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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. 

Why the Surge is scuppering John McCain's presidential bid

Whatever you think of the Iraq War, you just have to be impressed by John McCain’s cojones by going on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in front of a vehemently anti-war crowd and host, to argue in favour of the Surge.

You should watch the interview in full by clicking on the two videos below. It’ll give you a good understanding of why he’s already in trouble in the race for the 2008 presidential election.

His stance means he’s being bashed by both sides over Iraq. Twack - Democrats attack McCain for supporting the War. Twack - Republicans attack him for then criticising the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the War. Twack – Democrats bash him again for supporting the Surge, as that identifies him with the Bush Administration.

McCain’s noble attempt to keep a principled middle course on the War has meant that he’s seen on the wrong side of the argument by almost everyone.

McCain argues, like this article on the Foreign Policy website, that now the Surge has begun, it has to work, and setting a withdrawal date (as the Democrats are currently trying to do) would undermine it. After reading Bob Woodward’s excellent book, State of Denial, my own feeling is that this conflict was lost by the mistakes made in the first year of the invasion – and that the Surge may be too little too late. I hope I’m wrong.

Murad Ahmed

Is The Surge surging?

Is "The Surge" working? John McCain thinks that it is:

I just returned from my fifth visit to Iraq since 2003 -- and my first since Gen. David Petraeus's new strategy has started taking effect. For the first time, our delegation was able to drive, not use helicopters, from the airport to downtown Baghdad. For the first time, we met with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province who are working with American and Iraqi forces to combat al-Qaeda. For the first time, we visited Iraqi and American forces deployed in a joint security station in Baghdad -- an integral part of the new strategy. We held a news conference to discuss what we saw: positive signs, underreported in the United States, that are reason for cautious optimism.

And he is echoing an argument made by Robert Kagan in the same newspaper a month ago:

Though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

Are they right? I hope so. But optimism is hard, given all that's happened.

Bill tries to justify Hillary's Iraq War vote

Bill Clinton has been telling Hillary's fundraisers that her votes in the Senate should not be interpreted as support for the war.

The Hill was listening in to the conference call and provides this report:

In response to a question from one of the supporters on the phone about explaining Hillary Clinton’s Iraq vote to undecided voters, the former president jumped in front of former Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe, saying, “Let me answer this.”

He said he had re-read the Iraq resolution last week, and that his wife had voted only for “coercive inspections.” Clinton justified his wife’s refusal to apologize for her vote by explaining that she was acting out of concern that future presidents might need similar language authorizing “coercive inspections to avoid conflict.”

“It’s just not fair to say that people who voted for the resolution wanted war,” Clinton said.

Wanting war and supporting it are, of course, two different things. But whatever his wife may or may not have voted for, Bill Clinton certainly supported the war. In this article in the Guardian from March 2003 he eloquently explained why.

The position he took in the conference call is, by contrast, shifty and unconvincing.

The chink in the Galloway armour

Two comments on my debate with Gorgeous George.

First, you will note that he kept raising Israel. In so far as he was making an intellectual point at all, it was an utterly irrelevant one. I did not raise Israel because my arguments for toppling Saddam were not about Israel.

He has no independent reason for thinking that the defence of Israel is part of my case for invading Iraq - I have never written that or said it. He simply assumed that Israel must be the issue because I am Jewish. I think this extraordinary.

Second I stumbled across something interesting in our exchanges over his famous "Sir, I salute you" comments.

Galloway responds to every criticism with a flat denial that it is his position. He responds to the "Sir I salute you" attack with the absurd suggestion that he was saluting the people of Iraq.

But there was one attack he did not choose to respond to. Three times (not on the clip unfortunately) I pointed out that he congratulated the President on people naming their children Saddam. He said nothing when I said that, simply ignoring it.

I am persuaded by this that these comments about naming children are his real weakness and that he hasn't thought of a reply to them yet.

Watch George Galloway lose his temper, live on TV

I thought you might like to see some clips from my Sky debate last night with George Galloway. He does not, in Corporal Jones's immortal phrase, like it up him.

