Follow up re. Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah’s Friends in London

A number of items have been published in the last week that relate to the content of the previous post. The first part of that post dealt with a perception that the people of Syria are the immediate losers in US President Obama’s engagement with Iran.

Syria, the US, and NATO: Failure yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Even now, with the rate of killing in Syria worse than the worst years of the Iraq war, there are still some who argue that the West’s policy in Syria, though a failure, remains a better option than military intervention.

In his Foreign Policy column this week, Marc Lynch, who has consistently argued against US military intervention in Syria and in favour of diplomatic efforts, writes that “US military intervention would very likely have made things in Syria worse.” However the only way in which he seems to see such a scenario as worse is that the US would have incurred the direct costs of military action.

This is not a small thing, and is of course a reasonable concern for the US if not for Syrians, but the acknowledged failure of non-military efforts to date also has a cost or the US, and continued failure could lead to very great costs indeed, including military ones, for the US and for allies in the region, including NATO.

Arguments about numbers killed in war are choked with contradictions between a desire to do justice to individual deaths and the impersonal anonymity of statistics. Worse, in these grim versions of the trolley problem, we see again and again how the dead of other nations are counted for less than ones own. But even if we allow the inevitability of this dehumanising abstraction, this contextualisation of the thousands dead in terms of national interest and strategy, the killings still count.

Returning to my comparison between rates of killing seen in the Iraq war and the rate of killing in Syria, in strategic terms the killing rate is relevant as an indicator of the likely outcome. The strategic aim for the US in both Iraq and Syria must be a stable state that doesn’t pose a threat to US interests. By extension, the aim must be for a state that largely respects the rule of law and is capable of enforcing it within its own borders. The higher the killing rate, the poorer the prospects for such an outcome in the near future.

The worse the killing now, the more likely a Somalia-like future where US drones pursue Islamist terror groups sheltering in the rubble of a fractured Syrian nation that is unable to maintain rule of law within its own borders.

In an earlier column this month, Marc Lynch suggested the lessons of Iraq had been “long since internalized” by Americans, while praising Obama for keeping the US military out of Syria. It seems to me that while he’s understood some of Iraq’s lessons, he is ignoring others.

While all can see much of the extent of failure in Iraq, a greater failure was possible, and was avoided, in the post-invasion civil war. If the US hadn’t backed lesser evils when the most extreme forces were at their height in 2006-2007, Iraq would be in a much worse state today. Now in Syria, by failing to back the more moderate elements in the uprising, the US is helping the extreme ones to flourish. This is a lesson from Iraq that Marc Lynch misses out. [1]

Marc Lynch also seems blind to lessons on military intervention in the recent history of Bosnia. In March 2012, Radwan Ziadeh published an article titled Have We Learned Nothing From the Nineties? Syria is the Balkans All Over Again. Ten months later, it’s worth re-reading. At the time Marc Lynch responded with an ill-judged tweet, “People do realize that Bosnia war eventually ended through diplomatic negotiations with Milosevic, right?”

This flip factoid wholly ignored the part played by NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, the air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces carried out between 30 August and 20 September 1995 that belatedly brought an end to the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo and forced Serb leaders to negotiate. While the air campaign was successful in this, the negotiation ended in the Dayton Agreement which rewarded ethnic cleansing and failed to deter Milosevic from carrying out further crimes in Kosovo, leading to another NATO air campaign in 1999.

More usefully, in this blog post Marc Lynch points to some alternative views on Syria. They are A Syria Strategy for Obama by Andrew Tabler, Syria: Is It Too Late? by Frederic C Hof, and The Road Beyond Damascus by Michael Doran and Salman Shaikh.

The US and NATO’s Syria failures of yesterday and today can’t be allowed to excuse continuing failure tomorrow.

