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Events of the last weeks have made it clear that four things are now probably going to happen. It’s possible to use this information to more accurately predict who the next president of the United States will be.
- Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential election.
- President Obama has been pushed into a re-engagement in the Middle East and Af/Pak to counter Putin; (See 1 and 1a below.)
- There will be growing tension with China in the South China Sea; and (See 1b below.)
- Obamacare will become a political embarrassment and potential issue in the 2016 elections.
The Hill reports that “democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has opened up a 41-point lead over rival Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Iowa, according to a Monmouth University survey released Tuesday that differs wildly from other polls showing a tighter contest.” As Mark Halperin notes in Bloomberg, the party fence sitters have decided that Hillary is the Strong Horse in a field where Bernie Sanders is the also-ran. A party that has been trying to decide which of its candidates was anointed now knows who it is the unions, MSM pundits, billionaire funders and supporters have “sent”. It ain’t Bernie Sanders.
A glittering debate performance, the decision of potential rival Joe Biden not to run (greatly simplifying her path to the nomination), the vanquishing of Republicans during her daylong Benghazi hearing, and a solid turn at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner Saturday night. All have improved Clinton’s odds of cruising into the White House 12 months hence, and have thrown into sharper relief some of the advantages she has had all along.
The second matter now settled is that the Obama administration will be pulled kicking and screaming into its wars, especially now that Putin has mounted a direct challenge to the president. Currently the president is engaged by MSM count, in 7 wars. Although the administration will deny it is involved in these conflicts because apart from Afghanistan, it has committed no infantry on the ground, it is clear that in some way Obama has put American national security interests at stake in these places.
What you want to call them is a matter of semantics. They are at any rate too big to be finessed by parsing and talking points. As Niall Ferguson recently put it: “since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold”. Whole countries have been destroyed and more refugees on the move than at any time in world history, including World War 2. These conflicts represent unfinished business that is too pressing to entirely ignore.
President Obama, perhaps yielding to the pleas of his subordinates, and the pressure of foreign leaders has now reluctantly permitted direct action against the Islamic State, more assistance to CIA-sponsored rebels, partially reversed the drawdown in Afghanistan and allowed the US military more operational flexibility in the way it handled its missions. So there will be more combat news from all corners of the world, come what may.
To the third item: it is now virtually certain that a flashpoint with China is building over its island fortresses in the South China Sea. After months of watching Chinese grab the littorals the Obama administration finally sent a Burke class destroyer within 12 nautical miles of the Chinese positions to challenge, with predictable results. ”The Chinese navy has warned that further forays by the U.S. naval vessel into the waters claimed by China in the South China Sea may ’trigger eventualities.’”
Chinese navy spokesperson Liang Yang made the comment following a U.S. warship’s entering waters near the Nansha Islands on Tuesday. The Chinese navy monitored, tracked and issued warnings to the USS Lassen, according to Liang, who said China’s reaction is necessary, legitimate and professional.“China’s sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters is irrefutable,” he said. “The Chinese navy will resolutely perform duties and missions to unswervingly safeguard national sovereignty, maritime rights and interests, and peace and stability in the South China Sea.”The spokesperson said the navy will closely monitor the situation in and above the sea for goings-on that may jeopardize China’s national security.
Perhaps the biggest sleeper issue is the collapse of Obamacare. This is a domestic issue and may more directly affect the elections. It’s visibly collapsing. The administration has announced no new increases in enrollment are expected. The risk corridors have imploded, sending 9 Obamacare co-ops into bankruptcy. Obamacare insurance premiums are rising dramatically, some of them in the double-digits. The young invincibles have abandoned it, preferring to pay the fines which have themselves increased dramatically.
The president’s flagship welfare program is in an actual insurance death spiral.
These four landmarks will define the known landscape of the next 12 months. All the rest is hidden in the fog of the future. America will continue to be engaged in multiple wars across the world. A new area of conflict with China will rumble on, less insistent than the hot wars yet nevertheless there. Domestically, Obamacare will become an economic issue, perhaps a significant one. Their cumulative effect on the election is an interesting one.
Russia, the Jihadis and China noting the rise of Hillary within the Democratic party, may now be adjusting their present actions to reflect their preferred outcome in the elections. All things considered, America’s foreign policy foes would prefer a president Hillary to any likely Republican president because her ascendancy would represent the third and possibly the fourth terms of “president Obama”.
A Clinton presidency will signal to China, Russia and the Jihadis that the Happy Times for them are not yet over. They’ll get 8 more years to continue what they’ve done in the last 8. Given this prospect, they should rationally let up and avoid precipitating a foreign policy debacle that could sink a Clinton campaign.
Does this mean an inevitable president Hillary? On the debit side of the ledger the growing collapse of Obamacare will work against her. But the deciding factor will be Murphy, who in times of unrest remains the uncrowned king of events. No matter how much Russia, China or the Jihadis may want to give Hilary a pass, the sheer momentum of world troubles can create problems of their own accord.
