Wampum

Juan Cole posted the first of a multi-part interview with Rajiv Chandrasekaran (WaPo) today. I started to comment, but the point I was trying to make is long, so I'll use Wampum to comment on Informed Comment. Read that first, then, optionally, this.

The meta-point isn't that I'm so much smarter than some WaPo reporter, but that the privilege of WaPo's employ constrained a writer from writing about Iraq, so he wrote about America (in Iraq). Writing about America, and only one partisan (or corporatist) kind of America, and not writing about Iraq, as it is, has, after five years of production, produced many uninteresting books, and as the Lancet reports (again), a monstrous toll of mortality and morbidity.

Comment: In September, '02 Gore spoke against the Bush Iraq war plans, and in June '03 Kucinich was advocating replacing the US military and civilian occupational forces with UN military and civilian forces. If I could point to another contemporanious expression of a similar policy by a '00/'04/'08 cycle candidate, I would.

Also in June '03 Chandrasekaran was reporting that US military and civilian occupational forces lacked expertise in government administration and familiarity with the Arab world.

But that's not the same as reporting, in those two months, that the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi ministries as they existed then, before the Cheney/Bremer liquidation, had the expertise in government administration and familiarity with the Iraqi state.

Look, Chandrasekaran would like to be a wise, good, uncompromised (or recovered) reporter, but he didn't really work outside the limits of the politically possible. What he writes now is interesting, but what he didn't write in June '03 is our profound loss.

Heres what I wrote then (July 11th, 2003, minor edits, e.g., for space), with all the resources the WaPo placed at my disposal (none),

Reconstitute and Retreat (revisited)

No [candidate] is making the re-establishment of Iraqi forces as Iraqi civil defense an unconditional priority, to allow US troops to safely extricate. Sadam had no part in 9/11, nor did the Iraqi civil and military leadership, for all their other faults. Decapitation of the Iraqi civil and military leadership leaves no one but US troops to prevent anyone, repeat, anyone, from engaging US forces, at the sub-squad force level. No candidate has gone public with an alternative to an Iraq version of Dien Bien Phu.

Do so. Call for the re-appointment of the Iraqi career officer corps, payment and re-arming the regular army and the transfer of control of the Iraqi metropolitian zones to the Iraqi Army, Green Lines of Control, etc., and a transitional plan that gets the last GI out of harm's way.

Our troops need the Iraqi GHQ back in operation, and at least battalion-level local command and control capability, today. Sorting out the politics can wait. Halt, reconstitute the Iraqi Army and Police, dee dee back several klicks, and start treating them like WARSAW PACT forces that temporarily misplaced their political leadership.

Juan Cole has published a piece by former CIA Station Chief for Saudi Arabia Ray Close that is well worth reading.

Saddam, or the Baath Party, or Iraq, defeated the Coalition Forces some time ago. The strategic defensive capability that pre-determined the outcome of the conflict was stated quite plainly in another guest contribution to Juan Cole's blog. William Polk's What is to Be Done in Iraq?: When I first lived in Baghdad in 1951, the whole country had only 5 mechanical engineers.

Today, the situation is entirely different. Iraq has one of the highest rates of literacy in the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are highly trained professionals. In my example, it now has thousands of mechanical engineers. In sum, the Iraqis are not an "underdeveloped" people. It should be evident that they cannot be fooled with a façade in place of a government.

That is what is defeated the Coalition Forces, education.

How do we know that the Coalition Forces are defeated? For this look to the commentary from Khaldoun Al-Naquib, a Kuwaiti sociologist, in a piece by Omayma Abdel-Latif in Al Ahram on interviews Arab intellectuals: One should also note that the picture is not that bleak. There are small victories here and there. For example, I believe that the Palestinians have managed to destroy the Israeli dream of expansionism. The US is also finding it difficult to colonise Iraq as they thought they would.

The strategic goal of the Neo-Conservatives, the American War Party, was to colonise Iraq. That goal is not possible, as there are more than five mechanical engineers in Iraq. No non-Iraqis are required to operate the central functions of the state, from water to defense.

Tarting up peoples' failures as clued up reporters, bloggers, and the other detrious of carefully informed consent is going to be a growth industry. It may have started with the conversion of Matthew Yglesias from Chicken Hawk to Hero of the Opposition, sometime after the ticker tape yellowed, but it won't end any time soon.

I've a question for Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Perhaps he'll attempt to answer it. Name the journalists contemporaniously writing about Iraq, and the journals that published their work. May to July, '03. When truth mattered in the sense that something could have been done differently, had something then unknown been then known. When these mistakes were not yet made, or could have been unmade: CPA Order No. 1 of 16 May 2003
and CPA Order No. 2 of 23 May 2003.