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[1] Added 20 Jan: In his February 2012 policy paper for the Center for a New American Security, Pressure Not War (PDF), Marc Lynch does mention the 2006 arming of the Sons of Iraq militias, but uses it more as a lesson in unintended consequences than as an illustration of reducing violence by militarily strengthening a political centre against extremes. It must be remembered though that in February 2012 the estimated number of killed in Syria was a tenth of what it is today, and many still saw change by primarily peaceful means as a viable option. The relevant passage:

... However, providing weapons is not a politically neutral act. Those with greater access to the networks that distribute Western guns and equipment will grow stronger, politically as well as militarily. The arming of the Sons of Iraq in 2006, for instance, dramatically shifted the political power of competing Sunni tribes and families in unexpected ways, and the effects continue to unfold today. Better armed fighters will rise in political power, while groups that advocate nonviolence or advance political strategies will be marginalized.

The Radio Bug

Sadly, the Speechification blog, main source for the last two radio posts, has gone off the air. You may still get some joy by searching Google’s cache of the site, at least for a limited time.

On the plus side though, BBC radio seems to be keeping ever more programmes available online for longer, for example The Age of the Genome, a four part Radio 4 series presented by Richard Dawkins from June is still available. Some Radio 4 programmes which are no longer available for streaming after a week, then turn up on the BBC World Service available indefinitely.

From across the Atlantic, here are three programmes looking back on the last seven years of war in Iraq, in order of my preference.

First, from This American Life on WBEZ, Iraq After Us, an outstanding hour of radio built primarily on interviews with Iraqis recorded in Iraq.

Second, on PRI’s The World, Reflections on Serving in Iraq, Former U.S. Army Captain Blake Hall interviewed by Jeb Sharp of How We Got Here.

Third, on WHYY’s Fresh Air, A Foreign Correspondent Reflects On Iraq War, Anthony Shadid of the New York Times interviewed by Terry Gross. The interview focuses on this story about the trials of a family trying to locate the body of a family member kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and dumped.

I had minor reservations on that last interview, to do with distracting comments by the interviewer, but I still recommend it.

Related, Roland Dodds writes, State Building in Iraq has Just Begun.

From those same three sources, let’s have some other topics.

Here’s a This American Life broadcast from 22nd of May 2009, Turncoat, on red-baiting amongst America’s Vietnamese population, on Brandon Darby’s trip from anti-cop anarchist activist to FBI informer, by way of encounters with one of FARC’s pals in Venezuela and a pro-Hamas bombing conspiracy in the US, and ending with reading a short story from Israel by Etgar Keret.

And another from PRI’s The World, Revisiting the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, lawyer Judith Armatta talks about her experience of monitoring the trial, and of her book Twilight of Impunity. Interviewer Jeb Sharp includes a report from the trial she recorded in 2003.

Three related blog recommendations: Café Turco, Greater Surbiton, and Americans for Bosnia.

One more from The World, in the science archive, Seeking the Roots of Kindness: The Life and Work of George Price, in which Oren Harman talks about his book, The Price of Altruism.

And a blog post related to that, at Stumbling and Mumbling, Gamu Nhengu and the context of justice, on altruism, asylum, and familiarity.

A bunch from WHYY’s Fresh Air: Mark Feldstein talks about Jack Anderson and Richard Nixon, ruthless journalist vs ruthless politician, David Bianculli talks about The Smothers Brothers (see earlier post), Eric Foner on the evolution of Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery, and Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration (see earlier).

Finally, not really radio, from Wolfgang’s Vault, a 1978 interview with David Bowie. You’ll need to register for this, but it’s free, it just means being put on their mailing list. More Bowie at Bob’s.

PICTURE CREDIT! The comic strip is The Radio Bug in ‘If 8:15 isn’t a good hour, what is?’ by Walt McDougall, reprinted in Jerry Robinson’s The Comics, an Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, soon to be reissues in a new edition. Copyright © Walt McDougall.

Pilger links

Reading this, I felt it necessary to gather together links on a few John Pilger stories that had stuck in the mind over the years:

Martin Shaw, Research Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, on Pilger's downplaying of Saddam Hussein's responsibility in the suffering of the Iraqi people.

BBC special correspondent John Sweeney on the same topic.

Historian Marko Attila Hoare on Pilger's denial of genocide in Kosovo.

Martin Shaw on the same topic. (Also here.)

