sprice@rocketmail.com
So the president of South Korea was in town to see president top gun, and he sounded so rational and calm and you almost thought maybe this whole thing in north east Asia can sorted out through negotiations and international cooperation and then you remember that the North Koreans are just plain crazy and the Bush mob’s propensity to gamble makes Bill “sporting life’ Bennet look like a choir boy. Here’s John Gershman from The Project Against the Present Danger with a very smart assessment of what passes for our new north Asia policy.
What Next for Pax Americana?
By John Gershman | May 12, 2003
Project Against the Present Danger
With the occupation of Iraq firmly underway, and despite the uncertainties on the ground and within the occupying administration, some neoconservative analysts are already looking ahead--and not just to Syria or Iran or North Korea. "The real question now is how the United States can leverage its victory in Iraq to uphold, expand, and institutionalize the Pax Americana," says Thomas Donnelly in a recent issue of the American Enterprise Institute's National Security Outlook. Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI and served as the deputy executive director at the Project for the New American Century from 1999-2002.
Donnelly's piece focuses on shaping the overall framework guiding the Bush doctrine and the practical challenges facing the institutionalization of unipolarity, and recognizes, unlike some of the less nuanced advocates of unilateralism, the importance of multilateral institutions for managing empire. Two key developments include efforts to refocus on China and soft-pedaling the unilateralist nature of the exercise of U.S. imperial power.
Back to China?
Donnelly encapsulates what he sees as the Bush doctrine in practice:
In a nutshell, the practical application of the Bush Doctrine amounts to "rolling back" radical Islamism while "containing" the People's Republic of China, that is, hedging against its rise to great-power status. A corollary is to prevent strategic cooperation, formally or de facto, between either terror states or terrorist groups in the Islamic world and Beijing.
This description of Bush administration practice draws upon Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington's suggestion of a Confucian-Islamic connection that could emerge as a result of the "Clash of Civilizations." The recent appointment of Aaron Friedberg, a well-known neoconservative hawk on China, to Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, indicates that there remains ongoing positioning to insure that the rapprochement between the U.S. and China since the September 11th attacks does not displace the view of China as a strategic competitor, which had animated much of the neoconservative wing of the administration prior to 9/11.
Donnelly doesn't seem to share the same hysteria over China as some of his ideological fellow travelers, noting that "While it is true that China has the potential to become the canonical 'global peer' of the United States, and already possess the ability to complicate American strategy in many places, the global 'correlation of forces' seems very heavily in our favor." This frame suggests that there will be ongoing tension within the administration and the think tanks that house neoconservative ideologues over the scope and severity of the "China threat."
Multilateralism in the Service of Empire
At the same time, there appears to be a growing recognition that the simple celebration of unilateralism is both bad public relations and bad policy. As Donnelly notes, "It is difficult to imagine how the United States can maintain global leadership without running the risks of 'imperial overstretch' unless it forges a new set of international institutions, or at very least, radically reforms the current ones. Even a sole superpower needs strategic partners."
While citing liberal internationalist John Ikenberry approvingly, Donnelly's vision of multilateralism is all about facilitating U.S. imperial rule and has nothing much to do with international law. Furthermore, he shows that the neoconservatives are more "radical" than conservative--for the agenda Donnelly outlines is an agenda of institutional transformation, not one oriented at protecting the status quo, other than the position of the U.S. as an unchallenged superpower.
Donnelly argues that the post-World War II experience of creating NATO and the UN offers lessons for the present, but that neither the UN nor NATO in their current forms is suited for achieving U.S. policy objectives. Both institutions are constrained by their origins as defensive institutions established to promote order and stability against a revolutionary threat from communism. In contrast, he argues, institutionalizing Pax Americana requires organizations willing to promote instability (i.e., liberty) where necessary. [Note that it is liberty and not democracy that is the goal.]
His outline for a reformed United Nations--or a successor organization--would value liberty more than stability or state sovereignty and would dedicate itself to helping repressed peoples secure their individual political rights rather than tolerating repressive regimes. This form of cosmopolitanism and internationalism is a distinct departure from traditional conservative ideals of realpolitik or the isolationist view of Pat Buchanan.
On the military front, Donnelly's new NATO would be more agile and flexible and be better able to provide forces for a variety of new missions rather than simply as a defensive coalition. Holding out more hope for a reformed NATO than a reformed UN he notes that "It is the NATO architecture that allows willing participants in U.S.-led operations to 'plug and play'." This framework would represent the means of institutionalizing the "coalition of the willing" to support and facilitate U.S.-led military operations where it deemed them necessary, creating the institutional infrastructure for the doctrine of preventive war.
The challenge for a truly global Pax Americana, and one concerned about China in particular, is to extend close U.S. military ties outside of Europe with a major focus on strengthening the multilateral security architecture of Asia. He argues that such arrangements would not need to be as "formal a structure as the Atlantic alliance … but it could provide the practical and training basis for the wide range of coalition operations that might be necessary in the coming decades."
Donnelly also makes explicit his view of the key supporting players in this drama of institutionalization, of an empire that increasingly dares to speak its name: Great Britain, "new Europe," India, and the wealthy traditional allies in East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. Latin America and Africa are absent from the program.
Whatever one thinks of the vision of Donnelly and other neocons have outlined, one thing is clear. The gauntlet has been thrown. The George W. Bush administration will not be accused of not being able to deal with "that vision thing."
For more see:
What's Next? Preserving American Primacy, Institutionalizing Unipolarity
By Thomas Donnelly, April 22, 2003
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.16999,filter./pub_detail.asp
END
Keep an eye out on China, although I think Cuba may be in the sights as well. What a gift that would be to the ex-pats in Miami who helped Jeb and fearless leader so much in the last elelctions.
China Hawk Settles in Neocons' Nest
By John Feffer | May 12, 2003
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
Foreign Policy In Focus
Neoconservative hawks have scored a new victory in the administration of President George W. Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security adviser and director of policy planning on Cheney's high-powered foreign policy staff headed by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the administration. Libby also served as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, a House Select Committee that issued a report in 1999 accusing China of large-scale espionage to advance its nuclear weapons program and was soundly criticized by many China scholars for its factual errors, unsupported allegations, and shoddy analysis.
Both Friedberg and Libby, as well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and 21 other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for the adoption of a "'Reaganite' policy of military strength and moral clarity." Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the "war on terrorism" to be directed against Iraq and other anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC cofounders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also included chapters by other leading neoconservative hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey.
The significance of his appointment lies both with Cheney's and Libby's influence in foreign policymaking and the fact that Friedberg will be the only recognized China expert in such a senior position. "There really haven't been top people under Bush who knew much about China," says John Gershman, an Asia specialist at New York University's Wagner School and the codirector of the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank. "He's the first one." But according to Gershman, Friedberg "fits clearly into the group that has been dominant in the administration" since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. "He's a China-threat person without being hysterical about it," Gershman continues. "But his appointment is a clear sign that the cooperation that has emerged between the U.S. and China on the war on terrorism and North Korea is entirely tactical, and that Cheney is still inclined to see China as a strategic competitor."
