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this is an intersting and quite damning analysis of how the americans have generated much of the chaos they were trying to prevent in iraq--and presumably afghanistan, where chaos also reigns.

Quote:

In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam
Early Missteps by U.S. Left Troops Unprepared for Guerrilla Warfare

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; A01

The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50.

That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day.

There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may have intended some sort of rear-guard campaign of subversion against occupation. The stockpiling of weapons, distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all indicate some planning for an insurgency.

But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.

On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, "De-Baathification of Iraq Society." The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending: "By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you'll really regret this."

He was proved correct, as Bremer's order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.

Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army's interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence" -- that is, soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling.

"We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans," one Army general said. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there "DAB"-ing, for "driving around Bosnia."

The U.S. military jargon for this was "boots on the ground," or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers.

For example, a briefing by the 1st Armored Division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be "presence patrols." And then-Maj. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the commander of that division, ordered one of his brigade commanders to "flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out." Sitting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone in May 2003, he added: "Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by."

The flaw in this approach, Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive."

The U.S. mission in Iraq is made up overwhelmingly of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower-profile Special Forces units. And in 2003, most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions.

Few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt in being overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

Complicating the U.S. effort was the difficulty top officials had in recognizing what was going on in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at first was dismissive of the looting that followed the U.S. arrival and then for months refused to recognize that an insurgency was breaking out there. A reporter pressed him one day that summer: Aren't you facing a guerrilla war?

"I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one," Rumsfeld responded.

A few weeks later, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid succeeded Gen. Tommy R. Franks as the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. He used his first news conference as commander to clear up the strategic confusion about what was happening in Iraq. Opponents of the U.S. presence were conducting "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," he said. "It's a war, however you describe it."

That fall, U.S. tactics became more aggressive. This was natural, even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. forces and a series of suicide bombings. But it also appears to have undercut the U.S. government's long-term strategy.

"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam."

For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there as well.

"What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals.
Draconian Interrogation Ideas

On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use.

"The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period.

"Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks," Ponce wrote. He told them, "Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03."

Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. With clinical precision, a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment recommended by e-mail 14 hours later that interrogators use "open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches." He also reported that "fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely."

The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to "low-voltage electrocution."

But not everyone was as sanguine as those two units. "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are," cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. "It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient."

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.

These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. The problem was that the U.S. military, having assumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a massive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain and interrogate Iraqis, to analyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it.

"As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations," Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later.

Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population.

In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967.

When the United States went into Iraq, his book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed.

Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war.

"A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty," he wrote, adding that "the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire."

The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize.

"The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula wrote.

Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.

Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul.

"Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting," Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment in 2004.

When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the U.S. experience in Iraq in 2003-2004 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home.

Most significant for Peterson's analysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. "Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools," he concluded.
Casey Implements a New Tactic

In mid-2004, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. took over from Sanchez as the top U.S. commander in Iraq. One of Casey's advisers, Kalev Sepp, pointedly noted in a study that fall that the U.S. effort in Iraq was violating many of the major principles of counterinsurgency, such as putting an emphasis on killing insurgents instead of engaging the population.

A year later, frustrated by the inability of the Army to change its approach to training for Iraq, Casey established his own academy in Taji, Iraq, to teach counterinsurgency to U.S. officers as they arrived in the country. He made attending its course there a prerequisite to commanding a unit in Iraq.

"We are finally getting around to doing the right things," Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice observed one day in Iraq early in 2006. "But is it too little, too late?"

One of the few commanders who were successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained.

By the academic year that ended last month, 31 of 78 student monographs at the School of Advanced Military Studies next door were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier.

And Galula's handy little book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was a bestseller at the Leavenworth bookstore.

