US Diary: Iraq, terrorism, Angela Merkel

Three pieces on related matters: a spirited interview with often loony and sometimes sensible Christopher Hitchens; a piece about how Bush cannot be trusted with the war on terrorism; and an editorial about what Angela Merkel might say to Bush about Guantanamo.

1. From FrontPageMagazine.com: Christopher Hitchens On Why We Must Win -- by Bill Steigerwald

One of President Bush's most reliable allies when it comes to defending the war in Iraq and the global war on terrorism is writer/pundit/atheist Christopher Hitchens. The brilliant Vanity Fair columnist, recovering socialist and former intellectual hero of the American Left, whose most recent book is "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America," could almost be a card-carrying libertarian if it weren't for his hawkish interventionist foreign policy. I talked to Hitchens by phone from his home in Washington, where he said he was starting work on his next book, "God Is Not Great."

Q: What’s your assessment of Iraq?
A: Well, it’s a race between the idea of federalism and democracy and the ideas of partition and theocracy, and the United States is on the right side of the argument. There are only three things that can happen in Iraq: One, that it’s ruled by one of its three constituent parts (Kurdish, Sunni and Shia), which in practice mean absolute rule by a minority of that minority, of a kind that was Baathism.

The other is partition, where they just separate and you get in effect three states, one of which would probably be invaded by Turkey -- the Kurdish one; one of which might well become dominated by Iran and the other, I don’t know, it would probably be dominated by Saudi Arabia. What people don’t understand is that if the United States and Britain had not intervened in Iraq, these three neighboring countries were going to do so as it fell apart.

The third alternative is where all agree that no one group, let alone any minority of one group, can govern the country, which means that they agree to some form of federalism and democracy. And though I don’t think that’s fated to happen, I think there are huge number of Iraqis who want it. And as I say, I think American policy is designed to help that emerge.

The other thing about Iraq is that it is the chosen battleground of the al-Qaida fundamentalists. They’ve decided, as I think they had after they were thrown out of Afghanistan, to make Iraq the next place they make a stand. So it’s also a test in that war.

Q: A test for the United States or al-Qaida?
A: A test for everybody. It’s a test for anyone who is not indifferent to the idea of a country of the size and importance of Iraq becoming Talibanized. That is not America’s sole concern. I would like to think that no one could view that with indifference, but an amazing number of people do view it with indifference and/or take the other side -- and I spend a lot of my time trashing them.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception, or myth or fallacy Americans have about what is going in Iraq?
A: The biggest mistake most Americans make is to think our engagement with Iraq began in 2003, and that we had the option of not doing anything there and presumably should have exercised that option. The beginning of wisdom is the realization of responsibility. We’ve inherited responsibility for Iraq starting at least from the moment when Jimmy Carter encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran, but perhaps earlier than that in the 60s when the CIA most certainly did help Saddam’s wing of the Baath Party to come to power. So we can’t walk away.... We have to accept that a busted up and screwed up Iraq was in our future no matter what. The reason I support the president is that he in some sense seems to realize that. He couldn’t do what Clinton had done and just push it on into the next administration.

Q: Does that mean you are of the “We broke it, but we broke it a long time ago school and now we’ve got to fix it?”
A: When I first heard the Pottery Barn analogy put -- I think by that great stateswoman Maureen Dowd -- I thought how irritating and how trivial. But then I thought, “You know what, by accident, she’s got it right.” Because, OK, “You break it, you own it,” can be rephrased. It was broken and we did own it. And so everything has to start with that recognition....

The main criticism that the neocons have, and I take more or less their line on this, is that all of this should have been taken care of in 1991. They should not have let Saddam Hussein survive his conquest of Kuwait and his defeat there. He should have gone down then and we should never have tortured the Iraqi people with sanctions for 12 years.

Q: Has the cost to America in blood, treasure and diminished domestic liberties been worth it?
A: Well, I think in a way that’s the wrong question. Again, it suggests that there was the alternative of not doing anything. But of course, doing it does not mean you have to listen to people’s telephone conversations. But that is not a product of the war in Iraq, by the way. That’s a product of Sept. 11.... My view is this: If an al-Qaida member knows something, I want to know it too.... The main point is that we are engaged in a just war -- on the right side.

Q: To be successful in the long run, what has to happen in Iraq. Will it only work if it’s federalized?
A: I hope it’s federal, not completely devolved. Obviously, what was in the front of everyone’s mind when they did the constitution was we’re never again going to have a centralized fascism as we had before, so all the emphasis is on devolution.... It’s like the German constitution. It’s designed to make sure that the strong central regime can ever merge again.