A New Twist to U.S-China Ties?
The appointment, which will take effect June 1, comes at an interesting moment in the evolution of Sino-U.S. ties under Bush, who came into office with a significantly harsher view of Beijing than his predecessor, President Bill Clinton. An early test came in the spring of 2001, after a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet that destroyed the latter and forced the U.S. plane to land on Hainan Island, where its crew was detained for several weeks. The incident turned out to be an early indication of the profound split within the administration between right-wing hawks centered in the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose successful negotiation of the crew's return eventually defused a crisis that was avidly stoked by neoconservatives, especially Kristol and Kagan, whose Weekly Standard magazine generally reflects the views of the administration's hawks.
Bush himself appeared to mellow on China after the crisis and a subsequent meeting with then-president Jiang Zemin, a process that was furthered after Sep. 11 when Washington actively sought Beijing's cooperation in the "war on terrorism." But despite the détente, Rumsfeld, presumably with Cheney's backing, held up resumption of military-to-military ties between the United States and China that were cut off for more than one year during the crisis.
In addition, the Pentagon has been trying to persuade a reluctant Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province, to buy a slew of weaponry, including destroyers, submarines, and aircraft, which the administration approved for sale to the island almost two years ago. According to the May 9 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Washington is now offering Taiwan its most advanced anti-missile system, the Patriot-3, a sale that, if consummated, is almost certain to result in a Chinese protest.
The Pentagon has also been eagerly courting the Indian military over the past year in what one recently leaked document revealed by Jane's Foreign Report depicted China as "the most significant threat to both (the U.S. and India)," and called for Delhi to become a "vital component of U.S. strategy" vis-a-vis China, particularly now that Washington is reassessing its military alliances with Japan and South Korea.
A Significant Appointment
In this context, Friedberg's appointment gains significance. In his writings over several years, Friedberg has depicted China as a "strategic competitor" to the United States that will almost inevitably challenge Washington's own political and military pre-eminence in the region. In a 2000 article entitled The Struggle for Mastery in Asia, in the leading neoconservative monthly Commentary, Friedberg wrote, "over the course of the next several decades there is a good chance that the United States will find itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical rivalry with the People's Republic of China (PRC)." While such a situation is not completely inevitable, he says, it is "quite likely." "The combination of growing Chinese power, China's effort to expand its influence, and the unwillingness of the United States to entirely give way before it are the necessary preconditions of a 'struggle for mastery'," he goes on, adding that actual military confrontation could be either slow to develop or could happen as a result of "single catalytic event, such as a showdown over Taiwan."
One of the major problems that U.S. policymakers will face is balancing the interests of "powerful business lobbies"--which Friedberg calls "pro-PRC lobbying groups"--in the United States, which are determined to expand access to China's market and labor force, against strategic concerns caused by Beijing's desire to expand its influence in the region. He also expresses concern that China's growing economic power in Asia will enable it to exert influence on the region's governments as part of its "strategic competition."
Moreover, writes Friedberg, China "will be a very different kind of strategic competitor from the Soviet Union," given its size, dynamism, and relative openness, all of which could work against Washington's ability to contain it in the coming years. "The thrust of what he writes is the inevitability of confrontation with the U.S. or of an attempt to displace the U.S. in Asia," says one former senior State Department Asia specialist. "The problem with this is his automatic presumption of a clash rather than a more careful assumption that confrontation may not be inevitable."
Indeed, Friedberg's assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both engagement and containment--or "congagement"--toward China. In a published reply to Friedberg's Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption "that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no means inevitable," Khalilzad said, arguing that it was also possible that the relationship would evolve into "mutual accommodation and partnership," particularly if Beijing made democratic reforms.
But Friedberg thinks this unlikely. "Regimes in transition from strict authoritarianism to greater political openness," he replied, "have historically been prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism." While Washington should continue to foster trade and investment--though not in key strategic areas--the priority, he wrote, should be placed on "serious, sustained, and unchecked efforts to strengthen our alliances, improve our military capabilities, and maintain a balance of power in Asia that is favorable to our interests. Engagement, yes; but from a position of strength."
END
As thorny as things are going to be with the North Koreans and the Chinese, Bush may soon want to turn in that direction because Iraq and Afghanistan are rappedly turning into real trouble. Remember how Rummy and the right-wing press chortled when people smarter than me warned that this war might turn out to be similar to the sucking bog that trapped this country in south East Asia a generation ago, well I don’t think I’ll take back those sentiments just yet. Here’s James Pinkerton, no liberal belly-acher I assure you in the LA Times with his take on the new, free Iraq. Bare in mind that one of the reasons I opposed this war was that the chances of it ending well were almost nil. Two months ago I noted that our not-in-doubt victory would leave us in difficult position, running a lawless country where the people don’t really like or trust us, or worse installing a puppet and running away. My bet was on Bush declaring victory and running. I suppose there is a worse alternative; we could stay but not really commit and thus remain sitting targets in a new Gaza strip the size of California. We’ll see.
May 14, 2003
COMMENTARY
Victory in Iraq Shows Signs of Unraveling
By James P. Pinkerton, James P. Pinkerton is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Is President Bush's victory in Iraq coming undone like a cheap cowboy boot? Let's look at some of the unraveling stitches.
First, there's the situation on the ground in Iraq. After a series of attacks on GIs, the American "peacekeepers" adopted the same modus operandi they used in Bosnia: Forces have been under orders to travel as little as possible. It's especially critical to avoid casualties now, as body bags might upstage the administration's declare-victory-and-let's-cut-taxes blitz. Of course, the problem is that not much policing — let alone nation-building — gets done.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. shuffles the bureaucratic players into their various boxes at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Shiites are mobilizing. The multiple factions of Shiite Islam don't agree on much, except that the United States should leave. In the past, colonialists kept the Shiites under control through a divide-and-conquer strategy. But for the U.S. to be so Machiavellian, it will need Americans who speak Arabic, and those are in short supply in Baghdad.
Yet in the Muslim world, to ignore a problem is not to make it go away. The Times reported Tuesday that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in despair over his inability to control provincial warlords, is considering asking Washington to crush his rivals. "We need to take serious steps or this government is doomed to fail," said one Karzai aide. During a year and a half of U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Americans have never stopped operations against the Taliban, but it would be a huge escalation if Americans started fighting Afghans on behalf of "our" Afghans.
Second, there's the mysterious matter of the weapons of mass destruction. A headline in USA Today said it all: "U.S. begins to downplay hunt for banned weapons." The article notes the "before" and "after" quotes of top Bush people. Before the war: chapter-and-verse specifics about the location of Saddam Hussein's WMDs. After: vague calls for patience.
Third, there's the rest of the terror-ridden region. Another Times headline Tuesday read, "Arabs Feel Let Down by Powell: Disappointment rises over U.S. failure to get Israel to accept key elements of 'road map.' " Washington may largely be ignoring this because Mideast Arabs don't vote in the U.S., but other democracies are paying attention as the Israelis and Palestinians pick each other off by ones and twos; in Britain, Clare Short, a prominent Cabinet minister, resigned, denouncing Tony Blair's foreign policy. And when we get around to letting the Iraqis vote, they might hold our failure to help the Palestinians against us — and our troops.
