The Price of Compromise

Insurgent violence has taken a heavy toll on the U.S. in Iraq. A series of attacks earlier this month pushed the total of American fatalities past 1,800. The mounting casualties have shaken American confidence. Terrorism has hit Iraqis even harder. On Capitol Hill, there are bipartisan calls for the White House to establish a timeline for withdrawal. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been floating trial balloons. Senior military officials and diplomats, meanwhile, seek to deflate the insurgency. They urge Iraqis to embrace and engage former Baathists, Islamists, and Arab Sunni rejectionists. If the Sunnis can be brought into the fold, the conventional wisdom goes, peace and reconciliation will prevail.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. The insurgency has gained momentum as a result of failed U.S. policy and well-meaning but wrong-headed assumptions.

The coalition's ouster of Saddam Hussein was popular among the vast majority of Iraqis. They greeted American troops warmly. There were flowers and candies. Iraqis danced as Saddam's statues fell. But the honeymoon faltered and collapsed amid looting and confusion about American intentions.

Throughout the 35-year Baathist dictatorship, survival depended upon maintaining a low profile and divining the leader's wishes. Iraqis would note with whom the leader met as a sign of favor. Officials would parse televised speeches to fine-tune their sycophancy.

Generations of Iraqis continued their Kremlinology when Jay Garner arrived as the director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. They watched as he repeatedly met with Saad al-Janabi, a former Baathist businessman and a close associate of Saddam's late son-in-law, Hussein Kamal. Iraqis interpreted Garner's outreach to an agent of influence of the former regime as a sign that the White House might restore the former regime to power. The fear had precedent. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush called upon Iraqis to rise up in rebellion against Saddam Hussein. They did. But the White House did not come to their aid. According to the Iraqi narrative, Washington shared responsibility for the subsequent massacres by releasing Republican Guard prisoners-of-war in time for their redeployment against the civilians. Garner's choice of dinner guests might have been innocuous to American diplomats and military officers eager to catalyze reconciliation, but it created a chill of distrust among ordinary Iraqis. More importantly, it convinced high-level Baathists that they need fear no justice.

A faulty belief in reconciliation is largely responsible for the disintegration of security in Mosul. Rather than confront Baathists and Islamists, General David Petraeus empowered them. Discussing his strategy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on April 7, 2004, Petraeus explained, "The coalition must reconcile with a number of the thousands of former Ba'ath officials ... giving them a direct stake in the success of the new Iraq." Good in theory, but the result was Potemkin calm.

Petraeus assigned former Baathist General Mahmud Muhammad al-Maris, for example, to lead Iraqi Border Police units guarding the Syrian border. Al-Maris handpicked allies and poked holes in an already porous border. Petraeus allowed another former Baathist, General Muhammad Kha'iri Barhawi, to be Mosul's police chief. Not only did such a choice demoralize Iraqis who suffered under the former regime, but it undercut security.

On July 26, 2004, Brigadier General Andrew MacKay, head of the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team, told Pentagon officials. "We are seeing an increasing confidence within the Iraqi Police Service as they realize they are more than a match for the terrorists - even more so when they are led by officers of Major General Barhawi's ability." Unfortunately, the confidence was misinterpreted. After the November 2004 uprising in Mosul, Coalition officials learned that Barhawi had organized insurgent cells and enabled Islamists and former Baathists to briefly seize the city. Barhawi is now in prison. And both Iraqis and Americans are dead because of misplaced confidence and baseless theories.

Under Saddam Hussein, Baathists survived by ingratiating themselves to power. Too often, U.S. officials would base judgments on their own conversations, unaware of what former regime officials said behind their backs. The loyalty former regime elements and Islamists show is illusionary. In January 2004, for example, a delegation from the Ninewah provincial council visited Makhmur, a town in the Erbil governorate but tied administratively to Mosul. When an accompanying diplomat excused herself briefly, a translator - a former student of mine - said that councilmen berated the mayor for collaborating with the Americans. In Mosul, Petraeus created not placidity, but rather a safe-haven for terror.

