Although Bremer was a former ambassador, he spoke no Arabic, had no experience with postwar reconstruction or with running a large organization, had never served in the military or the Arab world, and had never even visited Iraq. Those shortcomings did not hinder his candidacy. Perversely, as I would learn from Bremer, they enhanced it.
.. It’s been more than five years since US combat troops left Iraq. It took about that long after Vietnam for the nation to begin wrestling honestly with the forces that had led us into that mistaken war. It’s time we start doing the same with Iraq. And the case of L. Paul Bremer — at once well intentioned, infuriating, and tragic — is the ideal place to anchor this kind of reexamination.
.. Why had Bremer’s lack of expertise in the Middle East made him more attractive to the neoconservatives in the Bush administration?
Wolfowitz, a former academic dean, believed too many of the “Arabist” regional specialists in the State Department had concluded that democracy wasn’t possible in the Middle East. Bremer says Wolfowitz had wanted to make sure he hadn’t been “infected” by that kind of defeatist thinking.
.. Cheney owed his remarkable rise almost entirely to one man, Donald Rumsfeld. He had tapped Cheney to be his replacement when Rumsfeld departed the position to become Ford’s secretary of defense.
.. The shock was over a superpower’s impotence to stop the ransacking of a nation by desperate civilians and brazen thugs.
.. it’s clear the war could also serve as a demonstration project for their own animating philosophies.
For Cheney, it was the importance of untrammeled executive authority.
.. For Rumsfeld, Iraq would give him the chance to make the Pentagon’s generals, whom he saw as trapped in outdated Cold War thinking, see the wisdom of his plan to modernize the military with a smaller, faster, more technologically advanced fighting force.
.. For Wolfowitz, it was the belief that only a bold, military-initiated experiment in democracy could free the Middle East from its decades-long paralysis of despotism and anti-Semitism. Toppling Saddam, the brutal dictator who had gassed his own people, would allow a new democratic Iraq to emerge, one that would be gratefully pro-American, would dutifully make peace with Israel, and would promptly unleash the spread of democracy across the Middle East.
.. During World War II, planning for postwar Germany had begun more than two years before the end of fighting. For the Iraq War, the administration launched General Garner’s postwar planning operation slightly more than two months before the end of combat. For Bremer, the time between his appointment to replace Garner and his arrival in Baghdad had been just two weeks.
“The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us.”
The suspense is over. We now know that the American occupation of Iraq gave us ISIS.
.. AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, argues all occupations are fated to fail in the modern era. But he suggests the tipping point for this one came with the selection of Bremer. “They chose the best man to do the worst job,” he says. “They chose a very arrogant person with a very colonial attitude.”
.. After a couple of days of the too-small contingent of US troops in Baghdad idly watching as Iraqi marauders ransacked every ministry building and museum, destroying priceless Mesopotamian artifacts up to 7,000 years old, Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference. He jokily dismissed criticisms about the Pentagon’s planning failures as “henny penny” overreactions and concluded, “Stuff happens.” To proud Iraqis looking for clues about whether the American leaders respected their cradle-of-civilization past and were invested in their future, Rumsfeld’s snickering spoke volumes.
.. While most critics fault Bremer for his orders de-Baathifying the government and disbanding the army, the Pentagon’s war architects blame him for handing over sovereignty near the end of his tenure rather than closer to the start.
.. Bremer says that the darling of the neocons, the brilliant but slippery businessman and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, was clearly not the right man for the job. This wasn’t just because he had provided intelligence on Saddam’s alleged WMD program that turned out to be dead wrong. Chalabi hadn’t lived in Iraq for decades and had no domestic base of support.
.. Although Bremer has come to be regarded as the sole author of this decree to root out Saddam loyalists from the Iraqi government, that is simply not true. Drafts of the order had been circulating around the Pentagon long before Bremer’s appointment.
.. saying Bremer issued that order practically “before he’d met his first Kurd.”
.. In the end, the deBaathification order is believed to have hoovered up 85,000 to 100,000 Iraqis, including thousands of teachers and mid-level technocrats who were summarily shut out of Iraq’s public sector future.
.. This was a dramatic departure from Jay Garner’s plans to keep the bulk of the Iraqi military intact, putting it to work on reconstruction efforts around the country.
.. At one point, he recalls, White House chief of staff Andy Card took him aside and warned him about maneuvering at the Pentagon: “They’re gaming you. They’re trying to blame you for this whole thing.”