The recent terror bombing in Saudi Arabia will only accelerate the decline of American influence there. The U.S. had already announced a withdrawal of troops from the kingdom; now, a similar exodus of American civilians is likely. So what will happen when Saudi Arabia, home to a quarter of the world's oil, as well as the spiritual capitals of Islam, is let adrift in the shifting sands of Islamopolitics? Also, how 'bout that truck bombing in Chechnya, not so far north of Iraq? The Russians have been trying to subdue the Muslim Chechens for more than two centuries, and they still don't have the hang of it.
Fourth, on the home front, the web spun by the Bush administration is being unwoven. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, accuses the White House of a "cover-up" over 9/11.
To be sure, Graham is running for president, but wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins are on the Pulitzer trail. And though it's impossible for anyone not living in France to imagine that the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, it's not hard to imagine that a Bushie or two missed a clue. Moral clarity may be admired, but intelligence myopia that perhaps failed to prevent the deaths of thousands will not be easily excused.
It's likely that these stitches won't unravel completely until after the 2004 election. And that's good news for Bush.
END
Here’s the rub. I cordially hate this administration, in a pure and visceral way I loath what these people are doing to my country, but while I am terrified by the consequences of their failure, in some sense I have to hope that they don’t fail completely, because the stakes are so high. Bush cut the Gordean Knot of Saddam and at some levels that’s a good thing, no argument. But he did it the way a drunken frat boy busts open a piñata full of jello shooters. Sure ublce Dicks’s got Louie Louie cranked up on the stereo and Top Gun is playing air guitar in his flight suit, but things get messy and quick, and frat boys like George never do that stuff at their houses, it’s always someone else who has to clean up after the kegger. This is awful because I must admit that when I see the way these idiots are trashing the international community and our long term economic future, part of me feels vindicated and I hope they keep going until even the corporate media can’t hide what they’ve done… but what a mess. Here’s another piece from the LA Times.
Saboteurs Undermining Efforts in Iraq, U.S. Says
By Mark Fineman, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD -- From attacking American soldiers to sabotaging Iraq's power grid, well-armed remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime are waging a campaign that is stalling the United States' reconstruction efforts and undermining popular support for its presence in Iraq, senior U.S. civilian and military officials here say.
"There are still regime elements out there that are actively, aggressively seeking to impede, discredit or disrupt coalition operations," Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said Wednesday. "They destroy infrastructure repairs made by the coalition and the Iraqis."
So effective is the campaign that McKiernan signaled that it may prolong the U.S. military presence here. "They are committed to a long fight that will complicate the mission of the coalition," he said. "We will stay until a secure environment is achieved."
Although McKiernan gave no specifics on the campaign, senior U.S. advisors and mid-level military commanders in recent days have likened it to guerrilla warfare and said the nation's power grid is a key battleground.
Restoring electricity to Iraq is crucial to U.S. efforts to win the peace. Iraqi and American engineers are working alongside contractors from San Francisco-based Bechtel Group to repair the grid, but officials say they have been plagued by sabotage, attacks and thefts by hard-line members of Hussein's Baath Party.
In the last two weeks, officials said, saboteurs have shot out key insulators and power lines using AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, looted critical parts from power plants and relay stations, stolen more than 40 cars from the national Electricity Commission, carjacked one of its commissioners at gunpoint and staged night looting raids on construction sites for 26 new transmission towers needed to restore the backbone of Iraq's power grid.
The lack of full electrical service is the single-biggest cause of delays in the effort to rebuild the oil-rich country and win the public's confidence, say U.S. officials and a broad sampling of Iraqis.
Hours-long blackouts have encouraged a crime wave that is plaguing the capital. The crippled grid also is to blame for the maddening, mile-long lines to buy gasoline.
Most of the nation's power plants run on fuel oil or diesel, which are byproducts of making gasoline. The oil refineries can produce only limited quantities of gasoline now because their pipelines and storage tanks are full and there's nowhere to put fuel oil and diesel that is being made but not used.
"They want to keep the chaos going. It's a way to leverage and retake power," said Jim Lanier, the U.S. Agency for International Development official in charge of Iraq's power sector, in blaming Baathist saboteurs for delaying repairs. "Their strategy is, 'Let's keep the coalition crippled.' They know what they're doing."
McKiernan said it isn't clear whether the resistance is centrally organized but that it includes "Baathist hard-liners, perhaps [secret police], perhaps Fedayeen." The Fedayeen Saddam was a black-uniformed militia loyal to Hussein.
"It's like an insurgency," said Col. David Perkins, who commands the U.S. Army brigade that took Baghdad more than a month ago and has been trying to hunt down the regime's remnants.
"The process of de-Baathification of the members of the party who want this [reconstruction] to fail is one of the most critical things we can do," Perkins said. "It's a huge task, validating who's who. We're trying to stand back up a country. We're trying to build goodwill with a country we just invaded and killed a lot of their people."
Perkins and other commanders have teamed up with Iraqis who worked within the former regime to track down not only the 55 ex-officials on the United States' most-wanted "black list" but also more than 3,000 others on a "gray list."
Two Iraqis who have helped capture some of the most-wanted independently told The Times that members of Hussein's intelligence agencies and other Baathists are regrouping and staging attacks, from armed robberies and rapes to the raids on the power system. Scores of Iraqis interviewed in Baghdad in the last two weeks say the intelligence agents and party leaders who terrorized them for years remain in their houses and move about the city, heavily armed, with impunity.
'Hateful People'
Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who has led the overall Iraq war effort, has outlawed the Baath Party, and senior U.S. civilian advisors shepherding in a new government are requiring candidates for key jobs to resign from the party and renounce it.
Educated middle-class Iraqis say purging the Baathists is essential to America's image.
"We thought that when the Americans came, all of the Baathists would be arrested," said Sajda Nasser, a teacher at Baghdad's Secondary School for Girls. "They are hateful people and they are still among us, terrorizing our neighborhoods and streets. The other day, I saw the Baathists stealing weapons from the National Security College. We are all still afraid."
Although McKiernan characterized the threat from Baathist holdouts as the most serious law enforcement issue facing coalition forces, he acknowledged that basic street crime also is a major problem. The U.S. intends to have 4,000 military police patrolling the city with Iraqi police by June 1, he said.
In the meantime, the lawlessness has kept out many of the U.S. contractors that the development agency, known as USAID, hired to do about $1 billion in civilian reconstruction work. The agency's contracts require "a permissive environment" before the agency will let them into the country, and areas such as Baghdad remain largely off-limits.
The result is a vicious cycle of instability. "It's not going to get any more permissive than it is now until we get some of those projects up and running," Perkins said.
