So that's what that was all about? (Jerome Delay/AP)
Thomas Friedman, Iraq war booster
At the end of May 2003, America was on the verge of one of its longest-running, most expensive wars in Iraq. Yet Iraq war boosters were feeling vindicated by the swift march on Baghdad, which had fallen within weeks, and the swift collapse of the regime.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a fan of the Iraq war, appeared on Charlie Rose to crow about this rousing success on May 29 2003. The brief clip below from that interview (the full interview can be found here) is a fascinating glimpse into the id of Washington insiders like Friedman before the invasion in March of that year and for the first few months, at least, of what was to prove a long occupation.
He appears to still think it was the right choice. He wrote last June, in a column on Syria, that: "You can’t go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America" and "the only reason Iraq has any chance for a decent outcome today is because America was on the ground with tens of thousands of troops to act as that well-armed midwife, reasonably trusted and certainly feared by all sides, to manage Iraq’s transition to more consensual politics."
I don't ever remember a time in my five years in Iraq where the US was generally seen as a trusted "midwife" by a majority, or even a large minority, of people. Whether or not Iraq might have a found a better, less bloody way out from the shadow of Saddam Hussein without an invasion and occupation, is now something forever unknowable.
(I just made the below transcript from the above clip. I've omitted most "uhms" and the like, and may have made one or two errors since the audio is a bit compromised):
Rose: “Now that the war is over and there’s some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?”
Friedman: “I think it was unquestionably worth doing Charlie, and I think that looking back that I now certainly feel I understand what the war was about and it’s interesting to talk about it here in silicon valley because I think looking back at the 1990s I can identify there are actually three bubbles of the 1990s, there was the Nasdaq bubble, there was the corporate governance bubble, and lastly there was what I would call the terrorism bubble, and the first two were based on creative accounting and the last two were based on moral creative accounting. The terrorism bubble that built up over the 1990s said flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, that’s Ok. Wrapping yourself with dynamite and blowing up Israelis in the pizza parlour, that’s Ok. Because we’re weak and they’re strong and the weak have a different morality. Having your preachers say that’s Ok? That’s Ok. Having your charities raise money for people who do these kinds of things? That’s Ok. And having your press call people who do these kind of things martyrs? That’s Ok. And that build up as a bubble, Charlie. And 9/11 to me was the peak of that bubble. And what we learned on 9/11 in a gut way was that bubble was a fundamental threat to our society because there is no wall high enough no INS agent smart enough no metal detector efficient enough to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble. And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically uhm, and, uh, uhm take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said ‘we’ve got you’ this bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don’t care about life, we’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your hummers. And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad uhm, and basically saying which part of this sentence don’t you understand. You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go, well suck on this. Ok. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan, We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth. “
What's maybe most interesting about this bizarre set of views was that they were so commonplace back then. Al Qaeda has hit the United States, so we must hit back at them. Not just at Al Qaeda, or the people who might have directly assisted them, but a much bigger "them:" A whole civilization who had started to loom in the sight of people like Thomas Friedman as an existential threat to America.
Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Iraqi people had had nothing to do with 9/11. Were there people there who were delighted to see the US get a bloody nose from Osama bin Laden? Yes. The previous decade had seen a US-backed sanctions effort targeting Saddam Hussein that crippled the country. Never mind that Saddam brought that upon his people with the invasion of Kuwait. Average people were the ones who suffered the most. In 1999 UNICEF estimated that the mortality rate for children under the age of five had doubled in central and southern Iraq since sanctions were imposed, from 56 dead children per 1,000 between 1984-1989 to 131 per 1,000 between 1994-1999.
I don't begrudge them their anger, not least because they weren't doing anything to harm people here in the US. I never understood the terror that seemed to grip so many Americans after 9/11, perhaps because by that point I'd covered small wars and grasping poverty we haven't seen the likes of in the US for generations across Southeast Asia. A few years prior, I covered the independence of East Timor. The murder of Monitor stringer Sander Thoenes there was what led me to getting picked up by the paper -- and he was just one of over 100,000 excess deaths in the tiny country during Indonesia's 24-year occupation. For comparison, that was one in seven people in East Timor. One in seven Americans dying as the result of war and occupation would be 44 million people.
I had schoolmates who died in the towers, one dear friend who departed from the heights of Tower Two just minutes before it would have been too late, and who struggled with survivor's guilt about the colleagues who stayed at their desks, for years after (most reckoned the plane that had crashed into the first tower was an accident, not a terrorist attack). It effected me, as it effected almost all Americans.
But it didn't seem that hard to keep some perspective. And having lived in Muslim majority Indonesia since 1993 and spending the years after 9/11 covering Al Qaeda and aligned militant groups in the region, I'd learned enough to know that a war that could be painted as against Muslims in general would suit Al Qaeda right down to the ground - such a reaction is what they wanted, since they reckoned that would yield them a bonanza of new recruits.
Mr. Friedman has gone from strength to strength in the years since, with handsome speakers fees for him to explain his theories about how the world is changing and evolving. But that brief clip above shows a man whose analysis is easily swayed by emotion, by sentiment.
"What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying which part of this sentence don’t you understand. You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go, well suck on this" is not the sort of comment that comes from dispassionate, reasoned analysis. It comes from fear.
We learned in a "gut way (that) bubble was a fundamental threat to our society?" That's not really learning. As horrible as that attack on us was, there was no fundamental threat to our society. We have done a good job in the years since increasing security (to the point that, in some views, we have actually threatened our own open society ourselves) and preventing any further major attacks on our soil. Did the invasion of Iraq and taking out "a very big stick" accomplish that? No.
