A Promise Israel Would Expect Us To Keep

Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military security and one of the pilots who flew F-16s in the strike against an Iraqi reactor in 1981, summarizes the stakes in next week's U.S.-Israel summit:

Asking Israel’s leaders to abide by America’s timetable, and hence allowing Israel’s window of opportunity to be closed, is to make Washington a de facto proxy for Israel’s security — a tremendous leap of faith for Israelis faced with a looming Iranian bomb. It doesn’t help when American officials warn Israel against acting without clarifying what America intends to do once its own red lines are crossed.

Mr. Obama will therefore have to shift the Israeli defense establishment’s thinking from a focus on the “zone of immunity” to a “zone of trust.” What is needed is an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity — and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest — Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.

I hope Mr. Obama will make this clear. If he does not, Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can.

Good News For Nixon And Bush In Iraq

Describing Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's consolidation of power at the expense of the country's Sunni minority (as well as an encouraging reduction in sectarian violence), Tim Arango quotes the journal published by the former Nixon Center:

After the crisis erupted in December, analysts warned the country was on the edge of a civil war. “There has been a rapid and widespread deterioration of security in Iraq since the mid-December end of the U.S. military mission there,” Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, wrote this month in The National Interest.

After a bloody January — by some accounts a deadlier month than any last year — February had been on pace to be one of the least violent months since the American-led invasion nine years ago, until a series of car bomb attacks in Baghdad and around the country on Thursday left more than 40 people dead.

Arango finishes with also-encouraging comments by an al-Maliki ally which suggest that someday George W. Bush may be remembered more fondly in Iraq and U.S. history than he is today:

Ahmed al-Khafaji, the deputy interior minister, a Shiite whose life, like many Iraqi leaders, was shaped by years in exile in Iran, dismissed criticisms that the Iraqi state had shut out Sunnis from power.

“Freedom is the most important thing,” he said.

“Here is an Islamic newspaper,” he said, waving it about. He pointed to his laptop, and his cellphone. “Now we have 600 satellite channels.”

He echoed the familiar refrain here that it will take generations to achieve a durable sectarian co-existence.

“With time, democracy will continue, and one day we will be like Switzerland, or France or the Italians,” he said. “In the United States in the 1960s, a black man couldn’t get on a bus, and now Obama is president."

Iran's Shi'a Pet?

Most of my former colleagues at the Center Previously Known As Nixon were skeptics about President Bush's invasion of Iraq. Now one of its scholars, Dov Zacheim, describes the strategic consequences of replacing Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baathist regime with Nuri al-Maliki, whom Zakheim calls "nothing more than a Shi'a strongman":

Maliki insists that he is not a tool of the Iranians. Strictly speaking, he is correct. Iraq will never allow itself to be completely dominated by Tehran. Nevertheless, just as there can be no denying that Iran was the real victor of Operation Iraqi Freedom because America defanged its only seriously powerful regional rival, so too is it true that Iraq has increasingly come to share Tehran’s perspective on regional affairs. Witness its abstention on the Arab League’s vote to suspend Syria. Iraq is now firmly rooted in what King Abdullah of Jordan years ago termed “the Shi’a crescent,” which includes also Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, which also abstained from the Arab League vote, and Syria.

You Think?

U.S. Loses Leverage In Iraq Now That Troops Are Out" -- New York Times RSS feed headline for this article

Cf. Saigon, April 1975

The New York Times, yesterday:

There were fears that the precipitous withdrawal of American troops might lead to instability in Iraq, but the speed with which conditions have deteriorated has alarmed Western officials. Until Thursday, however, the bitter fighting between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, and his foes in Parliament had not been accompanied by a rise in violence.

But with this round of bombings, the political turmoil seemed to spill into the streets, where a still potent insurgency, in abeyance for some time, remains capable of mounting attacks that can undermine the fragile government and pit Sunnis against Shiites.

Iraq And A Hard Place

As U.S. troops come home from Iraq (thanks be to God), some domestic political realpolitik from Christopher Preble at "The National Interest," who says it's all the same for Barack Obama if the Iraqi government succeeds or fails:

The American people want this war to end, and he wins credit, fairly or not, for following through on his promise to end it. And if Iraq descends into chaos and civil war, or if Iran somehow manages to consolidate power over its restive neighbor, Obama can claim, justifiably, that these things wouldn’t have happened had people listened to him in 2002. But he doesn’t have to say it. Others will say it for him. Nearly every news story reporting on this week’s events have reminded viewers, listeners and readers that the president opposed this war. That one fact translates to a relatively favorable perception of the president’s handling of foreign policy, generally.