Q: When should U.S. forces start coming out?
A: When the insurgency has been convincingly military defeated. The stakes here are fantastically high. If we can prove that in a really major country, in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world, that al-Qaida can be met on the battlefield openly and isolated and discredited and defeated and destroyed, that’s a prize really well-worth having. These people are our enemies. I don’t believe the president is right in saying we fight them there rather than here, because that is a false antithesis. But I think we should fight them everywhere -- and we have no choice in the matter. The crucial thing is to press in on to victory and make absolutely certain that the defeat is a humiliating one for them.... When that’s done, I think we should turn over the country to the Iraqis. The art and science of it is to be doing both things at the same time, because the point is, it’s the Iraqis who are the victims of these people, not us.

Q: How will you measure whether the war in Iraq was a success 10 years from now?
A: Well, we’ve dropped a huge depth charge into what was a completely frozen and imprisoned region. It will take longer than 10 years for us to find out what the long-term effect is of millions of Iraqis suddenly getting the right to vote.... The ripple effect of things like free press, blogging, satellite dishes, rights of national minorities, all of that, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Egypt -- a lot of that’s been very positive already. Years from now I hope to be meeting young Iraqis who don’t really remember the war very well but who can date their own emancipation from it.


2. Losing the War on Terrorism -- by Michael T. Klare

President Bush has lost the support of most Americans when it comes to the economy, the environment, and the war in Iraq, but he continues to enjoy majority support in one key area: his handling of the war on terrorism. Indeed, many analysts believe that Bush won the 2004 election largely because swing voters concluded that he would do a better job at this than John Kerry. In fact, with his overall opinion-poll approval ratings so low, Bush's purported proficiency in fighting terror represents something close to his last claim to public legitimacy. But has he truly been effective in combating terror? As the war on terrorism drags on -- with no signs of victory in sight -- there are good reasons to doubt his competency at this, the most critical of all his presidential responsibilities.

Consider, for a moment, the President's view of the global war on terror. While the White House keeps trying to stretch this term to include everything from the war in Iraq to the protection of oil pipelines in Colombia, most Americans wisely view it in more narrow terms, as a global struggle against Muslim zealots who seek to punish the United States for its perceived anti-Islamic behavior and to free the Middle East of Western influence through desperate acts of violence. These zealots -- or "jihadists" as they are often termed -- include the original members of Al Qaeda along with other groups that claim allegiance to Osama bin Laden's dogmas but are not necessarily in direct contact with his lieutenants. It is in fighting these adversaries that the public wants Bush to succeed, and it is in this contest that he is failing.

Why is this so? Consider the nature of the commander-in-chief's primary responsibilities in wartime. Surely, his overarching task is to devise (with the help of senior advisers) a winning strategy to defeat, or at least pummel, the enemy and to mobilize the forces and resources needed to successfully implement this framework. Choosing the tactics of battle -- the day-by-day management of combat operations -- should not, on the other hand, fall under the commander-in-chief's responsibility, but rather be delegated to professionals recruited for this purpose. Bush has failed on both counts, embracing a deeply flawed blueprint for the war on terror and then meddling disastrously in the tactics employed to carry it out.

Finding Terrorism's Center of Gravity

As all the great masters of strategy have taught us, devising a winning strategy requires, first and foremost, understanding one's opponent and correctly identifying his strengths and weaknesses. Once that has been accomplished, it is necessary to craft a mode of attack that exploits the enemy's weaknesses and undermines or overpowers his strengths. In modern military parlance, this task is often described as locating and destroying the enemy's "center of gravity."

For example, in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American war planners correctly identified the Iraqi center of gravity as the highly centralized, top-down command structure of the Saddam Hussein regime; once this structure was crippled early in the fighting, the Iraqi combat units in the field -- however capable and dedicated -- were unable to perform effectively, and so were easily routed. In the current war in Iraq, by contrast, American commanders have been unable to locate the enemy's center of gravity, and so have been incapable of crafting an effective strategy for defeating the insurgents.

What, then, is the enemy's center of gravity in the war on terror? This is the critical question that President Bush and his top advisers have been unable to answer correctly. According to Bush, the terrorists' center of gravity has been the support and sanctuary they receive from "rogue" regimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan and, supposedly, Saddam Hussein in Iraq as well as the mullahs in Iran. If these regimes were all swept away, the White House has long argued, the terrorists would find themselves weakened, isolated, and ultimately defeated. "The very day of the [9-11] attacks," Condoleezza Rice later recalled , "[Bush] told us, his advisers, that the United States faced a new kind of war and that the strategy of our government would be to take the fight to the terrorists. That night, he announced to the world that the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." From this basic proposition, all else has followed: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the current planning for a war in Iran.