If no significant crisis eventuates in the months between today and November, 2016 the odds of a Clinton victory next November are probably dead even. But if some unforeseen crisis arises, Hillary’s chances decrease dramatically. So the relevant question is “what is the likelihood that some significant crisis occurs in the next 12 months which will adversely affect the administration’s credibility?” There is no way to objectively predict this probability. Perhaps we can approximate the chances by proposing the following scale.
- Nil
- Not inconceivable
- Likely
- Highly likely
- Certain
Open thread.
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Tonight, more Republican wheat should be separated from the stalk. Too many candidates continuing to diffuse the debate, the message, the focus on the strategy the public needs to assess. Some of the low hanging fruit(s) should fall by the wayside as the demand for funding heats up and becomes the driving force of remaining viable.
Hillarious is beatable on two fronts. The Republican candidate must appeal to all but the Demwits and be capable of handling Hillarious' nastiness. Second, she is more than capable of beating herself when she gets angry and since she is always angry at right wing conspiracies that grip her soul the candidate just needs to egg her on to self destructive actions. (See 1a below.)
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I have maintained for decades Viet Nam and the aftermath consequences left an indelible impression on our nation which has metastasized. Respect for authority, an unwillingness to win, to stay the course to the end and too much political involvement where neither needed or productive, when it comes to military challenges, are three tragic legacies. (See 2 below.)
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If words have meaning anymore then the language in Obama's Iran Deal has been breached and the document should be deemed a dead letter. Are there consequences or will Obama turn a blind eye allowing his great legacy to cripple the next president? (See 3 below.)
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Foreign Policy talk. (See 4 below.)
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Foreign Policy talk. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
In Shift, U.S. Invites Iran to Join Syria Talks
Move reflects increased leverage of Iran and Russia after they jointly launched military operations
A man cycled past buildings damaged by shelling in Jobar, a suburb of Damascus, on Tuesday. PHOTO: BASSAM KHABIEH/REUTERS
WASHINGTON—Iran will be invited to participate in international talks on the Syrian crisis Friday in Vienna, U.S. officials said, in a major shift in the Obama administration’s approach to ending more than four years of fighting in the country.
The White House on Tuesday also gave its strongest statement yet that it was willing to let President Bashar al-Assad remain in office and oversee a political transition in Syria, though he would eventually have to go.
This recent tack toward the Syrian dictator marks a significant U-turn from earlier U.S. demands that Mr. Assad leave office, and together with the shift on Iran, highlights the increased leverage of Russia and Iran after they jointly launched military operations in defense of Mr. Assad last month.
“We have very different views, and our coalition partners do, from the Syrian government, the Russians and the Iranians,” Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national-security adviser, said at an event at Yale University. “But I think there is the potential for an arrangement to be agreed wherein this transition begins, perhaps with Assad still in power, but it doesn’t end with him in power.”
The U.S. and its Arab allies previously blocked Tehran from participating in United Nations-backed talks on Syria, because of Tehran’s deep military and financial support for Mr. Assad. Iran has repeatedly rejected U.S. demands that it commit to supporting a political transition in Damascus that would end the Syrian leader’s 15-year rule.
Secretary of State John Kerry and European diplomats in recent weeks have publicly acknowledged that reaching a diplomatic solution to end the Syrian conflict was probably impossible without the involvement of Iran and Russia.
The White House has previously raised the possibility of cooperating with Tehran on Syria in the wake of the landmark nuclear agreement Iran reached with global powers in July. The deal aims to scale back Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions on Iran.
“We have to have a conversation and a dialogue with Iran,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday, though he stressed that the U.S. viewed Tehran’s activities in Syria as “destabilizing.”
“They are a stakeholder in this process,” Mr. Kirby told reporters. “They do have a relationship with the Assad regime; they do have a relationship inside Syria.”
Iran and Russia have substantially increased their support for Mr. Assad. Last month, they jointly launched military operations targeting Mr. Assad’s battlefield opponents. Tehran has also mobilized thousands of Shiite fighters from across the Middle East to bolster the Syrian regime’s forces since civil war broke out in the country in 2011.
It is still uncertain whether Iran will attend the Vienna conference. Iranian PresidentHassan Rouhani has publicly backed international cooperation to end the Syrian conflict. But the country’s most powerful political figure, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly banned Iranian officials this month from holding discussions with the U.S. on anything besides the nuclear issue.
U.S. officials said it was unclear whether Mr. Khamenei’s declaration would prevent Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif from traveling to Austria’s capital. “It’s up to Iran to decide whether they’re going to [attend] or not when they are asked,” Mr. Kirby said.
More than a dozen countries are expected to attend the meeting this Friday, including the most important backers of all sides in the Syrian conflict. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have all provided military and financial support to the largely Sunni forces seeking to overthrow Mr. Assad. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has opposed Iran’s participation in talks on Syria, saying Iran has helped Mr. Assad commit war crimes on his own people.
Mr. Kirby wouldn’t say if the other countries, including Saudi Arabia, supported Iran’s presence, but he said all were consulted.
Mr. Kerry has intensified discussions with Russia’s government in recent weeks on ending the Syrian civil war. This included a string of meetings and phone calls with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week.