Ian Black, diplomatic editor of The Guardian, writing on Pilger's conspiracy theories about NATO action in Kosovo in 1999. The column by Pilger that he was responding to is here.

Pilger's support for those deliberately targeting civilians in Iraq.

Pilger's defence of the deliberate targeting of civilians in Israel.

Added, Pilger misrepresents the views of Independent Jewish Voices. (Thanks to Flesh is Grass.)

Added, 1 March 2010, Oliver Kamm on John Pilger’s approval of Gilad Atzmon:

“I’d like to know - and I invite him to comment on it - why Pilger is citing this bigot as a voice of conscience and an advocate of justice.”

More on Pilger and Atzmon at Engage and the CST blog.

Added, 10 June 2010, Michael Ezra takes on just one paragraph from  Pilger’s latest cornucopia of conspiracy theory. This is on the Vietnam War, though the Pilger New Statesman piece it comes from, The way to lie about another war, also raves on about Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Japan, and Oxbridge, all sites of “master illusions” and “black propaganda”. Oh yes, the quotation marks come thick and heavy in this piece of “journalism”. See also Mick Harley’s comments.

Another collection of Pilger links can be found on David Thompson’s blog, including one to a post by Tim Blair in 2004 reproducing Pilger’s declarations that American, British and Australian soldiers in Iraq were “legitimate targets”, and that:

“I think the situation in Iraq is so dire that unless the United States is defeated there that we’re likely to see an attack on Iran, we’re likely to see an attack on North Korea and all the way down the road it could be even an attack on China within a decade.”

Oliver Kamm collected criticisms of Pilger’s documentaries on Cambodia and on nuclear weapons in his 2006 post, Celebrating John Pilger.

Added, 19 December 2010, lawyer David Allen Green provides a legal commentary on Pilger on Assange. (Via Shiraz Socialist.)

Added, 5 June 2011, Denying Rwanda: An Open Letter to John Pilger, by Adam Jones PhD, author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers 2010. (Via Max Dunbar.)

Added, 16 September 2011, Decline and Fall, Peter Ryley on Pilger and Libya.

Added, 30 October 2011, “Most egregious” competition, Gene of Harry’s Place compares comments by right wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and John Pilger, on the Obama administration’s intervention against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

A commenter responding to that post helpfully links to a 2008 article by Sunny Hundal, The racist flip side of anti-imperialism, which begins:

What do Ralph Nader, John Pilger and Ayman al-Zawahiri have in common?

Before Barack Obama has even taken office or signed a single bill, all three have dismissed him as a sellout by using racial slurs. One might be tempted to say, “at least give the guy a chance,” but that would be a futile exercise.

The activist Ralph Nader and documentary filmmaker John Pilger both referred to him as an “Uncle Tom”, while, more recently, al-Qaida No 2 al-Zawahiri said Obama was “the direct opposite of honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, and lumped Obama together with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as “house slaves”.

The Pilger column referred to is here.

1999: McCain on Kosovo 2

I wrote earlier on Matthew Yglesias, who thinks that he’s scoring points against McCain by bringing up the candidate’s position on Kosovo in 1999. The problem is that Yglesias seems ignorant of the facts of that conflict.

Not only has Yglesias not read enough history, he doesn’t seem to read the comments on his own blog either. If he did he’d have discovered that he was talking rubbish in that first post, and wouldn’t have repeated it again and again.

Not that this history is that ancient, and Mr Yglesias should be just about old enough to remember as he turned eighteen during the Kosovo war. Maybe he had other things on his mind back then.

UPDATE 21 AUGUST: Matthew Yglesias is not so hot on rocket science either. Writing on the US-Polish missile defence agreement, he gives another flamboyant display of ignorance. Be sure to read the comments. The wisdom of Matthew:

“Russia interprets the construction of missile defense facilities on Polish soil as a hostile act. And rightly so — clearly the only possible adversary such a system could be aimed against is Russia.”

Some basic facts: the US wants to put 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, and Russia has 2,146 land-launched nuclear warheads, 1,392 sea-launched warheads, and 624 air-launched warheads. So what do you think, do 10 interceptor missiles pose a threat to the effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear deterrence?