The overthrow of the Taliban did eliminate an important sanctuary and training base for Al Qaeda. But were "rogue" regimes ever truly the center of gravity for the terrorist threat? The events of the past few years unequivocally demonstrate that such has not been the case, then or now. (In fact, we know that there were no links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.) The Taliban and the Hussein regime are, of course, long gone, but Al Qaeda continues to mount assaults on Western interests around the world and new manifestations of jihadism continue to erupt all the time.

"Al Qaeda has clearly shown itself to be nimble, flexible, and adaptive," observed terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation in Current History magazine. "Because of the group's remarkable durability, the loss of Afghanistan does not appear to have affected Al Qaeda's ability to mount terrorist attacks to the extent that the United States hoped." Afghanistan did provide bin Laden with training facilities, supply dumps, and the like, "but these camps and bases...are mostly irrelevant to the prosecution of an international terrorist campaign -- as events since 9-11 have repeatedly demonstrated."

Far from impeding Al Qaeda and its offshoots, the overthrow of the Taliban and, especially, the Hussein regime have been a boon to their efforts. War and chaos in the Middle East, with American forces serving as an occupying power, have proved to be the ideal conditions in which to nurture a multinational jihadist movement aimed at punishing the West. As noted in a recent CIA report, would-be jihadists from all over the world are flocking to Iraq to bloody the Americans and acquire critical combat skills that can later be applied in their own countries. According to a summary of a CIA report in the New York Times , the Agency has concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory" for militants to improve their skills in urban combat. It follows from this that the longer American troops remain in Iraq, the greater will be the potential advantage to international terrorism. Indeed, senior CIA officials have reportedly told Congressional leaders that the war in Iraq is "likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict."

This prediction has been confirmed in recent months by terror attacks in Jordan and Afghanistan that bear the distinctive trademark of Iraqi-style combat, including the use of both suicide bombers in urban areas and improvised roadside explosive devices, or IEDs. For example, the deadly bombings in Amman, Jordan on November 9 have been described by American intelligence officials as representing an effort by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the self-styled Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, to apply combat techniques perfected in Iraq to other countries led by pro-American regimes. Likewise, in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have told reporters that "militants are increasingly taking a page from the insurgent playbook in Iraq and using more roadside bombs and suicide attacks."

European officials are particularly worried by this phenomenon, fearing the return to Europe of Islamic militants who have slipped off to Iraq for first-hand combat experience. "We consider these people dangerous because those who go will come back once their mission is accomplished," said a senior French intelligence officer in late 2004. "Then they can use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe, or the United States. It's the same as those who went to Afghanistan or Chechnya."

Botching the War on Terrorism

Clearly, Bush's identification of rogue regimes as the center of gravity of the terrorist enemy has proven faulty; nor, in light of this failure, has he been able to correctly identify the true center. As suggested by most serious scholars of Islamic extremism, the real crux of the jihadists' strength lies in their ability to articulate and propagate a message of radical struggle that inspires and activates thousands of disaffected young Muslims around the world. As summarized by Hoffman of RAND, Al Qaeda has evolved into "an amorphous movement tenuously held together by a loosely networked constituency rather than a monolithic, international organization with an identifiable command and control apparatus.... It has become a vast enterprise -- an international movement or franchise operation with like-minded local representatives, loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base but advancing its goals independently."

Obviously, defeating this "movement" requires a very different strategy than the one now employed by the United States. Instead of military assaults on rogue states, it requires a capacity to identify and apprehend the often self-appointed "local representatives" of Al Qaeda, to disable the movement's propaganda apparatus, and, most of all, to discredit its prime messages. On a grand scale, this requires positioning the United States with progressive forces in the Middle East, withdrawing from Iraq, and ending U.S. support for repressive, regressive regimes like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On a purely tactical level, it means developing harmonious relations with professional intelligence officials in other countries and developing a communications strategy aimed at delegitimizing the jihadists' violent appeals within the Islamic world -- an effort that can only be successful if it enjoys the assistance of moderate Muslims willing to cooperate with the United States.

The need for a strategy of this sort has been voiced by at least some terrorism experts in the U.S. and by many knowledgeable officials in Europe. But even those American experts who have advocated such an approach have been repeatedly stymied by the President's unswerving commitment to his own, demonstrably failed approach. No divergence from the official White House blueprint has been permitted. To make matters worse, Bush and his top advisers have insisted on micro-managing the war on terror, choosing tactics that amplify the damage caused by their defective strategy.