Finally, even the notion of a "terrorism bubble" in the 1990s was a bit of a myth. The decade that the 9/11 attacks began so horrifically was among the safest ones when terrorism in the skies is considered ever (since supplanted by the last decade). There were 469 fatalities for passengers, crews and passengers for commercial fliers in the 2000s, 256 of those on 9/11. In the 1990s, there were just under 400 fatalities. In the 1980s, there were about 1,400 and in the 1970s, there were just over 800 killed. When total number of commercial flights are included to make apples to apples comparisons, the most dangerous decade was the 1930s, with 616 fatalities per billion passenger flights. The 2000s had 22 per billion flights taken.
If there has been a "terrorism" bubble it appeared to have burst around 1991, judging by this graph at the Global Terrorism Database maintained at the University of Maryland with funding from the Department of Homeland Security. Terrorism, though, surged again after 2003, largely with a rise in terrorist incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq associated with the wars being fought in those lands.
At this time of looking back, let's try to remember the track records and quality of argument presented by people whose views and advice are sought before the wars of our future.
Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 2: weapons of mass destruction
I covered the Iraq war from the summer of 2003 until 2008, and saw at first hand the consequences of the decision to invade. Skeptical of the wisdom of the war before the invasion, living and working in Iraq solidified that into certainty. I'll be putting out some of my thoughts on the war in a series of posts in the next few days.
The biggest “argument” made for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had sundry chemical weapons programs: He had roving chemical weapons labs on wheels, he had weaponized anthrax, he had tons of sarin nerve gas that he was itching to offload to a multinational terrorist group, he’d even somehow managed to clandestinely revive his nuclear program.
“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice solemnly warned America.
As it turned out, none of this was true. Relentless economic sanctions since the Gulf War had crippled Iraq’s economy and driven basic measures of national wellbeing, like childhood mortality and lifespan, through the floor. Saddam had given up all of his chemical weapons stockpiles, abandoned efforts at biological weapons, and had no ongoing nuclear work of any kind. Today these are indisputable facts.
RECOMMENDED: Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 1: Saddam was 'evil'
But setting aside how Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, eager to draw the US into a war for their own purposes, were allowed to spin a web of hearsay, rumors, and fabrications into an argument for war with the help of the Bush administration, let’s assume for a minute they were right. Would that have then been a justification for the invasion?
Probably not. Saddam Hussein had certainly possessed chemical weapons in the past, and had even used them – on the Kurds at Halabja in 1989 and during his brutal war with Iran at various points, including mustard gas on the battlefield in 1984, during a period of détente between Washington and Baghdad.
That didn’t trouble the US much in those days. Despite strong evidence of the Iraqi Army's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians in 1984, the US nevertheless went ahead with full normalization of relations that year.
Why? Because US officials were worried that Saddam might lose his war with the Islamic Republic.
Relations with him soured after his invasion of Kuwait in 1989, and the US became much more interested in human rights violations by his Baath regime after that point. The horrors of Halabja were frequently referred to, but if in 1991 or 1992 Halabja wasn’t an argument for regime change, why would it become one a decade later?
The answer is that it shouldn’t have. There was no reason to suspect Hussein would arm Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that hated his regime almost as much as it hates the US, with chemical weapons, thus losing control of when, if, and against whom they’d be used. So far in human history, no government has done that. And he knew that such an action would almost certainly precipitate the US-led invasion that he’d long feared.
What about the “mushroom cloud?” Again, there was no evidence of an ongoing nuclear program (because there was no ongoing nuclear program) but if there had been, does that require regime change? Not as the first order of business (witness how Iran is being handled, which has an actual and sophisticated nuclear program and has for many decades).
And certainly not because Al Qaeda, a group with no ties to or direction from the Iraqi regime, had managed to take over a few airplanes with boxcutters and fly them into buildings in the US.
Read the first installment of this series, "Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 1: Saddam was 'evil'," here.
On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, former and current Monitor journalists who covered the war are looking at where the Iraq stands today and how things stood at the peak of the war.
* Ten years after invasion, Iraq remains dangerously divided – In the new Iraq, old sectarian fears remain. Around Baghdad's Green Zone, concrete walls pulled down a year ago are going back up.
* The day the conflict changed – Ten years after the Iraq invasion, reporter Scott Peterson recalls the day a suicide attack threw him out of bed in a formerly quiet Baghdad neighborhood – and blew a hole in any sense that the war was keeping its distance.
* On the road to Baghdad for 17 days – Andy Nelson, who photographed the US invasion of Iraq, recalls the pulling down of Saddam's statue – and early signs of chaos.
* The Iraq war: a timeline – A photo collection depicting the main events of the conflict.
RECOMMENDED: Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 1: Saddam was 'evil'
Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 1: Saddam was 'evil'
(I covered the Iraq war from the summer of 2003 until 2008, and saw first hand the consequences of the decision to invade. Skeptical of the wisdom of the war before the invasion, living and working in Iraq solidified that into certainty. I'll be putting out some of my thoughts on the war into a series of posts in the next few days.)
Ahead of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, as the Bush administration was creating trumped-up evidence of weapons of mass destruction (remember Colin Powell’s prop-assisted performance at the UN in 2002?) and peddling it to the American public, President George W. Bush took to describing Saddam Hussein and his regime as “evil."
