[Dialogue] Needed: Honesty on Iraq

[Karl Hess]

Jim and all,

By the standards of US journalism and pandering 
to the Israeli right, it is a good article.  A 
couple of things are misleading, though.

If you remember the situation in the summer of 
1990 after the fall of the USSR, and the US 
military-industrial complex desperately needed 
another demon, the proposed military budget was 
dropping like a shot.  If you read Joe Wilson's 
book, you will learn that he was in the Embassy 
in Baghdad at the time.  Saddam Hussein kept 
asking the ambassador April Glaspie what the US 
position was on his acquisition of the province 
of Kuwait.  She desperately kept cabling 
Washington to get a policy statement and none was 
forthcoming, which he interpreted as a go-ahead, 
but what was in reality a trap.  He didn't 
realize we needed a demon and volunteered for it. 
And of course the military-industrial complex got 
its money - in spades.  Hoagland certainly knows 
that but repeats the normal propaganda.

He also knows, but seems to be pretending not to 
know, that any candidate who tells the truth will 
be defeated.  I surely hope no democrats fall for 
that kind of stuff.  Wiggling out of positions is 
something you do AFTER the nomination AND the 
election.

He just sounds silly to me.  Mainline media are 
so deeply complicit in all this I don't see why 
anyone takes them seriously.

Karl

>I believe this to be an unusually astute 
>analysis of dangerous mistakes the three major 
>presidential candidates are making.  The article 
>doesn't identify it, but there is a powerful 
>source causing these mistakes.  It is the debate 
>censorship imposed by AIPAC, the powerful U.S. 
>lobby that promotes Israel's current hard line 
>policies in the Mideast.  In contrast, that 
>debate is open and public in Israel itself. 
>Hoagland does make an oblique reference to this 
>where he states that the candidates do 
>overestimate their ability to wiggle out of 
>positions that ignore the power of local forces 
>to limit them to choices ranging from bad to 
>awful.  Like, more bloodshed in Gaza and in a 
>bloody war with Iran, for instance.
>Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE
>
>------------------------------------
>Needed: Honesty on Iraq
>By Jim Hoagland, WashPost, 3/16/08
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Iraq?tid=informline>Iraq 
>is the moral quagmire of the past 
>quarter-century for American presidents and 
>politicians. Every attempt by our leaders to 
>ignore, manipulate or resolve with brute force 
>that country's deep conflicts has quickly come 
>back to haunt its architect with unanticipated 
>consequences and new, agonizing choices.
>So it is no wonder that Americans are weary of 
>having troops in such a place and are not eager 
>to face up to the bloody dilemmas that an 
>immediate U.S. withdrawal would spark. Iraqis 
>have always found inventive ways to punish the 
>indifference, cravenness or rash miscalculations 
>that successive U.S. leaders have visited on 
>them.
>We do not lack reminders of those actions and 
>inactions: Today marks the 20th anniversary of a 
>barbaric chemical weapons attack on Halabja, in 
>Iraqi 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Kurdistan?tid=informline>Kurdistan. 
>That war crime was part of the genocidal 
>campaign by 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Saddam+Hussein?tid=informline>Saddam 
>Hussein that the Reagan and first Bush 
>administrations did little to prevent or to 
>punish. They reaped Iraq's 1990 invasion of 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Kuwait?tid=informline>Kuwait 
>as reward.
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Bill+Clinton?tid=informline>Bill 
>Clinton used sanctions and pinprick missile 
>attacks that helped protect the Kurds and Iraq's 
>Arab neighbors. But those tactics also had the 
>effect of aiding Hussein in grinding into dust 
>any remaining social cohesion in the country. 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+W.+Bush?tid=informline>George 
>W. Bush's grievously mismanaged occupation -- 
>and blatant political use of the war issue in 
>the 2004 elections -- undermined his promises to 
>bring democracy to the Arab world.
>The Iraq trap now reaches out to ensnare those 
>Americans who would be president. It invites 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Hillary+Clinton?tid=informline>Hillary 
>Clinton, 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barack+Obama?tid=informline>Barack 
>Obama and 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/John+McCain?tid=informline>John 
>McCain to be expedient -- instead of being frank 
>-- about the problems ahead. They are tempted to 
>avoid serious discussion on the campaign trail 
>by portraying the moral choices on Iraq as easy 
>and clear instead of acknowledging them as the 
>tangled knots they are. Tactics crowd out 
>strategy and purpose in such a campaign.
>Iraq is not the only foreign policy issue that 
>the candidates are temporizing on or even 
>shielding from a real discussion with the 
>electorate. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 
>which balances on the edge of a devastating 
>explosion, has imposed a similar blanket of 
>conformity on the three, who compete to portray 
>themselves as 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Israel?tid=informline>Israel's 
>truest supporter. They spread land mines along 
>the path of a future presidency on this as well 
>by not saying the obvious: On this problem, 
>fresh thinking is badly needed.
>Obama and Clinton both recently flunked a 
>symbolically important moral test on Iraq. They 
>implicitly conspired to gloss over the hard 
>questions on an American withdrawal that were 
>raised publicly by 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Samantha+Power?tid=informline>Samantha 
>Power, an Obama adviser who was quickly ousted 
>by the campaign for going way off message in a 
>pair of interviews with British media.
>Power's exasperated and hyperbolic description 
>of Hillary Clinton as "a monster" was featured 
>in the headlines as her firing offense. But 
>Power's sensible admission to 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/British+Broadcasting+Corporation?tid=informline>BBC 
>television that Obama's tightly scripted Iraq 
>withdrawal plan is a "best-case scenario" that 
>would be reviewed once he became president was 
>the more serious problem for her boss. Obama was 
>immediately accused by Clinton of again 
>promising one thing while planning another.
>Clinton could have used Power's remarks on Iraq 
>-- which actually parallel the 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+York?tid=informline>New 
>York senator's description of what she would do 
>as president -- as an occasion for a serious 
>exchange with Obama and with the voters. Instead 
>she took the easy route of going for transitory 
>political advantage.
>But Obama comes off even worse. He lacked the 
>moral courage to defend Power's realistic and 
>sagacious statements. His retreat instead 
>inflates the idea that he is chaining himself to 
>his campaign rhetoric if he gets to the 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline>Oval 
>Office, come what may.
>He shouldn't, and I would guess that he won't. 
>But like Clinton, and like the past four U.S. 
>presidents, Obama may overestimate his ability 
>to wiggle out of positions that ignore the power 
>of local forces to limit him to choices that 
>range from bad to awful.
>John McCain's heavy emphasis on the military 
>tactics of the surge providing a clear "victory" 
>runs these same risks. Such a narrow approach 
>also skirts serious discussion of the moral 
>obligations and dilemmas that Iraq still poses 
>for Americans. McCain would do well to turn 
>those obligations into a major theme for the 
>fall general election race.
>Getting elected is the priority objective of 
>these three politicians, of course. But they and 
>their followers cannot afford to believe that 
>walking away from difficult positions comes 
>cost-free. Insulting the future is a 
>particularly dangerous exercise in Iraq.
><mailto:jimhoagland at washpost.com>jimhoagland at washpost.com
>© 2008 The Washington Post Company
>
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