View 281 October 27 - November 2, 2003 (original) (raw)

Sunday, November 2, 2003 All Souls Day

For the resolution to the Outlook/Agent story see above.

http://www.zwire.com/site/10419957.html The Stupid need prayers, too. When a stupid man is doing something he knows is wrong, he always insists that it is his duty. Is this a disease that affects all of Ohio or only part of it?

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James Woolsey (the former CIA DCI, not our frequent correspondent) has a very good interview at

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/
security/story/0,10801,86638,00.html?nas=PM-86638

that is well worth reading. He brings up an attack we all thought of but didn't want to mention; a caution that I suspect was ill informed.

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I expect most of you know about this, but if you don't:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html has some really great optical illusions and things of that sort.

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Here is a revolting development:

Since I installed Office 2003, if I go to a Washington Post story, it crashes Explorer. Unless: I first open a window, disable Popup Stopper, then go to the Washington Post story. I am then "treated" to a DoubleClick window advertising some muck I don't want.

I have found the remedy: by default Office 2003 apparently turns on some active x controls and turns off some others. By switching some of those options (Tools / Internet Options / Security ) to PROMPT I seem to be able to defeat the popup windows and still not crash the Explorer. I must have got about 20 crashes (and sent every darned one of them to Microsoft) before I began looking about.

Office 2003 seems to change some of your Internet Explorer defaults. Be careful out there.

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Thoughts on Iraq

I am working on an essay on what to do about Iraq. I haven't time for a full piece on this. Here are some thoughts:

We cannot continue losing a trooper a day to this meatgrinder. We can, of course; it's a small price compared to active wars. But neither the troops nor the American people will put up with it without a lot more motivation including more ringing exhortations from national authority.

The effects on the troops are worse than on the American people: the edge goes off, and meanwhile the troops begin to hate the Iraqis. If war is what those people want we can give it to them good and hard. That won't bring peace. As Israel is finding out.

Fortunately we are not in the same situation as the Israelis. We don't have to make promises we can't keep. We can give them their country back, and it's not all that hard to make them believe we will do it. We do have to get realistic about what kind of government we will leave behind. And we should pray for an Ataturk.

Some things are clear.

The US forces in Iraq are not police and are not configured to do a police job. They are military forces intended to defeat military forces. Think of them as analogous to the Iraqi Republican Guard. It's their job to be sure no indigenous or foreign army takes Iraq away from us.
Most of the Iraqi Army were Iraqi patriots, as were most of the police. Disbanding their entire army without pay or any hope for future employment was a major error, and whoever advised the President to do that is no friend to the President and ought to be dismissed as unfit to serve the US in any advisory capacity whatever.
1. There are those who say the disbanding of the Army "just happened" and wasn't planned. That doesn't say much for the planners. Nor does it say much for our attempts to prevent it : only we didn't attempt to prevent it. When Iraq dissolved we did not say "Soldiers of Iraq: report to your barracks. Payday is next Friday."
2. See http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/specialreports/iraq/s_161341.html (thanks to Rod Montgomery) for more on what happened to the Army.
3. What that meant was that we needed to make an effort; which means better planning. If you are going to invade someone you really need to think hard about what happens when you win.
We need a large and dedicated force in Iraq whose interest is keeping the peace.
That would be the Iraqi army and police force minus the Republican Guard. Their pay ought to begin again immediately, but with this difference: any week in which there are successful attacks on Americans will result in substantial docking in pay of both officers and enlisted Iraqi military and police. Do your job or lose pay.
We need to establish local Iraqi courts to determine who has clear title to property, and give them the authority to issue certificates of clear title. They can apply local law and customs; the important thing is that decisions are final, and acceptable to the local community where the property is located. Rule of law cannot prevail until there is clear title to property. Abstract justice is nowhere near as important as a final decision in matters of this kind. Local justices of the peace drawn from respectable people of the community are desperately needed.
1. If this sounds a bit like the way the Normans consolidated rule in Saxon England, so be it.
We need to move swiftly toward empowering local governments. Big national government with power over the oil revenues we will not have, because the stakes are too high. Local and regional governments with the US portioning out revenue dependent on how well the local governments implement rule of law and keep the peace are possible and desirable and can be implemented rather quickly.
Get the oil flowing again, so there is money to be doled out to the functioning local governments. Do what it takes to provide security for the oil fields and pipelines: if that takes importing foreign mercenary troops, then do it. But don't put our troops out there as targets. Pay some others. There are plenty of armies for hire in this world. Some of them are pretty good. The Brits have had great success with the Ghurkas. The US had some very good Philippine auxiliaries. There are probably plenty of Afghani tribesmen willing to work security in Iraq.
1. Understand I am not talking about stealing the revenue from the oil. But that oil is Iraq's greatest resource and without that revenue they haven't got any money to pay their government or build the infrastructure. The oil has to flow. It's true that we benefit from the lower world price that will cause, but Iraq needs the money badly. They can have the revenue from oil sales.
Understand that an army of conquest is never likely to be all that good as an army of occupation. The Marines are to some extent and exception to this because they are more accustomed to small wars and their aftermath; but good soldiers seldom make good police. The Roman Empire understood this. We should.

I would think the above obvious. Since it isn't being done, perhaps it's not obvious, but at the moment I don't think of too many arguments against this view. I agree that to cut and run now would probably leave things over there worse off than if we hadn't gone in. I am not at all convinced that we can make things much better than they were before we went in but surely we can try. We must try.

Following is excerpted from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/
magazine/02IRAQ.html?pagewanted=1

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.

I have to agree with that. But it doesn't answer the question: What Do We Do Now? And how did we get here?

Bremer's first major act was not auspicious. Garner had resisted the kind of complete de-Baathification of Iraqi society that Ahmad Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had resisted calls to completely disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only to fire Baathists and senior military officers against whom real charges of complicity in the regime's crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects.

Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and the lustration of 50,000 members of the Baath Party. As one U.S. official remarked to me privately, ''That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.''

The decision -- which many sources say was made not by Bremer but in the White House -- was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where the average family size is 6, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving 2,700,000 people without incomes; in other words, more than 10 percent of Iraq's 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers. It is a slow and complicated process, however, and there have been demonstrations by fired military officers in Iraq over the course of the summer and into the fall.

More another time; but it should be clear enough that we didn't plan for victory. Any military battle plan needs to continue through success: wars are won in the pursuit.

In part we were victims of our own success. The Army began to roll, and the enemy collapsed, and we were in Baghdad sooner than we thought. We were supposed to get General Garner in to make things happen, but again, things came about too fast. Garner's people were stuck in Kuwait, without transportation, and their first efforts to get to Baghdad were thwarted when a general confiscated their plane on the grounds that it was more important that he get in than Garner. Once in Baghdad Garner had few resources.

The looting took everyone by surprise. Why? Los Angeles could have told you that if you remove the police and people feel they have been oppressed their first response is looting. And the looting went on, for days and days and days, and Garner was given no resources for stopping it.

The point is not to find people to blame. The military did something no one supposed would happen, took Mesopotamia, the fabulous Mesopotamia, graveyard of invaders, seat of the first civilization; seat of Babylon and Nineveh, seat of Assyria: and did it in days with almost no casualties. What more were they expected to do?

And that is the problem. No one told them what more they were expected to do. And we can wonder: has anyone told them yet?

Iraq has fallen. Now what?

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