His subordinates followed suit:
“This is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us,” Condoleeza Rice, then Bush’s national security advisor, said in August 2002. She argued that Iraq had to be invaded because “there is a very powerful moral case for regime change.”
In his memoir, then-Vice President Dick Cheney recalls how the 9/11 attacks transformed Bush’s belief that intervention wasn’t such a hot idea into an almost Manichean – good versus evil – approach to foreign policy.
"We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Mr. Cheney wrote. “We are dealing here with evil people.”
Unfortunately, when fighting "evil" is your reason for going to war, it almost always ends in tears, because the emotional appeal is being used to avoid making arguments from national interest, and also leads to fuzzy and subjective goals, rather than concrete ones.
There were many things I’d be willing to call “evil” about Iraq under Saddam: Rampant use of torture, summary execution, the punishment of whole families for the actions of sons and fathers among them.
Yet Iraq today?
There is still rampant torture, summary executions, and collective punishment.
And during the US occupation?
Rampant use of torture, summary executions, and collective punishment.
Is the situation better than before? Probably, for now. But how many “evil units” have been shaved off the Iraqi “evil” index?
There is no way to judge that. And if we can’t, how can we determine how much evil has to be removed to make the war – which claimed the lives of 165,000 Iraqis and nearly 5,000 Americans and robbed tens of thousands on both sides of limbs, health, and, in some cases sanity – worth it?
Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs were a pretty poor excuse to go to war, but so was the "evil" argument. We didn't care when he used nerve gas on the battlefield against Iran or against Iraq's own Kurdish population in the north in the 1980s.
When a politician starts talking about wars against “evil,” you should you start running for the hills. He’s either a true believer or he’s making an emotional appeal because he knows he can’t make a convincing national interest argument – the key component to any reasonable case for war. Either way, it’s primrose path time.
On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, former and current Monitor journalists who covered the war are looking at where the Iraq stands today and how things stood at the peak of the war.
* Ten years after invasion, Iraq remains dangerously divided – In the new Iraq, old sectarian fears remain. Around Baghdad's Green Zone, concrete walls pulled down a year ago are going back up.
* The day the conflict changed – Ten years after the Iraq invasion, reporter Scott Peterson recalls the day a suicide attack threw him out of bed in a formerly quiet Baghdad neighborhood – and blew a hole in any sense that the war was keeping its distance.
* On the road to Baghdad for 17 days – Andy Nelson, who photographed the US invasion of Iraq, recalls the pulling down of Saddam's statue – and early signs of chaos.
* The Iraq war: a timeline – A photo collection depicting the main events of the conflict.
The flag that flew over Iraq between 1958 and the bloody takeover by the Baath in 1963
Lessons from Iraq... in 1958.
The Atlantic recently re-posted a piece they'd commissioned from William R. Polk in 1958 and I stumbled across it when I was looking for some of Mr. Polk's more recent work this morning.
Mr. Polk's essay was published five months after the July 1958 coup that ended the pro-Western monarchy that the British had installed in Iraq in 1921 and came at a time of enormous regional upheaval, when forms of government were being upended, new ideologies were burbling throughout the Arab cultural and social sphere, and the US and its closest allies were desperately scrambling for a new regional modus videndi. The essay is simply titled "The Lesson of Iraq" and I'm putting it straight into my "the more things change..." file.
Here's the first paragraph: "Crash programs seldom result in a sound policy. Too often our State Department has waited until the United States was involved in a new crisis before it began to improvise a pact, a doctrine, or a show of force; too often we have reacted in the heat of emergency, under circumstances not of our own choosing."
There's a lot of wisdom in those words alone as regards US behavior in the years since 9/11, certainly for our nearly decade of war in Iraq, which removed the secular-nationalist Baath Party (that rose to power with a coup of its own in 1963), and for America's fumbling for new policies in a region that is once again being turned on its head. In the 1950s, US-friendly monarchs were overthrown in Iraq and Egypt and replaced by officers angry at what they considered the humiliation of being Western client states and seeking to upend what they saw as corrupt domestic orders. Across the region, publics were inflamed with the pan-Arabism preached by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Today, political Islam has come to the fore in Egypt. In Iraq, a Shiite-Islamist dominated government resulted from the US war to remove Saddam Hussein. In Syria a bloody, sectarian war is raging with the US uncertain of what to do, seeking influence with a rebellion, many of whose members have as little love for America as Abdel Karim Kassem did for the US in 1958.
Also interesting is his comments on the lack of a US plan b in Iraq in the 1950s, which reminds me very much of our long-standing relationship with Mubarak's Egypt. Iraq then was awash in secret police and informants, a place where all peaceful avenues for channeling political dissent were shut down, leaving a chaotic uprising the only real avenue for change. Nuri as-Said was the political power behind the Iraqi throne, a seven-term prime minister who Polk called the "keystone of the Iraqi arch of power." But he was also aging, in ill-health, and in a country with growing aspirations and frustrations brought on by rising levels of education and industrialization thanks to oil wealth, he wouldn't have hung on for long, coup or no coup.
Yet "in case of his retirement, which Washington should have foreseen, upon whom or what were we planning to rely? Nuri built no party organization and had no follower of sufficient ability to succeed in command. The hatred directed toward his government, which was held in check by the fear he inspired, could not be controlled by any of his associates or followers."
While it is far from a perfect analogy, the US also had no plan b for Egypt after Hosni Mubarak, the reliable dictator who was aging, in ill-health, had closed off all avenues for peaceful political dissent, and was trying to find a way to pass power to his unpopular son that most observers predicted would end in disaster.