.. “We screwed up,” he says. “The biggest screw-up was Bush took too long to fire Rumsfeld and change the strategy.” Only after the post-Rumsfeld surge in troop strength did things begin to improve. But when I ask him if the war was a mistake, he vigorously shakes his head no.
Trump’s Political Philosophy: I Win, You Lose
To put this in perspective, Trump is now proposing a larger troop deployment than any other candidate has endorsed — not even the “neocon” Marco Rubio wants that many boots on the ground. And yet virtually no one seems to have noticed this apparently startling reversal. Why? Because Trump’s supporters don’t even believe anything he says about policy at this point. Keeping up with the substance of his ever-shifting pronouncements has exhausted the most dogged observers to the point that all anyone can do is marvel at his cult of personality.
.. But the Republican front-runner isn’t a Jacksonian populist. He’s a Trumpian Trumpulist. And his motto is “always be closing.” Weeks ago, when he declared that he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes, he was signaling that he’d closed the deal with his base. He had their support sewed up, and now it was time to pivot back toward the center in search of the next deal. Because closers close.
Social-justice warriors taught us long ago that truth matters less than narrative, and millions of Americans have now piped up on cue to prove the point. The narrative they crave is chillingly simple — I win, you lose. It’s all will to power now.
.. Last week, after Mitt Romney laid out a point-by-point case detailing Trump’s business failures and his flawed policies, the response wasn’t a defense of Trump but rather insults such as, “Establishment!” or “Where was that passion against Obama?”
.. So get ready, Trump fans, to lose everything in a general election — everything except maybe victory. Trump is a closer. He’s closed on you. Now he’s got a bigger deal in his sights.
Where the Soldiers Are Scarier Than the Crocodiles
“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager
.. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
.. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
.. Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up to die in childbirth than to finish high school.
.. All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension.
.. A new United Nations report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages ..
.. it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it. “Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”
.. when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than hungry crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder.
The War of Western Failures: Hopes for Syria Fall with Aleppo
Every two or three hours, warplanes attack the city, aiming at everything that hasn’t yet been destroyed, including apartment buildings, schools and clinics. Often, they use cluster bombs, which have been banned internationally.
.. The regime, he says, has targeted the hospital five times in the past several years, but always missed. “The Russian bombardment, though, is very accurate.”
.. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s calculation seems to be that once the rebels are destroyed, only the regime and Islamic State would be left — and no other alternatives. But the Sunnis, which have long been in the majority in Syria, aren’t likely to throw their support behind an Alawite-Shiite Assad regime. Syria would face years of Somalia-like failed state status.
.. Moscow has targeted exactly those rebels that the West had hoped would fight IS.
.. In addition, his brutal operation has driven tens of thousands of people to take flight, thus intensifying the conflict between the EU and Turkey, dividing Europe even further and propelling the Continent’s right-wing populist parties to unprecedented heights. Those are all desired side-effects that conform to Moscow’s calculus: Everything that hurts Europe makes Russia stronger.
Berlin, too, has become convinced that Putin’s involvement in Syria is about more than merely providing support for his ally Assad — and about more than just the Middle East. For Putin, it’s about Europe, about ending the sanctions and about recognition of Russia’s zone of influence. “Putin is intentionally aggravating the refugee crisis in order to destabilize the EU.
.. Putin is now the most powerful man in Damascus and he appears to be following a strategy similar to the one he once employed in Chechnya: destroy everything until there are no more people left, there is no more resistance and no political alternative. Then he is free to install a leader of his choosing.
.. Turkey has already absorbed over 2.5 million refugees, but Erdogan no longer wants to take any more Syrians into the country. His reasoning has more to do with forcing political concessions from Europe than with fears that his country will be overwhelmed. Although Brussels has approved €3 billion in aid to Ankara for dealing with the refugee crisis in the country, Turkish politicians have been saying for some time now that they consider this sum to be too low.
.. The greatest risk right now, though, is that of a direct confrontation between Turkey and Russia. After Turkey shot down the Russian warplane in November, Moscow moved to increase air defenses so heavily in Syria that it would now be extremely difficult for Ankara to intervene in the hostilities taking place next door
.. It is very clear at this point that the US has no strategy beyond its half-hearted efforts to provide training and arms to rebels — and to otherwise rely on negotiations. But none of this has born any fruit, as events in early February demonstrated.