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072201004.html

i think the blindness at the center of this cycle of self-defeating applications of power is political--conservative-specific--if you consider the history of contemporary conservatism, which would date from the middle 1970s i guess, reaction against what reagan later called "the vietnam syndrome" did a tremendous amount of work--it was motivated by a series of problems--the desire to erase the simple fact of an american military defeat--the desire to erase the fact of sustained massive political mobilization against not only the war but the national-security state that organized and benefitted from the war---an assertion of a kind of irrational counternarrative according to which the americans could have won vietnam had they not been "stabbed in the back" by a "domestic fifth column"--on and on.

the effect of this appears to have been making of the war in vietnam a kind of political and intellectual black hole: in this world, one can only invest the war in vietnam through aversion.
whence the bizarre responses of paul bremer to suggestions concerning tactics that made explicit reference to vietnam.
and from this follows the reverse: the strategy in iraq has been circumscribed by this refusal to think about vietnam and so has been characterized by the rigid and repeated application of a mode of force that is wholly self-defeating.

what you see here is a fine example of the linkage between identity branding and political ideology, the psychological power of socially constructed networks of association and exclusion as they operate within conservative ideology.

do you see linkages between this and the bush administration's position on israel's assault on lebanon?

here's one take:

absolutely weakened internationally and domestically as a function of its own arrogance and incompetence, boxed in by the nature of their own ideology (the "war on terror" and the mayberry machiavellian vision of geopolitics that is of a piece with it) the bush administration is using israel's action as a way to prop itself up internationally by positioning itself, and no other institution, as the ony legitimate arbiter of this conflict. to accomplish the goal of ressusitating itself, the bush administration is willing to allow lebanese civilians to be killed in great number, the infrastructure of the country to be destroyed. facing midterm elections that will no doubt weaken its position even further, facing the crumbling of the foundations of its legal doctrine of authoritarian executive power, the bush people also hope that associating itself with the violence of the israeli campaign will function to its advantage in november.

forget about iraq, forget about afghanistan, forget about the gaza strip: here is the hallucinatory "war on terror" in all its irrational, brutal grandeur. aint it lovely? vote for me.

The new "game" is to "blame" the Palestinians and Lebanese for "voting" Hamas and Hezbollah into political office. Are Americans ready to blame themselves for voting against their own economic and diplomatic interests ?
Afteralll....by the Nov. 2004 U.S. election, it was not difficult for an American to know whether he was voting for rigid religiously influenced extremists who advocated pre-emptive war in place of diplomacy, and secret, unaccountable government.....or not!

I was gonna start another thread, roachboy, titled, <b>"As Lebanon burns, consider that we must endure 30 more months of Bush/Cheney "leadership"...."</b>...but this is as good a place, as any, in view of the theme of your thread, to "park" yet another of bothersome "ole" host's "content rich" posts....the kind that are viewed as lower than "I know what I know" "banter" that passes for serious "discourse", all too often, on these threads:

Quote:

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0718nj1.htm
Bush Blocked Justice Department Investigation

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Updated at 8:40 a.m. Wednesday

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today that President Bush personally halted an internal Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales and other senior department officials acted within the law in approving and overseeing the administration's domestic surveillance program.....

..."The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales said in response to a question by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to know who denied the clearances to the investigators.

The statement by Gonzales stunned some senior Justice Department officials, who were led to believe that Gonzales himself had made the decision to deny the clearances after consulting with intelligence agencies whose activities would be scrutinized, a senior federal law enforcement official said in an interview.

Gonzales was questioned by Specter in light of a May 27 story in National Journal that reported that the OPR investigation was quashed because of the refusal to allow investigators security clearances. Senior Justice Department officials told National Journal then that the investigators were seeking only information and documents relating to the National Security Agency's surveillance program that were already in the Justice Department's possession.

A senior Justice official said that the refusal to grant the clearances was "unprecedented" and questioned whether the clearances were denied because investigators might find "misconduct by those who were attempting to defeat" the probe from being conducted. <h3>The official made the comments without knowing that Bush had made the decision to refuse the clearances. </h3>

H. Marshall Jarrett, OPR's lead counsel, wrote Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, on April 21, 2006, to point out that while OPR was denied security clearances to conduct its inquiry, requests from prosecutors and FBI agents tasked with investigating who first leaked details of the NSA surveillance program to the New York Times were "promptly granted."

