Norway's Best Friend

One of the great puzzles of modern public policy is: how come Norway got it right? Recall: nearly every polity with significant natural resources turns into a kleptocracy where gangsters wrangle over the resource pool while everybody else can go to hell. Think Putin's Russia; think Harlan County, KY.

So how did Norway get it right, emerging as the poster child for responsible management of a resource find? This is another victory that probably has a thousand fathers, but thanks to Michael for showcasing a Financial Times story that identifies at least one. He's an Iraqi who came seeking medical care for his kid.

His name is Farouk al-Kasim, an Iraqi oil technocrat, married to a Norwegian he had met while studying in London. They had three children, but the youngest had cerebral palsy and needed medical care he would not get at home. So they came back to Norway. I won't repeat the rest of Martin Sandbu's fine story, except to make it clear tht al-Kasim appears to have played a central role both in the technical and in the institutional/political part of the Norwegian story. The FT headline writer calls him "The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil," which is certainly hyperbole, but if he didn't do the job single-anded, still Sandbu makes it clear that he played an important role in making it happen. Great reading, highly recommended.

Enjoy Your Day...

Police arrest anti-war protester, 80, at mall

BY ANASTASIA ECONOMIDES AND MATTHEW CHAYES |
March 30, 2008

An 80-year-old church deacon was removed from the Smith Haven Mall yesterday in a wheelchair and arrested by police for refusing to remove a T-shirt protesting the Iraq War. ...

Link. H/T: Froomkin.

Stop Reading This Right Now

If you don't have Glenn Greenwald on your A-list, stop reading this right now and go here. For a taste, here's Glenn on all those "Liberal Hawks" who are telling Slate what they got wrong:

[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: "Wars that aren't directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn't be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason." Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

As long as the root premises of our endless war-fighting remain firmly in place, there will be many more Iraqs, "justified" by similar or only marginally different objectives. We need to invade to remove a Bad Government, or stop a civil religious or ethnic war, or prevent mistreatment by other ruling factions of their citizens, etc. etc. -- as though we possess the ability and are blessed with sufficiently magnanimous, selfless political leaders to accomplish any of those lofty goals with military invasions of other countries.

Nothing to add, your honor.

The End Game Again

What’s our end game in Iraq? How will we know we have won? I’m one of a legion of those who say we have no end game and we won’t know when we’ve won. But having listened (with one ear) to the House Petraeus/Crocker hearings yesterday, I need to revise my views.

Someone—I forget who—asked Crocker a question, which amounted to the same thing I’ve been asking—how will we know when we’ve won. Crocker’s answer was a marvel of diplomatic obfuscation—this guy has not spent nearly 20 years as an ambassador for nothing. But if you listened with care, you could grasp that under the gobbledygook, there was an assertion.

As I understood him, Crocker said little or nothing about “democracy,” and not a whole lot about a unified central government. Well he might not: as Chuck Hagel pointed out this morning, four southern provinces have already hived off on their own, under leadership that would hardly pass the Eleanor Roosevelt test. And it is our money that is supporting our former enemies, the Sunni sheikhs who are fighting AQI. And I take it for granted that the ambassador knows about the Hunt’s direct deal with the Kurds for oil.

So, we’ve given up on democracy and we’ve given up on a unified Iraq. We know there will be decentralization and tribalism. Translated, there is an end game: we're hoping to minimize the bloodshed, to hang onto a government structure will cooperate with us on oil.

It’s politically untenable to make this case out loud, not least because it is such a mean comedown from our grandiose expectations. But under the circumstances, it doesn’t sound to me like a bad outcome—I can’t think of a better, and I can think of a lot worse.

If this is our game plan, Crocker and Petraeus are probably about as well equipped as anybody to achieve it. There are a million ways it can still go wrong. And there are real questions about whether we have the resources, forget about the resolve, to do it. But there is the remotest chance they might get lucky. If so, an irony is that the beneficiary of their good luck might be the next Democratic president.

Toad, Meet Punchbowl

FP Passport offers a “quotable” from Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Iraq (link):

In the States, it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we're done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else. Whereas out here, you're just getting into the first reel of five reels, and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.

Wait a minute, whoa! It happens I think the ambassador is pretty much right here—but isn’t this exactly the opposite of the party line? Give us a few months, give us until September, just give us a little time… everything the administration says about Iraq is designed to impose the soothing assurance that it’s only a matter of time, and not very much time, at that.

