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A fact you should know

CNN provides a striking piece of information:

Motorcycle accidents have killed more Marines in the past 12 months than enemy fire in Iraq

Henry Kissinger on Iraq

What would happen if the US withdrew from Iraq?

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provides his views in our new FORA video. He also talks about what John McCain has to do to sustain support for the war. You can watch it all here.

If you can't see this video, click here

The Iraq question we all want the answer to...

How can we make the conflict more eco-friendly?

Here are some thoughts courtesy of the humourists at The Onion.

(Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Alice Fishburn

Today's Web Grab

You might enjoy:

• Ben White in Comment is free: What lies beneath
• Chris Cillizza in The Fix: On reporters and voting
• Libby Purves in Faith Central: Tone down your sex scenes say Italy's bishops
• Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics: Why aren't there more old criminals?
• Cryus Farivar in Slate: Why is it so easy to steal art in Europe?

Just as bad as each other

I've just heard of a great quote from William Hague. Talking about a recent trip to Iraq, he said:

We went to speak to a squaddie who’d been blown up the day before, so I remarked the only thing worse than being blown up on a Sunday is to be visited by politicians on a Monday, to which he replied, "Actually, it’s on a par, sir"

Murad Ahmed

(Hat Tip: Laura Deeley)

Your handy guidebook to an invaded Iraq

A quite wonderful book is being republished next month: Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II. The guidebook was made to inform American troops stationed in Iraq in 1943 how best to assist the British guarding it against Nazi infiltration – and much of the advice holds true today.

But the preface of the book, written by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, reveals in a small way, how underprepared today’s US troops were to “win the peace” in Iraq.

Nagl writes that he wishes:

…that we had listened to lessons already learned but long forgotten, advice such as: “The nomads are divided into tribes headed by sheikhs. The leaders are very powerful and should be given great consideration.” A policy that showed greater consideration to the Sunni sheiks and to their interests in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 might have prevented the fervent insurgency from being raised to the fever pitch it has taken recently – for, as the 1943 guide warns in stunning understatement, “The Iraqis have some religious and tribal differences among themselves.”

Really? American troops were really not given basic information on the internal mechanics of Iraqi culture? The instructions in this guidebook were to inform the military about Iraq in 1943, but it’s not like America hasn’t fought a war in that country since then - the first Gulf War ended just 12 years before the 2003 conflict. Did the US military learn fail to learn any lessons in 1991 – or were they just not passed on to the military and political leaders who prosecuted this war?

This is just a small example of the mismanagement of the current war. The big picture can be gained from reading Bob Woodward’s excellent book, State of Denial. Woodward thinks that the current Iraq war could have been won, but is being lost because of strategic errors made in the first year after invasion.

So Woodward would probably agree with this (amazingly frank) assessment from Lt Col Nagl in the Iraqi guidebook:

It is almost impossible, when reading this guide, not to slap oneself on the forehead in despair that the Army knew so much of Arabic culture and customs, and of the importance of that knowledge for achieving military success in Iraq, six decades ago – and forgot almost all of those lessons in the intervening years. It is a sad fact of history that armies all but invariably forget the lessons of prior campaigns and have to relearn them from scratch when war begins again, at the cost of too many soldiers’ and civilian lives.

Murad Ahmed

Iraq: a chink of light?

Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm was the best argument produced for the invasion of Iraq. But for the last three years its author, the former Clinton adviser on Iraq and Iran, has been highly critical of President Bush's conduct of the war.

So his new article in the New York Times, "A War We Just Might Win", written with his Brookings colleague Michael Hanlon, is turning heads.

Here is the nub of their argument:

We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with...

A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help.

My friend Michael Barone points out that opinion is turning in America, too:

Now, there's additional evidence for the progress of the surge in this Associated Press report and of a turn in opinion from the Gallup/USA Today poll. Respondents were asked whether the increased number of troops was "making the situation better" or "not making much difference."

Last month the balance of opinion was decidedly negative, 22 to 51 percent. Now it is significantly less negative, 31 to 41 percent.

I've discounted the idea that the surge might work as simply wishful thinking. Am I wrong?

Lessons from the UK: Why Hillary should stick by her war vote

What should Hillary Clinton do about the war? Should she tack against the war to secure the party nomination, or stick to her guns to show she is a leader and consistent.

In as superb piece of analysis on Real Clear Politics, Kathleen Parker shows just how much trouble these questions are giving the Senator:

Early on during the anti-war surge, she stood bravely by her vote. Then under pressure from the Democratic base, she said she wouldn't have voted the way she did had she known then what she knows now. By the first Democratic debate last month, she said she regretted trusting Bush when he said he would let U.N. weapons inspectors do their work. By Sunday's second debate, Clinton's Iraq War vote was really for "coercive diplomacy."

So can I offer her some advice based on our experience in Britain?