The Egyptian uprising of Jan. 2011 couldn't have been timed or predicted. But that a change was coming was clear for years. I covered Egypt intensely from 2003-2008 and have made frequent visits since. The US constantly urged Mubarak to "reform" in public, but in private the flow military and economic aid was assured, and when the change came, which has brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power (at least for now) US policy makers were ill-prepared.
The piece covers a lot of ground -- from the Arab-Israeli conflict, the stability of Jordan and the oil monarchies of the Gulf, and the definition of US interests. A lot of the context has changed, but much of this essay still rings true. He concludes with a call to US policy-makers, reminding his readers that, in the end, most people in the region want to prosper, the oil states want to sell their oil, and no one wants ruinous wars if they can avoid it.
"Let us not forget that our essential policy interests are identical with those of the Arabs," he writes.
Supporters of Egypt's military shout anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans and wave national flags during a protest in front of the Unknown Soldier memorial, in Cairo, Friday. Hundreds of pro-military supporters gathered to reject the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi's rule calling for the military to return to power. (Amr Nabil/AP/File)
The UN document on women that has terrified Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
Yesterday Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement warning of apocalyptic consequences if a proposed document addressing violence against women is adopted by the UN.
While the core of the group's objections derives from their interpretation of Islamic law, their complaints revealed what many in Egypt feel is a regressive long-term plan for women in Egyptian society. The Brothers, who propelled President Mohamed Morsi to power, warned that the UN is seeking to place the right to decide when to work or where to travel in the hands of women, rather than their husbands; that a married man who rapes his wife would face the same legal risks as if a stranger had raped the woman; or that a woman who had a son out of wedlock could make the same demands on the father as if she were married to him.
While no UN document would have any effect whatsoever on Egyptian society unless Egypt agreed with it, I was curious as to why the Muslim Brotherhood was so riled up. A proposal to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, part of the UN Women organization created in 2010, was presented in early March and has been the subject of negotiation since (so the draft I've found, grandly titled, "The elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls," may be substantially different now).
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It contains a lot of vague, aspirational language. For instance, the proposal calls on UN member states to "promote and protect the human rights of all women and girls, including their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality free of coercion, discrimination and violence, their right to the highest standard of health, including sexual and reproductive health, and their reproductive rights." And it also wants governments to "accelerate efforts to eliminate discrimination against women and girls and ensure women’s equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to education, health, social security, land, property, inheritance, employment, participation and decision-making in all spheres of life."
Founded in 2010 by a vote of the General Assembly, UN Women's task is to promote "gender equality and the empowerment of women." The first is something the Brotherhood is openly hostile too -- they reject the notion that men and women should be strictly equal. And they don't seem so hot on the "empowerment of women" since they have strongly patriarchal views that require wives to be subservient to husbands.
A lot of the UN ideas do directly conflict with the Muslim Brothers' religious views. Calling for women to have "equal enjoyment" of rights regarding property and inheritance, for instance, conflicts with the Brothers' interpretation of Islamic law, which requires women to inherit less than men. And the Brothers strongly believe that women should not be free to make decisions without interference from their adult male relatives or husbands.To be fair, the drafters of the UN document are trying to universalize their own cultural beliefs, what the Brothers termed an attempted "intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries."
But s the UN going to have any impact on the Brothers plans for Egyptian society (or an effect on places where the rights of women are far more restricted, like Saudi Arabia)? No. But the strength of the Brothers' reaction is a reminder that just because a country has free elections, or is trying to build a more democratic system, its leaders won't necessarily be interested in liberal values more broadly understood.
This is a latest salvo in a long-running culture war, one that Egypt's new leaders seem eager to enter. And they have friends. According to Reuters, Egypt has been joined by Russia, Iran and the Vatican in making strenuous objections to the proposal, finding common cause against the draft's call for better treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and access to abortion.
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Syrian rebels attend a training session in Maaret Ikhwan, near Idlib, Syria, Dec. 2012. (Muhammed Muheisen/AP/File)
From every direction, arms for Syria
The United Nations said today that more than 5 million Syrians – about 20 percent of its population – have been left reliant on aid handouts by the ferocious civil war that has raged there for two years now.
A glance at today's headlines gives good reason to expect the number of Syrians driven from their homes to bulge – they highlight the prospect of more arms flowing into a conflict that has already claimed 70,000 lives and driven more than 1 million refugees into neighboring countries.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are already arming the rebellion, and Iran and its partner Hezbollah in Lebanon have been sending arms and men to fight alongside President Bashar al-Assad's troops. Now Britain and France want to open the door to direct arming of the rebels themselves. Yesterday, the two countries said they want to lift immediately a European Union embargo on arming the rebels, set to expire on May 31.
"We have to go very fast," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said, indicating France may act even if it doesn't get an EU green light. "We are a sovereign nation," he emphasized.
The UK doesn't appear to be quite as gung-ho as France, but still seems to be inching close to much stronger intervention in Syria's war. "We have no plans at the moment to do anything different," Foreign Secretary William Hague said in London today.
But he also didn't fully distance himself from the French position, adding, "I have said of course that that policy may need to change again in the future if the situation continues to get worse, more people dying, more people fleeing, but we have no plans at the moment, the British government has no plans to send lethal arms, lethal equipment to Syria."