"We note...," Jarrett wrote, "that the Criminal Division's request for the same security clearances from a large team of attorneys and FBI agents were promptly granted, and that their investigation of certain news leaks about the NSA program is moving forward."

Jarrett also noted that while he and his attorneys were denied the clearances, five "private individuals" who serve on the president's "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have been briefed on the NSA program and have been granted authorization to receive the clearances in question." Private citizens -- especially those who serve only part-time on governmental panels -- have traditionally been considered higher security risks than full-time government employees, who can lose their jobs or even be prosecuted for leaking to the press.....

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001184.php
Ackerman: Don't Expect Phase II or Intelligence Reform from Pat Roberts
By Jeff Hughes - July 21, 2006, 2:27 PM

As long as Pat Roberts is chairman of the Senate Select Committeee on Intelligence, we may never see Phase II of the investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence.....

.....“Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sprinted off the blocks in early 2005. The very picture of an energetic committee chairman, he explained with a glimmer of excitement in his eye what his agenda for the next congressional session would be during a March 2005 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center. In the cards was vigorous committee oversight during the ongoing intelligence-community restructuring, as the CIA's role diminished and a new Director of National Intelligence arrived. Not in the cards, Roberts explained only in response to a question, was the committee's long-awaited report into the Bush administration's shaping of prewar Iraq intelligence.....

.....Not even last November's Democratic shutdown of the Senate has managed to pry the report out of Roberts, and committee insiders aren't hopeful that anything will change. A particular bone of contention is what the committee should say about Douglas Feith's famous Pentagon intelligence operation, which sought to highlight mostly-illusory links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. <h3>Frustration has grown to the point where the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) took matters into its own hands last month, holding its own hearing with former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson and ex-CIA Mideast official Paul Pillar--</h3>much to the applause of DPC member Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the intelligence committee herself.....

.........The committee has been laughably inactive on intelligence reform, impotent in the face of mass CIA staff hemorrhages under now-ex-Director Porter Goss, and, despite Roberts's grumblings, unable to avert the flow of resources into short-term intelligence analysis, at the expense of longer-term foresight. All too predictably, Roberts has spent most of his time as chairman this year running interference for Bush on his illegal warrantless surveillance program, huffing at The New York Times for breaking the story and <h3>holding closed-door hearings about leaks, rather than investigating the controversial programs themselves.......</h3>

The following is the background of the guy who testified at the hearing held by congressional democrats, mentioned above, and described in Pincus's June 27 reporting, below:

Quote:

http://www.mideasti.org/articles/doc355.html
wayne white joins mei public policy center as adjunct scholar

Washington, DC
March 21, 2005

<H3>......White most recently served as Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia. White also served as principal Iraq analyst and head of INR/NESA’s Iraq team from 2003 to 2005.</H3> He was Chief of INR’s Maghreb, Arabian Penninsula, Iran and Iraq division and State Department representative to NATO Middle East working groups from 1990 to 2002.

Mr. White served as Political Officer at the US interest section in Baghdad in 1983.....

....White has a BA and an MA in Middle East history from Penn State University.

The following is a report about the hearing that Pat Roberts has prevented:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...601306_pf.html
Analyst Says He Warned of Iraqi Resistance
Danger Was Clear Early, White Said

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; A04

Days after the United States invaded Iraq, senior U.S. officials were warned that Iraqi Sunnis would strongly resist American troops' occupation efforts, according to testimony given yesterday before Senate Democrats.

<h3>Wayne White,</h3> a former deputy director in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told senators that when British soldiers were forced to repeatedly take the port city of Umm Qasr from Iraqi guerrillas, "I knew then and there that we would have a serious problem on our hands."

"I quickly warned, around the first week or 10 days of the war . . . that this spelled danger as we moved farther north, especially into Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland," White told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The advisory came in a formal bureau assessment that typically goes to senior officials at the State Department.

