[Dialogue] The Tethered Goat Strategy

Mon Apr 10 23:50:17 EDT 2006

AlterNet

The Tethered Goat Strategy

By Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian
Posted on April 10, 2006, Printed on April 10, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/34661/

Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the
Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables
describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient
communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as
many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni
insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to
mutate. 

Meanwhile, President Bush's strategy of training Iraqi police and army to
take over from coalition forces -- "when they stand up, we'll stand down" --
is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department
officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as
cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions
of order and security is fueling civil war.

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are
discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on
the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top
attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual
reports that are too upsetting.

The Bush administration's preferred response to increasing disintegration is
to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding. "More delusion as a
solution in the absence of a solution," said a senior state department
official. Under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is
partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of
Baghdad. By reducing the number of soldiers, the administration can claim
its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs the
military doesn't want to perform are being sloughed off on state department
"provisional reconstruction teams" (PRTs) led by foreign service officers.
The rationale is that they will win Iraqi hearts-and-minds by organising
civil functions.

The Pentagon has informed the state department it will not provide security
for these officials and that mercenaries should be hired for protection
instead. Internal state department documents listing the PRT jobs, dated
March 30, reveal that the vast majority of them remain unfilled by
volunteers. So the professionals are being forced to take the assignments in
which "they can't do what they are being asked to do", as a senior
department official told me.

Foreign service officers, as a rule, are self-abnegating in serving any
administration. The state department's Intelligence and Research Bureau was
correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein's possession
of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in
its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for
reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from
Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service
officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When
these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed.
Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending
disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats.

Amid this internal crisis of credibility, the secretary of state,
Condoleezza Rice, has washed her hands of her department. Her management
skills are minimal. Now she has left coercing people to fill the PRTs to her
counsellor, Philip Zelikow, who, by doing the dirty work, is trying to keep
her reputation clean.

While the state department was racked last week by collapsing morale, Rice
traveled to England to visit the constituency of Jack Straw. She declared
that though the Bush administration had committed "tactical errors,
thousands of them" in Iraq, it is right on the strategy. Then she and Straw
took a magic carpet to Baghdad to try to overthrow Prime Minister Ibrahim
al-Jafaari in favour of a more pliable character.

"Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that after Vietnam we'd be
doing this again?" one top state department official remarked to another
last week. Inside the department, people wonder about the next "strategy"
after the hearts-and-minds gambit of sending diplomats unprotected to secure
victory turns into a squalid fiasco. "Helicopters on the roof?" asked an
official. 

Sidney Blumenthal, author of "The Clinton
<http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0374125023-0>  Wars," writes
a column for Salon <http://salon.com>  and the London Guardian
<http://guardian.co.uk> . 

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