At the last General Election, it became clear that Iraq was Tony Blair's most significant political liability. The Conservatives were desperate to exploit it. Just one problem - they too had voted for the war on Iraq.

So Tory leader Michael Howard tried this line - I wouldn't have voted for the resolution to go to war if I had known the full truth. Yes, I support the war, he said. But, now I know the full story I wouldn't have given my backing to Tony Blair's explanation.

Funnily enough this was not a mere political ploy. He actually believed it. But it didn't work. It looked opportunistic as well as being a piece of lawyerly (Howard was a lawyer) evasiveness. In the election, he ended up being forced to argue that he would have attacked Saddam if he had known that the Iraqis did not have WMD. A position held by hardly any voter.

The lesson from this episode is that any attempt to escape responsibility for a pro-war vote will fail. Even using arguments, which you believe and can justify. The Senator needs to understand that she is stuck with supporting the war and arguments about detailed bits of resolutions are pointless.

The British experience endorses Kathleen Parker's view entirely:

Clinton would have done better to stick to her original principle: She did what she thought was right at the time and wishes the war had been better managed. That's an assessment other war supporters can share and that war protesters can respect. Americans tend to be forgiving of errors in judgment made in good faith. They are less forgiving of fudging history in the service of politics. 

Where is al-Qaeda now?

The global war on terror is set to get, well, even more global. Why? Well, the evidence is that al-Qaeda is trying to spread its bases much further than the caves and deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bruce Riedel, writing in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, surveys the spread of al-Qaeda and finds patterns in where it succeeds and fails.

According to Riedel’s analysis, al-Qaeda has established bases in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan with the aim of overthrowing the governments there. Other emerging targets are Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Bangladesh and Somalia.

Meanwhile attempts to bring down dictatorships governments in other Muslim countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (hardly bastions of secular or “moderate” Islam) have failed. In some cases, al-Qaeda has been largely destroyed in those countries.

So what’s the difference between a Somalia and a Jordan?

In Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, the governments have strengthened the secret police and given them carte blanche to strike al-Qaeda and its sympathisers. The United States and its allies in Europe have also provided additional counterterrorism assistance to the targeted regimes and stepped up cooperation with their security forces.

The lesson is clear: al-Qaeda is still too weak to overthrow established governments equipped with effective security services; it needs failed states to thrive

This might seem like an argument for nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Riedel prescribes different pills for either nation. For Afghanistan:

A critical first step toward decapitating al-Qaeda is for Washington to enhance its commitment in Afghanistan. President Bush promised to do so last February, but more needs to be done. Defeating the resurgent Taliban will require a significant increase in NATO forces, and that will require U.S. leadership. The United States should urgently divert more troops from Iraq to Afghanistan as a way to encourage U.S. allies in Afghanistan to help supply the additional troops and equipment needed. NATO should also encourage its partners in the Mediterranean Dialogue -- especially Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia -- to contribute to the stabilization of Afghanistan. It should also create a contact group led by a senior NATO diplomat to engage with all of Afghanistan's neighbours to secure the country's borders, especially the 1,500-mile one with Pakistan. This group should include Iran, which has generally been a helpful player in Afghanistan in the last few years. NATO should reach out to India as well: New Delhi has already provided half a billion dollars in aid for Afghanistan, and, having long been a target of Islamist terrorism, India has a national interest in defeating it

But for Iraq:

Iraq is, of course, another critical battlefield in the fight against al-Qaeda. But it is time to recognize that engagement there is more of a trap than an opportunity for the United States. Al-Qaeda and Iran both want Washington to remain bogged down in the quagmire. Al-Qaeda has openly welcomed the chance to fight the United States in Iraq. U.S. diplomacy has certainly been clumsy and counterproductive, but there is little point in reviewing the litany of U.S. mistakes that led to this disaster. The objective now should be to let Iraqis settle their conflicts themselves. Rather than reinforce its failures, the United States should disengage from the civil war in Iraq, with a complete, orderly, and phased troop withdrawal that allows the Iraqi government to take the credit for the pullout and so enhance its legitimacy.

The piece is well worth reading in full.

Murad Ahmed

The truth about withdrawal

The New York Times carries this story:

Congressional Democrats relented today on their insistence that a war spending measure sought by President Bush also set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

with this second sentence:

The decision to back down, described by senior lawmakers and aides, was a wrenching reversal for some Democrats, who saw their election triumph as a call to force an end to the war.

This is an interesting assertion. Surely there can't be any Democrats who believe it in their power to "end the war"? After all, if any American had it in their power to "end the war" in Iraq there would be no need to debate troop withdrawal. Troops would be able to come home straight away.

The sentence reflects a widespread misunderstanding about the killing in Iraq. It is not primarily a conflict between Iraqis and Americans. It is Iraqi killing Iraqi. And far from ending that, precipitate US troop withdrawal is quite likely to make it worse.

Many Americans may wish to end their involvement, but they shouldn't whitewash withdrawal with dishonest rhetoric about ending war.