The one constant of this war has been more people dying and more people fleeing, so Mr. Hague appears to be laying the public ground for a shift. The UN refugee agency said registered Syrians who had fled their country surged to 121,000 last week, 10 percent of the running total of 1 million refugees generated in the past two years. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called the increases a "staggering escalation." He said the daily flow of refugees more than doubled from December to February – from 3,000 a day to 8,000.
This is tragic, but hardly surprising. December is when it first became clear that the rebels had tapped into a new arms supply, since confirmed to be supplied by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, mostly via Jordan. As a result, rebels have made gains in a number areas, but has also intensified fighting that has reduced whole blocks of cities like Homs and Aleppo to rubble. The Syrian government has responded with an even greater willingness to target civilian residential neighborhoods with stand off weapons like mortars, rockets and cluster bombs.
Amnesty International wrote yesterday:
Research carried out inside Syria in the last fortnight confirms that government forces continue to bomb civilians indiscriminately, often with internationally banned weapons, flattening entire neighborhoods. Detainees held by these forces are routinely subjected to torture, enforced disappearances or extra-judicial executions
“While the vast majority of war crimes and other gross violations continue to be committed by government forces, our research also points to an escalation in abuses by armed opposition groups,” said Ann Harrison, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. “If left unaddressed such practices risk becoming more and more entrenched - it is imperative that all those concerned know they will be held accountable for their actions.”
So, will even more arms for the rebels make a difference? While US Secretary of State John Kerry said on a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this month that the US hopes arms flows to the rebels will force Assad to the negotiating table, so far they have only bolstered the resolve of the rebellion while doing nothing to take away from the commitment of Assad's troops, many of whom belong to his minority Alawite sect and view victory in this war as a question of survival.
The sectarian dimension, both locally and internationally, looms ever larger. Syria is already in many ways a hot proxy war in Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia's long tussle for regional power and influence. Iraq, which has a Shiite-led government but an angry Sunni minority, is providing aid to both Assad via official channels and to the rebels via Sunni militants who see victory for Syria's rebellion as a potential gamechanger for their own prospects inside Iraq.
With all this activity comes the possibility of blowback for international actors. Secretary Kerry has said the US is convinced that current arms flows are going only to nationalist groups, rather than to the jihadi-inspired organizations like Jabhat al-Nusra, which have been at the forefront of some of Syria's bloodiest recent rebels, but the historic track record of making sure only the "good guys" end up with the weapons is not very promising.
Consider the US and Saudi effort to arm the mujahideen who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. While the US tried to avoid arming what it viewed as the most extreme and anti-American groups fighting the Soviets, the Saudis had far fewer qualms about this. In any event, following the Soviet withdrawal, the weapons that ended up in the hands of what became the Taliban enabled them to win their own civil war, at an enormous cost that country is still counting today.
Syria is not Afghanistan. A different place, a different culture, a different time. But there are at least superficial similarities. The Global Post reported on Wednesday that "hundreds of young Saudis are secretly making their way into Syria to join extremist groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad... over a dozen sources have confirmed that wealthy Saudis, as well as the government, are arming some Syrian rebel groups. Saudi and Syrian sources confirm that hundreds of Saudis are joining the rebels, but the government denies any sponsoring role."
Sound familiar? It should. Saudi fighters flowed to the Afghan jihad too, and were the vanguard of what became Al Qaeda. Back then, the House of Saud didn't consider the dangers of blowback. They may be making the same mistake again.
Meanwhile, US involvement continues apace, and is making for strange bedfellows. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story this week about the CIA stepping up training and equipping efforts for Iraqi anti-terrorism units that answer directly to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
"The stepped-up mission expands a covert US presence on the edges of the two-year-old Syrian conflict, at a time of American concerns about the growing power of extremists in the Syrian rebellion," WSJ wrote. "Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist network's affiliate in the country, has close ties to Syria-based Jabhat al Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, an opposition militant group that has attacked government installations and controls territory in northern Syria. The State Department placed Al Nusra on its list of foreign terror organizations in December, calling the group an alias for Al Qaeda in Iraq."
The concerns are obvious. But units that answer directly to Mr. Maliki have frequently been accused of torture and execution, with their efforts largely targeted at Iraq's Sunni Arabs. And Iraq's goal in this is to stem the flow of support and fighters to Syria's rebellion – a rebellion the US says it would like to see succeed, even as Iraq helps Iran arm Bashar al-Assad.
This all seems likely to grow more, not less, complex. While the outcome remains difficult to predict, the near-term future seems to promise more suffering for Syria's people.
Members of the Iraqi Army gather near the site of a bomb attack at Alawi district in Baghdad, where co-ordinated blasts killed at least 21 people Thursday. (Saad Shalash/Reuters)
Iraq attack shows coordination, planning, and numbers
The clocks are ticking down to the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Forums and roundtables are convening to look back at all the spending and the death and trying to put a bow around what it means and what we've learned from the fiasco.
Back in Iraq of course, the war never really ended, as a highly sophisticated series of attacks that claimed over 25 lives in downtown Baghdad today demonstrated.
Though Iraq is much more peaceful than it was during the height of its sectarian civil war from 2003 to 2009, which claimed more than 165,000 lives, it remains one of the world's most dangerous places. In 2011 it suffered more terrorist attacks and deaths from terrorist attacks than any other country but Afghanistan.
When the numbers are counted for 2012, it is unlikely that Iraq's rankings will have improved much. All indications going back into early 2012 have been of rising sectarian violence, and more effective use of terror tactics by Sunni militants.
Thursday's events in Baghdad, a complex, well-coordinated attack on the government in the heart of the capital, are in some ways a culmination of that rising trend. The Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has sidelined Sunni political rivals, when it hasn’t pursued politically-motivated terrorism investigations against them.
