Right Wing Nut House

The anti-war crowd has been saying for years that it is possible, indeed necessary, for the United States to simply walk away from Iraq by systematically drawing down its forces without regard to the security of the Iraqi government or people.

Also for years, I have been saying that despite monumental blunders and stupidities committed by our side, that such a scenario just wasn’t a viable option unless we could be assured of leaving behind some kind of stable government that at the very least, couldn’t be hijacked by al-Qaeda and made into a base of operations that would threaten us and our friends around the world.

I still believe that to be a viable, sensible, logical position to hold - but just barely. Once again, I feel myself “stretching” to defend a position that even just a few days ago I felt quite comfortable with.

Almost a year ago, I responded to my critics who accused me of changing my mind about Iraq by writing a post that tried to show how events can undercut long held assumptions and present you with the choice of being dishonest about how you truly feel by stretching your logic and reason in order to have your beliefs comport with your original assumptions or change the underlying assumptions on which you base your beliefs in order to reflect a new reality:

One by one, assumptions I had formed at the beginning of the war and occupation fell victim to changing realities in Iraq. This is not the same place it was 4 years ago nor is it even the same as it was a year ago. And if it has changed – if the facts, perceptions, and reality has changed, what did that do to the underlying justification for my opinions?

Once I began “reaching” to justify my opinions, I got very uncomfortable. The threads of logic became more tenuous the more I examined those pesky assumptions. I realized that many (not all) of my original assumptions were basically obsolete, done in by the cruel logic of domestic politics and a growing realization that the the US military could do everything that was asked of it and more and still come up short thanks to the balking politicians in Iraq, the twisted narrative of the war being spun by the left and the Democrats, Administration failures to implement a strategy that would win the war, and a growing belief that the country was sliding out of control.

So if you’re in my shoes, what do you do? Continue to defend a position you know is becoming untenable as a result of changing realities (and new information not available at the time you formed your original assumptions)? Or do you alter your assumptions and change your opinion?

Until I got on the internet, I always believed it was the mark of a thoughtful man to constantly challenge one’s beliefs and adjust them if necessary to the changing realities of the world. This is how I went from believing in liberalism to thinking like a conservative. There came a time after college graduation where liberal dogma refused to stand the test of rigorous self-examination and I gravitated toward a much more conservative worldview. Within that conservative framework, I have altered my opinions many times regarding many issues. For instance, I am much more conservative on immigration than I was even just a few years ago while I have perhaps moderated my views on issues like affirmative action and minority set asides.

Those are small examples but telling. Think about it. What kind of idiot - right or left - would maintain a mindless belief on an issue even after the original assumptions on which they based that conviction have been superseded by events or a different set of facts?

The situation in Iraq at the moment is quite fluid and not beyond repair. A return to some kind of status quo albeit with a weakened Maliki and suddenly ascendant al-Sadr is possible. But I think that some of those underlying assumptions about Iraq that I held just a week ago have proven themselves to be changing - and not for the better.

To wit:

1. It was always an assumption that the Iraqi militias would have to be destroyed or neutralized in order for peace and security to come to Iraq.

But 6 days of fighting in Basra shows that Iraqi army incapable of doing either. And any political solution regarding the militias would necessarily put them on the police force or in the army where their loyalties would always be suspect.

2. It has been an assumption from the beginning that the Iraqi army was capable of “standing up” without American assistance so that we could safely draw down our forces.

I don’t believe the Iraqi army did that badly in Basra. There are enough credible reports that they stood up to some pretty vicious assaults by the Mehdis and may, in some instances, have been facing an enemy with superior arms including heavy weapons not in their arsenal. What is clear is that the spin on this battle has been incredible. Reports of “defections” by the army to the Mehdis have been wildly exaggerated while every temporary setback by the Iraqi army was given glowing coverage.

But their performance was nevertheless disappointing. Their inability to make much headway against the Mehdi in most neighborhoods and their reliance on American and British air power shows that they still have a long way to go before they can handle internal security for the country much less beat off an invading army from Iran or Syria.

How much more training can we give them? My military friends who read this site will no doubt tell me that it is a very difficult task to build an army from scratch and that leadership on the battlefield is a difficult commodity to recognize and encourage. I will buy that notion but will also point out that there is a political clock ticking here at home and performances like that shown in Basra by the Iraqi army do not engender confidence that they can “stand up” before time runs out and Congress (or a new president) pulls the plug.

3. It has been an assumption that Malki could unite the country despite dragging his heels on reconciliation measures.

This is one that has been slipping away for months. In fact, Maliki is proving to be not a uniter but a divider, interested in pursuing power for his coalition at the expense of other Shia parties and the Sunni minority. This was certainly a large part of the rationale he used for entering Basra in the first place. And in the end, it may be his undoing.

4. It has been an assumption that al-Sadr must die.

Mookie may have become too large a player in Iraqi politics to take him out. He and his party have become the “agents of change” in the south where precious little has been done with regards to reconstruction of basic services like electricity and sewage. His power in the national government may be small but the power of the national government is nothing to shake a stick at. If nothing else, he has become a powerful regional actor who both the US and Maliki must now deal with. His ties to Iran notwithstanding, perhaps it is time to if not embrace him, at least stop trying to kill him and the Mehdi. In other words, turn a huge negative into a slightly net positive.

5. It has been an assumption that the Kurdish north is not a big problem and that we can allow the Iraqis to deal with security in that area.

This is definitely one of those assumptions that is changing. Al-Qaeda has made its presence known in Mosul and Kirkuk while a low intensity conflict between Shias and Kurds for control of the vital oil center of Kirkuk has been going on for almost a year. Is there anything the US can reasonably be expected to do to alter that situation?

6. It has been an assumption that the US must stay in Iraq in order to kill the remnants of al-Qaeda.

This is probably the strongest argument for maintaining a large combat force in Iraq. But the Sunni militias have proven that they are very effective in securing their neighborhoods against al-Qaeda attacks while also rooting out terrorist cells on their own. Will we soon get to a point where the Sunnis can “stand up” so we can “stand down?”

These are just a few of the underlying assumptions about Iraq that most reasonable people, I believe, would have to say are in flux at the moment. Does this mean I believe we should walk away from Iraq? Not at this point. But unless some of these basic assumptions about our role as occupier and friend of Iraq can be changed for the better, I can certainly envision a day where such a course of action would become self-evident.

Anyone who is cheering on what is happening in Iraq probably also roots for crashes at NASCAR races and train derailments.

Admittedly, the situation is so confused and bloggers and the MSM are spinning the news to such dizzying lengths that getting a semi-clear picture of what is actually transpiring in Basra, in Kut, even in Baghdad has become a guessing game.

We know that after some initial success, the Iraqi army is bogged down in a battle for Basra that has degenerated into running gun battles with Mehdi militiamen who appear to be equally or better armed than the US supplied government troops.

There is word that American air power is being employed to help the Iraqi army:

The air strikes are the clearest sign yet that the coalition forces have been drawn into the fighting in Basra. Up until Thursday night, the American and British air forces insisted that the Iraqis had taken the lead, though they acknowledged surveillance support for the Iraqi Army.

The assault on militia forces in Basra has been presented by President Bush and others as an important test for the American-trained Iraqi forces, to show that they can carry out a major ground operation against insurgents largely on their own.