Engagement and reconciliation may be the bread-and-butter of diplomacy, but in Iraq they are a prescription for failure. There is a correlation between re-Baathification and violence. Baghdad's security situation deteriorated sharply after Coalition Provisional Administration head L. Paul Bremer on April 23, 2004 declared, "Many Iraqis have complained to me that de-Baathification policy has been applied unevenly and unjustly. I have looked into these complaints and they are legitimate."

While Bremer argued that only implementation - not policy - changed, Iraqis felt otherwise. Their perception was validated one week later when Coalition forces lifted the siege of Fallujah and empowered former Baathists and insurgents in the name of reconciliation. Within a month, car bombings across Iraqi had increased 600%.

A belief persists in Foggy Bottom, Langley, and the White House that extensive de-Baathification is unpopular and destabilizing. Facts suggest otherwise. The Embassy embraced politicians like Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and former Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi because they favored Baathist reintegration. Given a choice at the ballot box, however, Iraqis rewarded candidates who promised tough implementation of de-Baathification. Pachachi, once the shining star of the State Department, failed to win a single seat. Incumbent Allawi mustered only 15% of the vote.

Engagement has a price. In June 2005, word leaked that U.S. officials had engaged Iraqi insurgents in order to encourage them to join the political process. A National Security Council senior director rationalized the approach by differentiating between "talking to" and "negotiating with" insurgents. The Arab world drew no such distinction. A June 28, 2005 ash-Sharq al-Awsat cartoon depicted Uncle Sam, surrounded by barbed wire, with an insurgent blocking his path to escape. The lesson drawn was that the U.S. was weak, not magnanimous. Violence spiked soon after.

Political compromises sometimes carry a high price. As a consequence of adding 15 Sunni Arab members to the Constitutional Commission, women may lose their rights across Iraqi society. Contrary to popular wisdom, Iraq's Sunni political leaders are more Islamist than many of their Shi'ite counterparts. Blatant sectarian pandering backfires.

American strategy in Iraq is fatally flawed. Not just policy implementation has gone awry, but rather the assumptions upon which policy is based. Iraq is neither an academic problem nor a template upon which to impose theories imported from Bosnia and Kosovo. It is a unique society with a very vocal population. Blinded by a false conventional wisdom, we refuse to listen. The cost has been bitterness among natural allies, emboldening of terrorists, and unnecessary American and Iraqi casualties.

Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

"...war has been taking place - not [just in] Iraq, but in D.C. between the Bush Administration and the State Department and CIA."

The American public has no idea how many anti-American, overt traitors operate inside our intel agencies.

Those traitors screamed about the Iraq war; they screamed about Porter Goss becoming their new boss; they fabricated bad intel (e.g. Iraqi WMDs); they accepted forged French intel docs from an Italian on French payrolls over Niger; they leaked and continue to leak intel, whether true or not, that they view as being damaging to the President; they have actively opposed President Bush's diplomacy with North Korea; they have attempted to poison our relationships with friendly nations (the most egregious example perhaps being the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia); they have *failed* to either predict or detect the Indian nuclear tests, the Pakistani nuclear tests, the bombing on the USS Cole, 9/11, the anthrax attacks, etc.

This is not a new problem. Our intel agencies, specifically the number 2 man Mark Felt at the FBI, illegally leaked classified intel in order to bring down the entire Nixon Presidency for personal gain and vengeance over a missed promotion.

In Iraq under President Clinton, our State Dept controvened our CIA's good work with two Kurdish factions, ruining years of good fieldwork. In Bosnia and Serbia, our intel agencies ignored the importation of Iranian Mujaheeden (our stated enemy), KLA drug running, and the massacres of Serb Christians by Islamic radicals...and instead touted wild-eyed claims of genocide against Muslims there, even though there was clearly no shortage of Muslims for the TV cameras (and "mass graves" of hundreds of thousands were mysteriously never found). Our intel agencies had no clue about the cells planning the 1993 WTC attacks. They chalk up TWA 800's shootdown to a physically impossible "center fuel tank explosion."