USAID has waived the "permissive environment" requirement for such urgent work as recreating the power grid. Bechtel, which won a contract worth at least $680 million to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure to prewar levels, sent a small team of engineers to Baghdad eight days ago to join the effort.
Working under a separate grants program, the development agency also has committed more than $10 million to small emergency reconstruction projects nationwide, largely using Iraqi contractors.
A small agency team launched a garbage collection and sewer-repair project Wednesday in the Baghdad slum formerly known as Saddam City. It is paying Iraqi companies to make repairs to looted and fire-gutted ministry buildings. And it rushed supplies to a dam in Mosul to keep it from shutting down and risking a breach.
"Basically, it's a Band-Aid," said Fritz Weden, who is running the team from a room in the former Hussein palace that now houses the Pentagon agency set up to rebuild Iraq.
"It's all about the provision of basic needs and services," he said. "If the Iraqi people don't feel like these are being restored in a timely fashion, they're going to be that much more restless."
Baghdad's most basic need at the moment is electricity. The capital is subject to blackouts and is getting only about half the power it had before the war.
"We have always considered the United States a superpower capable of anything and we expected them to get the power back on right away," Aneeba Jabar, director of a local orphanage, said. "But it's been more than a month now, and still we're in darkness most of the night."
Lanier, a retired Texas utilities engineer, said it wasn't clear that coalition military action was to blame for knocking out the country's power grid.
"Towers were damaged, destroyed or collapsed during the war," he said. "There was no targeting by the coalition, but whether it was collateral damage or sabotage, we just don't know."
Baghdad was without power when Perkins' 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division captured Hussein's main palaces and other seats of power in April.
Army engineers working with Iraqi Electricity Commission technicians restored partial power to the city within days. Army Corps of Engineers assessment teams fanned out across the country and identified the key towers and relay stations that had to be repaired to restore the national grid.
British engineers in Basra repaired the nation's southern grid in a matter of weeks. Last weekend, the city had 24-hour-a-day electricity for the first time in 12 years, after an era under U.N. sanctions during which the regime took power from the south to ensure round-the-clock electricity in the capital.
But because the national grid remains down, none of Basra's power can be shared with Baghdad until 26 critical transmission towers scattered throughout the country, part of a nationwide network of 6,000, are restored.
40 Cars Lost
Peter Gibson, an Army Corps of Engineers civilian who is serving as senior U.S. advisor to Iraq's Electricity Commission, described strategic theft and vandalism as "one of our most serious problems."
"The Iraqis and our contractors are afraid of leaving their equipment out there for fear it will be looted," he said. "We've lost 40 cars in the last two weeks. We've had people shot. It's all coordinated and designed to slow us down.
"Some of it is little stuff," Gibson said. "People will lasso a transformer on a pole and pull it down just to get the copper out of it and sell it. But the worst of it is organized and targeted."
Gibson and Lanier said they hoped to restore full power to the capital in two weeks. "By June 1, we should have the system tied back together," Gibson said, "depending on the vandalism."
McKiernan said at a Wednesday news conference at Baghdad's convention center that the coalition is importing more than 1.5 million gallons of gasoline to Baghdad to at least ease the fuel shortages.
But, in a sign of the times, as he answered a question about the long lines of motorists waiting to buy gasoline, the power failed in the center and everything went black.
END
I wish the people of Iraq the vest and I’m very glad that Saddam is gone, even if Gush doesn’t seem to know where, but for God’s sake, this administration doesn’t seem to have had a clue as to what they’d do after they won and took their photo ops.
Remember Afghanistan, the last time the US government forgot about it, that would be Bush 41 in case you’re keeping score, we ended up with Osama and Al Qaeda, well junior seems to be making the same mistake, and to what end. I know when I use words like Vietnam, or criminal or fascist some people just turn off, but hey if the shoe fits… In this case I’ll refrain from using the word Vietnam and instead I’ll just use the country’s real name… we’re creating another Afghanistan, in Afghanistan! I wonder if president Karzai will get an invite to the 2004 inauguration, I wonder if he’ll still be alive.
From the Toronto Globe
How not to run a country
By PAUL KNOX
Hamid Karzai seemed like the perfect leader to head the transitional government of Afghanistan. He was well-educated and media-friendly, with family and extensive experience in the United States. He was a member of a key tribe of the country's Pashtun-speaking majority. He was duly installed as president in December of 2001, and began the job of constructing a post-Taliban nation.
Mr. Karzai is now in deep trouble. The post-Taliban era is on hold because the Taliban, apparently including their one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, are still around. Taliban guerrillas killed more than 30 Afghan soldiers and a Red Cross worker last month, and Mr. Karzai appealed to neighbouring Pakistan to crack down on cross-border marauding.
The Afghan President's so-called allies are at least as worrisome as his enemies. Warlords who helped U.S. forces oust the Taliban regime were rewarded with control over vast tracts of territory. They have their own armies and collect their own taxes, which Mr. Karzai has sought in vain to have remitted to the central government. In Herat province, on the Iranian border, governor Ismail Khan has reimposed Taliban-style restrictions on women, including -- according to a recent Newsweek account -- "forced virginity checks." In Kandahar, governor Gul Agha Shirzai is winning notoriety for his corrupt, eccentric ways.
Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women's resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women's affairs minister. They travelled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush's post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law.
When The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition. She now heads Afghanistan's Independent Commission on Human Rights. In March, she attended the formal opening of a branch of the commission in Herat, and a local news agency reported that Mr. Khan's security forces beat up a radio reporter as the ceremony took place.
That was part of a pattern of attacks on journalists instigated by warlords and Mr. Karzai's intelligence agents, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said this month. The group noted that journalists have been threatened by local commanders with whom U.S. military forces continue to work.
There has been no accounting for the reported atrocities of late 2001. Witnesses have said hundreds of accused Taliban prisoners captured by the forces of northern warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum suffocated in shipping containers and were buried in mass graves. Others fingered by Gen. Dostum were among those who wound up in jail in Guantanamo Bay. Unless someone has too many nightmares and decides to tell us what really happened, we'll probably never find out the truth.
People who travel to Afghanistan, meanwhile, return with tales of a country broken in pieces, with few of the pieces under Mr. Karzai's control. Mr. Bush held out the promise of a brighter future in Afghanistan as a serendipitous byproduct of America's post-9/11 pursuit of self-defence. But for many Afghans, especially outside Kabul, it remains little more than a promise.
U.S. officials are talking about beefing up America's presence in Afghanistan once again. They are even using the dreaded word "nation-building." But according to Marc Kaufman of The Washington Post, they can't decide whether to pour money into building a 70,000-strong army or pay the warlords to help them hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants -- let alone invest in aid that would directly help civilians.
Iraq won't be a replay of Afghanistan; they are very different countries. But Mr. Karzai's wretched experience poses fresh questions about U.S. commitment and staying power. You hear a lot of talk from Washington hawks these days about the virtues of benign imperialism, and from their enemies about Mr. Bush's supposed sinister plans for world domination. Yet what's happening in Afghanistan seems neither benign nor coherent.
It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush's idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn.