But the air strikes suggest that the Iraqi military has been unable to successfully rout the militias, despite repeated assurances by American and Iraqi officials that their fighting capabilities have vastly improved.

A failure by the Iraqi forces to secure the port city of Basra would be a serious embarrassment for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and for the Iraqi Army, as well as for American forces who are eager to demonstrate that the Iraqi units they have trained can fight effectively.

The airstrikes were against a “Mahdi stronghold” and a mortar position, according to the Times who quoted American military sources.

Bombing in residential areas nearly always results in collateral damage to surrounding buildings. This almost certainly isn’t making residents of Basra very happy to see us.

But the tell here is the fact that we bombed a “mortar team” for the Iraqi army.

Now I hate to get into areas where my expertise is limited but don’t Americans learn how to take a fortified position in basic training? Isn’t that like “Soldiering 101?” Correct me if I’m wrong but why, after three years of training can’t Iraqi troops manage this feat on their own?

I would take that as a sign that the Iraqi army, while not throwing down their arms and fleeing in terror, are not up to the challenge of operating independently yet. And this begs the question of why Prime Minister Maliki gave the go-ahead for this operation?

Daniel Davies asks some questions that I haven’t seen anywhere else:

John is right to be suspicious of this kind of “this looks like such a stupid idea that he must have some private information that explains it all” argument, and there was always the possibility that in fact, it just looked crazy because it was crazy – either a reckless desperation gamble, a wholly unrealistic assessment of the situation or a calculated attempt to precipitate enough of a crisis to force the USA to commit more resources. With the Maliki forces seemingly having made no progess toward their objective in Basra, and with rioting and curfews in Baghdad and actual armed battles in Kut, it looks like Maliki’s gamble is going badly wrong. Napoleon’s maxim is relevant here; “if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna!” – having picked the fight, Maliki absolutely had to win it, and failure here is likely to mean political failure too.

It’s hard to see a good way out of this. John’s prediction record here is substantially better than mine, and he thinks that we settle back down to a lower-energy state of affairs, with some kind of renegotiated ceasefire, but I’m now less optimistic than that. It seems to me that Moqtada al-Sadr’s control over the movement bearing his name is weakening; the man himself is in Qom, Iran, studying Islamic scripture and trying to stay out of trouble[2]. Meanwhile, the Mehdi Army[3] has clearly been getting more and more restless over the six months of ceasefire and still seems to me to be potentially quite fissiparous. The really interesting question to which I don’t know the answer is; to what extent do the uprisings across Shia Iraq reflect different branches of the Mehdi Army supporting one another, and to what extent are they local flare-ups which were precipitated by the attack on Basra but not coordinated responses to it?

First, I think going after the Mahdi was the next logical step for the government to take if they were ever going to have a “monopoly on violence” in the country. Basra and most of the surrounding towns and villages were lawless outposts ruled by gangs, rogue militias, and party warlords who vied for control in a low intensity conflict that the Brits couldn’t handle because of their sensitivity to suffering too many casualties. It would be a huge boost to the government’s credibility with Sunnis and many Shias if they could reduce the power of the Mahdi in Basra while gaining control of the region.

Second, Maliki is no doubt looking to the provincial elections in the fall and feared al-Sadr’s influence and especially his ability to rig elections in the south to give the Mahdi a favorable outcome. Pure power politics has its uses when everyone has a gun.

Third, I have little doubt that the Americans have been urging this course of action on Maliki for a long time. Not only will emasculating the Mahdi help the security situation in Iraq, but a demonstration of armed prowess by the Iraqi army would be good for the American electorate and especially GOP Congressmen who are getting antsy about funding the war with so little in the way of proof that the Iraqi military is coming along and will be able to handle security well enough that we can start to draw down our forces significantly.

But it is hard to see how this can end up a net positive for Maliki unless he destroys the Mahdi Army. That’s becaue any negotiated end to the fighting with the Mahdi still in Basra will be spun as a victory by al-Sadr - just as he spun his defeat in Najaf as a victory over the Americans.

This is from a Mahdi militiaman who was on the Basra police force and who took off his uniform to join his comrades in this fight against the Iraqi army:

“We know the outcome of the fighting in advance because we already defeated the British in the streets of Basra and forced them to withdraw to their base,” Abu Iman told The Times.

“If we go back a bit, everyone remembers the fight with the US in Najaf and the damage and defeat we inflicted on them. Do you think the Iraqi Army is better than those armies? We are right and the Government is wrong. [Nouri al] Maliki [the Iraqi Prime Minister] is driving his Government into the ground.”

According to the Times Online, several hundred of these policemen (out of 10,000) switched sides - not unexpected given the level of infiltration by the militias in the police force but worrying nonetheless.

With fighting breaking out in several other southern cities, Maliki may have bitten off more than the Iraqi army can chew. And that doesn’t include the fighting in Baghdad where the Iraqis aren’t even attempting to enter Sadr City, leaving that job to the US military:

U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army’s AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad.

We’ve used our airpower in Sadr City as well - a move that saved American lives I’m sure but I am equally certain that bombing a residential area also made a poor impression on the people who live there. And for the fourth day in a row, the Green Zone is getting hit hard:

Baghdad was on virtual lockdown Friday as a tough new curfew ordered everyone off the streets of the Iraqi capital and five other cities until 5 p.m. Sunday.

That restriction didn’t stop someone from firing rockets and mortar rounds into the capital’s heavily fortified International Zone, commonly known as the Green Zone. One slammed into the office of one of Iraq’s vice presidents, Tareq al-Hashemi, killing two guards.

An American government worker also was killed in rocket and mortar attacks Thursday in the International Zone.

U.S. warplanes pounded Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood Friday, killing six people and wounding 10.

Who is doing the shooting? Please don’t ask the American State Department:

U.S. State Department official Richard Schmierer said the rocket attacks appeared to be coming from fighters affiliated with al-Sadr who were “trying to make a statement” about the government offensive in Basra. He blamed the violence on “marginal extremist elements” who have associated themselves with the Sadrist movement.

When one of those “statements” kills an American and another crashes into the office of the 3rd ranking political figure in Iraq while the entire 2 million residents of Sadr City are being terrorized by thousands of Mehdi Army militiamen who have ordered shops and schools closed, you have to think that the resistance goes a little beyond “marginal extremist elements.”

It seems to me that the Iraqi government is already starting to weigh the domestic unrest caused by this move against any gains that might be made in Basra. If so, expect a cease fire by the end of the weekend and a humiliating pullback by Iraqi troops leaving the field to the Mehdi Army.

We are winning the War in Iraq.

President Bush says so. Vice President Cheney agrees. And GOP Presidential nominee John McCain, who just got back from Baghdad, says we’re on the verge of victory.

Indeed, violence is down significantly in most parts of the country. The Iraqi parliament is moving slowly toward passing important legislation that would help reconcile the factions. A recent poll on Iraq found the people more hopeful about the future.

But the fact is, despite this upbeat news, Iraq is still an ungodly mess - barely a country at all with neighborhoods in Baghdad separated by huge concrete walls and barriers, the presence of armed police and militia on every street corner, frequent and intrusive checkpoints. All this to keep the country from exploding into violence.

The surge has worked - for the present. Now what?

