I’m trying to educate people about why The Establishment is so incredibly resistant to admitting defeat in Iraq and accepting the consequences. Last week, you probably all read Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack’s happy opinion piece about their trip to Iraq. You may have missed that they were accompanied by a much less enthusiastic Anthony Cordesman. While Cordesman did not share O’Hanlon and Pollack’s optimism about the surge, he does have some tough love for those of us that think we should get out of Iraq…come what may.
IN an ideal world, arms sales are hardly the tool the United States would use to win stability and influence. America does not, however, exist in an ideal world, nor in one that it can suddenly reform with good intentions and soft power. Those pressuring Congress to kill the Bush administration’s proposed $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states need to step back into the real world.
America has vital long-term strategic interests in the Middle East. The gulf has well over 60 percent of the world’s proven conventional oil reserves and nearly 40 percent of its natural gas. The global economy, and part of every job in America, is dependent on trying to preserve the stability of the region and the flow of energy exports.
Washington cannot — and should not — try to bring security to the gulf without allies, and Saudi Arabia is the only meaningful military power there that can help deter and contain a steadily more aggressive Iran.
In case you are a little confused by his analysis, he did just say that Saudi Arabia was a ‘meaningful military power’. Of course, it is not. Saudi Arabia has spent hundreds of billions on American military toys (they have more fighter aircraft than the U.K.) but they have no clue how to use them and they have half as many men under arms as Eritrea. Iran’s army is over four times larger on a budget less than a third the size of the House of Saud’s.
Saudi military procurement is an exercise in American corporate welfare, and little else. We do, of course, offer to train Saudi pilots how to fly the planes we sell them, but that turned out to be a little bit of an error…don’t you think?
Cordesman thinks he is offering us grown-up advice. What he is really doing is explaining why America should continue a doomed effort to dominate and dictate to energy-rich Eurasian countries, in spite of our folly in Iraq.
And most Democrats fall for this crap. If they don’t fall for it, they’ve already figured out how to benefit from it. And if all that fails, it turns out that selling all that deadly arsenal to Arab nations will create or preserve jobs in their districts.
I got an email from John Kerry today. He told me:
Here’s the reality this week: Karl Rove is gone but a broken Iraq policy remains.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a party cling so disastrously to a policy that is as wrong as it is unsuccessful.
Kerry should have said, “I’m not sure I’ve seen two parties cling so disastrously to a policy that is wrong as it is unsuccessful.” He should have said that because it would be more honest. The American Establishment wants to dominate and dictate to all the energy-rich countries from Libya to Saudi Arabia to the Emirates and Kuwait, to Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan, to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. That is what the serious foreign policy thinkers in both parties want and their ability to do so is what is threatened by the neo-conservative fiasco in Iraq.
They hyped the threat of terrorism to mobilize the American people for a Eurasian power grab and now they have totally discredited themselves and bankrupted our country both financially and morally.
On top of that, they’ve betrayed our allies who will now be forced to cope with the mess we’ve made.
The Establishment knows that there is no way out and that we’ve overextended our hands. They just don’t want to fess up to the problem and deal with it. Not now…not with an election coming up.
But there is always an election coming up.
Cordesman is just another guy that wants to keep the gravy train going for another Friedman Unit or two. He and his Establishment have led us to disaster and now they think they can tell us what grown up, serious people know has to be done.
I don’t buy any of it. It’s time to throw these bums out and rethink the entire post-Cold War foreign policy approach of this country. It has been a disaster. And we can do better.
going.. going… gone! Booman hits it right out of the park, over the green monster, and it’s OUTTA HERE!!!
It may just turn out that the U.S. (let’s dump the patriotic ‘We’, you know the one at the beginning of the Constitution because both U.S. political organizations have made it clear that it applies to them and not to us) will end up leaving Iraq involuntarily, no matter what the Establishment thinks or doesn’t think. They’ve sunk their teeth into this mess and keep biting harder. But that doesn’t mean that their teeth won’t eventually fall out.