It's easy to worry about Iraq if you saw Ted Koppel's inaugural report for NBC's "Rock Center" last week. Some 16,000 Americans are staying behind in our fortress embassy and consulates, keeping an eye on both Iraq and Iran. The terrorist threat remains acute. Cleric Moktada al-Sadr, allied with his fellow Shi'ites in Iran, promises that his militiamen will be gunning for Americans. Koppel's report makes clear that you need an advance team and two motorcades to go out for a pack of cigarettes.

Will the Iraqis protect our personnel against the dozen or more insurgent groups that are intent on tearing down the country's fragile government? Can Iraq's Shi'ites, Sunni, and Kurds figure out how to coexist and collaborate? Most analysts sound pessimistic.

Analysts are, of course, changeable. Most sounded giddily optimistic during the Arab spring. We were assured that the region's secular-minded young people were using Facebook and Twitter to grasp for democracy, inspired neither by the U.S. project in Iraq nor the lure of Islamism. As the year ends, the picture isn't so clear. "The Economist" and New York Times counsel readers not to panic as the Muslim Brotherhood and more extremist Islamists win a majority of seats in Egypt's unfolding parliamentary elections.

Pro-democracy advocate Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, counsels patience:

Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government. The free world should place its bet on freedom — the hope and demand of Tahrir Square — and work toward a civil society defined by that value.

That sounds more or less like what George W. Bush tried to achieve in Iraq. History's judgement about whether he was right to do so by force of arms, in a war that left 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis dead, still depends to a considerable extent on the condition in which history finds Iraq in a quarter-century. For now, maybe advocates of a form of Arab democracy in which sectarianism takes a back seat should take another look at what the U.S. and Iraqis have tried to accomplish. Obama didn't support the war, and Preble is probably right that his political fortunes wouldn't be harmed if Iraq foundered after a decent interval. How much better for everyone -- both U.S. presidents and especially Iraq -- if it didn't.

The Oilist

Discussing foreign policy at a tea party rally in Florida, Donald Trump leapfrogs the realists, neorealists, neoconservatives, isolationists, nation builders, and liberal idealists:

He said he’d only be interested in current U.S. military actions in Iraq or Libya if the U.S. got the oil from those nations.

BTO Watch

Bachmann vs. Obama's Libya war in 2011: "Foolish." Obama vs. Bush's Iraq war in 2002: "Dumb and rash."

Wolfie's Overture

Maureen Dowd ridicules ex-Bush official Paul Wolfowitz's suggestion that the U.S. make it a three-fer:

Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionists on the left and the right insist it’s our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.

“It is both morally right and in America’s strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves,” Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture. But the neo-con naif has no shame.

After all, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets last month, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

The De-rogue-ifier

My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt has stimulated a debate between Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's defense secretary, and former White House aide Peter Wehner over how much stress Bush placed on democratizing the Middle East in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rumsfeld says it came up very little behind closed doors. Wehner says Bush mentioned it in several major speeches. Hewitt aptly leapfrogs the conversation:

Whatever one concludes about this debate, most serious observers connect Libya's disarmament of WMD with America's overthrow of Saddam, and aren't we glad this week that Qaddafi isn't sitting on his stockpile of deadly agents?

Hewitt's argument is preferable to those that credit Bush and his freedom agenda for Egypt's Nile grassroots revolution. What's still at issue isn't Bush's admirable post-Sept. 11 vision of a freer Middle East and Persian Gulf region but the use of force to bring it about. Besides, how could the Egyptians have been inspired by Iraq, since its inenviably tenuous democracy occurred as the result of an invasion by Western powers?

But Libya's self-de-rogue-ification because it didn't want to mess with Texas was a definite win for Bush, U.S. interests in the years since, and Libya's besieged people today.

Defying The President

In a slashing critique of Donald Rumsfeld's new memoir, "Slate"'s Fred Kaplan essentially accuses the former secretary of defense and Vice President Dick Cheney of defying President Bush and helping fuel an insurrection that cost thousands of lives.

At issue are two disastrous orders by Jerry Bremer, who ran Iraq after the U.S.-led coalition ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003. One was to disband the Iraqi army, the other to ban members of Saddam's Baathist party from the new government. Many whom Bremer scorned ended up joining the bloody insurgency. Kaplan surmises that the orders came from Cheney, with Rumsfeld's blessing and in spite of decisions to the contrary in which the president had participated:

[T]he NSC did take up the issue of what to do with the Iraqi army and the Baathists. On March 10, a week before the invasion, a principals meeting—attended by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and all of their top aides—decided that, after the war, a truth and reconciliation commission would be set up, similar to those in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Communist Eastern Europe, to ferret out the undesirable Baathists from those who could work for a new government. Staff analysts predicted that only about 5 percent of the party would have to be removed. On March 12, at another principals meeting, it was decided to disband the Republican Guard—Saddam's elite corps and bodyguards—but to call the regular army's soldiers back to duty and to reconstitute their units after a proper vetting.