What is it exactly that we are “winning” in Iraq? The peace? Amity in the national polity? Not hardly. A 70% drop in violence from the horrific levels of last year is heartening but is far from bringing peace and security to the country. And Shia resistance to Sunni participation in Iraqi public life is as entrenched as ever. Passing laws will not change the hearts and minds of those who suffered so long under the brutal Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

A realistic look at Iraq shows two sides, sullenly and without much enthusiasm for working together, eyeing each other suspiciously across a great divide patrolled by Americans and poorly paid and trained Iraqis, buttressed by the forced separation of the sects into ghettos while all the progress made over the last year balances on a knife’s edge.

And the helluva it is, we are entirely dependent on others for continued success.

Keeping the 80,000 strong Sunni militias happy is absolutely vital to continued peace. So would someone please explain to me why in God’s name we’re not paying them? If they were to quit in disgust and take up arms once again against the Americans, it would be a setback from which there would be no recovery.

Consider also our dependence on the forbearance and good will of Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia. His Iranian supplied fighters could make Baghdad into a nightmare again - concrete barriers or no concrete barriers.

What of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? His inability to drag his government toward meaningful reconciliation and his eagerness to establish close ties with Iran are extremely problematic for our efforts to unite the country.

And how do you deal with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the SCIRI) - the largest political party in Iraq - and their insistence that any power sharing agreement include an autonomous Shia state in the south where they have set up a government based largely on Sharia law and regularly thumbs their noses at Maliki’s government in Baghdad?

To be so dependent on others for our success or failure in Iraq highlights the fact that despite progress, for real peace to have a chance all the tumblers will have to click into place at the same time and the independent forces threatening to tear the country apart somehow be kept together.

Otherwise, everything goes south again and we’re back to square one.

The military and Bush recognize this and will keep troop levels at the same level they are now through the end of the year:

Troop levels in Iraq would remain nearly the same through 2008 as at any time during five years of war, under plans presented to President Bush on Monday by the senior American commander and the top American diplomat in Iraq, senior administration and military officials said.

Mr. Bush announced no final decision on future troop levels after the video briefing by the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the diplomat, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. The briefing took place on the day when the 4,000th American military death of the war was reported and just after the invasion’s fifth anniversary.

But it now appears likely that any decision on major reductions in American troops from Iraq will be left to the next president. That ensures that the question over what comes next will remain in the center of the presidential campaign through Election Day.

Perhaps they know something that we don’t?

On Sunday, a barrage of at least 17 rockets hit the heavily fortified Green Zone and surrounding neighborhoods, where both the U.S. and Iraqi government headquarters are housed, according to police. Most of them were launched from the outskirts of Sadr City and Bayaa, both Mahdi Army-controlled neighborhoods.

On Monday, the Sadrists all but shut down the neighborhoods they control on the west bank of Baghdad. Gunmen went to stores and ordered them to close as militiamen stood in the streets. Mosques used their loudspeakers to urge people to come forward and join the protest.

Fliers were distributed with the Sadrists’ three demands of the Iraqi government: to release detainees, stop targeting Sadrist members and apologize to the families and the tribal sheiks of the men.

The Iraqi security forces issued a statement promising to deal with those who terrorized shopkeepers and students.

“It’s an open sit-in until the government responds to our demands. If the government doesn’t respond, we will have our own procedures,” said Hamdallah al Rikabi, the head of the Sadr offices in Karkh, in western Baghdad.

The death toll from attacks that occurred all over Iraq on Sunday-Monday was at least 59 with 4 Americans killed in separate incidents. That brought the number of US dead over the previous two weeks to 25 - a disturbing spike that could be either a short term uptick in casualties or a sign that the enemy is growing stronger and that despite all our good work in rooting al-Qaeda from their strongholds and driving them away, it may not be enough.

I have lamented the fact before that we are well and truly trapped in Iraq and that the next president be it a Democrat or Republican will have precious few options. Grandiose statements of a quick withdrawal coming from the Obama and Clinton camps are meaningless. Some symbolic drawdown to appease the base would probably be undertaken but until the Iraqi army and police can prove themselves capable of preventing the country from falling from a barely manageable chaos into hellish dissolution and slaughter, American combat troops in large numbers will continue to be needed.

In the end, it comes down to a Hobson’s Choice between continuing an occupation in Iraq that has harmed our relations with our friends in the region, cost the nation a trillion dollars and counting, caused the sacrifice of 4,000 brave Americans, and currently has no end in sight or withdrawing from Iraq, leaving its uncertain fate to benighted thugs like al-Sadr and salivating foreigners like Iran and Syria while praying that there isn’t a bloodbath of biblical proportions.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION

Bob Owens looked into the Guardian story on the Sunni militias not being paid and found it to be “a load of bull:”

Multi-National Force-Iraq commanding General David Petraeus has little use for recent claims in the British press that the Surge is on the verge of collapse in parts of Iraq. In an e-mail to Pajamas Media, Petraeus wrote that the story, as reported in the Guardian were ”based on dated info.”

In addition, he said that reports that the Iraqi government is refusing to employ Sunnis are incorrect. ”The National Reconciliation Committee just approved a list of over 3,500 names of Diyala Sons of Iraq for the Iraqi Police,” wrote General Petraeus in his e-mail, a sign that more jobs integrating the Sunnis within the government’s security forces were forthcoming.

Petraeus also responded to a GuardianFilms video report for Britain’s Channel 4 on March 20 charged that Sunni militias in Iraq were not being paid by U.S. forces and were on the verge of staging a national strike because they were not getting jobs within the Iraq government. A Guardian print article also made that claim followed on March 21.
Petraeus said in his correspondence that a threatened strike in Diyala was “resolved a week or two ago” when Sunni militiamen called “Sons of Iraq” (SoI) were told that if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t get paid.

This is good news indeed. However, what was not addressed in Bob’s article was the belief by at least some of the militiamen that Americans were slighting their contributions to the effort to stamp out al-Qaeda and that our soldiers were letting the Sunnis do most of the hard fighting while sitting back and getting credit for their success.

I have no way of knowing whether this is true of a majority of Sunni militiamen. But I know that there has been quite a bit of triumphalism in some media quarters about our success and that this could very easily be misinterpreted by those who are already suspicious of us.

No matter. The fact that they are on the job, getting paid, and as Bob points out in his excellent article, being slowly integrated into the Iraqi police force is all that counts.

In my 54 years of life on earth, I have come to see war in rather stark and uncompromising terms:

1. War is waste.

2. There is nothing moral about any war except working to end it in victory as soon as possible.

Spare me your attempts to praise or condemn the decision to go to war based on some moral framework. Standing on the mountaintop preaching to the rest of us about how “immoral” it was to go into Iraq or how “Just War” doctrine applies is supercilious at best and ultimately irrelevant. History will have her way with us, judging whether the decision to invade Iraq was correct or incorrect. In that respect, morality plays little or no role. And those who pretend to know how the future will unfold as a result of our actions can easily be dismissed as charlatans - and that includes everyone from internet pundits to so-called experts who endlessly expound on the dire future in the region because of our invasion.

The fact is no one knows what the Middle East will look like 10 years or 5 years or even 2 years from now. Other forces are at work that may make our efforts in Iraq a positive contribution to stability in the region or the catalyst for cataclysm. I have too much respect for history to hazard much of a guess on where we’ll be in Iraq in 5 years or what the region will look like. Who would have guessed that the end of the Viet Nam war would lead to a peace and stability in east Asia - the first in more than a hundred years - that would allow economic powerhouses like South Korea and Hong Kong to prosper as never before while creating conditions for huge growth in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Viet Nam itself.

