Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - international congress on iraq? chirac's modest proposal

roachboy · 01-06-2007, 11:22 AM

here is a synopsis of the bush plan: stay within the same obviously catastrophic logic, but increase the number of troops:

Quote:

Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 ? President Bush?s new Iraq strategy calls for a rapid influx of forces that could add as many as 20,000 American combat troops to Baghdad in coming months, supplemented with a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects painting schools and cleaning up streets, according to American officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative.

The American officials said that Iraq?s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, formally agreed in a long teleconference on Thursday with Mr. Bush to match the American troop increase, made up of five combat brigades, by sending three additional Iraqi brigades to Baghdad over the next month and a half.

Nonetheless, even in outlining the plan, some American officials acknowledged deep skepticism about whether the new Iraq plan could succeed. They said that two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from northern Iraq, and they said that some doubts remained about whether they would show up in Baghdad or were truly committed to quelling sectarian fighting.

Mr. Bush is expected to make the plan public in coming days, probably in a speech to the country on Wednesday that will cast the initiative as a joint effort by the United States and Iraq to reclaim control of Baghdad neighborhoods racked by sectarian violence. Officials said Mr. Bush was likely to be vague on the question of how long the additional American forces would remain on the streets of Baghdad. But they said American planners intended for the push to last for less than a year.

The call for an American troop increase would put Mr. Bush in direct confrontation with the leaders of the new Democratic Congress, who said in a letter to the president on Thursday that the United States should move instead toward a phased withdrawal of American troops, to begin in the next four months.

A crucial element of the plan would include more than a doubling of the State Department?s reconstruction efforts throughout the country, an initiative intended by the administration to signal that the new strategy would emphasize rebuilding as much fighting.

But previous American reconstruction efforts in Iraq have failed to translate into support from the Iraqi population, and some Republicans as well as the new Democratic leadership in Congress have questioned whether a troop increase would do more than postpone the inevitable and precarious moment when Iraqi forces have to stand on their own.

When Mr. Bush gives his speech, he will cast much of the program as an effort to bolster Iraq?s efforts to take command over their own forces and territory, the American officials said. He will express confidence that Mr. Maliki is committed to bringing under control both the Sunni-led insurgency and the Shiite militias that have emerged as the source of most of the violence.

Some aspects of the plan were reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

An increase of 20,000 troops would add significantly to the total now assigned to Baghdad, though the phased escalation being planned by the Bush administration would take several months to carry out, the officials said. They would not say specifically whether the American troop increase would be carried out if the Iraqis failed to make good on their commitment to add to their own ranks, but they emphasized that the American influx could be re-evaluated at any point.

The American officials who described the plan included some who said they were increasingly concerned about Mr. Maliki?s intentions, and his ability to deliver. They said senior Bush administration officials had been deeply disturbed by accounts from witnesses to last Saturday?s hanging of Saddam Hussein, who said they believed that guards involved in carrying out the execution were linked to the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia that is headed by Moktada al-Sadr, whose name some of the executioners shouted while Mr. Hussein stood on the gallows.

?If that?s an indication of how Maliki is operating these days, we?ve got a deeper problem with the bigger effort,? said one official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing internal administration deliberations over a strategy that Mr. Bush has not yet publicly announced.

The White House has refused to talk publicly about any of the decisions that Mr. Bush has made about his plan, which is tentatively entitled ?A New Way Forward.? Even though speechwriters are already drafting Mr. Bush?s comments, several of the crucial elements are not finalized, officials warned. That apparently includes the exact amounts of money Mr. Bush will ask of Congress to finance the jobs program, or a longer-term job-training effort that will also be part of the strategy.

Mr. Bush has previously promised to remake American reconstruction efforts in Iraq, most notably in December 2005 when he said that the United States had learned from the failure of efforts to rebuild major infrastructure, mostly run by American companies. But subsequent efforts to focus on programs that would bring more immediate benefits to Iraqis have also faltered.

The details of Mr. Bush?s latest military, economic and political initiatives were described by several sources, including some who said they were doubtful that it would work. The jobs program, noted one, ?would have been great in 2003 or even 2004, but we are trying it now in a very different Iraq,? one in which the passion for fighting for sectarian control of neighborhoods may outweigh interests in obtaining employment.

The American officials who described the program included both advocates and critics of Mr. Bush?s new strategy, and included representative of three different executive branch departments. They would speak only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal deliberations about a plan that Mr. Bush had not yet announced.

