An open letter from Michael Moore…

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks for your address to the nation. It’s good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.

Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain’t gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We’ve already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean… bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this — BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!

You’ve got to show some courage, dude! You’ve got to win this one! C’mon, you got Saddam! You hung ‘im high! I loved watching the video of that — just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!

Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you’re in. As Ricky Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.

Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you’re out of combat-ready soldiers — so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million — Iraq — is to send in at least 28 million! Here’s how it would work:

The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.

Now, I know you’re saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:

1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where their vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don’t believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them — while they hide here in America.

2. Start a “Kill an Iraqi” Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I’m sure you’ll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.

3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war — and many of them are already trained from having been “embedded!” If that doesn’t bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel…

Take a look at this — a post from Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips’s Diary…

Wars are often characterised by mistakes in analysis and strategy. This one can be won — provided the President now understands the strategic and operational errors that have been made, and puts them right. Putting more troops into Iraq will not be enough unless the Iranian regime is taken out. Clearly, this is not a great prospect. But it is a prospect which as time goes on will become even less palatable as it becomes ever more unavoidable. The longer it is left, the more difficult it will be. We are now in a world where the only calculation to be made is between rocks and hard places. There are no good options. The only sane course of action is the least worst option.

There will be scant support for this, it goes without saying, from the British media which remains largely on a different planet. Thus Anatole Kaletsky in the Times thinks war with Iran would be

…a disaster on [sic] the Middle East, beside which the war in Iraq would be a mere sideshow… What now seems to be in preparation at the White House, with the usual unquestioning support from Downing Street, is a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Second World War. The trigger for this all-embracing war would be the formation of a previously unthinkable alliance between America, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Britain, to confront Iran and the rise of the power of Shia Islam…

The fact that the ‘Middle Eastern equivalent of the Second World War’ has already been declared and is being waged upon the west does not seem to occur to him. No, the war-crazy villains of the piece are ‘trigger-happy’ Israeli ‘hotheads’ who are ‘hell-bent’ on stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Yes, these are actually the terms he uses. Clearly, on planet Kaletsky it is those who seek to protect their country from the nuclear genocide that is being openly prepared for it — of which he makes no mention whatever — who are to be blamed for ‘trigger-happy’ aggression rather than those who are planning such a holocaust. No mention, either, of the fact that Iran has directly threatened America, has for years attacked America and in Iraq is currently waging war on America, which all might be thought to constitute a somewhat overdue reason for a response by America. But no, it’s those wretched Jews again. What moral and intellectual sickness is this?

Alas, it is the default position in British media and political circles. It is also rampant in the US, but there at least there is now an argument going on. On the outcome of that argument the course of this war — and the fate of the free world — now depends.

So now you know. Andrew Brown thinks that this is the way Dubya thinks.

Hmmm… Suppose he’s right. There is a strange, rather weary, liberal consensus (to which I subscribe) about what’s happened in Iraq, namely that the failure of the neocon project in that benighted land is so manifestly obvious that it’s inconceivable that the US Administration doesn’t now see it that way. (After all, the result of the mid-term elections suggests that the majority of American voters have come round to the view that the whole adventure has been either a mistake or a catastrophe.) In that sense, the report of the Iraq Study Group seemed to us to be just a statement of the obvious.

But it’s just possible that Bush & Co don’t see it like that at all. Maybe they see the difficulties in Iraq as a symptom of not applying enough force? Or of not applying it to the right points — e.g. Iran? Maybe they are seriously thinking of a strike against Iran?

Excuse me while I go and lie down in a darkened room.

From today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 — Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major “surge” in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said Friday.

Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.

Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive.

At present, only about 17,000 American soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible…

What’s interesting about this (apart from the echoes of Vietnam) is that it’s not so long ago that we were told that US military planning and budgeting was predicated on ensuring that the US would always be able to fight two major wars simultaneously. I was always incredulous about that — but, hell, what do I know about war-fighting. Now it seems that the mighty US war-machine is stretched beyond endurance by a raggle-taggle crowd of turbanned and balaclava’d insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There’s a terrific essay by Mark Danner in the current issue of the New York Review of Books…

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”

For anyone who hasn’t the time (or the stomach) for Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, Danner’s essay provides an excellent crib. He picks out the pivotal moment in the narrative.