It has also been clear for quite a while that the U.S.’s strategy now is the search for a Saddam clone. That’s what’s behind the arming of Sunni warlords. Maybe the wish isn’t for a Saddam clone who will be as nasty as his predecessor, but still one who can keep things quiet, while hopefully being somewhat accommodating to the Shia. And of course a Saddam clone wouldn’t deserve the name if he didn’t invade Iran.
The people running the U.S. now are infinitely stupid and even more than infinitely mean.
Good find, BooMan, the revival of ‘the Establishment’. Many younger people are probably unfamiliar with the notion and will have to think twice what it means. Lots of older people will of course start foaming at the mouth about the dirty fucking hippies and Ronald Reagan will be resurrected by Newt Gringrich in the first pan-wingnut miracle play.
I am no longer sure that “we can do better.”
How can we do better Boo? It is easy to see how bad the US has done butits the “how can we do better” that Ain’t that easy to explain.
but no Pol right now will say so. To do so will incur the full wrath and strong, powerful opposition of the Saudis and the military-industrial complex. They are still holding at least half the cards. Hillary is walking a tightrope. And Edwards, who tells the truth, is getting the full blast of MSM ridicule, prompted by their oil-mongering stockholders.
Why will we leave? Because we will be thrown out by the Shi’a. It’s only a matter of time. The current sword-rattling against Iran is intended to slow down that tide.
Of course, there’s the possibility that Cheney will actually be allowed to light the fire that destroys peace for generations. I’m not sure the Dem’s even have the balls to stop that.
And in a real world Jimmy Carter would have had time to enact his alternative energy program before peak oil hit us and as a hedge on MidEast instability.
Did you see that now Bush is using our failure in Vietnam to justify our continued presence in Iraq?
Perhaps we should have stayed longer in Nam he’s going to speculate.
I’m really getting 3$%^ing sick of refighting the battles of the sixties. You boys lost as did the McNamara Technocrats. Get over it.
Talk about a disconnect from reality.
pound it home to those miserable “cut-and-run” republicans…
it’s perfectly logical… anyone and anything, republican or democrat, that might serve as an obstacle to gaining unfettered power and keeping staggering rivers of cash flowing will be a target… bushco has already proven beyond anybody’s ability to dispute that it awards its support and loyalty conditionally, that is to say only on the basis of UNCONDITIONAL support and loyalty toward bushco… political party, religious affiliation, public standing, credibility, reputation – none of that will shield you from the wrath of bushco should you show one iota of deviation from that unconditionality…
The difference between Vietnam and Iraq:
Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.
lol. that is funny, bob.
boo- i’d complexify it a little. it’s not just arms, it’s finance. that is, the tremendous amounts of money the oil rich oligarchs invest in the us economy. i’ve been told it is 3billion a day, we borrow. not all from oil rich folks, but a lot. the sums in question at least rival, if not exceed, the amounts moving in the arms trade.
further, some of the money that is spent on arms trickles down to key areas of this country. don’t think the republicans forgot to grease their minions. that’s coming to an end now, as they’ve fucked up the economy even for their exurban core, but for a few years that gravy train had a real impact on american electoral politics.
i still choke on the irony of 9/11, and how the republicans have used the media to utterly occlude the facts relating to that day.
Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
The pols are doing what the majority of the US public wants. That is to keep the prices low on raw materials and finished goods entering the US. The public doesn’t want to have to deal with how this gets done, we just want to keep driving our SUV’s.
When asked, the vast majority say we need a “strong military” and many think that we still aren’t spending enough of this sector. In fact militarism amounts to about a half trillion per year. People don’t want to acknowledge that they are being selfish so they are perfectly happy to buy into the popular fictions about bringing democracy to foreign states or preventing terrorism from entering the US. Self deception is a powerful protective mechanism and we are very good at it.
If the wars were going better you wouldn’t be hearing any substantial dissent. Not only don’t people want to pay for their consumerism they don’t even want to have to pay in terms of the lost and damaged lives of our soldiers. We should just get what we want pain free.