To his credit, Gen.David Petraeus has been saying from the start that he thinks it will be a long slog. But generals have a habit of speaking awkward untruths. Folks just ignore this kind of toad in the punchbowl and life goes on as before. Crocker, by contrast, is the ambassador—a man whose role, as they say, is to be “sent abroad to lie for his country.”

So this is a puzzle. Is Crocker just crashingly, smashingly out of line here? Or is the White House playing a more subtle game, allowing, perhaps encouraging, him to speak the truth in the background, while Tony Snow pours on the syrup in front of the mike?

There, That About Gets It

Executive summary:

It is hard to exaggerate the Bush administration’s fundamental miscalculations on Iraq, including but not limited to unrealistic policy objectives; fundamental intelligence failures; catastrophically poor understanding of what would characterize the post-Saddam period, and completely unrealistic planning as a result; denial of the existence of an insurgency for several months; and the absence of a consistent explanation to the American people or the international community about the reasons for the war. Small wonder that after nearly four years of warfare, Iraq has been a disaster, costing thousands of lives, requiring the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, stretching our forces and reserve system to the breaking point, and becoming a magnet for terrorists and hostility toward the United States throughout the Muslim world.

--Dennis Ross, Statecraft 23 (2007)

“Could,” asks Ross, “the war yet yield a less disastrous and possibly more hopeful outcome?” Perhaps surprisingly, his answer is “maybe.” But then, that’s why he wrote a book.

Iraq and Algiers, and Other Stuff

Underbelly's crack military correspondent has been reading Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace (link):

...and the ending is looking like the end of the war in Iraq: De Gaulle pulled the rug out from under the army – although you can argue that getting the army out without the native’s cooperation would have been very costly.

Everyone seems to agree that the Army had pretty well knocked off active warfare by the FLN in the countryside – but mostly because it had been able to kill off or capture nearly all of the active troops. But what was left was still there – just not fighting. That was possible because the French pretty well sealed the borders with Morocco and Tunisia – not absolutely but sufficiently that the insurgents in country were pretty well isolated. He doesn’t say so but it sounds like the FLN made the decision to go forward with negotiations rather than fighting.

If the book is the basis for Petraeus’ strategy of ‘surge’, there are myriad differences that suggest that we will fail.

Most obvious is that the French had largely isolated the FLN in country from reinforcement and resupply. We cannot seal the Iraqi borders and the insurgents of all varieties have an infinite sources of resupply and reinforcement. It’s hard to see what role ‘world opinion’ plays in this situation (by the end, just about no one was supporting France) but it would appear to range from ambivalent to hostile. Certainly, public opinion here is heavily in favor of ending the war. In that respect, there is some similarity – since it appears that the French were pretty well worn out with the war – and it was fighting the war with conscripts.

The odd part about the book is the passing references to the number of assassination attempts that De Gaulle escaped. I think there were at least 12 that were mentioned only in passing. There were some fairly serious attempts – that failed. (the French Army apparently couldn’t even get an assassination correct). Recall the uproar over the two attempts to off Ford back in the mid ‘70s. If there were 12 known attempts to get Bush in this country, he’d be locked up so tight that the country couldn’t squeak. Yet the book only makes passing reference as though that were fairly close to normal. Even the number of bombings carried out by various groups in metropolitan France would put this country into a tizzy.

Sherman on Insurgency, And the Dispersal of Armies

We insist on talking and thinking about the Iraq insurgency as if it were new or unexpected; yet the most elementary sense of history will throw doubt on this proposition. General Sherman at the end of the Civil War, winding up one of those most sustained and successful campaigns in human history, agonized over the terms of surrender, and made every effort to assure that the Confederate forces dispersed in an orderly manner, lest the “vanquished” disintegrate into a mob. “What we now want,” he said “is the new form of law by which common men may regain the positions of industry, so long disturbed by the war.” Protesting when he was overruled, he said, “I now apprehend that the rebel armies will disperse; and instead of dealing with six or seven States, we will have to deal with numberless bands of desperadoes.

In the end, matters worked out mostly to Sherman’s liking, although the history of Reconstruction, and indeed the long history of the opening of the American West may be regarded as an extended coda to the Union victory.