That peace was purchased with the blood of 58,000 Americans and rests to this day on the opening to China by Nixon - an event that almost certainly would never have taken place if we were not in Viet Nam. By beginning to remove the basis for conflict between China and America, we eventually brought peace and growing prosperity to billions.

Who could have foreseen the emergence of the Asian economic dynamo? Certainly not the protesters in the street. And few if any hawks were in favor of Nixon’s historic trip to China. The future is always a puzzle and those who claim prescience must deal with the hard reality that they are more often extraordinarily wrong than right.

Seen in that context, was the Viet Nam war a moral or immoral conflict? Truth has many fathers at times and to ignore the effect of the war on the region in order to claim some imagined moral high ground is intellectually dishonest. We fought the war for the right reasons (according to our lights) but failed to take into account those other historical forces at work 40 years ago, including one even more powerful than Communism - anti-colonialism.

In our ignorance, we failed to see that rather than liberators, we were seen by most Vietnamese in both the north and the south the same way the French were viewed - colonial occupiers. This made any government we supported illegitimate in the eyes of almost everyone. In the end, we went from fighting Communism to bolstering a cruel dictatorship. Yes, we killed a lot of Communists (and civilians), winning every major engagement but were forced to leave when it became obvious that there would be no end to it. The South Vietnamese government was in control at the point of our bayonets and there was absolutely no prospect for them to ever claim legitimacy with the South Vietnamese people.

We are still in danger of making the same mistake in Iraq. Five years gone and the Iraqi central government is still a mess although there are recent signs that some understanding of what needs to be done is finally taking hold. The Iraqis are learning about compromise - something foreign to them since they have absolutely no experience in working with other sects, other tribes. To say they have no sense of nationhood would not be entirely accurate. They appear to love their country but place its well being farther down on their list of loyalties - well after what mosque they worship in and who their tribal benefactors might be.

The American army meanwhile is killing a lot of terrorists but we’re also bolstering a regime to which some Iraqis only give conditional support and obeisance. I asked Iraqi embed Bill Ardolino (whose “Inside Iraqi Politics” series is a must read) about the effective control of the central government over the rest of the country. He thought that they were doing a better job lately but that there were still pockets of resistance to their authority in the south and some Sunni provinces. That matches pretty much what other embeds have been reporting.

Is the Iraqi government a failure? Not yet but it’s balanced on a knife’s edge. At this point, as with the rest of Iraq, things could go either way.

But here we are again. Our bayonets are guaranteeing a regime that is not very popular and would dissolve into incoherence and confusion - or worse, be overthrown - if we weren’t there. Hence, 5 years later we are well and truly trapped in a brier patch of our own making. The rank incompetence commented on by both hawks and doves in today’s New York Times “Reflections on the Invasion of Iraq” is instructive only because it reveals an almost universal belief that the period from the time the statue fell until the new counterinsurgency strategy developed by General Petreaus was implemented turned out to be wasted due to incompetent leadership and poor planning.

There’s no other way to say it except Bush blew it. And his incomprehensible decision not to change strategy sooner while sticking with a secretary of defense whose lies about how well things were going in Iraq echoed the worst of what the government was telling the American people during the Viet Nam war was a monumental error in judgement.

The President’s mistakes will be paid for by the next Chief Executive. I have no doubt both Clinton and Obama are sincere about wanting to leave Iraq. But I would say to my liberal friends if you believe they will be able to just walk us out in the six months promised by both, you are radically mistaken. If you have listened to them, both have said as much - that all depends on what the military says and conditions on the ground. Given those caveats, I have no doubt we will have a sizable contingent of combat troops in Iraq until the Iraqi army is big enough and trained well enough that they can take over completely. That will almost certainly take longer than 6 months and may be years in the making.

The only certainty about the outcome of the war we have today is that it will end eventually. And years from now, when the veil of history is uncovered and we glimpse what effect the Iraq War had on us, on the region, and on the rest of the world, I suspect there will be some surprises. Clio is a mischievous mistress and works very hard to make those who try and predict her verdicts look like fools.

Terrorism and the threat of an attack has been a Republican strong point with the voter since 9/11. I’m not sure why. The Bush Administration has dropped the ball in so many areas of Homeland Security that if the Democrats had any brains, they would attack Bush not for making terrorism a political issue but for the spectacular failures of his administration on issues such as border and port security, airport screening procedures, and improving the security around soft targets like chemical and electric plants. (Talking about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security itself is a bureaucratic mess and a disaster could take up a whole other article.)

But they cannot bring these issues up because they don’t believe there is a War on Terror - or at least not in the sense that we have anything really to worry about. The great conundrum for Democrats when dealing with the terror issue is that since the 2004 campaign they have been screaming bloody murder every time the issue of terrorism has been raised by a Republican candidate. They call it “playing the politics of fear” and denounce any effort to talk about the threats facing us.

But people want to know what Obama and Clinton are going to do to keep us safe. Hence the conundrum; Democrats must talk about the threats facing us but leave themselves wide open to charges that they too are playing the politics of fear when doing so.

It is a problem of their own making made obvious by the latest ad from Hillary Clinton that shows kids in bed asleep at 3:00 AM and a telephone ringing. A voice over asks who they want answering that phone in the White House - presumably when some crisis is confronting the country. The last scene showing Hillary picking up a phone in a darkened room is quite effective. (Ed Morrissey has the video.)

Clinton is really hearing it from the Obama camp and the blogs:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pushed back hard against the new ad, which ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos described as “the nuclear option” on Friday’s “Good Morning America”.

Addressing a group of veterans at an American Legion post in Houston, Obama said: “We’ve seen these ads before. They’re the kind that play on peoples’ fears to scare up votes.”

The tone of the ad — which echoes the infamous Daisy Ad from the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater presidential race and the red phone ad former Vice President Walter Mondale ran against Gary Hart in their ‘84 race for the Democratic nomination — indicates that the Clinton campaign is pulling out the all the stops leading into the Ohio and Texas primaries.

Is it inevitable now that any candidate - Republican or Democrat - who wants to speak frankly to the American people about the real threats we face will be tarred with the charge that they are trying to scare people to get votes?

I see nothing inherently wrong with Hillary trying to highlight the exceptional inexperience of her opponent on national security matters. I hope McCain goes after Obama in a similar manner early and often. But the question remains; are we ever going to be able to talk about terrorism?

Not as long as an advantage accrues to one side or the other when running for office. The idea that a candidate will use the politics of fear in order to win has a long, dishonorable tradition in American politics. The Democrats have successfully demagogued social security for 50 years, scaring senior citizens into thinking that Republicans want to throw them out on the streets and make them eat dog food. Republicans have spent much of the last 30 years successfully portraying the Democrats as weak sisters on national security matters, scaring voters into believing they would surrender first to the Soviets and now to al-Qaeda.

The politics of fear is a powerful ally for any campaign. The temptation to use the tactic is overwhelming because, depending on the issue, it works extremely well. The threat of terrorism is real and immediate. And using it the way that Hillary Clinton does in her ad - as a way to place doubts in voter’s minds about Obama - should not penalize her for bringing up a legitimate issue with which the next president is going to have to deal.