So the president of South Korea was in town to see president top gun, and he sounded so rational and calm and you almost thought maybe this whole thing in north east Asia can sorted out through negotiations and international cooperation and then you remember that the North Koreans are just plain crazy and the Bush mob’s propensity to gamble makes Bill “sporting life’ Bennet look like a choir boy. Here’s John Gershman from The Project Against the Present Danger with a very smart assessment of what passes for our new north Asia policy.
What Next for Pax Americana?
By John Gershman | May 12, 2003
Project Against the Present Danger
With the occupation of Iraq firmly underway, and despite the uncertainties on the ground and within the occupying administration, some neoconservative analysts are already looking ahead--and not just to Syria or Iran or North Korea. "The real question now is how the United States can leverage its victory in Iraq to uphold, expand, and institutionalize the Pax Americana," says Thomas Donnelly in a recent issue of the American Enterprise Institute's National Security Outlook. Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI and served as the deputy executive director at the Project for the New American Century from 1999-2002.
Donnelly's piece focuses on shaping the overall framework guiding the Bush doctrine and the practical challenges facing the institutionalization of unipolarity, and recognizes, unlike some of the less nuanced advocates of unilateralism, the importance of multilateral institutions for managing empire. Two key developments include efforts to refocus on China and soft-pedaling the unilateralist nature of the exercise of U.S. imperial power.
Back to China?
Donnelly encapsulates what he sees as the Bush doctrine in practice:
In a nutshell, the practical application of the Bush Doctrine amounts to "rolling back" radical Islamism while "containing" the People's Republic of China, that is, hedging against its rise to great-power status. A corollary is to prevent strategic cooperation, formally or de facto, between either terror states or terrorist groups in the Islamic world and Beijing.
This description of Bush administration practice draws upon Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington's suggestion of a Confucian-Islamic connection that could emerge as a result of the "Clash of Civilizations." The recent appointment of Aaron Friedberg, a well-known neoconservative hawk on China, to Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, indicates that there remains ongoing positioning to insure that the rapprochement between the U.S. and China since the September 11th attacks does not displace the view of China as a strategic competitor, which had animated much of the neoconservative wing of the administration prior to 9/11.
Donnelly doesn't seem to share the same hysteria over China as some of his ideological fellow travelers, noting that "While it is true that China has the potential to become the canonical 'global peer' of the United States, and already possess the ability to complicate American strategy in many places, the global 'correlation of forces' seems very heavily in our favor." This frame suggests that there will be ongoing tension within the administration and the think tanks that house neoconservative ideologues over the scope and severity of the "China threat."
Multilateralism in the Service of Empire
At the same time, there appears to be a growing recognition that the simple celebration of unilateralism is both bad public relations and bad policy. As Donnelly notes, "It is difficult to imagine how the United States can maintain global leadership without running the risks of 'imperial overstretch' unless it forges a new set of international institutions, or at very least, radically reforms the current ones. Even a sole superpower needs strategic partners."
While citing liberal internationalist John Ikenberry approvingly, Donnelly's vision of multilateralism is all about facilitating U.S. imperial rule and has nothing much to do with international law. Furthermore, he shows that the neoconservatives are more "radical" than conservative--for the agenda Donnelly outlines is an agenda of institutional transformation, not one oriented at protecting the status quo, other than the position of the U.S. as an unchallenged superpower.
Donnelly argues that the post-World War II experience of creating NATO and the UN offers lessons for the present, but that neither the UN nor NATO in their current forms is suited for achieving U.S. policy objectives. Both institutions are constrained by their origins as defensive institutions established to promote order and stability against a revolutionary threat from communism. In contrast, he argues, institutionalizing Pax Americana requires organizations willing to promote instability (i.e., liberty) where necessary. [Note that it is liberty and not democracy that is the goal.]
His outline for a reformed United Nations--or a successor organization--would value liberty more than stability or state sovereignty and would dedicate itself to helping repressed peoples secure their individual political rights rather than tolerating repressive regimes. This form of cosmopolitanism and internationalism is a distinct departure from traditional conservative ideals of realpolitik or the isolationist view of Pat Buchanan.
On the military front, Donnelly's new NATO would be more agile and flexible and be better able to provide forces for a variety of new missions rather than simply as a defensive coalition. Holding out more hope for a reformed NATO than a reformed UN he notes that "It is the NATO architecture that allows willing participants in U.S.-led operations to 'plug and play'." This framework would represent the means of institutionalizing the "coalition of the willing" to support and facilitate U.S.-led military operations where it deemed them necessary, creating the institutional infrastructure for the doctrine of preventive war.
The challenge for a truly global Pax Americana, and one concerned about China in particular, is to extend close U.S. military ties outside of Europe with a major focus on strengthening the multilateral security architecture of Asia. He argues that such arrangements would not need to be as "formal a structure as the Atlantic alliance … but it could provide the practical and training basis for the wide range of coalition operations that might be necessary in the coming decades."
Donnelly also makes explicit his view of the key supporting players in this drama of institutionalization, of an empire that increasingly dares to speak its name: Great Britain, "new Europe," India, and the wealthy traditional allies in East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. Latin America and Africa are absent from the program.
Whatever one thinks of the vision of Donnelly and other neocons have outlined, one thing is clear. The gauntlet has been thrown. The George W. Bush administration will not be accused of not being able to deal with "that vision thing."
For more see:
What's Next? Preserving American Primacy, Institutionalizing Unipolarity
By Thomas Donnelly, April 22, 2003
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.16999,filter./pub_detail.asp
END
Keep an eye out on China, although I think Cuba may be in the sights as well. What a gift that would be to the ex-pats in Miami who helped Jeb and fearless leader so much in the last elelctions.
China Hawk Settles in Neocons' Nest
By John Feffer | May 12, 2003
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
Foreign Policy In Focus
Neoconservative hawks have scored a new victory in the administration of President George W. Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security adviser and director of policy planning on Cheney's high-powered foreign policy staff headed by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the administration. Libby also served as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, a House Select Committee that issued a report in 1999 accusing China of large-scale espionage to advance its nuclear weapons program and was soundly criticized by many China scholars for its factual errors, unsupported allegations, and shoddy analysis.
Both Friedberg and Libby, as well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and 21 other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for the adoption of a "'Reaganite' policy of military strength and moral clarity." Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the "war on terrorism" to be directed against Iraq and other anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC cofounders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also included chapters by other leading neoconservative hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey.
The significance of his appointment lies both with Cheney's and Libby's influence in foreign policymaking and the fact that Friedberg will be the only recognized China expert in such a senior position. "There really haven't been top people under Bush who knew much about China," says John Gershman, an Asia specialist at New York University's Wagner School and the codirector of the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank. "He's the first one." But according to Gershman, Friedberg "fits clearly into the group that has been dominant in the administration" since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. "He's a China-threat person without being hysterical about it," Gershman continues. "But his appointment is a clear sign that the cooperation that has emerged between the U.S. and China on the war on terrorism and North Korea is entirely tactical, and that Cheney is still inclined to see China as a strategic competitor."