(Incidentally, the final vote was not 18-82 - they announced that after only 10 minutes of voting - voting went on and in the end the result was a rather more respectable 34-66)

Copyright Sky News

The debate Parliament won't have

Here's a life-enhancing opportunity not to be missed. The Stop the War Coalition have organised "the debate Parliament won't have". Should you wish to attend, I suggest you bring an inflatable travel pillow to maximise your enjoyment of the speeches of the not 30, not 31, not 32, but 33 promised speakers. But silly me, doesn't a debate involve arguing with people who hold different opinions? What? It's just another left-wing shoutfest?

Robbie Millen

Anchoring and the Iraq War

Anjana Ahuja has done a terrific job unpicking the row over the Lancet's claim that there have been 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, a shocking number.

The Lancet research has taken quite a battering. But this doesn't mean that it isn't important work.

Why? Anchoring.

Once a figure is established in the public mind, there is room for some adjustment. But not all that much. Gordon Brown relies on anchoring to make Tory criticisms of his budget seem risky and inappropriate.

If the Lancet's critics are right and part of the motivation for publication was political, then the job has been well done.

Winner of the Nick Cohen competition

Talk about anchoring.

Every person of whom I've asked this question:

Between 1973 and 2002 what proportion of Iraqi conventional arms came from the United States and what proportion from the United Kingdom?

has given me a wildly incorrect answer.

But once I turned into the Comment Central Nick Cohen Competition and asked people to post their answers, everyone either got it exactly right or nearly right.

Why? Because once the first answer was in, everyone was anchored to the low figure. Either that or they used the internet.

Anyway, the answer is that 0.46 per cent of the total came from the US, 0.18 per cent came from the UK. The majority of weapons were imported from 57.26 per cent.

More Iraqi weapons came from Denmark than from America.

A copy of Cohen's book is on its way to Ismael Klata.

Critical thinking and the Iraq War

The Washington Post has an enjoyable blog - the Achenblog - from Joel Achenbach.

In his latest post he informs us that he has been reading a book. Always a good idea in my view. Anyway, he says:

I  was just reading a book on critical thinking, "Hoaxes, Myths and Manias," by Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford, that lists the most important elements of learning how to think critically:

1. Ask questions; be willing to wonder.

2. Define your problem correctly.

3. Examine the evidence.

4. Analyze assumptions and biases.

5. Avoid emotional reasoning.

6. Don't oversimplify.

7. Consider other interpretations

8. Tolerate uncertainty.

Then Achenbach adds:

Now who does that NOT sound like?

His conclusion is:

If this country [he means the US] had thought more scientifically in 2003, and asked, what do we really know, what's the source of this information, what are some alternative interpretations, how certain are we that our plan will work, and so on, we might not be in the mess we're in.

Yes. But on the other hand they might have been.

The implication of Achenbach's post is that with a bit of critical thinking the Iraq War might have been avoided. But the opposite is also true. Simplistic thinking, or no thinking at all, might have led one not to do anything at all in Iraq and just let Saddam continue.

The fact that things have become so difficult in Iraq does not mean that the thinking that led to it was a mistake. In fact Achenbach's list acknowledges this by including the phrase "tolerate uncertainty".

I would argue that is exactly what we had to do when we went into Iraq.

Fareed Zakaria's take on Iraq's dark cloud

There is a must-read piece in Newsweek from the often excellent Fareed Zakaria. He makes two striking points.

First:

For those in the West asking when Islam will have its Reformation, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the process appears to have begun. The bad news is it's been marked by calumny, hatred and bloody violence. In this way it mirrors the Reformation itself, which we now remember in a highly sanitized way.

And second:

An organization [Al Qaeda] that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam. Bin Laden began his struggle hoping to topple the Saudi regime. He is now aligned with the Saudi monarchy as it organizes against Shiite domination. This necessarily limits Al Qaeda's broader appeal and complicates its basic anti-Western strategy.

Zakaria is, in another words, suggesting that the cloud of Iraqi civil disorder has a silver lining.

The problem with neocons is that too many are journalists. Really?

Gideon Rachman has a penetrating column in the Financial Times about neocons. He writes this:

The neo-cons stand accused of many errors: imperialism, Leninism, Trotskyism (New York school), militarism. Some believe that the real problem is that so many of them are Jewish – this is an alarmingly popular theme, to judge by my e-mails. But the problem with the neo-cons is not that so many of them are Jews. The problem is that so many of them are journalists.