Both of these decisions were unanimous. In other words, Bremer's first two orders constituted acts of massive insubordination. Most of the NSC officials, including Bush, first read about the two orders in a newspaper.

Rumsfeld doesn't mention either of these meetings in his 815-page memoir.

Pilgrims' Progress in Nazareth: Why We Came

"This is why I came," said a St. John's pilgrim as we drove along the western edge of the Sea of Galilee on Saturday morning. It was as Christ-drenched a day as we'll have during our 12-day pilgrimage, beginning with the renewal of our baptismal vows in the Jordan River (pilgrims Melinda, Deb, and Cheryl are above) and culminating, sacramentally, at least, with Holy Eucharist served around a stone altar high above the lake.

Before I said the mass, I asked our pilgrims to preach the sermon by calling out two or three words that they associated with our trip so far. The one I heard the most was peace. If you yearn for peace, if you want to feel close to the historical Jesus, if your faith in God's saving and infinitely loving power is bolstered by the feel of solid ground under your feet that Jesus's may have touched first, then come to Galilee.

For one thing, you'll find a church built in remembrance of one New Testament event after another -- Jesus's healing work at Simon Peter's house in Capernaum as recounted in the action-packed first chapter of Mark's gospel, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, even the meal the risen Christ prepared for his disciples as recounted in John 21.

All these miracles and mysteries notwithstanding, our pilgrim hearts were also touched by moments of sheer humanity and common sense. In Nazareth, at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, our guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, pointed out his favorite fresco, depicting the
Holy Family's flight to Egypt as described in Matthew's gospel. Usually we see the patient Joseph leading a mule carrying Mary and her child. But wouldn't we be just as likely to see the lad riding on Joseph's strong shoulders?

Joseph would probably have been singing as they walked along, and we've been singing up a storm, too. In Bethlehem, a few feet from the grotto remembered as the site of Jesus's nativity, we sang "O Come All Ye Faithful." We did our best approximation of the Blind Boys of Alabama's "Wade In The Water" as I used olive branches to sprinkle my fellow pilgrims with Jordan River water. We sang hymns and the Taize "Gloria in excelsis" during our hillside Holy Eucharist and "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" (what else?) during a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee. And on Sunday morning in Christ Church in Nazareth, we belted out hymns in English (you can see that pilgrims Dale, Phyllis, and Bob were holding up their end) while our local Episcopalian brothers and sisters sang in Arabic.

On Saturday evening, we were blessed by a visit to our pilgrim guest house by a dynamic Nazareth-born priest in the Diocese of Jerusalem, the Rev. Fuad Dagher, whom we'd welcomed at St. John's in August while preparing for our pilgrimage. He told us about the child care center he's launching at his church in Shefa-'Amr, St. Paul's, with the support of the Diocese of Los Angeles and some $40,000 in local contributions.

Over dinner, Fr. Fuad waxed pessimistic about prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, chalking up most of the problems to the Israeli side. A couple of pilgrims pushed him back on issues such as the U.S. war in Iraq (which he said was a disaster for all concerned).

I'll write later in our pilgrimage about politics, the leitmotif of almost everything we see and do in the Holy Land. For now, I can't help tarrying a little more over the sights, sensations, and sacraments of our two rich days in Galilee.

Killing Christians Wherever They Can Find Them

Al-Qaeda's campaign of religious cleansing in Iraq.

The "Madness" Of War With Iran

Andrew Sullivan takes a hard line against the Saudis' proposed U.S. war against Iran:

The idea that the US should risk a tidal wave of Jihadist terror, a blow-up in Iraq, and a fatal p.r. blow in Afghanistan at the behest of the dictators and monarchs who funded Wahhabist terrorism and extremism for years is beyond absurd. It may make sense from an entirely myopic, short-term, Likudnik point of view. From any other perspective, it's madness.

Bush League

The new round of Middle East peace talks show the president at his best. Yesterday's New York Times article about his poor relations with his predecessor seems to show him at his pettiest:

It is no secret that he opposed the Iraq war, and that as a senator he took a dim view of Mr. Bush’s “surge,” the 2007 troop buildup that many military analysts credit with helping to stabilize Iraq. Leading up to Tuesday night’s address, Republicans were clamoring for Mr. Obama to give the former president credit.

He did not. Instead, he said simply that he had spoken to Mr. Bush earlier in the day, and that while their disagreements were well-known, “no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.”

The White House declined to discuss the thinking behind that language. But Bush loyalists on Wednesday were more than a little miffed by it.