A New Twist to U.S-China Ties?
The appointment, which will take effect June 1, comes at an interesting moment in the evolution of Sino-U.S. ties under Bush, who came into office with a significantly harsher view of Beijing than his predecessor, President Bill Clinton. An early test came in the spring of 2001, after a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet that destroyed the latter and forced the U.S. plane to land on Hainan Island, where its crew was detained for several weeks. The incident turned out to be an early indication of the profound split within the administration between right-wing hawks centered in the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose successful negotiation of the crew's return eventually defused a crisis that was avidly stoked by neoconservatives, especially Kristol and Kagan, whose Weekly Standard magazine generally reflects the views of the administration's hawks.
Bush himself appeared to mellow on China after the crisis and a subsequent meeting with then-president Jiang Zemin, a process that was furthered after Sep. 11 when Washington actively sought Beijing's cooperation in the "war on terrorism." But despite the détente, Rumsfeld, presumably with Cheney's backing, held up resumption of military-to-military ties between the United States and China that were cut off for more than one year during the crisis.
In addition, the Pentagon has been trying to persuade a reluctant Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province, to buy a slew of weaponry, including destroyers, submarines, and aircraft, which the administration approved for sale to the island almost two years ago. According to the May 9 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Washington is now offering Taiwan its most advanced anti-missile system, the Patriot-3, a sale that, if consummated, is almost certain to result in a Chinese protest.
The Pentagon has also been eagerly courting the Indian military over the past year in what one recently leaked document revealed by Jane's Foreign Report depicted China as "the most significant threat to both (the U.S. and India)," and called for Delhi to become a "vital component of U.S. strategy" vis-a-vis China, particularly now that Washington is reassessing its military alliances with Japan and South Korea.
A Significant Appointment
In this context, Friedberg's appointment gains significance. In his writings over several years, Friedberg has depicted China as a "strategic competitor" to the United States that will almost inevitably challenge Washington's own political and military pre-eminence in the region. In a 2000 article entitled The Struggle for Mastery in Asia, in the leading neoconservative monthly Commentary, Friedberg wrote, "over the course of the next several decades there is a good chance that the United States will find itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical rivalry with the People's Republic of China (PRC)." While such a situation is not completely inevitable, he says, it is "quite likely." "The combination of growing Chinese power, China's effort to expand its influence, and the unwillingness of the United States to entirely give way before it are the necessary preconditions of a 'struggle for mastery'," he goes on, adding that actual military confrontation could be either slow to develop or could happen as a result of "single catalytic event, such as a showdown over Taiwan."
One of the major problems that U.S. policymakers will face is balancing the interests of "powerful business lobbies"--which Friedberg calls "pro-PRC lobbying groups"--in the United States, which are determined to expand access to China's market and labor force, against strategic concerns caused by Beijing's desire to expand its influence in the region. He also expresses concern that China's growing economic power in Asia will enable it to exert influence on the region's governments as part of its "strategic competition."
Moreover, writes Friedberg, China "will be a very different kind of strategic competitor from the Soviet Union," given its size, dynamism, and relative openness, all of which could work against Washington's ability to contain it in the coming years. "The thrust of what he writes is the inevitability of confrontation with the U.S. or of an attempt to displace the U.S. in Asia," says one former senior State Department Asia specialist. "The problem with this is his automatic presumption of a clash rather than a more careful assumption that confrontation may not be inevitable."
Indeed, Friedberg's assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both engagement and containment--or "congagement"--toward China. In a published reply to Friedberg's Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption "that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no means inevitable," Khalilzad said, arguing that it was also possible that the relationship would evolve into "mutual accommodation and partnership," particularly if Beijing made democratic reforms.
But Friedberg thinks this unlikely. "Regimes in transition from strict authoritarianism to greater political openness," he replied, "have historically been prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism." While Washington should continue to foster trade and investment--though not in key strategic areas--the priority, he wrote, should be placed on "serious, sustained, and unchecked efforts to strengthen our alliances, improve our military capabilities, and maintain a balance of power in Asia that is favorable to our interests. Engagement, yes; but from a position of strength."
END
As thorny as things are going to be with the North Koreans and the Chinese, Bush may soon want to turn in that direction because Iraq and Afghanistan are rappedly turning into real trouble. Remember how Rummy and the right-wing press chortled when people smarter than me warned that this war might turn out to be similar to the sucking bog that trapped this country in south East Asia a generation ago, well I don’t think I’ll take back those sentiments just yet. Here’s James Pinkerton, no liberal belly-acher I assure you in the LA Times with his take on the new, free Iraq. Bare in mind that one of the reasons I opposed this war was that the chances of it ending well were almost nil. Two months ago I noted that our not-in-doubt victory would leave us in difficult position, running a lawless country where the people don’t really like or trust us, or worse installing a puppet and running away. My bet was on Bush declaring victory and running. I suppose there is a worse alternative; we could stay but not really commit and thus remain sitting targets in a new Gaza strip the size of California. We’ll see.
May 14, 2003
COMMENTARY
Victory in Iraq Shows Signs of Unraveling
By James P. Pinkerton, James P. Pinkerton is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Is President Bush's victory in Iraq coming undone like a cheap cowboy boot? Let's look at some of the unraveling stitches.
First, there's the situation on the ground in Iraq. After a series of attacks on GIs, the American "peacekeepers" adopted the same modus operandi they used in Bosnia: Forces have been under orders to travel as little as possible. It's especially critical to avoid casualties now, as body bags might upstage the administration's declare-victory-and-let's-cut-taxes blitz. Of course, the problem is that not much policing — let alone nation-building — gets done.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. shuffles the bureaucratic players into their various boxes at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Shiites are mobilizing. The multiple factions of Shiite Islam don't agree on much, except that the United States should leave. In the past, colonialists kept the Shiites under control through a divide-and-conquer strategy. But for the U.S. to be so Machiavellian, it will need Americans who speak Arabic, and those are in short supply in Baghdad.
Yet in the Muslim world, to ignore a problem is not to make it go away. The Times reported Tuesday that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in despair over his inability to control provincial warlords, is considering asking Washington to crush his rivals. "We need to take serious steps or this government is doomed to fail," said one Karzai aide. During a year and a half of U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Americans have never stopped operations against the Taliban, but it would be a huge escalation if Americans started fighting Afghans on behalf of "our" Afghans.
Second, there's the mysterious matter of the weapons of mass destruction. A headline in USA Today said it all: "U.S. begins to downplay hunt for banned weapons." The article notes the "before" and "after" quotes of top Bush people. Before the war: chapter-and-verse specifics about the location of Saddam Hussein's WMDs. After: vague calls for patience.
Third, there's the rest of the terror-ridden region. Another Times headline Tuesday read, "Arabs Feel Let Down by Powell: Disappointment rises over U.S. failure to get Israel to accept key elements of 'road map.' " Washington may largely be ignoring this because Mideast Arabs don't vote in the U.S., but other democracies are paying attention as the Israelis and Palestinians pick each other off by ones and twos; in Britain, Clare Short, a prominent Cabinet minister, resigned, denouncing Tony Blair's foreign policy. And when we get around to letting the Iraqis vote, they might hold our failure to help the Palestinians against us — and our troops.
