Worst Evil Cabal, Ever

Apparently, even Naomi Klein isn't too impressed with the evil neo-con geniuses who are hell bent on destroying the world.

As you may recall, in Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, she argues against the myth that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, that free markets are the natural economic expression of free societies. Instead, she contends that capitalism works best in the context of disaster, turmoil, and chaos, and that those with the most to gain (the wealthy and the powerful) seek out, foster, and, if necessary, invent crises to promote this economic agenda. That's the Shock Doctrine: using the shock of a natural disaster, or a war to exploit people when they are at their most vulnerable and unable to think rationally, maintaining that shock through violence, repression, and torture, and finally silencing critics through threats and intimidation.

Basically, everything we've seen over the last six years. Except.... Except... It's not working. As Mark Engler writes in Dissent:

Klein’s insights into the use of political shock are probing, but they, too, have limits. When the book’s chronology finally makes it up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, its argument takes a strange turn. Throughout the volume, Klein frequently invokes the “shock and awe” metaphor. Because of this, readers are led to believe that George W. Bush’s war will represent the epitome of the shock method. In fact, it is where the metaphor starts to unravel.

Iraq has been subjected to every shock imaginable. But rather than producing a state of regression and acquiescence, the onslaught has provoked intense resistance. As deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage is quoted as saying, “The U.S. is dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed.” Beyond the ethical and political implications of the botched occupation, it is just plain bad capitalism: “Bremer was sent to Iraq to build a corporate utopia,” Klein writes; “instead, Iraq became a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded.” The author is ambivalent about the lessons. On the one hand, the corporate contractors who fled Iraq en masse had already reaped billions from government contracts, and energy companies still have their eye on Iraq’s oil. On the other hand, the crisis model has been foiled in important ways.

Which leads me to one of my pet phrases: the myth of competence. Which is to say, human beings are capable of dreaming up all sorts of nefarious schemes, invent all sorts of plots. They can try to take over the world. But, there is no evidence that they are actually capable of executing them. Most things that happen are just circumstances, luck, and coincidence. It's only in retrospect that events seem to have a plot running through them that give the illusion that history is controlled or masterminded. But when groups buy into their own ideology and try to act as if they are in control, as if great historical forces can be manipulated, they fail, and fail spectacularly.

The truth of disaster capitalism is that it destroys countries, communities, nature in a sort of blind grasping that can neither be achieved or fulfilled. Not because it succeeds, but because it can't ever succeed. And when it eventually runs out of steam, it moves on and leaves others to try to clean up after it.

That is the future of Iraq.

Mahdi Strategery

Very interesting take on what's currently going on in Iraq. Certainly more compelling than the Bush/McCain hundred years' war. John Robb writes:

The Iraqi government's militias (Army/police) are on the offensive in Basra, in an attempt to eliminate the Sadr's militia. In contrast to previous engagements with the Mahdi army, this fight is going to more interesting. A leaner and more efficient Mahdi army has learned from Hezbollah's success in southern Lebanon that a carefully planned defensive strategy in combination with a strategic timer (a series of actions that inflict visible strategic damage to the opponent) can rapidly dissolve the political will of a weak adversary...

We're essentially moving in the direction of insurgency 2.0, or what the bloggers are calling open source warfare. The western powers represent monolithic Microsoft type corporations with buggy code, bloated operating, and increasing dependence on hardware upgrades just to do the same things they could do in earlier eras. The insurgents on the other hand are being portrayed as hackers: smaller, faster, and smarter whose only goal is to disrupt and cripple the powers that be by hitting them where their strongest (which is Rove-ian politics at its finest, come to think of it).

Robb's blog predicted what's currently going on in the green zone, as well as the disruption of the oil pipelines.

[Via Kung Fu Monkey]

The Victory That Nearly Was

This is probably old news to a lot of folks, but I was fascinated by Peter Bergen's account of the rise and fall and rise of Al Qaeda in last week's New Republic. The whole thing is worth reading but here's the part that really got to me (Bergen is describing the battle of Tora Bora as the daisy cutters smash down on Al Qaeda's heads):

Bin Laden was clearly in trouble, and he knew it. At some point during the battle, he would sustain a serious wound to his left shoulder. And, on December 14, around the time he finally fled Tora Bora, he wrote a final testament that included this bleak message to his offspring: "As to my children, forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to work with Al Qaeda."