It was only recently that I became aware of the words of Yglesias, through his admirer Andrew Sullivan. Lance at A Second Hand Conjecture has been reading those words for quite a while longer, and noted at a word Yglesias didn’t mind using about his own policy proposals in 2006: appeasement. Here’s a word Lance used to describe Yglesias: hypocrite. And a whole bunch more words: unwarranted moral and intellectual smugness.

This one year old post of Lance’s on Andrew Sullivan was also interesting to me. Some people type faster than they think.

1999: McCain on Kosovo

Matthew Yglesias, whose sanity is much admired by Andrew Sullivan, linked yesterday to an item from the archives of The New York Times. Dated April 4 1999, it’s about how John McCain was arguing on the need for the US to be prepared to use ground troops in the ongoing Kosovo conflict. The bombing had started on March 24th and after ten days of it Milosevic was defiant, and the Clinton White House was ruling out ground forces.

Oddly, Yglesias seems to see this as a point against McCain.

It’s interesting that a commenter on Yglesias’ blog brings up Wesley Clark to further critcise McCain, unaware perhaps that Clark, commander of Nato during its campaign in Kosovo, wrote “the threat of a ground attack, I believe, proved decisive.” Here.

There’s a longer story behind Clark’s conclusion, one of initial expectations that a few days of bombing would be sufficient, of Nato coming to the end of its initial target list with still no movement from Milosevic, of Clark moving as many ground forces as possible into Albania to make Serbia think he was planning a ground invasion, and having to do it under the justification of ground support and force protection for the air campaign because of the political resistance to committing ground forces.

By arguing for ground forces, McCain was leading where Clinton would follow in talks with Blair weeks later. Again, in Clark’s own words:

In the end, NATO achieved every one of its aims. With the air war intensifying, a ground invasion being prepared, and no other country to turn to for help, Milosevic in early June pulled his troops, police, and weaponry out of Kosovo. A NATO-led international peacekeeping force entered to establish order.

Much more detail on the move to accepting the logic of invasion in this Washington post article from September 1999 and this New York Times article from November 1999.

In an earlier post I raised an eyebrow at Mr Yglesias’ understanding of foreign affairs and of geography. It would seem that very recent history isn’t his strong point either. But hey, his book has loads of five star reviews on Amazon, so why should he worry? And it’s on foreign policy!

UPDATE 20TH AUGUST: Not only has Yglesias not read enough history, he doesn’t seem to read the comments on his own blog either. If he did he’d have discovered that he was talking rubbish in that first post, and wouldn’t have repeated it again and again.

Not that this history is that ancient, and Mr Yglesias should be just about old enough to remember as he turned eighteen during the Kosovo war. Maybe he had other things on his mind back then.

More Yglesias fun in this follow up post.

A slightly longer view

In Why Iraq Was Inevitable, historian Arthur Herman takes a look back at the Iraq war, and doesn’t just limit himself to the period of the current US presidency. 

In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”

Arthur Herman recounts the history of policy towards Iraq during the Clinton presidency: the failure of inspections, the failure of air strikes, the failure of sanctions, the failure of covert action, and the consequent examination of alternatives by the Clinton administration.

A plan for an actual land invasion of Iraq had been drawn up a few years earlier under the stewardship of Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was updated after Desert Fox. Although (Pollack writes) “no one thought the U.S. public would support such an invasion,” this was now beginning to seem the only option.

Concurring with this judgment was Scott Ritter, an American who had served on the UN’s weapons-inspection term and had become notorious for his aggressive approach to his job. In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late 1998, Ritter castigated the Clinton White House for failing to confront Saddam with the threat of invasion. This hardly endeared him to the President, but it did win him two warm allies in the Senate. One was the Republican John McCain. The other was the Democrat John Kerry, who outspokenly declared that since Saddam clearly intended “to build WMD’s no matter what the cost,” America “must be prepared to use force to achieve its goals.”