The recent terror bombing in Saudi Arabia will only accelerate the decline of American influence there. The U.S. had already announced a withdrawal of troops from the kingdom; now, a similar exodus of American civilians is likely. So what will happen when Saudi Arabia, home to a quarter of the world's oil, as well as the spiritual capitals of Islam, is let adrift in the shifting sands of Islamopolitics? Also, how 'bout that truck bombing in Chechnya, not so far north of Iraq? The Russians have been trying to subdue the Muslim Chechens for more than two centuries, and they still don't have the hang of it.
Fourth, on the home front, the web spun by the Bush administration is being unwoven. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, accuses the White House of a "cover-up" over 9/11.
To be sure, Graham is running for president, but wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins are on the Pulitzer trail. And though it's impossible for anyone not living in France to imagine that the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, it's not hard to imagine that a Bushie or two missed a clue. Moral clarity may be admired, but intelligence myopia that perhaps failed to prevent the deaths of thousands will not be easily excused.
It's likely that these stitches won't unravel completely until after the 2004 election. And that's good news for Bush.
END
Here’s the rub. I cordially hate this administration, in a pure and visceral way I loath what these people are doing to my country, but while I am terrified by the consequences of their failure, in some sense I have to hope that they don’t fail completely, because the stakes are so high. Bush cut the Gordean Knot of Saddam and at some levels that’s a good thing, no argument. But he did it the way a drunken frat boy busts open a piñata full of jello shooters. Sure ublce Dicks’s got Louie Louie cranked up on the stereo and Top Gun is playing air guitar in his flight suit, but things get messy and quick, and frat boys like George never do that stuff at their houses, it’s always someone else who has to clean up after the kegger. This is awful because I must admit that when I see the way these idiots are trashing the international community and our long term economic future, part of me feels vindicated and I hope they keep going until even the corporate media can’t hide what they’ve done… but what a mess. Here’s another piece from the LA Times.
Saboteurs Undermining Efforts in Iraq, U.S. Says
By Mark Fineman, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD -- From attacking American soldiers to sabotaging Iraq's power grid, well-armed remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime are waging a campaign that is stalling the United States' reconstruction efforts and undermining popular support for its presence in Iraq, senior U.S. civilian and military officials here say.
"There are still regime elements out there that are actively, aggressively seeking to impede, discredit or disrupt coalition operations," Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said Wednesday. "They destroy infrastructure repairs made by the coalition and the Iraqis."
So effective is the campaign that McKiernan signaled that it may prolong the U.S. military presence here. "They are committed to a long fight that will complicate the mission of the coalition," he said. "We will stay until a secure environment is achieved."
Although McKiernan gave no specifics on the campaign, senior U.S. advisors and mid-level military commanders in recent days have likened it to guerrilla warfare and said the nation's power grid is a key battleground.
Restoring electricity to Iraq is crucial to U.S. efforts to win the peace. Iraqi and American engineers are working alongside contractors from San Francisco-based Bechtel Group to repair the grid, but officials say they have been plagued by sabotage, attacks and thefts by hard-line members of Hussein's Baath Party.
In the last two weeks, officials said, saboteurs have shot out key insulators and power lines using AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, looted critical parts from power plants and relay stations, stolen more than 40 cars from the national Electricity Commission, carjacked one of its commissioners at gunpoint and staged night looting raids on construction sites for 26 new transmission towers needed to restore the backbone of Iraq's power grid.
The lack of full electrical service is the single-biggest cause of delays in the effort to rebuild the oil-rich country and win the public's confidence, say U.S. officials and a broad sampling of Iraqis.
Hours-long blackouts have encouraged a crime wave that is plaguing the capital. The crippled grid also is to blame for the maddening, mile-long lines to buy gasoline.
Most of the nation's power plants run on fuel oil or diesel, which are byproducts of making gasoline. The oil refineries can produce only limited quantities of gasoline now because their pipelines and storage tanks are full and there's nowhere to put fuel oil and diesel that is being made but not used.
"They want to keep the chaos going. It's a way to leverage and retake power," said Jim Lanier, the U.S. Agency for International Development official in charge of Iraq's power sector, in blaming Baathist saboteurs for delaying repairs. "Their strategy is, 'Let's keep the coalition crippled.' They know what they're doing."
McKiernan said it isn't clear whether the resistance is centrally organized but that it includes "Baathist hard-liners, perhaps [secret police], perhaps Fedayeen." The Fedayeen Saddam was a black-uniformed militia loyal to Hussein.
"It's like an insurgency," said Col. David Perkins, who commands the U.S. Army brigade that took Baghdad more than a month ago and has been trying to hunt down the regime's remnants.
"The process of de-Baathification of the members of the party who want this [reconstruction] to fail is one of the most critical things we can do," Perkins said. "It's a huge task, validating who's who. We're trying to stand back up a country. We're trying to build goodwill with a country we just invaded and killed a lot of their people."
Perkins and other commanders have teamed up with Iraqis who worked within the former regime to track down not only the 55 ex-officials on the United States' most-wanted "black list" but also more than 3,000 others on a "gray list."
Two Iraqis who have helped capture some of the most-wanted independently told The Times that members of Hussein's intelligence agencies and other Baathists are regrouping and staging attacks, from armed robberies and rapes to the raids on the power system. Scores of Iraqis interviewed in Baghdad in the last two weeks say the intelligence agents and party leaders who terrorized them for years remain in their houses and move about the city, heavily armed, with impunity.
'Hateful People'
Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who has led the overall Iraq war effort, has outlawed the Baath Party, and senior U.S. civilian advisors shepherding in a new government are requiring candidates for key jobs to resign from the party and renounce it.
Educated middle-class Iraqis say purging the Baathists is essential to America's image.
"We thought that when the Americans came, all of the Baathists would be arrested," said Sajda Nasser, a teacher at Baghdad's Secondary School for Girls. "They are hateful people and they are still among us, terrorizing our neighborhoods and streets. The other day, I saw the Baathists stealing weapons from the National Security College. We are all still afraid."
Although McKiernan characterized the threat from Baathist holdouts as the most serious law enforcement issue facing coalition forces, he acknowledged that basic street crime also is a major problem. The U.S. intends to have 4,000 military police patrolling the city with Iraqi police by June 1, he said.
In the meantime, the lawlessness has kept out many of the U.S. contractors that the development agency, known as USAID, hired to do about $1 billion in civilian reconstruction work. The agency's contracts require "a permissive environment" before the agency will let them into the country, and areas such as Baghdad remain largely off-limits.
The result is a vicious cycle of instability. "It's not going to get any more permissive than it is now until we get some of those projects up and running," Perkins said.
USAID has waived the "permissive environment" requirement for such urgent work as recreating the power grid. Bechtel, which won a contract worth at least $680 million to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure to prewar levels, sent a small team of engineers to Baghdad eight days ago to join the effort.