There is little sign of this changing voluntarily. At some point the world or mother nature will push back hard enough that the US will be forced to scale back its consumption. Whether this will be a pleasant experience or not will depend upon how long we stay in denial of reality.
I came to the conclusion some time ago that defeat is the only answer, as it was the only answer to Germany’s imperial venture. This is going to be very tough on the troops, needless to say, and my heart goes out to them. There will be no draft, which is the only way the United States can maintain a permanent presence in Iraq. The American people won’t stand for it, and this includes the party of Jenna and not-Jenna as well as the rest of us.
We are just going to have to watch this crap go down the toilet, along with everybody else. The foreign policy elite can hoot and hollar all they want about strategic importance, but unless they can get the American people to support a draft so they can drive their SUV’s at any speed they want, they won’t get it. And if they don’t get it, our effort over there is doomed.
Exactly, this is why everyone serious about stopping the war, should be focusing on antirecrutment efforts. The quicker the cannon fodder dries up the faster the war will end. The politicians in both parties are worthless, even conservative Democrats are becoming disenchanted with them.
Looking forward, this diary is all about Hillary Clinton and the DLC/AIPAC continuation of the Iraq War. Unless Gore gets involved, she is it for the next 8 years and we will still be in Iraq on her retirement. Pelosi did not get booed during her address at AIPAC for suggesting that the US must get out of Iraq for nothing. Hillary will not disappoint them. Democratizing the Middle East will also be her greatest foreign policy folly.
shergald, in some respects I agree with you, but this diary only alludes to Israel twice, and obliquely (see if you can find them), and it most definitely not ‘about’ Israel.
We have not been defeated if the primary goal is military/economic occupation.
The longer we are there, the more justified our presence becomes: hence the Friedman Units. The chaos itself demands that we stay on as occupiers at some significant level. Is abandonment really a policy without guaranteed blowback?
Remember the Pottery Barn Rule? ‘You broke it you bought it’ was not offered as a reason not to go, but rather to provide a method to justify staying on long term. We broke it, we’ve bought it. It’s ours.
Is that defeat? As ugly and unpopular as it is, we’ve acquired our 51st (52nd?) state. This is what Bush figures he’ll be remember for.
I actually understand the calculus behind further weaponizing Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Israel and others in the region. BushCo has created such a catastrophe in the region that this sort of bribery is almost necessary for the time being because it’s cheaper than having to wage overt war against the Saudis now, something the Neocons couldn’t pull off now regardless of their enthusiasm for it (eventually). Paying them off buys a bit of time to monkey with other geopolitical forces. Yet our problem here in the US is that we have no leaders from any party to follow through with measures that will pro-actively begin to repair the damage done by the Bush/Cheney juggernaut, and restore any sort of balance of power in the Middle East or the greater world at large.
And in the end, it is lunacy, and as long as our own government is run by crazies like Cheney & Co or equivocators from both parties who sanction the overarching myth that we have a right to be in the MidEast preemptively attacking soverign nations and telling them what to do. No matter how clever the tactics might be to keep the whole charade going, it will collapse in chaos and tragedy under the weight of it’s own false premises.
This weaponized strain of “American Exceptionalism”, this sort of aggressive hubris and contempt for others that lies at the heart of the neocon agenda, simply cannot yield positive results because it is fatally flawed from the getgo. For “America to succeed” with such an agenda, America would have to forsake it’s own (already seriously crippled) democracy, and even then the successes would last only as long as the half-life of the typical sound-byte, sort of like a “We have achieved victory over China” proclamation followed an hour later by the total collapse of the global economy and our selfish way of life with it.
So, I would see the promised money to Saudi, et. al. as a good thing if we had leaders of our own who might reasonably follow through on making the most of such bribery to restore a semblance of balance in the region. But, we have no one from either party who displays even a glimmer of such awareness, and it’s not clear that the US even has the capacity to effect such dealings any longer, so deeply has the Bush regime weakened and disgraced the US itself.