Noting that a Sunni insurgency began to gather momentum only after conventional fighting ended in May 2003, <h3>White said, "My warning was accurate, just a tad premature."</h3>

Yesterday's hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building was conducted, said committee Chairman Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), <b>"to understand what has happened in the recent past and what lessons can be learned from that with respect to the future."</b>

<h3>Dorgan said he had invited Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), who runs the Republican Policy Committee, to join the session, but Kyl declined.</h3>

Witnesses who came before the senators included Paul R. Pillar, a longtime CIA analyst and a former national intelligence officer covering Iraq, and Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

White and Pillar both discussed the lack of Middle East experience by White House officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who pushed for the Iraq invasion. White said that "lack was a major impediment to sound policymaking if one already does not have an open mind and is driven by a particular agenda."

Pillar said "little if any" of the warnings such as White's, on the problems that would be faced in post-Hussein Iraq, "influenced the decision-making on going to war."

Assessments by the intelligence community, Pillar said, showed that the "political culture" of Iraq "would not provide fertile ground for democracy," and analysts foresaw "a significant chance that the sectarian and ethnic groups would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it."

They also predicted that the occupying forces would become targets and that "war and occupation would boost political Islam, increase sympathy for terrorist objectives and make Iraq a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East," Pillar said.

<h3>White's and Pillar's testimony marked the first time intelligence assessments on postwar Iraq have been specifically discussed in a congressional session.</h3>

Wayne White, described above, was enough of an "expert" to retain his chief analyst position on Iraq, during both Powell and Rice's time at the State Dept

Quote:

http://harpers.org/sb-six-questions-...308402183.html
Six Questions on the Bush Administration and the Middle East Crisis for Wayne White

Posted on Sunday, July 23, 2006. Wayne White, now an Adjunct Scholar with Washington's Middle East Institute, was Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Middle East and South Asia Analysis until March 2005.....

1. Condoleezza Rice is leaving for the Middle East. Is her trip likely to lead to any favorable diplomatic outcome?

I don't think so. At least not anytime soon..........<h3>I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority.</h3> To cite just one disappointment, the apparent failure to engage senior Syrian officials directly.....

3. What does Israel hope to gain from its ongoing military operations in Lebanon, and is it likely to meet with success?

.......In fact, not learning from the American experience in Iraq—that trying to crush a guerrilla movement with conventional military force and thereby inflicting significant (in this case, even deliberate) collateral casualties might only generate thousands of other potential fighters bearing various grievances—the IDF could find itself mired in the same sort of seemingly open-ended confrontation.........

6. Will there be any negative consequences resulting from the administration's relatively passive diplomacy?

Very much so. As I have noted, the Israelis have embarked on a campaign that will most likely make matters worse over the long term. This crisis will further erode the United States' credibility in the Middle East—and beyond....

<b>....Washington used to be regarded</b> as a party quite often useful for intercession with the Israelis, but in this case the Bush Administration has seemingly given Israel a blank check to do whatever it wants for as long as it wants.....

......another extremely serious consequence of not working to bring this carnage to an early end, Lebanon already has absorbed billions of dollars of damage. By the end of the crisis, the cost of rebuilding Lebanon will be incredibly high and the rebuilding effort quite prolonged, leaving most Lebanese, aside perhaps from the hard-core Christian right, considerably more hostile to Israel—and the United States—than ever before. In this respect, I find scenes of devastated Lebanese urban areas not only appalling, but frightening.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/world/23bolton.html
Praise at Home for Envoy, but Scorn at U.N.
By WARREN HOGE
Published: July 23, 2006

.......The Bush administration is not popular at the United Nations, where it is often perceived as disdainful of diplomacy, and its policies as heedless of the effects on others and single-minded in the willful assertion of American interests. By extension, then, many diplomats say they see Mr. Bolton as a stand-in for the arrogance of the administration itself........

..........Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said, “He has done an extraordinary job representing the U.S. during what has turned out to be an extraordinary time at the U.N., and Secretary Rice thinks he’s doing a terrific job.”