U.S. and European governments have voiced concerns about Russian airstrikes inside Syria, saying they could further destabilize the country. Many of the attacks, U.S. officials said, have targeted militias supported by Washington and its allies.
Still, U.S. officials have also said Russia and Iran appear more interested in finding a diplomatic solution in Syria than previously, due to their recognition of Mr. Assad’s weakened political and military positions.
Following a meeting in Moscow last week with Mr. Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the possibility of new elections in Syria. The Russian leader has also called for a united international front in the fight against Islamic State militants who have taken control of large swaths of eastern and southern Syria in recent months.
At a closed-door hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday morning, Mr. Kerry told lawmakers that the U.S., Russia and other powers are narrowing differences on what a diplomatic transition in Syria could look like, attendees said.
“There seems to be from their perspective some congruence, if you will, around what the goals are in Syria itself,” said Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), who attended the meeting with Mr. Kerry and added that he was skeptical Russia and Iran’s presence in Syria could facilitate a diplomatic solution.
“When you look at the diplomatic objectives, are the facts on the ground that both Russia and Iran are creating, do they lead one to believe that the diplomatic solution that is being discussed is one that is real?” Mr. Corker said.
—Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.
1a)
The Myth of Hillary the Inevitable
Her big money has had its intended effect: scaring off any serious challenger.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
So now Hillary Clinton is invincible.
Such is the new received wisdom. It replaces the old received wisdom that she was a fatally flawed candidate sowing despair among Democratic Party bigwigs.
The new wisdom comes after a good two weeks that began with Mrs. Clinton trouncing her rivals in the televised Democratic debate and ended with her besting her Republican inquisitors on the House Benghazi Committee. In between, Joe Biden announced he would not be making good on his dying son’s request to keep the White House from the Clintons after all.
For all this, the idea that Hillary is unstoppable is nuts. Not least because her victories are less about defeating opponents than making sure the serious ones are removed before the contest has begun.
Start with the money. Back in the spring we learned that Mrs. Clinton and her outside supporters were aiming to raise $2.5 billion for her campaign even as she decried the role of money in politics. To put that $2.5 billion in perspective, it’s more than Barack Obama andMitt Romney spent combined in 2012.
Certainly this money will be an advantage in next year’s race. But it has already done what it was really designed to do: scare off serious challengers for the Democratic nomination.
No surprise, then, that her actual rivals would come down to a socialist from Vermont (Sen. Bernie Sanders), a failed former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland (Martin O’Malley), an ex-Republican, ex-governor and ex-senator from Rhode Island passionate about the metric system (Lincoln Chafee) and a former Democratic senator (Virginia’s Jim Webb) who only now seems to realize that the voters he was counting on are no longer in the Democratic Party.
No serious rival meant no serious debate. Thus Mrs. Clinton’s chief opponent, Mr. Sanders, not only refused to play the strongest card against Mrs. Clinton—her ethics—he exonerated her on behalf of the party before a nationally televised audience. Now he is reaping his reward, as Mrs. Clinton denounces him as a “sexist” for the way he attacked her on her anti-gun policy in the debate.
How different all this is from the Democratic primaries of 2008. Then, as now, Mrs. Clinton had planned a coronation. Then, as now, she had most of the advantages thought decisive: money, big-name endorsements, etc. Yet Barack Obama beat her anyway.
Mrs. Clinton’s record is a reminder that she is neither as fatally flawed as she was presented a couple of months ago nor as unbeatable as she may now appear. The truth is closer to what Mr. Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, faced in 2008: an imposing candidate with at least three key weaknesses the GOP would do well to exploit.
First, and unlike in 2008, Hillary 2.0 has moved sharply left, to the point where she is now the candidate of a third Obama term. This will work well in Democratic primaries but will be a harder sell in the general campaign, where she will be tagged with every Obama failure, from the rise of Islamic State to the record number of Americans out of work.
Consider her assault on Bernie Sanders. In 2008, Mr. Obama deftly avoided playing the race card even as he benefited from it. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has now made gender her signature credential. But it may not play the way she clearly expects: In April, the conservative political action committee American Crossroads released a survey reporting that eight out of 10 voters in battleground states say that Mrs. Clinton’s pitch to become the first woman president “makes no difference” to their support or opposition.
Second, Republicans don’t have to prove that Hillary Clinton is not to be trusted. Polls confirm the American people already know that. The challenge for a GOP nominee is to connect this fact—that Mrs. Clinton’s default mode is to deceive—with what this would mean if she became president.
Finally, as the former Obama adviser David Axelrod pointed out in his memoirs, Mrs. Clinton has two huge flaws: She’s polarizing and is a candidate of the past. In 2008 the Obama campaign attacked her in ads noting her coziness with Wall Street and accusing her of the “same old politics of phony charges and false attacks.”
Alas, rather than coldly analyzing and exploiting her weaknesses, as Messrs. Obama and Axelrod did in 2008, too many Republicans have been hoping for some fateful intervention such as a federal indictment. It’s wishful thinking: If there is one thing we know about the Clintons, it’s that where others might give up, they just keep moving.