The greatest damage has been caused by decisions made by top administration officials, including the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense, regarding the methods used to apprehend, confine, and extract information from terrorist suspects and those associated with them. Most significantly, this includes decisions to permit the abduction of suspects on the territory of friendly nations, to use Europe as a stopover point for the transport or "rendition" of suspects to Asian and Middle Eastern countries where torture is routinely employed to extract confessions, to allow U.S. interrogators to use methods that by any reasonable definition constitute torture, and to tolerate the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners in U.S. custody (whether at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or in secret CIA-run prisons in Afghanistan, Europe, and elsewhere). Separately and together, these decisions have severely alienated the very governments and religious figures whose assistance is desperately needed to mount an effective campaign against Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

To give just one example of the problems this has caused the United States: On December 24, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA operatives who abducted an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003 and "rendered" him to Egypt, where he was subsequently tortured by Egyptian security officers. This case has caused a major uproar in Italy, forcing even Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, normally a reliable White House ally, to distance himself from U.S. policies -- hardly the way to hold on to, no less gain, allies in the war against terror.

Equally worrisome is the growing anti-Americanism espoused by supposedly "mainstream" Islamic clerics in Europe. Prompted by what they view as an unrelenting American campaign against the Islamic world -- the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere providing but the most recent confirmations of this outlook -- these clerics are promulgating a militant message that, European intelligence officers contend, is inspiring young Muslim men to volunteer for combat in Iraq or to form their own, homegrown Al Qaeda-type organizations. It was a group of this sort, experts believe, that staged the bombings in the London Underground on July 7 that killed 52 people.

It is impossible to exaggerate the damage caused by the President's improvident decisions. Yes, these tactics are immoral. Yes, they violate American norms and values. Yes, they are in many respects illegal. All this, by itself, is enough to warrant condemnation by Congress and the public. But it is the lethal effect of these decisions on America's capacity for success in the war on terrorism that most concerns us here. By employing tactics that only serve to heighten the destructive consequences of a failing strategy, President Bush has essentially guaranteed America's failure. In the final analysis, the President's incompetent management of the war on terror has helped the jihadists take better advantage of their strengths while exploiting America's weaknesses. This does not bode well for the future of global peace and stability.

For too long, the American public has accepted the myth of presidential effectiveness in the war on terrorism. But as the practical implications of Bush's incompetence become ever more apparent -- lamentably, through the continued spread and potency of radical jihadism -- this last, crucial prop of the President's support could soon fall away. As 2005 was the year in which Bush's fatal incompetence in domestic affairs was revealed to all through the tragedy of Katrina and New Orleans, 2006 could prove to be the year in which his failed leadership in the war on terror finally comes back to haunt him.

(Michael Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books) as well as Resource Wars, The New Landscape of Global Conflict.)


3. NY Times editorial: A New Friend With Good Advice

The previous German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, created quite a strain in German-United States relations when he branded the invasion of Iraq a "military adventure" and joined France in ardently opposing it. Now his successor, Angela Merkel, whose ascendancy was welcomed by the Bush administration as an antidote to the more socialist Mr. Schröder, has told interviewers that when she makes her first official call on President Bush on Friday, she intends to speak her mind about Guantánamo and say the prison must be closed.

This may sound like a prescription for prolonging the American-German chill. It really shouldn't be. What infuriated the Bush administration about Mr. Schröder was that he opportunistically used America-bashing to win votes even as he was cozying up to President Vladimir Putin and trying to lift the European Union's arms embargo against China. Mrs. Merkel has not done that. If she feels strongly about the disgrace of Guantánamo, as all honest people should, she also feels strongly about the importance of trans-Atlantic relations.

The disagreements between Washington and Berlin will not go away. If anything, the list has been lengthened in recent months by revelations of secret C.I.A. prisons in Eastern Europe and the wrongful imprisonment by the United States of a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, who has now been released. But just as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has helped undo some of the damage of the administration's first-term "bring 'em on" bravado, so, too, has Mrs. Merkel earned an early round of plaudits for her capable, principled approach to foreign policy. Tone is all-important in international relations, and so far, Angela Merkel seems to get it. It worked for her in Europe when she brokered an 11th-hour compromise on the European Union's budget, and it could work in America.

A successful visit by the new chancellor is very much in Washington's interest. The Bush administration's "with us or against us" approach has left it quite isolated in Europe. Those who have been "with" America - Tony Blair of Britain, for example - have paid a steep political price, while those "against" - Jacques Chirac of France - have pretty much burned their bridges to Washington. Mrs. Merkel could be what Washington needs, a European friend with credibility and clout on both sides of the divide back home. Alas, Mrs. Merkel will most likely not persuade Mr. Bush to close down Guantánamo, but if she can convince him that her advice comes from a friend, the visit will be useful.