This is the conundrum largely created by the Democrats to answer the GOP’s huge advantage on the issue of terrorism. Apparently, it has now come back and bit them in the ass.

Kevin Drum watching the Democrats debate in Hollywood the other night:

Another thing the debate brought home to me is something Matt Yglesias complains about frequently. Both candidates claimed that Democrats understand national security and terrorism issues better than Republicans (”Democrats have a much better grasp of the reality of the situation,” as Hillary put it), and both agreed that a successful Democratic candidate would need to be able to make that case to the public. Obama thought he could make that case better because he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, while Clinton thought she could make the case better because she’s better prepared. But neither of them actually made that case. Both Obama and Clinton had a national stage where they had more time than usual to explain the liberal position on how to combat terrorism and make the world safer, and neither of them did it. They just said they needed to do it.

And they’re right. They do need to do that. So why didn’t they start last night?

Democrats “understand” national security issues better than Republicans but the cat’s got their tongue when trying to explain why?

Let’s buy into that dubious formulation and try to ease Kevin’s perplexity. First of all, both Clinton and Obama are hamstrung by one, overriding, overarching reality; they can’t support any policy, strategy, or proposal that has been implemented, offered by, or hinted at by the Bush Administration.

This is the baseline for any policy formulated by the candidates. The deranged nature of their base when it comes to anything Bush precludes the advocacy of some Administration policies that actually may have merit while other Bush policies regarding the use of pre-emptive force and the struggle against Islamic extremism have become an anathema to the entire Democratic party.

That leaves each candidate trying to show how much more accommodating they would be to the cutthroats of the world than Bush - a prospect that no doubt has the Iranians, Syrians, Hamas, and others wishing devoutly for a Democratic triumph at the polls next November but that may leave large segments of the American electorate cold.

Hence, the attempts by both candidates to obscure the truth by mouthing platitudes and offering generalities in lieu of specific ways to deal with the threats that we will face over the next decade. I think both candidate’s emphasis on nuclear non-proliferation is spot on and is something they should probably highlight even more. And I think that Clinton, at least, has a grasp of the nature of the terrorism threat and could be counted on to be creative in confronting it.

But we hear precious little about revitalizing NATO so that Afghanistan can be saved. Nor do we hear anything about regional security regarding our Gulf allies who truly see an existential threat coming from Tehran. Lest anyone doubt that fact, the recent flurry of diplomatic activity by both the United States and France in the region that included Bush’s tour of the region, the sale of sophisticated weaponry to the Saudis, and Sarkozy’s nuclear diplomacy with other Gulf states proves the point.

In the end, the real debate is over the use of force; when, against who, and if ever. Both candidates say they would respond forcefully to a terrorist attack against the United States. Bully for them. If they didn’t, they would be impeached by their own party.

What the American people want to know is would they strike to prevent an attack and what they would do about a regime that planned and/or executed another 9/11? What would be done about an attack that was something far less than another 9/11? Would there be a “proportional response” to such an attack - stopping short of regime change while lobbing a few cruise missiles on to some vital economic or military targets?

And what about regime change? Is there any criteria where it would be justified? Both candidates have roundly criticized - with some justification - Administration policies in Iraq. Would our experience there keep them from taking down a tyrant or regime that threatened America directly?

I suppose it somewhat unfair to ask Democrats to answer these questions when Republican candidates haven’t been very clear themselves although both Romney and McCain have come out in support of pre-emptive war to some extent. But for the Democratic front runners, being obtuse is a survival tactic. If they sound too tough in the primaries, they lose the base. If they sound too weak, the GOP makes hay during the general election campaign.

Hillary Clinton seems to have found the answer to that dilemma simply by speaking out of both sides of her mouth at the same time. She can sound as tough as any Republican when she talks about the War on Terror while offering soothing platitudes regarding negotiations and scathing criticism of Bush at other times. This has the dual effect of keeping the Democratic base at bay while not offering an opening for Republicans if she wins the nomination.

So both candidates end up promoting a “Wonder Bread” national security policy; very soft and full of air but tastes good going down. It is enough to satisfy their base but will it work on the voters in the general election campaign? I think that depends on how important national security will be as an issue next fall. If the economy is in the tank, I doubt if people will give much weight to GOP criticisms of the Democrat’s obscurant policy positions. But all bets are off if the United States is attacked again or if the economy isn’t quite as important as it is today. Then the Democratic candidate will be forced to be a little more specific about what they intend to do to protect the US from the threat of international terrorism.

Counting civilian deaths in Iraq is a ghoulish business. Given the chaos in the country for much of the last 4 years and the breakdown of government record keeping, the job has devolved into a statistical morass where competing methodologies give entirely different totals.

At the center of the controversy have been two separate studies that were published in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet. The results from both studies were wildly at odds with other estimates and resulted in questions being raised about the methodology used to determine the findings.

What was always most controversial for me was the timing of these studies. In 2004, the first study was published on Friday, October 29 - a scant 4 days before the presidential election. The fact that the regular date for publication of The Lancet was the following week showed a monumental bias on the part of the Lancet and an eagerness to try and affect the election of an American president by dumping the results of this questionable study on the internet so close to election day. Whatever confidence people might place in the study’s conclusions was undermined by the obvious political agenda at work in using the numbers as a hammer to slam the administration of candidate George Bush.

Also, the raw data for that study was never made public as would normally be the case. Because of that, any peer review of the author’s methods and conclusions was out of the question - a curious way for a “scientist” to have their work vetted and affirmed.

The second study by the same research group was almost as bad. It was published on October 11 - less than a month before the midterms. If anything, its conclusions were even more controversial in that they purported to show upwards of 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Once again, the methodology was called into question. Once again bloggers with knowledge of statistical analysis tore into the findings and revealed them to be wild exaggerations at best. And just recently, the New England Journal of Medicine debunked the study’s findings once and for all by publishing a study showing that 151,000 Iraqis had perished from 2003-2006. Still a heartbreaking number but one that any fair minded person would agree is a damn sight less egregious than the 650,000 fantasy figure in the Lancet study.

Now we have evidence that there may indeed have been political motivations in doing the study and in reaching its controversial conclusions.

Half of the funding for the study came from the George Soros group the Open Society Institute:

A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.

His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

My observation would be that the real figures are bad enough so why inflate them by using a methodology guaranteed to be closely scrutinized and found wanting? What the Soros study wanted to achieve was a political home run - a grand slam against the war that he hoped would cause such revulsion in the United States that it would sweep the Democrats to victory.

Soros may be a billionaire but he is a political dunce. (One need only look at the total failure of ACT and other Soros funded political ventures like Moveon.org who have done more harm than good to the anti-war cause.) Congressional Democratic candidates mostly ran on a war plank that referred vaguely to “changing course” in Iraq without much in the way of detail. And the only people who dared use the discredited Lancet numbers in debate were those on the far left.

The Democratic victory in 2006 was due to a wide variety of factors, not the least of which were caused by the Republicans themselves. Corruption, arrogance, profligate spending, and a sense that the GOP was a party of hypocrites when talking about “family values” what with a parade of Republicans caught in sex scandals were as much or more contributive to the Democratic landslide than the war in Iraq.

Essentially, Soros wasted his money.

Both sides of the political divide have moneymen with enormous influence. Richard Mellon Scaife, the Hunts, and a few others on the right probably give as much or more money to politicians and political groups as Soros and his crew.