Yet, even as bin Laden contemplated his own death and Al Qaeda seemed on the verge of defeat, Gary Berntsen, then commander of CIA operations in eastern Afghanistan, was worried. A gung-ho officer who speaks Dari, the local Afghan language, Berntsen realized that Afghan soldiers were likely not up to the task of taking on Al Qaeda's hard core at Tora Bora. In the first days of December, he had requested a battalion of Rangers--that is, between 600 and 800 soldiers--to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. That request was denied by the Pentagon, for reasons that have never been fully clarified. In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora Bora than the 50 or so Delta and Green Beret soldiers who participated in the fight.

Why is it that we aren't hearing more about this in the debates? On the news? Where's the movie? This is amazing. Even Bin Laden thought the jig was up and then we just magicked him a new life, a do-over, a divine wind, via reverse deus ex machina. We handed the endgame over to the Afghans who unsurprisingly did pretty much nothing. More importantly, by the time the Bush administration realized something was wrong, they'd already moved on to Iraq.

The article also goes into interesting detail on our mutually fake friendship with Pakistan, the stupidity of Guantanamo, and documented proof that torture is neither useful nor necessary (hint: captured Al Qaeda, faced with an actual judicial process, will turn state's evidence as quick as a Michael Vick or an O.J. Simpson accomplice).

Bush and Iraq: SOSDD

Reaction to last night's speech from Andrew Sullivan:

He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our nose: that Iraq is not, as he still seems to believe, full of ordinary people longing for democracy and somehow stymied solely by "extremists" or al Qaeda or Iran, but a country full of groups of people who cannot trust one another, who are still living in the wake of unimaginable totalitarian trauma, who have murdered and tortured and butchered each other in pursuit of religious and ethnic pride and honor for centuries. This is what Bush cannot recognize: there is no Iraq. There are no Iraqis. There may have been at one point - but what tiny patina of national unity that once existed to counter primordial sectarian loyalty was blown away by the anarchy of the Rumsfeld-Franks invasion. The president's stunning detachment from this reality tragically endures - whether out of cynicism or delusion or, more worryingly, a simple intellectual inability to understand the country he is determined that the United States occupy for the rest of our lives.

And Fred Kaplan with the short version:

President Bush's TV address tonight was the worst speech he's ever given on the war in Iraq, and that's saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

I think it's pretty clear that this whole thing is a sad delusion. History will remember W as a tragic figure, lost to his own fictions, fears, and dreams.

Iraq Progress Report

Not everything's as great in Anbar as we'd like to think:

The Sunni leader, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who met and shook hands with President Bush during a visit by Mr. Bush to Iraq last week, led the Anbar Salvation Council, an alliance of clans supporting the Iraqi government and American forces. Initial reports suggested he was killed either by a bomb in his car or by a roadside bomb close to his car near his home in Ramadi in Anbar Province, the sprawling region west of Baghdad.

This guy basically died for a Bush photo-op.

What If Withdrawl from Iraq Brings Peace?

From Tom Quiggin, Why Bush Has It Wrong, and why al-Qaeda needs us to stay in Iraq:

U.S. President George W. Bush has repeatedly claimed that if American forces leave Iraq, the war-torn state would be surrendered to al-Qaeda. It is unlikely that there is any basis in fact for these statements.

Al-Qaeda is likely to leave Iraq once American forces depart and when a new government (or governments) take over. For reasons of doctrine, history, and al-Qaeda's own assessments of the situation, it is unlikely that al-Qaeda is either planning or counting on a long-term presence in Iraq after an American withdrawal.

The U.S. has been wrong about everything else, why not this too?

Cheney's Empire

Matt Yglesias is finally saying what I've been hoping someone would say for years now: there never was a plan to leave Iraq. We're stay-ers:

...here we are, over four years after the invasion, and it's time to face up to the possibility that the Bush administration's policies in occupied Iraq haven't been driven exclusively by a sincere and idealistic commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people and the principles of liberty and democracy. Shocking, yes. But not to put too fine a point on it, it's the imperialism, stupid.

Bush won't adopt a bargaining strategy that involves walking away as an option, because he's not willing to walk away. The objective is to retain Iraq as a platform for the projection of American military power in the region, to continue a larger regional struggle against Iran and Syria, to maintain physical control over Iraq's oil resources, etc.

That's right, it's the imperialism, stupid. We wanted a permanent base in the Middle East, just like we have in Germany, Japan, and Korea. The snag is that it wasn't a very good plan from strategic or logistical points of view. It leaves troops on the ground in a hostile environment (unlike those other places) and we don't have enough of them to accomplish our goals.

To defeat the insurgency we need more troops (more than even the surge could provide). More troops that we can't have without a draft. And if we have a draft, the public will revolt and demand withdrawal. So now we're stuck, trying to complete the same job with fewer resources. Can't move forward, can't move backward. Instead of Empire, we have Quagmire.