The most immediate element of the new jobs program will amount to a major expansion of what is known in the military as the Commander?s Emergency Response Program, which provides funds to local officers to put civilians to work as a way of reducing resistance to the American presence in neighborhoods. While the effort has had some successes, they have largely been temporary. As one senior White House official noted in an interview recently, ?You?d go into a neighborhood, clear it, try to hold it, and come back later and discover that it?s all been shattered.?

The new effort, officials said, would cost between a half-billion and a billion dollars, some of which would be spent on other efforts to achieve stability and train Iraqis for more permanent jobs. Both the State Department and the Treasury Department have been brought into that effort.

The plan also calls for a more than doubling of the ?Provincial Reconstruction Teams,? relatively small groups of State Department officials who are empowered to coordinate local reconstruction efforts, chiefly hiring Iraqi firms. For much of the first half of 2006, the State Department was engaged in a bureaucratic dispute with the Defense Department about how these teams would be protected, including exploration of a plan to hire private protective forces that one White House official said ?was too expensive.? Now those teams will be expanded and embedded with the combat brigades, officials said, in what would amount to the latest effort to demonstrate to Iraqis that the American forces in their midst were not simply occupiers.

Mr. Bush?s speech is widely expected to make the case that Americans needed to commit to greater national sacrifice as part of what Bush administration officials acknowledge amounted to a last-ditch effort to salvage the mission in Iraq.

But almost as soon as his speech is done, a series of hearings will begin on Capitol Hill that Democrats intend to use to pick apart the details of the plan, with lawmakers questioning administration officials about whether a troop increase of any size can be successful this late in the war. Those hearings will also likely focus on whether the expanded American military commitment is linked to Iraqi military performance, a point that Bush administration officials would not address directly.

As described by those officials, Mr. Bush is stopping well short of declaring that the beefed-up American force will be sent only to Baghdad and Anbar Province, the seat of the Sunni Arab insurgency, if the Iraqis also boost their own forces. But under the phased increase being contemplated, the reality is that every month between now and April or May, Mr. Bush will have a chance to decide whether to send an additional combat brigade into the country. ?That?s our moment of leverage,? one White House official said.

Officials said that a larger American troop commitment to Iraq also would be used to illustrate Washington?s increased resolve to deter adventurism by regional adversaries, especially Iran. Mr. Bush?s speech is expected to include talk of a new diplomatic initiative to shore up confidence among Washington?s Islamic allies in the region as well as to warn its adversaries, officials said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to begin that initiative almost immediately after the speech, leaving for the Middle East by next weekend.

In parallel to an enlarged Baghdad security operation, Mr. Bush has already signaled his desire to expand the number of American military trainers working with Iraqi security forces.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/wo...pagewanted=all

trapped by their own way of thinking, a variant of which you see in powerclown's post above, the bush people seem to allow for no alternative that will not simply compound the problems that they have created for themselves. i am not ging to defend chirac: i do not consider the scenario powerclown outlines above to be close enough to the reality that other people know about to be worth commenting on any further: all it seems to demonstrate is the power of conservative rhetoric and its repetition for those who decide, for whatever reason, to lay themselves open to it.

for the far right, for the extreme right of the george w bush persuasion, i would think the convening of an international congress of some kind, probably outside the purview of the un, but even worse within it, would be understood as a greater defeat than what is happening now in iraq. it would represent the demolition of the far right's hyper-nationalism, its unilaterialism, and with that the illusion that the united states is not really part of the world community, because it is the Power. but i see no other way forward.

the biden plan seems preferable. if such a plan has been floated already, i would expect that it would surface in the context of debates about the bush policy in congress over the next few days.

i saw the war in iraq as a war on an idea of an institutional framework developing around globalizing capitalism that was not dominated by the united states as a function of their military capabilities. it was a primitve dream of power, rooted in what has turned out to be paradoxically called a "realist" mode of thinking power. the gambit the right played in iraq has turned out to be a disaster, and now they have to face the scenario they had hoped to see the least of all of them: a model of exactly the type of global order they tried to short circuit has to be convened in order to bail the americans out of a disaster for which there was not justification in the first place.

i dont see the united states loosing here: i see the american right experiencing a total defeat. but i think the united states will be better for that. i dont think anyone except perhaps for american conservatives identifies the states as a whole with the conservatives.

iraq is waterloo for american conservatism in its present form.