Better to keep in mind that Mrs. Clinton has had only two victories at the ballot box, both in blue-state New York against GOP lightweights: former House member Rick Lazio in 2000 and former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer in 2006.
The only time Hillary Clinton ever faced a serious candidate—Barack Obama—she lost.
1b)
U.S. Navy Ship Sails Near Islands Claimed by China
USS Lassen navigates near Spratly islands in South China Sea, crossing area Beijing claims as part of its sovereign territory
The USS Lassen, shown anchored at Tien Sa port in Vietnam in 2009, conducted Tuesday’s patrol. PHOTO: HOANG DINH NAM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
WASHINGTON—A U.S. Navy destroyer sailed within 12 nautical miles of artificial islands claimed by China, in a direct challenge to Beijing that raises the stakes in an expanding, multination territorial dispute.
The USS Lassen conducted a patrol early Tuesday morning within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, one of the land masses to which China lays claim within the Spratly chain of islands in the South China Sea, an area that China maintains is part of its sovereign territory.
International convention allows countries to claim territorial waters within 12 nautical miles of their coastal territory, but the U.S. and many other countries don’t recognize China’s claims to almost all of the South China Sea. Thus U.S. officials labeled Monday’s operation a “freedom of navigation” exercise.
“We have been clear that we take no position on competing territorial sovereignty claims to land features in the South China Sea,” a defense official said. “We will fly, sail and operate anywhere in the world that international law allows.”
Several U.S. defense officials said the navigation through the islands wasn’t a one-time operation, and that the U.S. Navy would continue to sail through waters claimed by Beijing.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Tuesday that his government was still trying to verify media reports about the U.S. operation, according to a statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website. “If true, we advise the U.S. to think carefully before acting, not to take reckless action and not to make trouble out of nothing,” the statement quoted Mr. Wang as saying.
While the U.S. has long said it doesn’t take sides in the territorial dispute over the Spratlys, the American ship’s passage through the area is significant as a signal of Washington’s view that some of China’s artificial islands have no right to territorial waters because they were built on reefs that used to be submerged at high tide
President Barack Obama has pledged to uphold the right of American vessels to travel through international waters despite what the U.S. sees as unfounded claims by other countries, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
“This is a critically important principle, particularly in the South China Sea, because there are billions of dollars of commerce that flow through that region of the world every year, and maybe even more than that,” Mr. Earnest said.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who has publicly scolded Beijing for its island-building campaign, has been blunt on the issue, saying the U.S. would sail its ships wherever and whenever it wants within international waters. Senior U.S. military officials, including Adm. Harry Harris, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, have urged the U.S. to proceed with the operation.
But despite long-standing expectations of a White House signal to Beijing, the National Security Council hadn’t given the go-ahead until now. Some believed the White House wanted to wait until President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington concluded last month.“I agree that the South China Sea is no more China’s than the Gulf of Mexico is Mexico’s,” Adm. Harris told a Senate panel in September. “I think that we must exercise our freedom of navigation throughout the region.”
The dispute has simmered most of this year as the American military has watched China expand the chain of islands in the South China Sea by using dredged material from the ocean floor to build or expand islands, using submerged reefs and rocks.
China has amassed thousands of acres of these man-made structures, according to a Pentagon report issued in August. Beijing says the islands are for both military and nonmilitary use, including to house fishermen.
But defense officials believe Beijing’s ambitions are more alarming, and point to China’s construction of airstrips, military facilities like barracks and ports. Washington fears that Beijing will use the islands for military purposes that could cause instability in one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping routes, with as much as $5 trillion annually passing through the region.
Airstrip construction on the Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea is pictured in this April 2 satellite image. PHOTO: DIGITALGLOBE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, had placed mobile artillery units atop one of the islands, known as Johnson Reef. Those artillery units have since been removed or obscured from view.
In September, Mr. Xi surprised U.S. officials on his visit to Washington by declaring that China didn’t “intend to militarize” the islands. But his statement has remained puzzling since Beijing has done little to clarify his remarks.
In September, a flotilla of five Chinese warships came within 12 nautical miles of the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea, a rare foray into U.S. territorial waters. Defense Department officials said Sept. 6 that the Chinese navy ships had passed through the waters but they had complied with international law and didn’t act in any threatening way.
The ships undertook what is known as “innocent passage,” a legal concept in which ships pass through another nation’s territorial waters. But the passage was seen as significant at the time given that Beijing has long objected to the U.S. Navy transiting China’s territorial waters without prior permission or even sailing near them.
That Chinese passage though the Aleutians was different from the U.S. operation Monday in the South China Sea because “innocent passage” by a ship in the area could imply recognition that China has territorial waters there.
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2)Commitment Issues
The War-Light approach to fighting terrorism continues to keep victory beyond America’s grasp.
By Ethan Rocke - November 1, 2015
When Afghanistan became the first U.S. target in the war on terror in the fall of 2001, there wasn’t much of a war plan. With winter approaching and Afghanistan’s well-known history as “the graveyard of empires,” President George W. Bush was averse to committing large numbers of ground troops. He opted instead for a strategy that minimized the number of U.S. troops deployed, relying primarily on the CIA and small teams of U.S. Special Forces who advised and funded anti-Taliban militias such as the Northern Alliance.
