Feb-03-2010
Washington Post: Obama's Iraq policy must be focused on more than withdrawal - by Henry Kissinger.
In a 71-minute State of the Union address, President Obama managed no more than 101 perfunctory words about Iraq. Throughout its term, the administration has recoiled from discussing Iraq's geostrategic significance and especially America's relation to it. Yet while Iraq is being exorcised from our debate, its reality is bound to obtrude on our consciousness. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq will not alter the geostrategic importance of the country even as it alters that context. Mesopotamia has been the strategic focal point of the region for millennia. Its resources affect countries far away. The dividing line between the Shiite and the Sunni worlds runs through its center -- indeed, through its capital. Iraq's Kurdish provinces rest uneasily between Turkey and Iran and indigenous adversaries within Iraq. It cannot be in the American interest to leave the region as a vacuum. Nor is it possible to separate Iraq from the conflict with revolutionary jihad. The outcome in Iraq will influence the psychological balance in the war against radical Islam, specifically whether the ongoing withdrawal from Iraq comes to be perceived as a retreat from the region or a more effective way to sustain it. But Iraq has largely disappeared from policy debates in Washington. There are special envoys for every critical country in the region except Iraq, the country whose evolution will help determine how American relevance to the currents of the region will be judged. The Obama administration needs to find its voice to convey that Iraq continues to play a significant role in American strategy. Brief visits by high officials are useful as symbols. But of what? Operational continuity is needed in a strategic concept for a region over which the specter of Iran increasingly looms.
Feb-03-2010
Middle East Transparent: The Ali Hassan al-Majid Anticlimax.
When a mass murderer dies, it is usually an anticlimax. At his hanging this week, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin of Saddam Hussein, had only ambient impassiveness to serenade him into the pit. A photograph was released by the Iraqiyah television station showing Majid dressed in an orange jumpsuit, minutes before death. Otherwise, there was an evasiveness and expediency to the execution that, for all the rules of due process it violated, was paradoxically fitting for so brutal a man. I first heard the name Ali Hassan al-Majid in 1991. As I recall, a video filmed by the Iraqi Army was obtained, then distributed, by the Iraqi opposition. It showed Majid leading the suppression of Shiites in the aftermath of the Gulf war, when Saddam, having been expelled by President George H. W. Bush from Kuwait, was allowed to slaughter his own people. The video showed Majid ordering soldiers to be merciless, then walking through a field to be shown bound Shiite prisoners. One began to shout the fatiha, prompting an officer to pull out a gun as if preparing to shoot him. The prisoners were later executed nearby. The unrelenting grimness of the scene, the certitude the prisoners surely had that their time was up, since they had become a trade fair exhibition for a man whose commerce was death, was difficult to shake off. And yet within no time Arab publicists had done precisely that, as their outrage was turned against the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq by the United Nations. And when Saddam transformed that regime into an instrument to reinforce his authority and wealth, the publicists’ amnesia returned, their outrage displaced to condemn America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Feb-02-2010
Wall Street Journal: The Obama Spell Is Broken. Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.
The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon. The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies. There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune. He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty. The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.
Jan/Feb-2010
The Atlantic: SimCity Baghdad. A new computer game lets army officers practice counterinsurgency off the battlefield.
Over dinner several years ago, an Army officer lamented to Randall Hill, the executive director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, that he and his men had been unprepared for what they faced after Baghdad’s fall. “We need SimCity,” he told Hill. The institute, which receives much of its funding from the Army, modeled UrbanSim on those experiences—the blood and tears of officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bosack and his team then built the game’s characters as autonomous agents that react not just to specific actions, but to the climate created by a player’s overall strategy. Members of a tribe, for instance, want jobs, but they won’t work if they don’t feel safe. Instead, they might join the insurgents. Patrolling neighborhoods, meeting with tribal elders, and creating more economic opportunities—tactics straight from counterinsurgency manuals—can reduce the likelihood of that outcome in the game.
Jan/Feb-2010
Atlantic: How America Can Rise Again.
Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.