But nothing would happen in 1999. At the end of the year, the UN passed Resolution 1284—an effort to get Saddam to accept a new inspection regime, called UNMOVIC, in exchange for lifting sanctions on all goods for civilian use. Yet, weak as the resolution was, it led to a split in the Security Council, with four members—including France, Russia, and China—abstaining from the vote. That split would become permanent. By 2000, life at the Security Council would turn into a constant battle of wills, with the U.S. and Great Britain in one corner and Russia, France, Germany, and China in another. Although George W. Bush would later come to be blamed for wrecking the coalition that had fought the first Gulf war, the reality is otherwise: the wreck occurred three years before he became President.

It’s not an overlong article, but it packs in a lot more, about how the difficulties of the Kosovo campaign reinforced Clinton’s post-Somalia caution about military action, how the incoming Bush administration was similarly cautious, how the post September 11 reassessment of risk was common to both Democrats and Republicans, and why these risk assessments were not unfounded.

We now know, thanks to captured Iraqi documents, that American intelligence seriously underestimated the extent of Saddam’s ties with terrorist groups of all sorts. Throughout the 1990’s, it emerged, the Iraqi intelligence service had worked with Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17), and had given training to members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Saddam also collaborated with jihadists fighting the American presence in Somalia, including some who were members of al Qaeda. It may be that al Qaeda had no formal presence in Iraq itself, but the captured documents show that it did not need such a presence. Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.

He recounts again what was known about Saddam and WMD, facts that stubbornly resist postwar attempts to trivialise them.

Operation Iraqi Freedom got under way on March 21, 2003. In October of that year, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) reported it was unable to find any of the WMD stockpiles that everyone believed were in Iraq. Still, what the group did find, in the words of its director David Kay, was “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” that Saddam had concealed from Blix’s inspectors in 2002: proof, in other words, of Saddam’s clear material breach of Resolution 1441.

Of course, this was not the element of the ISG report that attracted the attention of the war’s critics. According to the New York Times, the ISG’s findings supported the view that Bush had “used dubious intelligence to justify his decision to go to war.” That was and is false.

While Kay and his ISG inspectors found no WMD’s, they did not say there had been none. To the contrary: “My view,” Kay stated, is that “Iraq indeed had WMD’s” and that smaller stocks still existed on Iraqi territory. Later he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that he had found evidence of some WMD’s having been moved to Syria before the war. A question mark hangs over that possibility to this day.

In testifying to the Senate, moreover, Kay asserted unequivocally that “the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein,” adding that the upper echelons of the Iraqi regime had become divided into two factions: those willing to sell to the highest bidder whatever they knew about manufacturing WMD’s and those, including Saddam himself, willing to buy someone else’s know-how at equally high prices. Saddam’s FBI interrogations would confirm Kay’s analysis.

I highly recommend the article in its entirety.

Via Solomonia, Mick Hartley, and Harry’s Place.

* * *

In the resulting comments at Harry’s Place, a commenter asked “Why was invasion seen as the only way to get rid of Saddam Hussein?” My response was in part:

I think the reason why invasion was seen as the only remaining option is that attempted coups had been defeated, and the sanctions regime was being undermined by major players internationally. An ideal alternative might have been a peaceful popular mass movement within Iraq, but given the suppression of the Shia uprising in ’91 and given the violent sectarian response to change displayed post-invasion I think it’s reasonable to assume that even had any popular movement been able to establish itself, it would have been met by extreme violence of the same kind.

The massive death toll post-invasion reinforces the argument that there was no alternative to the invasion.

Given that Saddam’s Fedayeen, who organised much of the initial insurgency, were formed as much to put down internal dissent as to fight an invasion, (according to this interview with Col. HR McMaster,) and given that the post-invasion sectarian civil war was a deliberate strategy by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who had been given sanctuary in Iraq prior to the invasion, and given that the vast majority of people targeted by the insurgency have been Iraqis, not Coalition troops, and given again Saddam’s previous brutal repression of internal dissent, I have a hard time imagining how any internal movement to overthrow the Baathists could possibly have escaped massive violence.

It’s possible to speculate that such a scenario might not have been as bad as what happened post-invasion, but it’s also possible to imagine that it might have been much worse, with surrounding countries less inhibited from intervening.