“The view prevailing among senior American military leaders was that overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash and surrogate militias could win the war,” wrote Mary Anne Weaver in The New York Times Magazine in 2005.
In the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, winning meant capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaida and its surrogates. With the added capability of precision airstrikes directed by the Special Forces, the militias drove the Taliban from their Kandahar stronghold by December 2001. Bin Laden and his followers were on the run and holed up in the mountain stronghold of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.
Originally built for the mujahideen’s war against the Soviets with support from the CIA in the 1980s, Tora Bora was a complex network of fortified caves amid unforgiving terrain more than 13,000 feet up. Weaver described it as “miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls.” To meet the force of at least 1,500 well-trained and equipped fighters at Tora Bora, the Pentagon dispatched nothing more than a few dozen Special Forces troops aligned with several militias from competing warlords.
By Dec. 5, 2001, then-Brig. Gen. Jim Mattis commanded 4,000 Marines in the Afghan theater. He argued strongly that his Marines should surround and seal off bin Laden’s lair, but U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) turned down his requests. “The Bush administration later concluded,” Weaver wrote, “that the refusal of CENTCOM to dispatch the Marines – along with their failure to commit U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan generally – was the gravest error of the war.”
If Gen. Tommy Franks had let “Mad Dog” Mattis and his Marines off their leash in early December 2001, bin Laden likely would have been killed or captured and al-Qaida routed within months of the 9/11 attacks. Instead, about 800 al-Qaida fighters escaped Tora Bora, and bin Laden left around Dec. 16, making his way over the border to Pakistan, where he stayed until he was killed by members of SEAL Team Six almost a decade later.
For those who revere Mattis with cult-like fealty, an obvious takeaway from Tora Bora is that if “Mad Dog” says do it, you do it. While I count myself among the Marines who would endorse that maxim, he is not the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy. If Tora Bora should have taught us anything, it is that our strategic objectives must always be married to the force levels necessary to achieve them. This is one of the main pillars of the Powell Doctrine. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in the George H.W. Bush administration, Gen. Colin Powell expanded on principles first articulated in 1984 by former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, prescribing several criteria the United States should meet before committing the nation to war. Among them was the need for a clear, attainable objective with a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement.
Pointing to a series of successful military operations under his tenure as JCS chairman, Powell wrote in 1992, “The reason for our success is that in every instance we have carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives. We owe it to the men and women who go in harm’s way to make sure that this is always the case and that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes.” Powell conceived his doctrine based on lessons learned from Vietnam and his experiences spanning 30 years in uniform.
When Donald Rumsfeld, Powell’s ideological rival, took control of the Pentagon as George W. Bush’s first defense secretary, most of the lessons learned in Korea and Vietnam were effectively thrown out the window. Rumsfeld’s vision called for something like a “War-Light” doctrine. This is my name for those conflicts characterized by poorly conceived strategic objectives sold to the American public based on gross underestimations of the number of conventional forces and the length of commitment required to achieve them. War-Light is antithetical to the conventional assumptions upon which the Powell Doctrine was based. Its tragic legacy is a generation of Americans for whom a clear victory in prolonged conflict has proven as elusive as the moral authority with which the war was waged.
WHILE MAKING his case for military action against Iraq to members of the House International Relations Committee in October 2002, Bush said, “People out there say you cannot fight in Afghanistan and win in Iraq. Defeating two enemies is very difficult, but we will do it.”
According to Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” Bush instructed Rumsfeld in November 2001 to discreetly begin reviewing the Pentagon’s war plan for Iraq. In the following months, Rumsfeld met several times with Franks, commander of CENTCOM, pressuring him to revise the Pentagon’s plan and substantially reduce the number of boots on the ground. The plan Rumsfeld inherited – basically, the plan with which the United States had defeated Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War – called for at least 400,000 troops. When he concluded his back-to-the-drawing-board dance with Franks, Rumsfeld had settled on an invasion force of around 150,000.
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who served as JCS director of operations in 2002, resigned in protest of Rumsfeld’s plans for the invasion. In an April 2006 essay for Time, Newbold wrote that U.S. forces were sent to Iraq “with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions – or bury the results.”
When then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, he offered this assessment for an Iraq invasion: “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.” Two days later, Rumsfeld and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki’s assessment in the media. Rumsfeld said Shinseki’s numbers were “far from the mark,” and Wolfowitz used the words “wildly off the mark.”
In his memoir, former JCS chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton said this of Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon: “It was the worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service or have witnessed at the highest levels of the corporate world since then.” Rumsfeld has been publicly rebuked by several other generals who worked for him in Iraq and at the Pentagon, including retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, retired Maj. Gen. John Riggs, retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper and retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton.
