint a new assembly?  Or send in Martha Minow to draft a constitution for the Iraqi people?

Third, the fate of countless ambitious but miserably failed constitutions teaches that  the noblest aspirations in a constitution will be a dead letter if grafted onto a culture unready to embrace them.  I think the better approach is to push hard for a constitution that protects the bare minimum of political rights, which can be asserted in the political process to extend  equality into the civic realm.   The democratic project is, to use the familiar cliché, not an end but a process.  It necessarily embodies faith that even a rudimentary democracy, operating against the background of some semblance of the rule of law, will ultimately produce the substantive outcomes to which we are committed.   That does not mean that, like Leibnitz’s God, we set the constitutional clock running, then step back and observe from a distance.  Many kinds of subtle pressure, diplomatic, political and commercial, may be brought to bear in future by governments, international organisations, and NGO’s, to nudge Iraq towards full and equal civil rights.  But these extrinsic influences must be premised upon the assumption that, once the most fundamental procedural requisites of democracy -- by which I mean specifically political, as opposed to civil rights -- have been established, civic equality must be won through the struggles of Iraqi women in the political space that has been opened up.

Insisting that the Iraq constitution look like one that we would have drafted for ourselves is to make the best the enemy of the good.  A constitution laden with provisions anathema to the values of a deeply conservative community renders itself irrelevant.   Compared to what could have been, a constitution that does no more than institute the rule of law and universal suffrage should count as an astounding success.  More than that we cannot hope for.

Underarmored in Iraq Posted by Michael Signer

From Judd Legum at ThinkProgress, an upsetting disclosure:  the Marines killed on Wednesday were traveling in "lightly armored" Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAAV's).  While AAAV's are more heavily armored than the notoriously underarmed Humvee's, they're still not secure enough.

The Marines are doing the best with what they have.  But it's not clear why the upper echelons of our military command -- beginning with Donald Rumsfeld (he of the deathless phrase, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want," and, of course, the President -- haven't done a better job of equipping all of our fighting force in Iraq with superior vehicles for the threat of roadside bombs.

The problem is systemic, not episodic.  The Marine Corps Inspector General recently concluded that the Marines' preparation is in desperate straits.  As the Boston Globe reported:

Marine Corps units fighting in some of the most dangerous terrain in Iraq don't have enough weapons, communications gear, or properly outfitted vehicles, according to an investigation by the Marine Corps' inspector general provided to Congress yesterday.

The report . . . says the estimated 30,000 Marines in Iraq need twice as many heavy machine guns, more fully protected armored vehicles, and more communications equipment to operate in a region the size of Utah.

I hope that the President ponders this during his 5-week vacation in Crawford.  I hope he thinks about armor on the Humvee undercarriages when he's clearing brush for the cameras.  I hope when he throws a bone to Barnie, he considers how a bomb rips through the side panels.  When he's grilling by the pool, I hope he wonders about how the torn flesh and broken limbs stems directly from his failure to plan the war's aftermath, and to equip our troops for the mission he sent them on.