It’s interesting to note that Sherman’s concern for good civil order extended to his own troops as well as the enemy. Here he is in his farewell letter to the Army that had followed him in the long march across the Confederacy:

To such as remain in the service, your general need only remind you that success in the past was due to hard work and discipline, and that the same work and discipline are equally important in the future. To such as go home, he will only say that our favoured country is so grand, so extensive, so diversified in climate, soil, and production, that every man may find a home and occupation suited to his taste; none should held to the natural impatience sure to result from our past life of excitement and adventure. You will be invited to seek new adventures abroad; do not yield to the temptation, for it will lead only to death and disappointment.

William T. Sherman, Memoirs 870 (Library of America ed. 1990)

What I Really Meant Was: TPM on the War

I said the other day that the problem with the war was that we'd already won (link). I seem to have been a bit defensive at the time, as if I feared I was being flip.

TPM is up with a wonderful post this morning that says what I wish I'd said in the first place (link). The whole thing rewards reading, but here are some takeaway points:

We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended. The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq's threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves wtih the US.

Rationale 'A' quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

That left us with premise or rationale 'B'. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we'd overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren't interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war's supporters had in mind. ...

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. ...

I would submit that virtually everything we've done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial. ...

It's a huge distortion to say that this means the war was 'lost'. It just means what the war supporters said would happen didn't happen. The premise was bogus.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Or rather, I didn't put it better myself.

Peter Neumann's Crystal Ball

Count me among those who believe that the tragedy of Iraq (one of them) is that we can't walk away. One reason I'm so mad at these bums is that they have left us far more deeply involved in a far more dangerous and unstable Middle East than we were before they started.

I don't know anybody in government who talks realistically about this point (although Jack Murtha sometimes comes close), Happily, Foreign Policy now hoiks up Peter R. Neumann, director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London, who offers a bit of sobersided futurology (link). The whole piece is worth reading, but here's a money shot:

[A] withdrawal announcement is much more likely to drive more Sunnis into the arms of the insurgency than it is to compel the insurgents to the negotiating table. ...
If the United States announces a timetable for withdrawal, the only way this grim scenario will not come to pass is if Sunnis and Shiites miraculously learn to trust each other again. That’s becoming more unlikely every day. ...

In their quest to win the policy argument, those who favor heading for the exits in Iraq shouldn’t dismiss as mere political rhetoric the idea that a sectarian blood bath—not reconciliation—is the most likely outcome. Most importantly, though, U.S. political leaders should understand that the game is not over once a withdrawal date is set. On the contrary, getting out of Iraq without unleashing a civil war is likely to be as delicate an operation as getting into the country was in the first place. Let us hope that if the United States does leave, the planning is better this time around.

Recommended Reading from the Alabama Bureau

Still snarled up in snuff, so I turn the mike over to the Alabama bureau to offer up a bit of recommended reading:

Hi all -- if anyone needs more reasons why we ought to be leaving Iraq there are plenty in the March 26 New Yorker, in an article by George Packer titled "Betrayed -- the Iraqi translators who helped America." There were probably many good people there from State and a few other agencies and departments trying to do what they saw as right. but almost always the good guys were run over by weirdos, freaks, zealots, psychos supervised by tunnel vision bureaucrats, and top administrators like Bremer and Negroponte and Khalilzad didnt involve themselves in straightening out situations at low levels where the work gets done.

Unnerving report. It ought to be read word for word on the House and Senate floors and ought to be the basis of hearings on why we "lost" Iraq. The Bush administration lost the war the troops won, not Democrats trying to prevent more loss and more failure.

Comment: Might be a good companion to this Masterpiece of Self-Deception, from John McCain, via CNN, via Carpetbagger.

Well, Hey

Up this morning in time to listen to the media as they continue to massage us towards a war with Iran. Therefore it is a pleasant surprise to discover this shred of optimism from a guy who tends to get this sort of thing right. It’s about that Defense Department IG Report—the one subtitled “Doug Feith Still an A*hole.” Patrick argues that it’s a shot across the bow, and it wouldn’t have happened unless Robert Gates pulled the trigger. Nice to know that there is someone with experience in bureaucratic warfare who thinks that this larger war just might be a dumb idea.

Postscript: For a supersized serving of Feith hash, go here.

Post-postscript: Carpetbagger catches Gates with his waffle iron on stun.