Eaton, who in June 2003 was given the task of building a new Iraqi army, is one of several high-ranking officials in Iraq who were flabbergasted when L. Paul Bremer, as the newly appointed head of the Coalition Provincial Authority (CPA), implemented CPA Orders 1 and 2. With the stroke of his pen, he implemented a policy of de-Ba’athification, dictating that all public employees affiliated with Hussein’s Ba’ath Party be fired and prohibited from future employment in the public sector. The move effectively barred huge numbers of Iraq’s educated class from working to build a new government and relegated them to the ranks of the unemployed.
Then Bremer dissolved the Iraqi army, a decision that went against the advice of virtually every military officer and diplomat assigned to the Organization of Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance, which served as Iraq’s transitional government until the CPA took over. And after sending tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers into the ranks of the unemployed, Bremer, who answered to Rumsfeld, made no effort to secure the vast supply of military arms and equipment that lay in depots all over the country. The Oscar-nominated 2007 documentary “No End in Sight” is a maddeningly detailed account of the general incoherence of the Pentagon’s decisions in those vital early months.
“(Bremer’s) exclusion of the Iraqis early on from major participation in the decision-making process was a grievous error,” Lawrence Wilkerson says in the film. A retired Army colonel, Wilkerson was Powell’s chief of staff during his tenure as secretary of state. He endorsed Powell’s philosophy of “you break it, you own it,” meaning simply that “when you take out a regime and you bring down a government, you become the government.”
In a 2007 interview in The Atlantic, Powell discussed the Pentagon’s failure to own Iraq. “In the second phase of this conflict, which was beginning after the statue fell, we made serious mistakes in not acting like a government,” he said. “One, maintaining order. Two, keeping people from destroying their own property. Three, not having in place security forces – either ours or theirs or a combination of the two to keep order. And in the absence of order, chaos ensues.”
U.S. TROOP LEVELS in Iraq peaked at 166,300 during Bush’s now-famous surge of forces in 2007. Army Gen. David Petraeus devised and oversaw the implementation of the strategy, which relied on troop increases coupled with a policy of paying millions each month to the “Sons of Iraq” – many of whom were Sunni insurgents who had been killing Americans – to turn against al-Qaida and support the United States and its efforts. The Anbar (Sunni) Awakening succeeded in bringing greater stability to Iraq, but the gains ultimately proved temporary as a war-weary United States elected Barack Obama, who ran on a promise to draw down forces in Iraq and shift attention back to Afghanistan. When Obama announced his own surge of forces in Afghanistan in 2009, he also opted for War-Light, deploying 30,000 troops there despite the fact that his generals had asked for far more. In 2011, Obama delivered on his promise and withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq.
As the 2016 presidential election approaches, Middle Eastern policy and the military are political wedge issues once again. For most of the Republican candidates, the genesis of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) can be easily pinpointed at the moment U.S. troops left Iraq, or when Obama failed to arm and train certain factions of Syrian rebels. For liberals, the rise of ISIS can be clearly traced to Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. This pattern of partisan finger-pointing saddles U.S. political discourse with oversimplifications of the Middle East’s infinitely complex cultural and political landscape.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and other military operations in the Middle East are at least partly responsible for the massive destabilization that has occurred there in the past 14 years. Deposing Hussein led to the political ascendance of Iraq’s Shia majority, which upended a long-standing policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s resistance to the political power-sharing Bush’s surge was supposed to facilitate opened the door for ISIS to exploit the disenfranchised Sunnis. The centuries-old rift between Sunnis and Shias throughout the Middle East, and the consequences of the Arab Spring uprisings, should not be discounted.
In an interview with Politico magazine in July, John McLaughlin, former deputy director of the CIA, said, “Remember that in 2011, we had the Arab Awakening, and remember that Syria went drastically bad, largely because of (Syrian President Bashar) Assad’s reaction to what were legitimate protests in the area. Syria is about 70 percent Sunni, and that is the real engine that is drawing in fighters ... at something like 1,000 a month.”
Would leaving 10,000 or 20,000 U.S. troops have prevented the rise of ISIS? It’s possible, but the answer is inconsequential to the foreign policy problems the United States faces going forward. According to a Harvard University study published in 2013, “The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in U.S. history – totaling somewhere between $4 trillion to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for servicemembers, veterans and families, military replenishment, and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid.”
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee Jan. 27, Mattis said, “The foundation of military strength is our economic strength … If we refuse to reduce our debt/pay down our deficit, what is the impact on national security for future generations who will inherit this irresponsible debt and the taxes to service it? No nation in history has maintained its military power if it failed to keep its fiscal house in order.”
In 2004, bin Laden put out a video recording in which he lauded al-Qaida’s “bleed-until-bankruptcy plan” and gleefully pointed to America’s ballooning deficits as evidence that the terrorists were on a path to victory.
War-Light has long been an intoxicating theory that U.S. leaders have embraced for its populist appeal, but the historical record exposes it as an elaborate lie we like to tell ourselves: that war can be cheap and easy and our power to shape the world with military might is limitless.