The enemy is among us. Mr. Goss has a Herculean job in front of him to clean up the Aegian Stables of our corrupt intel agencies.

The world's number one intel expert, Angelo Codevilla, states that "U.S. foreign policy successes are due in spite of, not because of, U.S. intelligence agencies."

Our intel agencies failed to stop the pilfering of Los Alamos nuclear secrets (with scant, but existing, exceptions) or the illegal foreign financial influence on American elections.

In fact, corrupt American field agents themselves (e.g. Valerie Plame) have been caught giving campaign contributions to the *SAME* politicians as the Red Chinese. Do I detect a faint *hint* of conflict of interest here?!

Wow! If you really think that the kinds of military losses we suffered in Panama, and in the first Gulf War were unacceptably high (dozens, or a little over a hundred), then your viewpoint is exposed.

I didn't say they were high. I suggested that they were low -- which makes your comment about the Iraq war being the "least deadly" erroneous.

You believe that as a nation we cannot tolerate death rates that are less than the auto accident death rates the same group of young people would suffer on an ordinary weekend.

That point is utterly irrelevant to this discussion. Does anyone suggest that OJ isn't such a bad guy because his two victims might have died in a car accident the next day?

Therefore, the consequence of your beliefs is that we should disband the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, because if we ever use them to carry out military policies of the US, an intolerable number of Americans will be killed. Since we should never fight any war, we should not bother with having a military -- even a voluntary one, where everyone serving has personally chosen to do that.

This is a ludicrous statement, and you won't find any statement that I've made here on FR that even comes close to suggesting this.

Your position is geopolitical nonsense. As 9/11 demonstrated, retiring to fortress America and allowing the rest of the world to go to Hell in a handcart is no longer a viable option.

"I am worried about over-committing our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. I don’t think nation-building missions are worthwhile." --- Governor (and Presidential candidate) George W. Bush, 10/11/2000.

"The U.S. government has absolutely no business sending troops to die halfway around the world in some stupid nation-building exercise if it can't even get its story straight within the halls of its own state department and intelligence agency."

Why would you make such a claim? Having a unified, non-treasonous voice is not, after all, a requirement for killing people before they attack you.

You're against the Iraq War. Fine. Go sit next to Saddam Hussein and aid his court defense. Be sure to tell the widows of his poison gas attacks and political purges that hussein deserves better judicial treatment than their now-deceased husbands and children.

Go tell Al Qaeda that you are wearing your burkha to show solidarity for the terrorists found in Iraq such as Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Al-Zarqawi.

Go tell the moms of the Bali nightclub bombing that their children had no right to be out partying, that they should have been sequestered at home in "Fortress Australia."

Go tell the widowers in Egypt that their wives had no business shopping in open markets at Sharm el-Shiek. Tell them to get their troops out of Iraq (heck, they probably even don't know that Egypt has none, as it opposed that war just like you).

Go tell Londoners that they should all stay inside the UK to avoid Al Qaeda's spite and vengeance (even though remaining in London won't save them from subway and bus suicide attacks there, either).

Tell 3,000 families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania that if only the U.S. had no troops in Iraq that they'd all be alive (ignoring that the U.S. had no troops in Iraq in 2001).

Go tell Daniel Pearl's widow that he would be alive if only he'd ignored the story of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Tell the Ivory Coast's Christians that if they only convert to Islam and disband their government, that Al Qaeda and the French occupational forces there will let most of them live and remain in their own country.

...Because your sort of isolationist nonsense ignores the global cultural war that is on-going. Unless the French and German elite tell you that a war is good (e.g. against Serbia in 1999 which you no doubt failed to protest), then you are dutifully programmed to oppose using military might to save your own culture.