But what makes Soros different is that he is trying to affect an extraordinarily radical change in this country that would lead to a loss of sovereignty and the realization of his dream of a one world government. To that end, he has proved himself as ruthless and conniving as any international criminal who threatens the security of the United States.

His network of activist groups, funding sources, think tanks, and do-gooder organizations are all working with this one purpose in mind. And he hasn’t been shy about stating his goals:

And since 2003, tearing down what he views as the “fascist” tyranny of the United States, as he has put it, is “the central focus of my life.”

Through networks of nongovernmental organizations, Soros intends to ruin the presidency of George W. Bush “by any legal means necessary” and knock America off its global pedestal. “His view of America is so negative,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman, who, like Gen. David Petraeus, has been a target of Soros’ electoral “philanthropy.” “The places he’s put his money are . . . so destructive that it unsettles me.” Soros’ aim seems to be to make the U.S. just another client state easily controlled by the United Nations and other one-world groups where he has lots of friends.

Best known among these groups is MoveOn.org, a previously small fringe-left group to which Soros has given $5 million since 2004. Bulked up by cash, the group now uses professional public relations tactics to undercut the Iraq War effort, with its latest a full-page New York Times ad that branded Gen. Petraeus “General Betray Us.”

It ran Sept. 10 in the New York Times, the same day Petraeus delivered his progress report on the surge in Iraq.

MoveOn.org previously put out ads depicting Bush as a Nazi, something that certainly echoes Soros’ sentiment.

“We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process,” he told this year’s Davos conference in Switzerland.

We can look upon his funding of the pre-election Lancet hit piece in 2006 as just more of the same. But the question of how to fight him is an entirely different matter.

The only way to legitimately go after Soros is by exposing his connections to groups and organizations that work against American interests and go so far as to advocate a loss of US sovereignty. It’s no accident that Soros groups fund illegal immigrant rallies and push for legislation that would destroy our borders. Nor is it surprising that Soros would fund politicians who seek to emasculate the American military and seek to tailor our foreign policy not to promote and protect American interests but rather to kowtow to the United Nations.

Thankfully, his is still a minority viewpoint and all the money in the world is not going to bring his loony ideas of a one world government any closer to reality. But he is still a very dangerous, unprincipled, ruthless man who is determined to succeed. The only question is what won’t he do to make his agenda a reality.

UPDATE: John Tirman comments

John Tirman, the executive director and a principle research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies and the individual who commissioned the Lancet study denies any involvement by George Soros in the project:

I am reluctant to reply to this Soros Derangement Syndrome, but I will do so once for the benefit of the entire right-wing blogosphere. Yours is the first one I happened upon. Soros did not fund the Lancet 2 survey. MIT did. I commissioned the study. We did it with internal funds in October 05, with the hope of getting the results out by spring. Iraq being what it is, that proved impossibly dangerous, so there was a delay. The results were released when ready.

The Open Society Institute had no role whatsoever in the origination, conduct, or findings of the survey.

The new survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health shows 400,000 excess deaths, 150,000 by violence, since the U.S. invasion. Their numbers are probably low for violence, but the larger point remains—all surveys (Lancet 1 and 2, Iraq Health Ministry, and Opinion Business Research) show hundreds of thousands dead. The 4.5 million displaced, the 500,000 new widows, etc., underscore this catastrophe. We are trying to measure and understand it.

From the TimesOnline article quoted in the body of the post:

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.

How do you square his quote in the article with “The Open Society Institute had no role whatsoever in the origination, conduct, or findings of the survey…?” Yeah, but what about funding?

The good professor is saying that the OSI may have funded the survey but had no input into its findings. Why he couldn’t admit that in the comment is beyond me. Instead, he obfuscates the point by throwing up the strawman argument that OSI didn’t have any role in the findings - neglecting to mention that he told TOL that in fact, Soros partially funded the project (we must assume through MIT or perhaps a grant to the CIS - again Mr. Tirman is mute on the subject).

The problems with the Lancet 2 study were examined and found wanting by The National Journal - no bastion of right wing thinking by any means and one of the most respected political and government publications in the United States.

In fact, the Journal doesn’t just debunk the study. The Journal articile is an indictment - of Tirman, of Roberts, of the entire crew who tried to foist this propaganda on the American people.

The linked Journal article is long and extremely detailed. Not only are there problems with methodology that have been widely disseminated but I find it extraordinarily telling that, as with the first Lancet study, none of the underlying evidence has been released - as is customary and proper in order to allow peers to examine the evidence themselves and test whether the author’s conclusions can be duplicated:

Still, the authors have declined to provide the surveyors’ reports and forms that might bolster confidence in their findings. Customary scientific practice holds that an experiment must be transparent — and repeatable — to win credence. Submitting to that scientific method, the authors would make the unvarnished data available for inspection by other researchers. Because they did not do this, citing concerns about the security of the questioners and respondents, critics have raised the most basic question about this research: Was it verifiably undertaken as described in the two Lancet articles?

Tirman should not be wasting his time responding to me and my little blog. He should be responding to the National Journal. I would say that if what the Journal is writing is true (even half of it) Tirman is either a prevaricator of monstrous proportions or a self deluded ideologue who can’t recognize his own biases have clouded his academic and scientific judgement.

Given the deliberate obscurance of his comment, either is possible.

UPDATE II:

Bill Arnold points out in the comments that it is impossible to use the New England Journal of Medicine Study to “debunk” Lancet because the two studies cover totally different ground. Lancet deals with “excess” deaths while the NEJM study only deals with violence related deaths.

Mr. Arnold is correct and I have stricken that observation from the post.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the CIA informed Members of Congress about what they were doing to get information from high value al-Qaeda prisoners. Nor is it surprising that Democrats who were briefed would have kept that information from their colleagues as they were bound to do by law.

Some Republicans are trying to explore the hypocrisy angle by trying to point out that Democrats are hardly in a position to come down on Republicans for torture when their own leadership was privy to the “severe interrogation techniques” being used. I have yet to see any quotes from those who we know were briefed that they then objected to the torture later and used it in a political context to bash their opponents.

In the absence of proof that Pelosi, Reid, Rockefeller, Harman, et al criticized the Administration for their torture policies, it is hard to make the hypocrisy charge stick.

However, they can be and should be excoriated for meekly going along with these policies and not registering their objections in the strongest possible terms. Alone among the Democrats, former ranking minority member of the House Intel Committee Jane Harman says she sent a letter of protest to the CIA questioning their methods to extract information. The letter fell on deaf ears.

Some of the netnuts are twisting themselves into knots to posit the notion that the whole purpose of the briefings was to embarrass the Democrats:

It’s pretty clear that either one of the Republican members of Congress at the meeting, or the CIA, decided to leak what happened at a super-classified post-9/11 briefing in order to embarrass Pelosi and the Democrats. And I don’t doubt for a minute that Bush approved the leak, as he always does.

It’s also clear that had Pelosi raised any private objections during the meeting - remember, it took place in the first year after September 11 - Bush and the Republicans would have leaked that fact to the public (like they just did) and destroyed her career and marked her publicly as a traitor. No member of Congress, no American, could have spoken up about anything in the months after September 11 and survived. It’s patently unfair to suggest that somehow because Pelosi didn’t object then that she doesn’t have the right to object now.