Writing for The Atlantic in July 2013, Dartmouth College President Emeritus James Wright offered a sober accounting of the U.S. military scorecard since 1950: “Korea established a pattern that has been unfortunately followed in American wars in Vietnam, Iraq (II) and Afghanistan. These are wars without declaration and without the political consensus and the resolve to meet specific and changing goals. They are improvisational wars. They are dangerous.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in March, Mattis endorsed Wright’s essay, saying, “If you don’t get the political end-state right up front, you’re going to be engaged in a war you don’t know how to end in favorable terms.”
Sir Winston Churchill famously said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We have been repeating our mistakes since 1950, and the cultural hubris that fuels the pattern is resurgent yet again. A cycle of national amnesia and partisan gamesmanship binds our collective imagination, and as the hard-fought gains we made in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to dwindle, the psychological toll exacted on America’s collective conscience grows. We are a nation that has forgotten how to win, and if we do not change our calculus when it comes to waging war, we will not disrupt the pattern.
In a commentary for The Wall Street Journal, Mattis eloquently expressed the pride and reverence I have for the men and women who serve in uniform today: “No granite monuments, regardless of how grandly built, can take the place of your raw example of courage, when in your youth you answered your country’s call. When you looked past the hot political rhetoric. When you voluntarily left behind life’s well-lit avenues. When you signed that blank check to the American people, payable with your lives. And, most important, when you made a full personal commitment even while, for over a dozen years, the country’s political leadership had difficulty defining our national level of commitment.”
Those politicians seeking to command the most powerful military the world has ever seen owe the nation and its military members and veterans a clear-eyed assessment of the legacy and lessons of the war on terror. The United States cannot afford to buy another war based on false promises of swift victory with minimal commitments.
Ethan Rocke is an award-winning writer, photographer and filmmaker in Portland, Ore. He served as an infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division from 1998 to 2001 and as a Marine Corps combat correspondent from 2001 to 2011. www.ethanrocke.com
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3)
Iran’s Indecent Proposal
Khamenei haggles over the price of American surrender.
By Bret Stephens
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—better known as the Iran nuclear deal—was officially adopted Sunday, Oct. 18. That’s nine days ago. It’s already a dead letter.
Not that you would have noticed by reading the news or tuning in to State Department or White House briefings. It’s too embarrassing to an administration that has invested all of its diplomatic capital in the deal. Also, too inconvenient to the commodity investors, second-tier banks, European multinationals and everyone else who wants a piece of the Iranian market and couldn’t care less whether Tehran honors its nuclear bargain.
Yet here we are. Iran is testing the agreement, reinterpreting it, tearing it up line by line. For the U.S.—or at least our next president—the lesson should be clear: When you sign a garbage agreement, you get a garbage outcome.
Earlier this month Iran test-fired a new-generation ballistic missile, called Emad, with an estimated 1,000-mile range and a 1,600-pound payload. Its only practical military use is to deliver a nuclear warhead. The test was a bald violation of the Security Council’s Resolution 2231, adopted unanimously in July, in which “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons” for at least eight years.
Then Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei weighed in on the nuclear deal by way of a public letter to President Hassan Rouhani. “The behavior and words of the U.S. government in the nuclear issue and its prolonged and boring negotiations,” he wrote, “showed that [the nuclear issue] was also another link in their chain of hostile enmity with the Islamic Republic.”
The Supreme Leader’s comments on the nuclear deal have been billed by some reporters as a cautious endorsement of the agreement. Not exactly. They are a unilateral renegotiation of the entire deal, stipulating that the U.S. and everyone else must accept his rewrite—or else.
The best analysis of Mr. Khamenei’s demands comes from Yigal Carmon and Ayelet Savyon of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Demand One: The U.S. and Europe must completely lift, rather than temporarily suspend, their economic sanctions, putting an end to any possibility that penalties could “snap back” in the event of Iran’s noncompliance. Demand Two: Sanctions against Iran for its support of terrorism and its human-rights abuses must also go, never mind the Obama administration’s insistence that it will continue to punish Iran for its behavior.
Next Mr. Khamenei changes the timetable for Iran to ship out its enriched uranium and modify its plutonium reactor in Arak until the International Atomic Energy Agency gives Iran a pass on all “past and future issues (including the so-called Possible Military Dimensions or PMD of Iran’s nuclear program).” So much for the U.N. nuclear watchdog even pretending to monitor Iran’s compliance with the deal. He also reiterates his call for a huge R&D effort so that Iran will have at least 190,000 centrifuges when the nuclear deal expires.
“The set of conditions laid out by Khamenei,” Mr. Carmon and Ms. Savyon note in their analysis, “creates a situation in which not only does the Iranian side refrain from approving the JCPOA, but, with nearly every point, creates a separate obstacle, such that executing the agreement is not possible.”
That’s right, though it doesn’t mean Mr. Khamenei intends to stop negotiating. Instead, like in some diplomatic version of Lord Beaverbrook’s indecent proposal—“Madam, we have established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price”—Mr. Khamenei has discovered what the administration is. Now he wants to pocket the concessions he has already gained and wheedle for a bit more.