Especially because Obama has ordered a surge of his own in Afghanistan, his persistent failure to acknowledge that Bush's had turned Iraq around is frustrating. It was understandable when he refused to do so during the campaign. But in a presidential address, he could have figured out how to say that Bush's commitment of extra forces, combined with other factors in Iraq, had made a difference without seeming to go back on his opposition to the war in general. Saying so would have given him the opportunity to heap additional praise on the troops.

So why didn't he? Was it the pride of not wanting to call attention to his opportunistic failure to acknowledge the obvious in the campaign? But to do so would've made him look statesmanlike. Was it anger at the way he feels Bush left the country? Then he may be overlooking that it was the perfect storm of crisis in the fall of 2008 than won him the presidency at such a young age. This disrespectful miscue reminds us just how young he is.

Transformers II

The New York Times this morning, in an article about Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally:

[Sarah Palin] said she was asked not to focus on politics but did say, in a veiled reference to Mr. Obama, “We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want; we must restore America and restore her honor.”

Veiled? Not really. The Times also reported this morning in an article about President Obama as commander in chief:

Where George W. Bush saw the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as his central mission and opportunities to transform critical regions, Mr. Obama sees them as “problems that need managing,” as one adviser put it, while he pursues his mission of transforming America.

The second article, carefully reported by Peter Baker, brings to mind President Johnson's error of fighting the Vietnam war "on the the political cheap," as Norman Podhoretz famously said, because he didn't want it to sap the energy of his own ambitious and transformative domestic initiatives. His misjudgment cost him his presidency and helped deliver a poorly conceived and conducted war to Richard Nixon's doorstep. While Vietnam was a much larger commitment, Obama runs a comparable risk by trying to keep Iraq and now Afghanistan from consuming too much of his and voters' attention. For one thing, as Baker makes clear, his approach has contributed to the military's skepticism about their commander in chief:

The schisms among his team...are born in part out of uncertainty about his true commitment. His reticence to talk much publicly about the wars may owe to the political costs of alienating his base as well as the demands of other issues. Senior Pentagon and military officials said they understood that he presided over a troubled economy, but noted that he was not losing 30 American soldiers a month on Wall Street.

Obama's understandable and perhaps justifiable ambivalence about the the wisdom of continuing and expanding the Afghanistan war, so abundantly on display during last autumn's agonizing reappraisal, may persist. And yet Obama insists not. This part of Baker's article is riveting, because it reveals our sometimes stoic-seeming president's humanity as well as his Johnsonesque unwillingness to choose between guns and butter:

Last year, he flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet soldiers’ coffins. During a later meeting with advisers, Mr. Obama expressed irritation at doubters of his commitment. “If I didn’t think this was something worth doing,” he said, “one trip to Dover would be enough to cause me to bring every soldier home. O.K.?”

"The Economist" For Christmas, Todd, Please!

Franklin Graham on Sarah Palin's conversation with his father, Billy, yesterday at the great evangelist's home:

She...wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

That's pretty weird, since the Bible doesn't say anything about Israel after about 90 A.D., Iran (unless she means Cyrus the Great's Persia in the sixth century before Christ), or the war in Iraq (though Gen. 3 does suggest that the Garden of Eden was near Baghdad). Wrong briefing book, governor!

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 65

On Afghanistan, is President Obama displaying indecision, as his partisan critics proclaim, or taking the appropriate amount of time to make the right decision? I'm still inclined to think the latter. I'd be more certain if there weren't so many leaks, which do tend to make him look weak, as he and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates obviously realize, hence their threats to fire the leakers.

As for judging the outcome of his deliberations, we may not know until he's long out of office. Same with George W. Bush's Iraq intervention. Sometimes blink decisions are the best ones, though if the repercussions will last for decades or more, and if hundreds or thousands of lives are at stake, it's wise to take as much time as you have. Imagine if Kennedy and Johnson had done the same thing in Vietnam.

Missed Him By That Much

Max Boot was a few miles from Sunday's mass murder in Baghdad. He has not panicked:

Attacks are still down to their lowest level since 2003-2004. Life has returned to a semblance of normality in Baghdad and other areas. A few high-profile attacks — this one or the one in August — do not change the fundamental, day-to-day reality of life getting better.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

Future Iraq

Awful as they were, Sunday's murderous Baghdad bombings were harbingers of Iraq's future as a fragile young democracy, not evidence of unfinished business for the United States. The Bush-Obama troop withdrawal must continue. Writes the "Economist:"

Iraqis know that political violence will be with them for a long time, even if full civil war can be avoided. The fortunes of insurgent groups wax and wane, their support base shrinking and expanding depending on how vulnerable sectarian groups feel. But an end to the bombings is not in sight.