In making this point, I hope that I do not come across as some sort of self-hating journalist. The best opinion journalism has a clarity and readability that far surpasses most academic papers or diplomatic telegrams. But opinion journalism also has its characteristic vices. An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy. The fingerprints of simplifying and exaggerating journalists are all over the Iraq debacle.

But does this hold true for Britain? While much is made of the power of the press here, my impression is that American op-ed columnists are held in greater reverence and their views carry more weight in the US compared to their British counterparts. Certainly, columnists on the major US titles get away with acting much grander than columnists in the more raucous British press. (You cannot, for instance, imagine the absurd, self-absorbed, self-important bust up between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley about the paucity of women columnists taking place on Fleet Street.)

My hunch, though, is that the front-page splashes of British newspapers carry more clout with politicians than US papers do; probably because political power is so much more diffused in the USA. Am I right?

Robbie Millen

The American people will only support their President if they think he's in it to win

Just before the Iraq war began, The Times commissioned the great American speechwriter and author Peggy Noonan to answer this question:

How much will America be willing to suffer? What kind of losses will America accept and absorb, if it comes to that?

The piece she wrote in March 2003 is very much worth re-reading today, following George Bush's announcement that he is sending fresh troops to Iraq.

Peggy had this to say:

My own hunch is that Americans are more patient, persevering and accepting of pain than we know. We found that out on 9/11, and we may be about to find it out again. But Americans are practical. They all know how to do a cost-benefit analysis. They will be patient, persevering and willing to absorb pain as long as they feel they can win and are winning. They will accept bodybags as part of the price of victory, but not for a second will they accept them if they start to see evidence of defeat.

She argued that once America began negotiating a withdrawal in Vietnam the deaths quickly became intolerable. The split in the leadership of the country over whether to continue was also important in eroding support.

If Noonan's hunch is correct (and I think she got it right) then it is clear that the much touted Baker middle way was not really an option for the President. Beginning a slow withdrawal from Iraq, combined with international negotiations would have made every American death seem utterly pointless, a wasted life on the way to certain defeat.

So he really had to choose between rapid and complete defeat or one more attempt at victory. That is why he has sent the fresh troops. For it is only so long as the American people believe that their political leadership is committed to victory that they will tolerate being in Iraq at all.

The strange reaction to Saddam's hanging

The Press Gazette records that only 25 people complained to Ofcom about the television footage of Saddam's execution, while 1,000 complained about the eviction procedure on Big Brother.

Whether or not you quite agree with this ranking of priority, do you share my view that there has been something strange about the reaction to the hanging?

Politicians and commentators seem to be furious that someone shouted "Boooooo, down with dictators" or whatever, while ignoring the fact that Saddam was hanged. Now, Saddam and I don't have quite the same way of looking at things, but I am pretty certain that if I were in the same position as he, I'd be more hacked off at being executed than I would at being heckled while it was happening. Then again, perhaps that's just me.

Both John Prescott and David Cameron excused themselves from commenting on the execution, because that was a matter for the Iraqis, before condemning the booing, which apparently is open to foreign criticism.

I'm obviously missing something.

If Saddam had not been executed...

Here's an arresting thought. What would have happened if Saddam had not been executed?

Andrew Sullivan links to a post by UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge on the dictator's death. Much of it is an argument about Catholic teaching on the death penalty, but it finishes with this:

[Michael] Joseph [a thinker engaged in the Catholic debate] exercises prudential judgment in concluding that "Saddam's death sentence does not meet the criteria of Catholic social and moral teaching, and Martino has correctly noted that fact." I disagree, albeit respectfully. The basis for Joseph's judgment is as follows:

"The likelihood that Saddam could ever rise again to power is negligible; the world would not permit it. The atmosphere of death and fear that he generated will never arrive again by his doing."