Little wonder that Iran has upped the contempt factor since the agreement was signed. A day after the missile test, Iran convicted Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. On Monday came reports that Iran may have arrested an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran. Expect similarly brutish insults in the months ahead, all to underline how little Mr. Khamenei thinks of the American president and his outstretched hand.
As for the administration, it would be nice to imagine that it is starting to sense the Ayatollah’s disdain. But it isn’t. The missile test was met by a wan effort to take “appropriate action” at the U.N., whatever that might be. Mr. Khamenei’s letter has been met with almost complete silence, as if ignoring it will make it go away.
Perhaps none of this matters. For all the promises and warnings about the Iran deal, it is nothing more than surrender dressed up as diplomacy. The correlation of forces in the Middle East has shifted in the past year, and Mr. Obama will not lift a finger to restore the balance. Mr. Khamenei knows this, and he is not about to give the U.S. a dignified surrender. Then maybe Mr. Obama knows it, too. He doesn’t seem to mind the ignominy.
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4)
The 2016 presidential election offers a new beginning for U.S. foreign policy. Instead of resorting to stunts like Hillary Clinton’s gimmicky red reset button, we have the opportunity for a true reset of international relations.
4)
The Candidates and Foreign Policy
The 2016 presidential election offers a new beginning for U.S. foreign policy. Instead of resorting to stunts like Hillary Clinton’s gimmicky red reset button, we have the opportunity for a true reset of international relations.
The alternately passive and reactive U.S. foreign policy of the last three presidential administrations has ill-served U.S. and global interests. In contrast, any serious prospective candidate of either party should articulate a vision for a coherent U.S. strategy in global affairs.
Our next president’s foreign policy should pursue three key objectives. First, protect and promote our interests and those of our allies. Second, rebuild our military and intelligence capabilities. Third, support countries and groups that are moving toward democratic forms of government.
Our primary foreign policy objective must be to serve American interests first. The U.S. military diversion and catastrophe in Haiti and Somalia, respectively, during the 1990s demonstrated the perils of a foreign policy that fails to prioritize our own national interest.
Our military is ill-equipped for humanitarian missions. Failure weakens our resolve and our international standing, and it harms the very countries we seek to help. These types of half-hearted and unsuccessful interventions divert our attention from true threats on the horizon and diminish our military preparedness. While America slept, al Qaeda steadily prepared in plain sight, with attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the U.S.S. Cole, and the World Trade Center in 1993.
As the United States haplessly devoted priorities and resources to nation-building, our enemies steadily plotted our destruction.
We need a foreign policy that promotes the free movement of people, ideas, products and capital, free and fair trade, keeping the sea passages safe and combating threats to Internet commerce. ISIS and Middle East violence threaten all of these. The ripple effects cannot be contained in the Middle East any longer, as Europe’s refugee crisis has shown. The Syrian conflict forced millions of Syrians to flee their homeland, with little to no prospect of returning.
Having turned tail and prematurely departed Iraq, we must face the reality that we again need boots on the ground both there and in Syria. U.S. forces need favorable rules of engagement, and we need military leaders with clear-eyed recognition that Islamist regimes like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran have loyalties elsewhere than with the United States. Once the jihadists are eradicated, the region’s good actors could then make a new balance of power in the Middle East.
Any successful candidate for the Oval Office should seek maximum U.S. power to lead in world affairs and to guarantee U.S. security by a generous margin. “No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and remain a great power,” as Bret Stephens details in his book, “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.”
Under the last three presidencies, the U.S. has reduced its emphasis on, resources for, and moral support of our military and intelligence capabilities.
The Obama administration uses the military to implement social agenda items, prioritizing political correctness over military readiness.
The Bush administration failed to put adequate resources into our military by instead permitting runaway federal spending on priorities such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and increasing federal entitlement programs such as Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage.
The Clinton administration lacked a principled theory of military engagement, ignored growing threats, and used the post-Cold-War peace dividend to push through cuts in the military budget.
The next administration should direct money away from entitlements and towards our military. That administration should invest in attracting and retaining our best military and intelligence personnel and invest in military training, research and development to confront the asymmetric threats we face.
We should pursue public-private partnerships to develop new strategies, responses and weaponry. We should recruit our best and brightest innovators to produce new technologies to retain our edge in modern warfare, from drones to robotics to special-ops technologies. We should revoke and repeal the Obama-Corker agreement with Iran on Inauguration Day 2017.
Finally, the next administration should, at every opportunity, unabashedly and unapologetically promote democracy abroad. No liberal democracy has ever gone to war against another liberal democracy so if we want peace in the world, we should be working toward liberal democracies as all nations at the UN.
In international relations, the fact that democracies do not go to war with each other is “the closest thing we have to an empirical law,” according to professor Jack Levy of Rutgers University. Professor John Owen of the University of Virginia describes the causal underpinnings of the phenomenon in his award-winning book, “Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security.”
The best course for the future of our international security is to abandon the divisions of left and right, promote U.S. interests, strengthen our military might, and work to disseminate the one system proven to increase international peace and justice – democratic forms of government. The next president must lead the way.
Trotter is a lawyer in Washington, DC. Her views are her own.