In Sunni majority areas like Anbar Province, running west from Baghdad along the Euphrates, the grievances that have simmered since the US departure from Iraq have come close to boiling again.
What that means is not only more recruits for Sunni militant groups, but also a greater willingness of Sunnis not directly involved to look the other way when they stumble across a neighbor preparing a suicide car bomb in his garage.
That Iraqi unity and “reconciliation” that the US troop surge was supposed to set the stage for in the country? That never happened.
Helped by the sectarian war across the border in Syria, Jihadi groups like the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), which has links to Al Qaeda, have been on the upswing recently. There has been no claim of responsibility for today’s attacks, but it would make sense for the ISI to have carried it out.
They’re certainly capable; earlier this month the ISI killed 46 Syrian government troops, taking a breather from fighting the largely Sunni uprising at home in Iraq. Iraq’s Sunni militants and Syria’s have many causes and goals in common, while Maliki is viewed as aligned with Bashar al-Assad’s Shiite patron, Iran. A victory for the rebels in Syria could prove a major boost for militants in Iraq.
They’re already doing alright. At about 1 p.m. Baghdad time Thursday, a suicide bomber detonated himself in the lobby of the Justice Ministry, which is huddled behind layers of security checkpoints and fencing, killing bystanders, and setting off panic. Three comrades of his, armed with rifles, then stormed the building and exchanged fire with police before being killed themselves. Then, another car bomb targeted this area.
At roughly the same time in another part of town, a suicide car bomber targeted an Interior Ministry facility.
These are exactly the type of tactics that became so common during the height of America’s involvement in the war, and the perpetrators are likely to be the same kind of people that US spokesmen were so found of calling “dead-enders.” These attacks require planning, operational security, and coordination.
Iraq’s Sunnis have gotten the short end of the stick from Maliki, who is theoretically the head of a "power-sharing" government designed to address sectarian grievances, but in practice has been running the country by fiat since the US departure from Iraq at the end of 2011. A growing protest movement among the Sunni population, particularly in Anbar, where the fiercest engagements of the US war in Iraq were fought, has been volatile. In January, government troops killed five protesters in Fallujah, the town that US infantry and Marines tried to “pacify,” twice.
If Maliki isn’t careful, the war that never really ended could get a lot worse.
Egyptian women wave a flag showing pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut and anti-Muslim Brotherhood banners during a demonstration in Cairo, Friday, marking International Women's Day. (Amr Nabil/AP)
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood says UN proposal on women will destroy the world
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the power behind President Mohamed Morsi, usually makes its more incendiary statements in Arabic only. But such was the movement's horror at a United Nations proposal to reduce violence against women that it issued a statement in English today complaining that "the complete disintegration of society" would result if the UN adopts a set of recommendations from its Commission on the Status of Women.
While I haven't read the document in question, judging from the Brothers' response, the UN thinks it would be useful to raise the age of marriage, decriminalize homosexuality, make contraceptives more readily available, and give unmarried mothers the same rights as married ones. The Brothers are not pleased:
"The document includes articles that contradict established principles of Islam, undermine Islamic ethics and destroy the family, the basic building block of society, according to the Egyptian Constitution," the movement wrote. "This declaration, if ratified, would lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies."
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A concern about cultural colonization is what spurred the foundation of the Muslim Brothers 80 years ago. Leading early Brotherhood member and influential thinker Sayyid Qutb (an earlier version of this article incorrectly called him a "founding member"), executed by the Nasser regime in the 1960s for his activism, spent time in the late 1940s in the US and was horrified by what he considered the country's loose morals and materialism. A desire to preserve Egypt and Islam from what its leaders view as an external, hostile onslaught remains at the forefront of their agenda today.
They are terrified that the modern world is dragging Egyptians back to jahalliya, the age of ignorance before the coming of Islam, and made that clear in their complaint today. "These are destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution," they complained of the UN proposal. "They would subvert the entire society, and drag it to pre-Islamic ignorance."
It's hardly a surprise that the Muslim Brotherhood is opposed to equal rights for women in society. But the vehemence of today's statement, directed at a UN committee document that will have no binding authority over any member state, let alone Egypt, is striking. At least there's admirable clarity from the Brothers on where they stand. Some of their complaints are on specifically religious grounds, some related more to cultural attitudes toward women that require them to be subservient to men.
Below is their list of what "decadence awaits our world" if the UN passes this violence against women document:
1. Granting girls full sexual freedom, as well as the freedom to decide their own gender and the gender of their partners (ie, choose to have normal or homo- sexual relationships), while raising the age of marriage.
2. Providing contraceptives for adolescent girls and training them to use those, while legalizing abortion to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, in the name of sexual and reproductive rights.
3. Granting equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships.
4. Granting equal rights to homosexuals, and providing protection and respect for prostitutes.
5. Giving wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands accusing them of rape or sexual harassment, obliging competent authorities to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger.
6. Equal inheritance (between men and women).
7. Replacing guardianship with partnership, and full sharing of roles within the family between men and women such as: spending, child care and home chores.
8. Full equality in marriage legislation such as: allowing Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, and abolition of polygamy, dowry, men taking charge of family spending, etc.
9. Removing the authority of divorce from husbands and placing it in the hands of judges, and sharing all property after divorce.
