You knew that the Bush administration blew off the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group and its recommendations. What you didn’t know is just how far they are willing to go to dismiss the Iraq Study Group. In naming Eliot Cohen the new Counselor to the State Department, Condi Rice has empowered one of the harshest critics of the ISG. On December 10, 2006, while we were all still waiting to see Bush’s reaction to the midterms and ISG recommendations, Eliot Cohen penned a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled No Way to Win a War; Iraq Study Group: A fatuous process yielded fatuous results. Cohen urged the dismissal of their recommendations:
The creation of the Iraq Study Group reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely, no way to win it.
So, if the Washington establishment is a spent force, how does Cohen suggest we obtain ‘victory’?
We ‘grab the bureaucracy by the throat’:
What we need in Iraq is not a New Diplomatic Offensive (capitals in the original) so much as energy and competence in fighting the fight. From the outset of the Iraq war much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made.
This inability has come from things as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions, in the apparent belief that generals are interchangeable cogs in a counterinsurgency machine. It has come from an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act–which is why, three years after the insurgency began, we still send soldiers out to risk roadside bomb attacks in overweight Humvees when there are half a dozen commercially available armored vehicles designed to minimize the effects of such blasts. It is why–although the government has declared long before the ISG issued its report that training the Iraqis is Job One–we still embed fewer than a dozen American advisers in an Iraqi battalion when the right number is three to five times that many.
We have not come up to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or to keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commanders of those forces. We have known these things–but we have not done these things.
Glenn Greenwald has more on the history of Eliot Cohen. It isn’t a pretty history.
He’s signed at least six Project for the New American Century (PNAC) manifestos. He was a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (a group mocked in the movie Syriana. He’s on the Council of Academic Advisers to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). And he was on Dick Cheney’s Policy Planning Staff back in 1990. He’s quick to call any criticism of America’s policies towards the Israel-Palestine conflict anti-Semitic.
Here’s how he thinks we should run our empire:
Overwhelming dominance has always invited hostility. U.S. leaders thus must learn the arts of imperial management and diplomacy, exercising power with a bland smile rather than boastful words.
Of course, we can also go back and look at Cohen’s strategic thinking on November 20, 2001. Here it came in a Wall Street Journal column entitled World War IV; Let’s call this conflict what it is:
Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. The U.S. is within range of gaining two important objectives there: smashing al Qaeda (including the elimination of its leadership), and teaching the lesson that governments that shelter such organizations will themselves perish. But what next? Three ideas come to mind.
First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.
Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction. Again, American allies will flinch, and the military may shake its head at the prospect of revisiting the aborted Gulf War victory, but the costs of failing to do so, and the opportunities for success, make it good sense. The Iraqi military is weak, and the consequences of finishing off America’s archenemy in the Arab world would reinforce the awe so badly damaged by a decade of cruise missiles flung at empty buildings.
Third, the U.S. must mobilize in earnest. The Afghan achievement is remarkable–within two months to have radically altered the balance of power there, to have effectively destroyed the Taliban state and smashed part of the al Qaeda–is testimony to what the American military and intelligence communities can do when turned on to a problem. But the Taliban were not the hardest case, and the airplanes dropping bombs on the enemy in Kunduz and Kandahar are in some cases older than their pilots, and suffering for lack of spare parts.
National Interest Online is succinct:
“You’ve done one heck of a job, Eliot”, is clearly the ascendant sentiment within the Bush Administration regarding Eliot A. Cohen, tapped, according to The Washington Post today, by Secretary Rice to become one of her top advisors. Cohen, after all, is long due for administration commendation—in the Brown-Tenet tradition—after having so tirelessly, and on such very noteworthy basis—agitated for the war in Iraq before that inferno began to so voraciously consume U.S. lives, treasure and geopolitical strength.
Meanwhile, Steve Clemons explains this appointment this way:
Rice does not like to do direct battle with the Vice President and views personnel appointments as a way to inoculate herself and her efforts against sabotage from the Cheney team…
When I queried another top-tier political and intellectual personality who works closely with Eliot Cohen, the response I received was that he was surprised Cohen would want the job at this point in the life-span of the Bush administration.
This person also stated that Cohen would probably take over much of the “democratization” and “how to do nation building” portfolios that Krasner was working on as Director of Policy Planning. According to this source, Eliot Cohen has been working on the subject of how to get democratization — the nuts and bolts of the process — right.
The net effect for Condi’s game plan though is that Cohen protecting her rear flank from Cheney’s assaults is probably more important than any thing new he might achieve in another risky R&D effort on nation-building.
Is it January 20th, 2009 yet?