Consider, for example, this striking but typical discussion in the White House in April 2003 just as the Iraq occupation, the vital first step in President Bush’s plan “to transform the Middle East,” was getting underway. American forces are in Baghdad but the capital is engulfed by a wave of looting and disorder, with General Tommy Franks’s troops standing by. The man in charge of the occupation, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner, has just arrived “in-country.” Secretary of State Colin Powell has come to the Oval Office to discuss the occupation with the President, who is joined by Condoleezza Rice, then his national security adviser. Powell began, writes Woodward, by raising “the question of unity of command” in Iraq:

There are two chains of command, Powell told the president. Garner reports to Rumsfeld and Franks reports to Rumsfeld.

The president looked surprised.

“That’s not right,” Rice said. “That’s not right.”

Powell thought Rice could at times be pretty sure of herself, but he was pretty sure he was right. “Yes, it is,” Powell insisted.

“Wait a minute,” Bush interrupted, taking Rice’s side. “That doesn’t sound right.”

Rice got up and went to her office to check. When she came back, Powell thought she looked a little sheepish. “That’s right,” she said.

What might [George] Kennan, the consummate diplomatic professional, have thought of such a discussion between president, secretary of state, and national security adviser, had he lived to read of it? He would have grasped its implications instantly, as the President and his national security adviser apparently did not. Which leads to Powell’s patient—too patient—explanation to the President:

…You have to understand that when you have two chains of command and you don’t have a common superior in the theater, it means that every little half-assed fight they have out there, if they can’t work it out, comes out to one place to be resolved. And that’s in the Pentagon. Not in the NSC or the State Department, but in the Pentagon.

The kernel of an answer to what is the most painful and intractable question about the Iraq war—how could US officials repeatedly and consistently make such ill-advised and improbably stupid decisions, beginning with their lack of planning for “the postwar”— can be found in this little chamber play in the Oval Office, and in the fact that at least two thirds of the cast seem wholly incapable of comprehending the script. In Woodward’s account, Rice, who was then the official responsible for coordinating the national security bureaucracies of the US government, found what was being said “a rather theoretical discussion,” somehow managing to miss the fact that she and the National Security Council she headed had been cut out of decision-making on the Iraq war—and cut out, further, in favor of an official, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who, if we are to believe Woodward, did not bother even to return her telephone calls….

Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the clear import of Woodward’s narrative is that people on the ground in Iraq knew that what they were being ordered to do (by Rumsfeld, who was running the show from the Pentagon) would have catastrophic consequences. The first blunder was “Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1—De-Baathification of Iraqi Society,” an order to remove immediately from their posts all “full members” of the Baath Party. These were to be banned from working in any government job. In every ministry the top three levels of managers would be investigated for crimes. The CIA chief on the ground said:

“If you put this out, you’re going to drive between 30,000 and 50,000 Baathists underground before nightfall,” Charlie said…. “You will put 50,000 people on the street, underground and mad at Americans.” And these 50,000 were the most powerful, well-connected elites from all walks of life.

The second blunder was Coalition Provisional Authority Order number 2, which required disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s bodyguard and special paramilitary organizations:

Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster. Garner had told the president and the whole National Security Council explicitly that they planned to use the Iraqi military—at least 200,000 to 300,000 troops—as the backbone of the corps to rebuild the country and provide security. And he’d been giving regular secure video reports to Rumsfeld and Washington on the plan.

Garner woke up the next day (May 17), says Woodward, reflecting that “the US now had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before—the 50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers”.

The stupidity, ignorance and incompetence of the Bush administration in relation to Iraq beggars belief.

Danner opens his essay with a quote from George Kennan, the architect of the policy of containing the Soviet Union, and a wise old bird. On September 26, 2002, sitting in a nursing home in Washington, he said: “Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.” Which in turns brings up another thought: compared with Kennan, Truman, Acheson, General George Marshall, Attlee and the other architects of the post-war world, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Blair look like one-dimensional halfwits.