One final point. I hope this teaches Pelosi and Reid and all the Democrats that no matter what you do, this administration will mark you as a traitor and try to do destroy you. You might as well fight back and try to win, because if you don’t, you’ll sit back and lose.

Note that not only did some nefarious Republican leak from a “super classified” briefing - as if Avarosis ever gave a crap about leaking from other classified briefings as long as they reflected badly on Republicans - in order to make Pelosi look bad today, they would have leaked back in 2002 if Pelosi had objected to make her look bad today.

Of course, Johnny has no evidence whatsoever that a Republican leaked the story to the Post nor does he have a scintilla of evidence that Bush was behind it. He’s just throwing crap against a wall to see what sticks - a pastime he enjoys immensely when outing gay Republicans who would choose otherwise.

One other major meme that is emerging from the netroots is that since Bush had this meeting hanging over their heads, the Democratic leadership refused to begin impeachment hearings. With that kind of logic, we can expect an immediate effort by Pelosi to start the impeachment bandwagon moving next week now that everything is out in the open.

Fortunately for the republic, Pelosi is a little smarter than the rabid, frothing at the mouth bloggers who would push the Democratic party over the impeachment abyss.

Finally, just for levity’s sake, we now have to 9/11 truthers hot on the trail of the destroyed DVD’s that opened this whole can of worms in the first place. Here’s a comment left on my post on the subject:

The tapes destroyed primarily not because torture but because of what the tapes reveal. Possibly revealing the conspiracies behind 9/11 attack. This is another set of evidence revealing that the 9/11 was an inside job. The secret societies are directly responsible for this. Especially Bush family’s Skull & Bones. 2006 movie “the good shepherd”, directed by Robert De Nero, shows how the CIA was formed and the Skull & Bones influence over the intelligence community plus CIA’s torture…

I am not one who believes the republic has been permanently destroyed as a result of the torture authorized by the Administration. Good grief what a shallow and ignorant view of history one must have to believe that nonsense. We survived four score and seven plus years of allowing slavery in this country - even to the point that the government was in cahoots with slave owners in that they went after escaped slaves in the north and depended on revenue gleaned from cotton exports to survive.

There are plenty of sins committed by the United States government - some of which make torturing murderous jihadis look like a walk in the park. The innocents who have been victims of the government down through the years are a much blacker stain than the “severe interrogation techniques” used by the CIA and Army on, by all reports, was an extremely limited number of murderous, cold eyed killers.

Torture is wrong in all cases at all times. But to get hysterical about its implications for the republic, as most on the left seem determined to do, is absurd. Those nations overseas who are saying “American has lost its moral standing” didn’t recognize that standing in the first place. And even if some actually feel that way, I can guarantee that the next time we selflessly give of ourselves to save the victims of some natural disaster or pull some tiny country’s chestnuts out of the fire when it is being bullied by a larger neighbor, talk about America losing “the moral high ground” will disappear fairly quickly.

Let us treat this with the seriousness it deserves without either exaggerating its impact on our history or using it as a political club in a cynical attempt to demonize your political opponents. Torture has been used to our great shame and calumny. But it hardly merits the “end of the republic” rhetoric being bandied about so cavalierly by those whose outrage is nurtured and husbanded against their own government rather than directed equally toward an enemy that seeks to kill us all.

According to the Washington Post, a footnote in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which reports a halt in Iranian nuclear bomb building in 2003, shows that the main conclusions in the document came about as a result of two crucial pieces of intelligence; the now famous design for a bomb casing found in an Iranian document dump to the International Atomic Energy Agency back in 2004 and SIGINT from last summer involving conversations between high ranking Iranian generals that clearly indicated the program had been halted:

Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president’s top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

The fact that the Administration looked in askance at this new information was prudent, wise, and exactly the right thing to do. After all, it represented a 180 degree turnabout in what we thought we knew about the Iranian nuclear program. The intel folks then vetted the information in a unique manner:

Intelligence officers then spent months examining whether the new information was part of a well-orchestrated ruse. Their effort included “Red Team” exercises in which groups of intelligence officers tried to punch holes in the new evidence, substantially delaying publication of the NIE.

I was mistaken (as was half the liberal blogosphere) when I took the Administration to task for “sitting on the report” for a year. In fact, it appears that the White House had the final report for less than a week before they themselves released it:

Last year, Congress required that key judgments from the NIE be declassified. McConnell said in November that he had no plans to issue an unclassified version, but officials said the dramatic shift in the assessment convinced him otherwise. “Since our understanding of Iran’s nuclear capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available,” Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, said in a statement.

This puts the kibosh on some of my conservative friends who were speculating that this was a leak from the anti-Administration cabal at CIA/Defense/State. It was released by the Administration itself - probably to pre-empt the bureaucrats who would have leaked it anyway.

But no matter how it got out in the open, there is great unhappiness on the right. Michael Ledeen:

At this point, one really has to wonder why anyone takes these documents seriously. How can anyone in his (there was no female name on the document, nor was any woman from the IC present at the press briefing yesterday) right mind believe that the mullahs are rational? Has no one told the IC about the cult of the 12th Imam, on which this regime bases its domestic and foreign policies? Does not the constant chant of “Death to America” mean anything? I suppose not, at least not to the deep thinkers who wrote this policy document.

And as for Iran’s delicate sensitivity to international pressure, just a few days ago, the European ‘foreign minister’ Javier Solana was on the verge of tears when he admitted he had been totally unable to get the Iranians to come clean on their uranium enrichment program, even though he had told them that more sanctions were in the works. Yet, according to the IC, this program–neatly described in a footnote to the “Estimate” as “Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment—really doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear weapons. But if that is so, why are the Iranians so doggedly hiding it from UN inspectors?

Ledeen is a smart guy but he’s either being incredibly disingenuous here or deliberately obtuse. The “12th Imam” clique surrounding Ahmadinejad has been losing influence for a year. Ledeen knows full well that there are other factions in the Iranian hierarchy that are more pragmatic (if not less radical in their hatred of Israel and America) than Ahmadinejad’s true believers who have been stifling his domestic reforms and trying to rein him in on foreign policy.

But Ledeen asks a good question about why the intransigence by the Iranians with IAEA? The reason - and I base this on my reading from a variety of learned sources not any independent thinking of my own - is that Ahmadinejad has made the uranium enrichment issue a national sovereignty issue, thus garnering a tremendous amount of domestic support for continuing the enrichment program. The Iranian president seeks, above all, respect from the international community for Iran’s “achievement” in enriching the tiny amounts of uranium they have been able to process. This is where all his talk about “double standards” on the nuclear issue comes into play. He resists the IAEA because he feels their inspections intrude on what he sees as Iran’s sovereign right to develop what he calls a “peaceful” nuclear program.

Of course, the funny thing about a “peaceful” nuclear program is that the process that enriches uranium to reactor grade level is exactly the same process that enriches the uranium to weapons grade level. As I mentioned yesterday, our intelligence people believe that Iran has suspended work on weapons design, warhead and delivery systems, and other aspects of the nuclear program that could be identified as “single use.” It wouldn’t take much time or effort to get those programs out of mothballs and start them moving again.