First, "the world" did nothing to remove Saddam from power. The US and UK did more or less on their own, along with a fig leaf coalition. If Saddam were to escape, presumably it would be the US and UK that would have to prevent his return to power. Suppose Saddam did not escape until the US and UK have withdrawn from Iraq, however. Is it likely they would invade Iraq again to prevent Saddam from returning to power, especially given the political trends in both the US and UK? As for "the world," is it likely France, Germany, or any of our other allies who sat out Gulf War II would participate in a Gulf War III?

Second, is it realistic that Saddam might escape? In December 2006, an ex-Iraqi minister, Ayham al Samaraie, "who had escaped once before after being convicted in October," escaped from "a police station just outside the heavily fortified Green Zone where the dual U.S.-Iraqi citizen was being held on corruption charges." (Link) In February 2006, 23 al Qaeda operative broke out of a maximum security prison in Yemen. (Link) In November 2005, four top as Qaeda operatives broke out of US custody in "one of the most heavily fortified military prisons in the world" at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.  (Link)

Most pertinently, Saddam's own nephew, who was serving "a life sentence for financing insurgents and possessing bombs escaped from prison ... in northern Iraq." (Link)

Given the unsettled nature of Iraq's government, the apparently rampant corruption, the likelihood of additional chaos should the US and UK pull out, the persistence of Saddam loyalists, I believe reasonable minds could conclude that the risk of a return by Saddam to power was non-negligible and thus justified his execution in the name of ensuring the safety of Iraqi society.

This seems to me a very strong, and infrequently considered, argument for Saddam's execution.

Christopher Hitchens's three options on Iraq

In his Slate article Christopher Hitchens provides this useful rule of thumb:

If, when reading an article about the debate over Iraq, you come across the expression "the realist school" and mentally substitute the phrase "the American friends of the Saudi royal family," your understanding of the situation will invariably be enhanced.

And provides these choices:

Iraq has only three alternatives before it. The first is dictatorship by one faction or sect over all the others: a solution that has been exhausted by horrific failure. The second is partition, which would certainly involve direct intervention by all its neighbours to secure privileges for their own proxies and would therefore run the permanent risk of civil war. And the third is federalism, where each group would admit that it was not strong enough to dictate terms to the others and would agree to settle differences by democratic means.

It's hard to argue with that. Hitch chooses the third. And it's hard to argue with that too.

James Baker's place amongst the Wise Men

In this morning's Times former Secretary of State James Baker recalls his role as George W. Bush's representative during the Florida vote recount in 2000.

In this essay (via Real Clear Politics) Walter Isaacson wonders whether Baker's role as a partisan in this fight will deny him a place in history as one of the "Wise Men". (Isaacson is an expert on the Wise Men, having written a superb book on the subject)

I'd say that depends on how wise the Baker report on Iraq turns out to be.

Blogs from the trenches

Ben Macintyre mentions in his article today "the remarkable outpourings, some of them deeply moving and articulate, in the military blogosphere." Slate's The Sandbox carries some fine writing. This posting from a US soldier in Afghanistan gives you a rich flavour:

I sometimes will spend whole days simply reading people’s eyes, not saying a single word. You can learn a lot about a person just by looking them in their eyes...

The other day, after returning from a stand-off (still ongoing), I wanted to get a real sense of how everyone was feeling after being in a combat zone for five months. The string of BS that I receive when I ask some of my troops how they’re doing simply doesn’t cut it sometimes. I walk up to a Private First Class who is enjoying a cigarette out on the steps to our building. I pull out my own pack and light one up. "So, how ya doin' man?" I ask coolly, staring off into the distance, exhaling the smoke from the first puff. He starts going on about "It’s all good, S’arnt" and "Can’t wait to go on leave, S'arnt". I am hearing his words, and looking for his eyes to betray them. He doesn't notice me looking.

"That stand-off could turn into a full-out battle at any moment," I say, baiting him with my words. I think I detect a reflexive jerk on his face. That’s when I catch his eyes, only for a moment, and I see everything that I need to see, fear and the look of being lost, as he babbles on about warlords and wiping them out with his AT-4 rocket launcher.