Having a unified, non-treasonous voice is not, after all, a requirement for killing people before they attack you.

You're right, but I'll tell you what . . . if killing people before they attack us is vital to the survival of this nation, then anyone within the government who is actively working in their official capacity to sabotage the campaign behind the scenes ought to be sent out on the first bombing raid -- and dropped out of a B-52 from 37,000 feet. A government that can't deal with this kind of insurrection within its own institutions doesn't have any credibility to render judgements about "killing people before they attack us" in the first place.

In its infancy this country dealt with people like this by burning them out of their homes and chasing them to Canada, back to Britain, etc. Anything short of that would have been considered grossly inadequate by people who risked their lives to overthrow the British rule.

That's an eloquent list of items you've posted there, most of which are not my problem (nor anyone else's in this country). Unless you are trying to make the case for U.S. military intervention in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Great Britain, Ivory Coast, etc., then it's pretty meaningless.

Unless the French and German elite tell you that a war is good (e.g. against Serbia in 1999 which you no doubt failed to protest), then you are dutifully programmed to oppose using military might to save your own culture.

I'm guessing that I'm one of the few people here on this forum who consistently opposed the U.S. war in Kosovo/Serbia and the war in Iraq for the same reasons. Ironically, there have also been very few people who publicly supported both wars -- and their reasons were consistent, too. We called these folks idiotic "nation-builders" in 1999, but now they're "neo-conservatives" and they occupy many of the civilian posts in the U.S. Department of Defense.

"This is quite a remarkable statement. The U.S. government .... can't even get its story straight within the halls of its own state department and intelligence agency." ~ Alberta's Child

That is one naive statement. I can't believe you're on Free Republic every day, and you appear totally clueless about what's going on.

Bush has finally been able to maneuver himself into a position to be able to deal effectively with the traitor/enemy within our own government. That's what he's doing now. This item below might help you get up to speed, but I have my doubts.

The American Thinker
Spy Valerie and the rogue CIA July 18th, 2005
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4656

Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.

Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that [the new] CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.

Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs.

Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.

And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?

Clearly the CIA managers who failed the United States so terribly on 9/11 should have been fired four years ago.

Others now worried about their careers include officials who have long resisted the onerous task of building a topnotch human intelligence capability in the most dangerous parts of the world.

Porter Goss's new broom should also sweep away:

1) personnel who utterly failed to thwart critical technology theft by China during the Clinton years;

2) those who constantly undermine the war on terror;

3) the ones who make a regular habit of dropping media stinkbombs against the White House.

4) Finally, there is the faction that supported Saddam Hussein's hold on power, as Joe Wilson did.

It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.

The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House.

The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon.

The charge against Rove is based on a blatantly forged document, purporting to show that Saddam tried to buy Niger yellowcake uranium. We now know that the document was forged by the French government to embarrass Secretary Colin Powell, and undermine the American case against Saddam at the UN.

It was classic disinformation bait.

Powell flourished the Niger forgery at the Security Council, and the very next day "European intelligence agencies" leaked word that it was a laughable fraud.

Months later, the London Telegraph published the fact that it was all a French disinformation ploy.

The CIA has to know all about the French forgery, just as it knows that Joseph Wilson's famous trip to Niger was pure bilgewater.

Nobody sends a has-been diplomat to Africa to drink mint tea with corrupt old President Tandja Mamadou, expecting to discover whether Mamadou has secretly been selling nuke materials to Saddam.

That's pure Inspector Clousseau.

Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.

As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for DC, recently said, "The CIA isn’t stupid. They wanted this story out."

It was a publicity stunt from the get-go.

Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.

What Karl Rove apparently did was to hint to reporters about the fraudulence of the whole Wilson stunt, and for that the media mob wants him drawn and quartered. No good deed goes unpunished.

Everything else Wilson has been saying on his two-year speaking tour around the country has been shown to be lies, but well-designed lies --- lies that fit right into the mad-dog world of the Democrat Left.