10. Cancelling the need for a husband’s consent in matters like: travel, work, or use of contraception.
It's also worth remembering that Egypt is gripped in a financial and political crisis, yet the Brother's would prefer to fight quixotic battles against foreign "subversive immorality."
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Smoke rises after what the photographer said were missiles fired by a Syrian Air Force fighter jet loyal to President Bashar al-Assad at the Syrian town of Yaarabiya, near the main Syria-Iraq border March 2. (Khalid al-Mousuly/Reuters)
Terrorism and freedom fighting along the Syria-Iraq border
War is hell, right? Soldiers do whatever they can to win and survive. Officers do whatever they can to shape engagements so that superior numbers and firepower are rained down on an outnumbered enemy. Boobytraps, killing the other guy while he sleeps in his bed, and dropping artillery on his head from a safe distance are all part of a day’s work.
So why did US State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland label the killing of 46 Syrian troops in Iraq last week an act of “terrorism” on Monday?
Aside from the fact that the word “terrorism” has been tortured beyond all semblance of its conventional meaning in the past decade, it’s a comment – deliberate or not – that illuminates the strange, dangerous, and contradictory waters the US is wading into in Syria.
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The US has recently announced more support for Syria’s rebels and has tacitly approved an arms pipeline paid for by Saudi Arabia and running through Jordan to militias fighting to take down Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Syria has been under US sanctions for decades and President George W. Bush's most hawkish advisers, like Dick Cheney, were eager to invade Syria on the heels of Iraq in 2003.
So the killing of Syrian soldiers by rebels is good, right? Well, not exactly. Depending on who does the killing it can be labelled as terrorism or the actions of a people striving to be free.
Where the weapons are
In this case the killing was done by the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), an Al Qaeda affiliated group that's been helping its Syrian comrades across the border. Among their friends are Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the most effective rebel military units, which was recently added to the US terrorist list. The militia is largely composed of jihadis, ideologically akin to Al Qaeda, and the US has been worried that the arms and prestige they’re accruing in the fight against Assad will be turned on American interests later.
The large number of Sunni Islamists in the fight in Syria, many of whom have traveled from around the region to fight Assad and his heretical (in their eyes) Alawite faith, much as jihadis flocked to fight the Americans in Iraq, or the Russians in Afghanistan, frighten the US.
US officials say the arms flowing into Syria have bypassed Nusra and other jihadi groups, but in most conflicts like this, weapons flow to the best fighters, and Nusra like to lead from the front. Civilian leaders of the uprising have been exasperated with the US position, complaining that the US is more interested in measuring the length of rebels' beards than in seeing them defeat Assad.
Not surprisingly, reporters on the ground say they’ve started to see the weapons Saudi Arabia is buying from Croatia to arm the “good” rebels in jihadi hands.
The US has spent months trying to find a way to support the anti-Assad side of the Syrian civil war in a way that will limit sectarian killings and other atrocities, and steer pro-American forces into the best position to take over the country if and when the current regime collapses.
Has it found a good way to do this? No. It’s a nearly impossible task, particularly now that the war has dragged on for more than two years with nearly 70,000 dead and one in 20 Syrians displaced from their homes. It’s hard to imagine a decisive victory – for either the rebels, mostly members of Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, or for the regime, which relies heavily on the Alawite minority Assad belongs to – that doesn’t lead to large numbers of sectarian reprisal killings.
Which brings us back to events in Iraq, a country that's no stranger to sectarian violence.
According to Ms. Nuland, the Syrian soldiers killed last week had been wounded on the battlefield and taken to Iraq for medical care. As they were being transported back to the fight, they were ambushed by the ISI. "They were attacked with terrorist tactics," she said, calling the soldiers "noncombatants." In fact, killing enemy soldiers returning to the battlefield is something the US, like most militaries, has done in all of its conflicts.
Iraq support for Assad
So what's going on?
Notice that Iraq is providing at least passive assistance to Assad's military. It has good reason to, notwithstanding that puts it at odds with US policy. The Shiite-dominated Iraq the US helped create is hated by both homegrown jihadis and their friends across the border. A defeat for Assad would lead to a Sunni-dominated neighbor, certain to be more hostile to Iraq's interests and potentially a supporter of a reignited Sunni insurgency.
Syria was a popular safe haven and transit point for insurgents during the height of the Iraq war (while Assad had reason to fear jihadis himself, given that the US had repeatedly threatened an invasion, allowing them to tie up US forces in another country made sense) and could easily become one again under a Sunni regime.
So it's the US position that looks strange. It spent billions of dollars and the lives of nearly 4,500 soldiers in Iraq, fighting to put down a Sunni insurgency that was described as a grave threat to American interests. Today, the US government policy is assisting a Sunni insurgency in Syria that is not only similar in character to the one put down in Iraq, but has surviving Iraqi veterans of the war serving in it. The ISI’s core strength is in Anbar Province (these folks fought ferocious pitched battles against the US in Fallujah in 2004 and 2005), and its members have strong family and tribal ties along the Euphrates river into Syria.
The US knows this, and is trying to find a way to reassure countries like Iraq that Sunni Islamists will not dominate Syria if Assad is defeated. After all, Iraq may be helping Assad a little bit, but it could do a lot more if its alarm levels rise. In essence, the US is pursuing a policy that's harmful to Iraqi interests, can potentially empower people that are hostile to both Iraqi and US interests, and is trying to use language to smooth all this over.