But over the past month, more than 30 ambassadors consulted in the preparation of this article, all of whom share the United States’ goal of changing United Nations management practices, expressed misgivings over Mr. Bolton’s leadership............

.........Mr. Bolton came to the United Nations on Aug. 2 last year after a bruising battle in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Democrats on the committee cited accusations that he bullied subordinates, shaped intelligence reports to reflect his policy views and tried to engineer the removal of a C.I.A. official who disagreed with him. They also noted scornful references he had made about the United Nations like his comment that 10 floors of the Secretariat building could be lopped off without being missed..............

A European envoy said that Mr. Bolton was a difficult ally for his traditionally pro-American group because he often staked out unilateral hard-line positions in the news media or Congress and then proved unwilling to compromise in the give and take of negotiations.

In the aftermath of a 170-to-4 vote last spring on creating a Human Rights Council, which the United States opposed, Peter Maurer, <h3>the ambassador of Switzerland, characterized the American approach as “intransigent and maximalist.”

“All too often,” he said, “high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it.”....</h3>

The Bush era, if we survive it, will go down as a dark period for America, and the world, IMO.

The obsessive, penchant for secrecy precludes learning from "mistakes", the lip service paird to "diplomacy"....evidenced in the former State Dept. deputy secretary for Near East and South Asian affairs, Wayne White's July 22 comments (quoted in depth, above):

Quote:

I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority.

...in response to a question concerning Rice's "efforts" to "broker" a cease fire in the hostilities between Israel and it's neighbors......and in Bush's recess appointment, 12 months ago, of John Bolton as U.S. "ambassador" (saboteur ???) to the U.N., despite the fact that the senate failed to conffirm his appointment to that sensitive position, reveals the intent of this administration.

Why would Bush/Cheney deliberately send a man to represent the United States at the U.N., who was on record saying, <b>"that 10 floors of the (U.N.) Secretariat building could be lopped off without being missed"</b>, a man who failed to win confirmation by the senate to that ambassadorship,
if it was truly interested in building consensus for diplomacy at home, and abroad, as a priority over a military solution to the political conflicts in the middle east?

Why would no investigations be held, or even permitted, into the handling by the administration of pre-invasion Iraqi WMD intelligence "handling", or into the "end run" by the administration, of the FISA court in the warrantless domestice phone call monitoring controversy, if there was any priority placed by the ruling political party, in avoiding repetitive mistakes?

I submit that the "the rigidity of power" is a symptom, and a result of the rigidity of the thought processes, aggravated by a curiousity deficiency, and a flawed, emotion fueled, religious influenced patriotism, that leads too many voters to vote against their own best interests. Too many of the 50 percent of Georgians, for example, who control just 2-1/2 percent of the total private wealth in their state, voted for Saxby Chambliss instead of Max Clelland in Nov., 2002. Clelland, a veteran senator and democrat, former, admin. of the V.A., a former military officer who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was
painted by Ann Coulter as a beer drinking drunk who caused his own injuries, and by Chambliss, in televised campaign ads that flashed pictures of Saddam to "link" the Iraqi dictator with Clelland.

Instead of active military members and veterans voting in 2002, as they logically should have....for one of their own.....Clelland, too many were influenced by the republican propaganda machine to vote for Chambliss; a man who claimed a college football knee injury was the reason that he could not serve in the military. Chambliss went on to vote for the 2005 "Bankruptcy Reform" legislation.....ignoring the Harvard study that found that most personal bankruptcies were triggered by sudden illness induced income loss,
....and thus inflicted more enconomic hardship on the very folks who voted for him.....because Georgia is in the top 3 highest incidence of bankruptcies per 100 households, in the country.

As long as people are incurious to the avoidance of accountability by this leadership, and the fact that war has been chosen as policy that eclipses diplomacy, there will be much more economic inequality and dysfunction passing itself off a "leadership" in the U.S., more newly minted "terrorists", coming out of the muslim lands, and more empty chairs at holiday meals in U.S. households. You get what you vote for.