I've seen the same look in many Joes, both here and in Iraq, a look of despair entwined with resolve and determination at the same time. "What happens next?" with a side of "I will be going home." I am only about three or four years older than this man, but feel at least a decade older. Indeed, many here thought that I was early-to-mid-30's until I revealed my true age. It has been the same everywhere I go, ever since returning from that other battleground, Iraq. The 18-year-old's smile and baby face I had when I first joined the Army have been replaced by a resolute, hardened stare, one which actually unnerves some people, and a face that is showing wear from the desert elements.

Robbie Millen

Laying down my law

In Peter Wilby's (always diverting) media column in this week's New Statesman he writes about columnists who supported the Iraq War and has this say about me:

Daniel Finkelstein argued that supporting the US invasion of Iraq was like betting on Chelsea to beat Sheffield United in a football match. Since Chelsea are Premier League champions and Sheffield near the bottom of the table, the bet will usually be right.

A Sheffield victory would be a fluke and to predict it would be silly, since most of the time you'd be wrong. On this basis, Finkelstein ruled, it was right to support not only the Iraq war but the Vietnam war as well, since mighty America should usually win. He thus demonstrated what will no doubt be known as Finkelstein's Law, which I shall quote to my wife next time I direct her into a six-mile motorway traffic jam: "You cannot… judge the quality of a decision by its outcome."

I would be delighted if this became known as Finkelstein's Law, although somewhat surprised if the statisticians of the world decided to attach my name to a basic property of statistics.

The example that Wilby chose was fascinating because:

• The only thing you can do when choosing a route is to make the best estimate of the likely flow of traffic and then pick a route. If you then run into traffic - traffic that was always possible, but less likely than if you had taken the other route - it does not alter the correctness of your decision.
• Your spouse may, indeed probably will, berate you, but this does not mean that their ire is justified. They may say that they told you to go the other way. But you rejected that route correctly because the traffic on it was likely to be greater. Neither you nor your spouse is able to prove what would have happened if you had gone the other way. The only way of testing which of you was correct would be to assess the outcome of multiple journeys.
• Not only is this the correct point to make to your spouse in the circumstances, I am willing to bet that it is the one that Mr Wilby would use. He would be furious if its obvious common sense was denied.

Bet you're sorry you started messing round with light-hearted analogies now, aren't you Wilby?

Remembering Woodrow

In his excellent column this morning, David Aaronovitch begins his attack on foreign policy realism by telling the story of Woodrow Wyatt's lunch with the Iraqi Ambassador.

This reminded me of the launch of Woodrow Wyatt's diaries shortly after his death. The publisher began his speech with the words "If Woodrow were looking down on us today", and one of the guests shouted out "Up".

Victory by death

Yesterday, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging. And the BBC's John Simpson clearly regards this as a great triumph..... for Saddam.

He left court, according to Simpson, with "a faint but very definite smile" on his face. "It was though he had achieved everything he came to court to achieve."

Given that the tyrant had just been told that he is to be executed, I think that Simpson's is an eccentric judgment. I can think of greater triumphs than being killed by your enemies. But, then again, I wasn't there.

Was Churchill wrong in 1940?

Since having the idea behind my article in this week's paper, one thing has worried me - what about Winston Churchill in 1940?

For those of you who haven't read it, my op-ed on Wednesday argued that political decisions cannot be judged on their outcome. Instead, the only test of a good decision is whether or not the probabilities were correctly calculated. And this can only be established through analysis of the outcome of repeated decisions. It is possible, in other words, to make a good decision and achieve a poor outcome.

The flip side of this, of course, is that it is possible to make a poor decision that achieves a good outcome.

And this brought to mind John Lukacs’ book Five Days in London, his examination of Churchill's decision making in May 1940. Almost alone, Churchill forced his Government to take an incredibly risky course, one that seemed almost certain to end in failure. It did not. It saved civilisation. But this does not mean it was necessarily a good decision. A good outcome was most unlikely, even though a good outcome transpired.

So did Churchill make a mistake in 1940, according to my own theory?

I think not, and the reason for this judgment is important. The correctness of a decision does not depend on identifying just the probabilities. It depends on identifying correctly the expected outcome - that is the probability multiplied by the consequences.

In 1940, the probability of Britain prevailing may have been small, but the consequences of surrender would have been absolutely massive.