Telling lies to confirm somebody's paranoid beliefs is a classic disinformation gambit, right out of Spy School 101.

But such gambits would be far more usefully employed against al Qaeda, our opponent in war.

If the United States is attacked again by terrorists, one reason will be that our CIA has wasted time fighting the White House rather than the enemy.

Given Wilson's Niger trip, set up by wife Valerie for Joe Wilson to publicly show that a blatant forgery was, well, a forgery, the current media attack on the White House was completely predictable.

The Permanent Establishment had a perfect dress rehearsal last year with the uproar about Richard Clarke, who also worked in the Clinton White House, possibly next door to Joe Wilson. The barely-disguised message to George W. Bush was: if you try to get rid of us, we may pull a Deep Throat on you. J. Edgar Hoover would have seen through it instantly.

When the Twin Towers exploded in 2001, President Bush did not touch the FBI or the CIA.

By comparison, after the Japanese decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR and George Marshall churned the commanding ranks of the Army and Navy, elevating talented officers like Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. They created Wild Bill Donovan's OSS, the seed of the CIA. Donovan in his turn brought street spooks to the top, political correctness (of the day) be damned.

A lot of careers were broken, and the new talent skyrocketed. It worked like a charm. The infusion of new blood into a stale bureaucracy was the key to victory in World War II. The old crew had allowed a deplorable situation to develop, and were obviously incapable of recognizing what needed to be done.

So why didn't Mr. Bush clean out the dead wood at CIA?

A reasonable guess is that his father warned against it. George Bush, Sr. is a former CIA Director, after all, and is intimately familiar with its ways. He was a GOP Congressman during Watergate, when Mark Felt destroyed Richard Nixon for thwarting his lifelong ambition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover.

Paraphrasing LBJ's immortal words, it was smarter to keep the CIA inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around.

So George Tenet wasn’t fired, and as far as we can tell, neither was anybody else. Instead, the President met with Tenet every day for five years to get the latest about al Qaeda, and surely gained a deeper understanding of the intelligence maze at the same time.

The White House has played a very careful poker game since then, picking its cards one by one until it was ready to make the big move.

Today, George Tenet is out, State and Defense are in the hands of Bush loyalists, the House and Senate have GOP majorities, and the new CIA Director is not an insider.

The CIA itself is now subordinate to the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, a no-nonsense diplomat in the Kissinger mold.

When Goss became Director, Agency bureaucrats complained bitterly to the press. Mr. Bush now holds all the cards, and it is time to play them.

All this isn't just fun and games.

It casts a deadly light on internecine warfare in Washington at a time of great national danger.

We know that Hoover blackmailed four successive Presidents by threatening to reveal confidential FBI secrets.

We know that Hoover's fair-haired boy, Mark Felt, destroyed the Nixon Presidency – a virtual coup d'etat that the media tell us was a victory of Democracy over the Secret Government. With the media as destiny’s servant.

We know that Nixon taped visitors to the Oval Office without their permission, but that FDR, LBJ, and Kennedy did the same, without facing media exposure.

And during the unbelievable Clinton years we know that Bill and Hillary abused presidential power in a dozen egregious ways, and may still control copies of raw FBI files to use against their domestic enemies.

But it was Richard Nixon alone who got caught by a rogue FBI bureaucrat.

Deep Throat showed how a president can be destroyed by a bureaucrat.

The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media.

The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power.

Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.

The sneering media mob is on display on C-SPAN whenever the White House holds a press briefing. The Left is apoplectic: "Karl Rove + traitor" brought up 97,000 entries on google three days ago, and 124,000 this morning.

But Karl Rove is merely today's target for a permanent state of rage so deep and hot that it is always seeking new witches to burn.

As for the failed CIA spooks who are now living in fear of losing their perks, one can only imagine the steam blowing from their ears, as the day of reckoning draws closer.

I'm cheering for the good guys.

James Lewis

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