Not Anna

Editor and Publisher, and then Carpetbagger, took note of the passing of a young woman whose claim to fame is that she is not Anna Nicole Smith. I'll take the baton. Here is the AP story (via E&P):

A 2004 graduate of Fallston High School who followed her older brother to the Marines was killed during fighting in Iraq, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

Cpl. Jennifer Parcell, 20, of Bel Air, Md. died Wednesday "while supporting combat operations in Al Anbar province," a Department of Defense news release said.

"If you knew her, you loved her. She was a go-getter. She knew what she wanted in life and she was doing what she had to do to achieve that," Parcell's aunt Martha Benton of Aberdeen said.

Parcell joined the Marine Corps in January 2005. Benton said she'd wanted to enlist since attending her brother Joseph's graduation at Parris Island. The 24-year-old enlisted in February 2003 and he is returning from his tour to be with family.

The brother and sister were stationed together in Iraq for about a month before their tours of duty separated them, Benton said.

Math was her forte at Fallston High School in 2004, Benton said. She said Parcell always enjoyed the water, including boating and scuba diving. She also liked yoga and music and spending time with family and friends.

Parcell was assigned to Combat Logistics Regiment 3, 3rd Marine Logistics Group, III Marine Expeditionary Force, based in Okinawa, Japan. She had earned six medals and Benton said Marine Corps officials told the family Parcell may be eligible for a Purple Heart.

"We're just going to miss her very, very much," Benton said. "She was always someone you could count on."

The family was notified of her death Wednesday afternoon.

Also Thursday, the family of a 21-year-old Navy paramedic from the Eastern Shore said he was killed when a Marine helicopter crashed in Iraq Wednesday.

Manuel Ruiz, of Federalsburg, was two weeks into his second tour of duty when the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter he was riding in crashed, killing six other persons onboard.

TigerHawk Ought to Know Better

I like TigerHawk, honest I do. Granted, he’s a lot more comfortable with violence than I am, and he seems to have more confidence in the power of government (at least in its incendiary capacity) to do good. But he knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know, and he is capable of being independent-minded, at least when he wants to.

I think the trouble is that he spends too much time with people who agree with him—particularly people who aren’t as quick as he is. That’s what permits him to think he can get away with this from last week on public attitudes to the war. It’s called “Hoping to lose,” on the premise that 34 percent of Democrats [and 11 percent of Republicans, and 19 percent of Independents] are “hoping” President Bush’s new Iraq plan (or “plan”) will “lose.”

This is perverse on so many levels. For starters, it isn’t even a correct statement of the question (which he reprints): “Do you personally want [the plan] to succeed?” “I cannot for the life of me,” harrumphs, “I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want it to fail.”

Let me help you, TigerHawk, rephrasing some stuff I dropped in your comments a couple of days ago. You answered about "failure;" the question asked about "success." In order to know whether I want the plan to “succeed,” I would have to know what it means to “succeed.” Do you know what would count as “success” for the President here? Do you think the President knows? Failing that, do you know what you mean by “success” here? Can you explain, or articulate, for him or for yourself?

The term "success" is not self-defining. Consider the possibilities. We can leave behind “finding WMD”—nobody except possibly Dick Cheney is still counting on that. It can’t mean “catching and killing Saddam,” because that’s over and done with. And I am pretty sure that nobody in the White House (possibly excepting the President?) means “securing as stable, democratic, multi-factional Iraq"--a vain lost hope.

Beyond that, there is an almost infinite range of possibilities here. For example: if success means "an alliance with al Sadr to suppress the Sunnis," I might want it to fail. If it means "a lockdown of oil facilities for the petrolios in the Bush funding base,” I might want it to fail. If it means "scorched earth and resettlement by aliens from the Gamma Quadrant," I'd be disinclined do regard it as a good idea.

FWIW, “failure” is not self-defining, either. I suppose—I certainly hope not—that we could be blindsided and routed, without an adequate means of retreat (didn’t I read that that copter shot down over the weekend was taken by a shoulder-held missile launcher?.). I suppose we could simply pack our bags and go home, like the Mongols packed their bags and went home in 1241. No doubt there are voters who favor that view; maybe Dennis Kucinich favors that view. Can you any name anyone else in office who favors that view?