Which led Nuland into a very odd, strained statement. She appeared to define terrorism as killing anyone not in the middle of an all-out battle. "We’ve been pretty clear about calling out attacks against folks who are not in the middle of a firefight all the way through this from both sides," she said. By this definition, every drone assassination carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations has been terrorism, as have the frequent tactics of bombing or ambushing insurgents at home, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's an absurd definition of terrorism. Usually governments say absurd things when the policy being discussed is filled with contradictions.
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Afghan street children leave Afghanistan's Children- A New Approach (ASCHIANA) center after finishing their school hours in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. The impending withdrawal of US and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. (Musadeq Sadeq/AP)
With aid to Afghanistan, past performance is a predictor of future returns
In Afghanistan, it's not so much that the US is failing to learn from history. It's that it also seems to be failing to learn from the present.
During the past decade of war there, billions of dollars of US spending have been stolen, squandered, or have simply disappeared into well-intentioned projects that were inappropriate for Afghan needs.
So what is the US up to now? Planning more spending, even after US troops depart at the end of next year when it will have even less ability to monitor and account for spending than it does now.
This year the US is planning to spend $10 billion on Afghan "reconstruction" alone. While US plans for the country may begin to get some attention given the fight in Washington over slashing spending, raising taxes, or doing both, US plans for Afghanistan seem to be on auto-pilot. And some, frankly, seem utopian given its experiences there.
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Take USAID's announced plan to spend some $300 million on Afghan women's rights over the next five years (which has been in the works for more than a year, with for-profit companies scrambling for the spoils). Considering past problems, the prospect that all this money will be spent wisely, or spent at all, is very low, with US and other foreign troops scheduled to leave the country by the end of 2014. At that point, traveling the country at the behest of the US telling Afghans they need to change their culture will become even more dangerous than it is today.
But even if every nickel was spent as the US government intended, it's still a bad idea. And it reveals the fact that the US, after a decade of war there, still doesn't seem to understand Afghanistan, either in terms of culture or its basic needs.
The cart before the horse
After US forces drove the Taliban from power in 2002, Afghanistan remained a land where warlords wield power in their home districts, where the principal business of government officials is the collecting of rents and the direction of patronage to friends and family members, and where the massive US military presence is nothing so much as an ore-body to be mined, relentlessly, until it's tapped out.
In the absence of law and order, quality health care, and economic opportunity (Afghanistan's GDP is largely driven by aid spending and the opium trade), $300 million on women's rights in isolation seems like a folly. If you can't enforce basic order, or find a way to finance the government beyond foreign handouts, or make major inroads into high maternal and childhood mortality rates (US claims healthcare successes there to the contrary), how are hundreds of millions of dollars going to make any difference?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Afghanistan's women "we will not abandon you." Well, members of Congress are probably not going to start tabling bills to allow Afghan women to emigrate to the US to escape harsh conditions in their home country. And when it becomes too dangerous for young, well-meaning foreigners to travel across Afghanistan explaining to local folk how they're leading their lives in the wrong fashion, what then?
Read this sentence from the USAID proposal and see if you can count the management-speak buzzwords: "WLD will enable women to develop urgently needed leadership competencies that will create a prominent group of female role models and change agents in all sectors who will serve as models for girls and younger women.”
"WLD" stands for "Women's Leadership Development," a $20 million chunk of the USAID plan, and it is highly unlikely it will "enable" much beyond the careers of a few aid workers.
Huge hurdles
Positive role models are nice and all, but the problem for women and girls in Afghanistan isn’t that they’re unaware that women can have successful careers. It's that sometimes they get killed by their male family members for participating in programs like this, or are targeted by groups like the Taliban. In Afghanistan's Laghman Province, the local director of women's affairs, Naija Sediqi, was assassinated last December. She had been on the job for five months, following the assassination of her female predecessor Hanifa Safi.
The USAID document soliciting bids for this large women's rights project acknowledges it isn't just the Taliban that are hostile to their overall goals, noting that a clerical code of conduct for women endorsed by the government "condones wife beating under certain circumstances and aims to restrict women's mobility, causing many Afghan women to fear that transition will herald a reversal of their decade-long struggle for safety and rights." Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year defended his endorsement of the code, saying "it is the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans."
USAID's document makes clear that a primary goal of this effort is fundamental social and cultural change: "Achieving a critical mass of women in leadership roles in government, civil society and the economy will make the phenomenon of women seeking and acquiring such roles less unusual, less inappropriate and viewed as a more “new normal” pattern of behavior. When applied to women, the critical mass theory is quite specific about how the advantages of women’s leadership contributions accrue to and thus become apparent to and accepted by family, community, company, and country."
Are women treated appallingly in Afghan society? Clearly. But is USAID up to the task of rendering cultural change in a place that bristles at interference from foreigners?
Even in less contentious areas, aid spending in Afghanistan has a spotty track record, at best.
The Monitor's Ben Arnoldy reported in 2010 on the mismanagement of USAID in Afghanistan, a litany of failed promises: A claim that electricity had tripled for two communities that saw almost no increase in power at all; a road paved for $2.5 million that disintegrated back into a dirt track within three months; huge sums of aid money directed to the protection of engineers and other workers, a necessary response to insurgency, but on that so most goals for development fall short.
Will USAID's plan to use "small-group interventions [to] create large-scale social change through the impact that specific participants have on
those within their personal and professional spheres of influence" work? Well, that's their theory.
From the perspective of women's rights, large-scale social change would be very welcome. But the Afghans may not agree. The one thing Afghanistan (and Iraq) should have taught the US by now is the limits of its own power.
Programs like this one show the US still hasn't learned that lesson.
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