It troubles me that both sides in the debate over this document are cherry picking information to buttress their cases. Seen in its totality, I believe this NIE is cautious (perhaps overly so), prudent - in that it takes into consideration what we might not be able to see, - and careful in drawing conclusions. It’s main point - that Iran halted its dual use program in 2003 - appears solid as does its warning that we don’t know if that is still true today. In retrospect, I was too harsh on the Administration yesterday (thanks to my new Watchers Council colleague GW of Wolfs Howling for pointing this out) when I took them to task for their rhetoric. The fact that the White House is still warning the world about possible Iranian nukes is a sound policy that this NIE does nothing to undermine.

This is especially true because the Administration was giving those warnings in the context of trying to get the UN to initiate another round of sanctions. Let’s not forget why these sanctions are in place. The Security Council voted to force Iran to stop enriching uranium until the IAEA could determine the nature of their program. The Iranians refused and sanctions were ordered. And since the Iranians have made no effort to stop since then, more sanctions were applied.

Now the Administration is going for a third round of sanctions. The reason is exactly the same regardless of whether the Iranians have an active weapons program or not; they continue to defy the UN by expanding their enrichment program. Until Iran cooperates fully and the IAEA gives them a clean bill of health (while ensuring compliance through inspections and monitoring), sanctions should continue and be expanded the longer the Iranians refuse. The conclusions drawn by the NIE do not change this situation one iota. It is the enrichment program that poses a danger to the world and must be shut down until there are adequate safeguards in place that the Iranians will not use their knowledge to build a weapon.

One aspect of the NIE wasn’t changed from the 2004 document; the fact that prior to 2003, the Iranians were on track to build a nuclear bomb. Perhaps before the left begins to accuse the Administration of overselling the danger to the world of Iranian nukes, they remember that fact. We can’t read our adversaries minds so what the future aspirations of the Iranians might be with regard to acquiring a nuclear weapon remains hidden. Therefore, prudence dictates we continue our current course (without bombing) until pressure from the Security Council and the rest of the world brings the mullahs to heel and forces them to fully cooperate with the international community in revealing their entire nuclear program and make it available for long term monitoring.

Even if you don’t trust the Iranians farther than you can throw them, the National Intelligence Estimate on their nuclear program should enable you to breathe a sigh of relief. They will not have a bomb anytime soon - 2013 at the earliest according to the NIE - and their program is still plagued with technical problems.

But it is important to look at that program and realize what the NIE is actually saying.

* Iran no longer has an active bomb program. This does not mean they have abandoned the idea of building a nuclear weapon - far from it, I’d say. What it means is that the parts of their nuclear program dealing with bomb making - weapons design, warhead development, delivery vehicle modifications, and probably the bulk of their experimental work - has been shut down or severely curtailed. It is also important to remember that much of what remains still has dual use capabilities, that while they are enriching uranium to reactor grade levels, they are certainly learning how to enrich it further in order to have weapons grade uranium.

* The sanctions are working. It is clear that at least part of the reason the Iranians shut down those parts of their nuclear program dealing exclusively with bomb making is because they feared further sanctions.

* The date of 2013 is probably too pessimistic but is a consensus date that everyone would sign off on. In 2 years, Iran will have several thousand more centrifuges up and running at Nantanz. At that point, assuming they wanted to restart their bomb program, it would probably be a matter of months - a year at most - before they built a bomb. A date closer to 2011 is probably more realistic but was left off in deference to those (and there is apparently a faction in our intel community who believe this) who think Iran is too technologically backward to have a bomb much before 2015.

* The threat of an Iranian bomb will remain as long as Iran is enriching its own uranium.

Jeffrey Lewis chalks up the change to a bureaucratic shuffle initiated by former President Khatami that sought to forestall the matter of Iranian nukes from being taken before the UNSC:

I made this argument in a July 2005 blog post, pointing to a speech about Iranian decision-making by Hassan Rowhani that I called “wonkporn” and suggesting that the bureaucratic reorganization undertaken by Khatami might later been seen as the “beginning [of] a process of negotiations that constrained his more hardline successor.”

Another nuke expert, Paul Kerr, lays out the changes made:

Iran was publicly defiant and resisted cooperating with the IAEA investigation. Yet internally, there were signs that the government was anxious to avoid a potential confrontation with the United Nations. In an apparent attempt to facilitate cooperation with the IAEA, Iran consolidated decision-making authority over its nuclear program around October 2003. Hassan Rowhani, who was the head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC)—Iran’s top decision-making body on security-related issues—was put in charge of nuclear diplomacy. Previously, oversight of the issue had been divided between Iran’s Foreign Ministry and its Atomic Energy Organization.

For those disposed to disbelieve or reject this NIE, it would be well to remember that if a consensus about something this vital to our security was found among such a fractious, quarrelling, multi-agenda driven group of spooks, you can bet the information it’s based on is pretty solid.

Now we come to the distasteful question of what in God’s name the Bush Administration has been doing sitting on this damn thing for year? And beyond that, is there any Bush supporter out there who believes anything this president says about national security anymore?

We have been treated to the most bombastic rhetoric emanating from this White House for the last year especially - all the while they were sitting on this NIE and its conclusions about the Iranian bomb program. How do you square Bush’s “World War III” comment with what’s in the NIE? Or any other dire warning we’ve heard coming from the White House?

I understand the need for regime change in Iran. I am not naive enough to believe that the Iranian government doesn’t represent a threat to our friends, allies, and interests in the region - nukes or no nukes. But this Administration has made a nasty habit for 7 years now of employing rhetoric on national security matters that doesn’t match what the situation actually is.

Kevin Drum asks why release the NIE now?

Democratic members of the various intelligence committees saw the NIE (or a summary or a verbal report or something) and went ballistic. Footnotes and dissents are one thing, but withholding a report whose primary conclusion is 180 degrees contrary to years of administration innuendo produced a rebellion. Somebody who got briefed must has threatened something pretty serious if the NIE didn’t see the light of day.

Like I said, just a guess. But who else has the clout to force Bush, Cheney, and McConnell to change course?

I don’t necessarily see a change in course since it’s pretty obvious the Administration had been on the diplomatic track for months now. What the NIE does is knock the chocks from underneath the neo-cons and set them adrift. They’ve got nowhere to go now - unless they want to argue that the NIE is wrong.

For different reasons, that’s exactly the argument being made by AJ Strata:

The NIE is quite clear. We know they stopped, we have no intel on whether they are still stopped or not. The reporting that Iran has stopped as of now is not accurate. Here is the scary part - Iran is still processing fuel! They don’t NEED to process fuel for Nuclear Energy. Russia has offered to SELL THEM fuel if they return the spent fuel so it cannot be used to make weapons

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While AJ is right, that Russian offer was conditional on the Iranians halting their enrichment program - something that Ahmadinejad has now made (for largely domestic reasons) a national sovereignty issue and therefore, non negotiable.

Is bombing still a viable option? Unless you believe that the mullahs will not be dissuaded from eventually restarting the bomb making parts of their nuclear program then taking out the infrastructure is still on the table.

I still think bombing would be a bad idea - at least until we can say for sure that they have restarted that part of their program. The fact is, there is no reason for military action against Iran at the moment and every reason to continue applying pressure via sanctions to try and get them to stop enriching uranium. It also gives us time to develop and encourage those elements in Iran who could work to moderate or replace the regime - the latter being much more likely than the former.

The point is that time is once again our friend. Let’s use it wisely.