This is relevant to Iraq, as well. Lots of correspondents have suggested to me that Tony Blair greatly overestimated the probability of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. But, I think Mr Blair was concerned with the expected outcome, that is the probability of WMD multiplied by the consequences.

The mistakes of war

My article in this morning's paper began as an answer to Matthew Parris, something that Tim Hames has also provided.

Yet while working on it, I stumbled on an answer to a question that has always worried me.

I am self-aware enough to realise that if I had been alive at the time, I would have supported the Vietnam war. Yet I also realise that it ended in disaster. This leaves the question - why didn't my recognition of the failure of the Vietnam war change me in such a way that I became the sort of person who wouldn't, if they had been alive at the time, have supported it?

And the answer? The mistake is to consider the war as a single episode rather than as part of a successful cold war policy. If you've got a moment, read my argument in full and let me know what you think.

When there are no good options left

Confused about Iraq? Well, let me help (or maybe just add to your confusion) by giving you a brief guide to what American pundits are saying.

Fareed Zakaria says in Newsweek that there is only thing that can be done:

There is one last thing to try: privately but forcefully threaten a reduction of U.S. support for the current government. Nothing else—not the promise of aid, arm-twisting by the American ambassador, phone calls from President Bush—seems to have worked. It could be an honest conversation that explains to Iraq's governing coalition that American support cannot be unconditional. Without the American military, this Iraqi government would likely fall, and many of its members' lives might be in danger. Perhaps that will focus their minds.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post thinks there are two exit strategies ("There is a path out of this mess, but we will be lying if we call it victory"). One involves creating a federal Iraq. The other is for the US to involve Tehran and Damascus in stabilising the benighted country. Ah, the mad leader of Iran, President Ahmadinejad. The always clear-sighted Amir Taheri shows in The New York Post how Jim Baker and America's Iraq screw-up look likely to strengthen the position of Iran's hardliners.

Ignatius says there are two strategies. Nope, there are three says Peter Beinart, a liberal hawk with doubts: the "do it right" strategy, the "hail Mary" plan and the plain old "withdraw our troops".

Any advances on three. No. Three will do. Here's another couple of interesting articles. Peter Bergen, the al-Qaeda expert, reminds us that that other lunatic, Osama bin Laden is still out there. His advice is this:

This does not mean simply holding course. America should abandon its pretensions that it can make Iraq a functioning democracy and halt the civil war. Instead, we should focus on a minimalist definition of our interests in Iraq, which is to prevent a militant Sunni jihadist mini-state from emerging and allowing Al Qaeda to regroup.

While withdrawing a substantial number of American troops from Iraq would probably tamp down the insurgency and should be done as soon as is possible, a significant force must remain in Iraq for many years to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq.

That can be accomplished by making the American presence less visible; withdrawing American troops to bases in central and western Iraq; and relying on contingents of Special Forces to hunt militants. To do otherwise would be to ignore the lessons of history, lessons that Al Qaeda’s leaders certainly haven’t forgotten.

Lefties will enjoy this article by Jonah Goldberg, a very noisy neocon, in The National Review: yep, he admits "I got it wrong"

I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

This is always the danger for members of the more pugilistic wing of the commentariat. You're too busy going for the jugular, to see the facts. And, by God, the facts have reasserted themselves.

Robbie Millen

Laugh off your troubles

Good news for those looking for signs of progress in Iraq: satire, apparently, is doing quite well. Here's a joke from Saad Khalifa, Iraq's Rory Bremner. The Ministry of Water and Sewage has decided to change its name to simply the Ministry of Sewage; it's given up on the water part.

Well, it might be funnier in Arabic. But it reminded of a fascinating article in Prospect about political satire in another neck of the woods in equally unpromising circumstances -- Europe under Communist totalitarianism. Here's a funny joke from the Soviet Union.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. "I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage," says the first. "I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying," says the second. "I am here because I got to work on time every day," says the third, "and they charged me with owning a western watch."

Robbie Millen

Woodward on Iraq

Almost everything written by Bob Woodward is worth reading. His latest book returns to the Bush policy on Iraq. All you need to know is that it is called State of Denial.

And excerpts are now being posted on the Washington Post website.