If the Bush plan "fails," I suppose one thing we could do is to the borders of Iraq (or the region) and doing what we can to keep this war from metastasizing any further. This is, as I understand it, essentially what Congressman Murtha wants to do. Do you count this as “success” or “failure?” Certainly it would be a messy, frustrating, even open-ended result. But isn’t that the tragedy of this war—that we’ve got ourselves into a mess that we may be years, perhaps decades, getting out of? Cut and run, Oh I Wish. Hoping that Bush will succeed—well what, exactly, does he, do you, does any of us, have in mind?

Catch of the Day (Iraq Dept.)

I think the “catch of the day” prize goes to Solomon Moore in the LA Times, via Larry Johnson at TPM Café.

[Lt. Gen. Raymond T.] Odierno said another reason for Iraqis' alienation was the tendency of many leaders to be more interested in sectarian interests than the national good of Iraq. "We thought they'd come together rather easily," he said. "We underestimated that…. We thought they'd think Iraq first, and that didn't occur. I think maybe it will occur over time, but it's not occurring now."

So Odierno, our new “chief operating office” in Iraq. I know, taken out of context and all that. If means anything like what it seems to mean, it means that one of our top generals is as ignorant of the Iraqi political situation as—well, as the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Don’t they teach them at general’s school that Iraq—like, that it isn’t really a country at all, and became one Maybe they should give the commanders some of the books that reporters stuff in their backpack.

Second thought: Wait a minute, you criticize one general on the basis of one fragmentary quotation—but you ignore the fact the British, who screwed things up so royally at the end of World War I, included people like Gertrude Bell who actually did know something about Iraq, and still got everything wrong (for a crisp summary, go here). Response: Touché. Knowledge alone does not always trump hubris.

Third thought: Isn’t anybody but me intrigued by the fact that we now have, yoked together in Iraq, the general who had the best rep with the press (Petraeus) with another who had one of the worst (Odierno, supra).

Still another, um, thought: No surprise that the most trenchant analysis of the urge to surge comes from the master of boots-on-the ground military commentary, Fred Kaplan at Slate (link).

Alistair Horne on Two Savage Wars

I’m deep into Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace (1977; NYRB reprint 2006) (link), about the French-Algerian war of the 50s-60s. It’s worth the effort but it’s not easy going: the story is well told, but it’s grim and Horne does nothing to smooth its rough edges—let’s just say they won’t likely be turning it into a musical real soon. For its part, the New York Review of Books must feel they won the lottery on this one. Did they know when they signed on for the reprint that the original would be the must-read book among junior officers in the Middle East, with yellowed originals reputedly commanding upwards of $200?

The differences between French Algeria and the 21^st-Century are Iraq are obvious and should not be elided. America is not a traditional occupying power in Iraq like the French were in Algeria. There is no class of permanent resident Europeans, like the pied noir in Algeria. And so forth. For the similarities, it is perhaps convenient to let Horne speak for himself: his new 2006 preface is posted at the NYRB website (link). Here’s the money shot:

The lessons surely apply today. At the time of writing, one feels that Bush’s Washington (and Blair’s London) also went blindly into Iraq —and into collision with the Islamic world—without the kind of necessary preparation, where study of Algeria in 1954-62 might have helped. At the very least its lessons might have imposed caution before getting involved in Iraq in the first place.

There are at least three areas where the echoes are particularly painful, if not deafening.

ONE: In the early days of the Algerian War, once the FLN realised it was not strong enough to take on the powerful French Army, it concentrated its attacks on the native police loyal to France. Result: a deadly loss of morale among the police, with defections to the FLN, and the French Army defensively reduced to protecting the police, instead of concentrating on active “search-and-destroy” missions. The “insurgents” in Iraq have learned from this strategy with deadly effect.

TWO: The benefit of porous frontiers. In 1954-62, the winning French Army was paralysed by its inability to pursue its FLN enemy across into its friendly bases in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco. This is what, in effect, led to the collapse of the French government and the advent of de Gaulle in 1958. In their turn, the Iraq insurgents have been able to use Syria—and now, much more dangerously, Iran—to similar advantage.

THREE: The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led—probably more than any other single factor—to the ultimate defeat of France was the realisation, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation were being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. …

Thomas E. Ricks reviews the book here. Another good review is here. Horne himself weighs in on Israel here.

OTOH, if Andrew Sullivan is right, maybe you should skip Algeria and cut straight to (another NYRB favorite) the Thirty Years War.