Working under a separate grants program, the development agency also has committed more than $10 million to small emergency reconstruction projects nationwide, largely using Iraqi contractors.
A small agency team launched a garbage collection and sewer-repair project Wednesday in the Baghdad slum formerly known as Saddam City. It is paying Iraqi companies to make repairs to looted and fire-gutted ministry buildings. And it rushed supplies to a dam in Mosul to keep it from shutting down and risking a breach.
"Basically, it's a Band-Aid," said Fritz Weden, who is running the team from a room in the former Hussein palace that now houses the Pentagon agency set up to rebuild Iraq.
"It's all about the provision of basic needs and services," he said. "If the Iraqi people don't feel like these are being restored in a timely fashion, they're going to be that much more restless."
Baghdad's most basic need at the moment is electricity. The capital is subject to blackouts and is getting only about half the power it had before the war.
"We have always considered the United States a superpower capable of anything and we expected them to get the power back on right away," Aneeba Jabar, director of a local orphanage, said. "But it's been more than a month now, and still we're in darkness most of the night."
Lanier, a retired Texas utilities engineer, said it wasn't clear that coalition military action was to blame for knocking out the country's power grid.
"Towers were damaged, destroyed or collapsed during the war," he said. "There was no targeting by the coalition, but whether it was collateral damage or sabotage, we just don't know."
Baghdad was without power when Perkins' 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division captured Hussein's main palaces and other seats of power in April.
Army engineers working with Iraqi Electricity Commission technicians restored partial power to the city within days. Army Corps of Engineers assessment teams fanned out across the country and identified the key towers and relay stations that had to be repaired to restore the national grid.
British engineers in Basra repaired the nation's southern grid in a matter of weeks. Last weekend, the city had 24-hour-a-day electricity for the first time in 12 years, after an era under U.N. sanctions during which the regime took power from the south to ensure round-the-clock electricity in the capital.
But because the national grid remains down, none of Basra's power can be shared with Baghdad until 26 critical transmission towers scattered throughout the country, part of a nationwide network of 6,000, are restored.
40 Cars Lost
Peter Gibson, an Army Corps of Engineers civilian who is serving as senior U.S. advisor to Iraq's Electricity Commission, described strategic theft and vandalism as "one of our most serious problems."
"The Iraqis and our contractors are afraid of leaving their equipment out there for fear it will be looted," he said. "We've lost 40 cars in the last two weeks. We've had people shot. It's all coordinated and designed to slow us down.
"Some of it is little stuff," Gibson said. "People will lasso a transformer on a pole and pull it down just to get the copper out of it and sell it. But the worst of it is organized and targeted."
Gibson and Lanier said they hoped to restore full power to the capital in two weeks. "By June 1, we should have the system tied back together," Gibson said, "depending on the vandalism."
McKiernan said at a Wednesday news conference at Baghdad's convention center that the coalition is importing more than 1.5 million gallons of gasoline to Baghdad to at least ease the fuel shortages.
But, in a sign of the times, as he answered a question about the long lines of motorists waiting to buy gasoline, the power failed in the center and everything went black.
END
I wish the people of Iraq the vest and I’m very glad that Saddam is gone, even if Gush doesn’t seem to know where, but for God’s sake, this administration doesn’t seem to have had a clue as to what they’d do after they won and took their photo ops.
Remember Afghanistan, the last time the US government forgot about it, that would be Bush 41 in case you’re keeping score, we ended up with Osama and Al Qaeda, well junior seems to be making the same mistake, and to what end. I know when I use words like Vietnam, or criminal or fascist some people just turn off, but hey if the shoe fits… In this case I’ll refrain from using the word Vietnam and instead I’ll just use the country’s real name… we’re creating another Afghanistan, in Afghanistan! I wonder if president Karzai will get an invite to the 2004 inauguration, I wonder if he’ll still be alive.
From the Toronto Globe
How not to run a country
By PAUL KNOX
Hamid Karzai seemed like the perfect leader to head the transitional government of Afghanistan. He was well-educated and media-friendly, with family and extensive experience in the United States. He was a member of a key tribe of the country's Pashtun-speaking majority. He was duly installed as president in December of 2001, and began the job of constructing a post-Taliban nation.
Mr. Karzai is now in deep trouble. The post-Taliban era is on hold because the Taliban, apparently including their one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, are still around. Taliban guerrillas killed more than 30 Afghan soldiers and a Red Cross worker last month, and Mr. Karzai appealed to neighbouring Pakistan to crack down on cross-border marauding.
The Afghan President's so-called allies are at least as worrisome as his enemies. Warlords who helped U.S. forces oust the Taliban regime were rewarded with control over vast tracts of territory. They have their own armies and collect their own taxes, which Mr. Karzai has sought in vain to have remitted to the central government. In Herat province, on the Iranian border, governor Ismail Khan has reimposed Taliban-style restrictions on women, including -- according to a recent Newsweek account -- "forced virginity checks." In Kandahar, governor Gul Agha Shirzai is winning notoriety for his corrupt, eccentric ways.
Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women's resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women's affairs minister. They travelled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush's post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law.
When The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition. She now heads Afghanistan's Independent Commission on Human Rights. In March, she attended the formal opening of a branch of the commission in Herat, and a local news agency reported that Mr. Khan's security forces beat up a radio reporter as the ceremony took place.
That was part of a pattern of attacks on journalists instigated by warlords and Mr. Karzai's intelligence agents, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said this month. The group noted that journalists have been threatened by local commanders with whom U.S. military forces continue to work.
There has been no accounting for the reported atrocities of late 2001. Witnesses have said hundreds of accused Taliban prisoners captured by the forces of northern warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum suffocated in shipping containers and were buried in mass graves. Others fingered by Gen. Dostum were among those who wound up in jail in Guantanamo Bay. Unless someone has too many nightmares and decides to tell us what really happened, we'll probably never find out the truth.
People who travel to Afghanistan, meanwhile, return with tales of a country broken in pieces, with few of the pieces under Mr. Karzai's control. Mr. Bush held out the promise of a brighter future in Afghanistan as a serendipitous byproduct of America's post-9/11 pursuit of self-defence. But for many Afghans, especially outside Kabul, it remains little more than a promise.
U.S. officials are talking about beefing up America's presence in Afghanistan once again. They are even using the dreaded word "nation-building." But according to Marc Kaufman of The Washington Post, they can't decide whether to pour money into building a 70,000-strong army or pay the warlords to help them hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants -- let alone invest in aid that would directly help civilians.
Iraq won't be a replay of Afghanistan; they are very different countries. But Mr. Karzai's wretched experience poses fresh questions about U.S. commitment and staying power. You hear a lot of talk from Washington hawks these days about the virtues of benign imperialism, and from their enemies about Mr. Bush's supposed sinister plans for world domination. Yet what's happening in Afghanistan seems neither benign nor coherent.
It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush's idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn.
posted by Scott at 5/16/2003 09:32:00 PM
