World Affairs: September 2003 Archives

Josh Marshall broke this story a few days ago (presumably with an assist from a recent article by Hill colleague Michael Gerber) but I didn't take special note of it until he pointed out this Times article today.

A group of businessmen linked by their close ties to President Bush, his family and his administration have set up a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects.

The firm, New Bridge Strategies, is headed by Joe M. Allbaugh, Mr. Bush's campaign manager in 2000 and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency until March. Other directors include Edward M. Rogers Jr., vice chairman, and Lanny Griffith, lobbyists who were assistants to the first President George Bush and now have close ties to the White House.

At a time when the administration seeks Congressional approval for $20.3 billion to rebuild Iraq, part of an $87 billion package for military and other spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, the company's Web site, www.newbridgestrategies.com, says, "The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq."

I don't normally have a problem with ex-Administration types starting up a consulting company like this, which is why I didn't make much of Josh's original piece. I assumed they had some expertise in the area, and I wouldn't normally see any harm in their making a living off that expertise, as long as they aren't in a position to actively influence the decision making process. But these guys don't seem to have any expertise in anything but working for the Bush family.

I'm not sure there's anything truly nefarious about this and I don't imagine this will turn into anything huge, but it's another little chip in the facade. Those chips are adding up.

Looks like Plamegate is proceeding full steam ahead despite Bob Novak's flip flopping.

PLEASE READ: Important Message From Counsel's Office

We were informed last evening by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee.

-----------------------------------

The Department advised us that it will be sending a letter today instructing us to preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation. Its letter will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the Department's investigation. Any questions concerning this request should be directed to Associate Counsels Ted Ullyot or Raul Yanes in the Counsel to the President's office. The President has directed full cooperation with this investigation.

Alberto R. Gonzales

Counsel to the President

Emphasis added.

I don't know where this will end up, but it should be fun to watch ... unless Bush makes the smart political move and quickly comes clean on the whole affair. While Karl Rove seems to be losing his magic touch, he's still a weasel with a big bag of tricks and a game plan.

[Plamegate summary via Andrew Sullivan]

[Update]
Sometime between writing this and posting it, Bush sort of took my advice.

President Bush called on Tuesday for anyone with information about those who disclosed the identity of a CIA official to come forward, saying: "I want to know the truth."

"If anybody's got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward," Bush told reporters after meeting with business leaders in Chicago. It was Bush's first public comment on the controversy.

They're spying on me.

Dick Cheney on Meet the Press 2 weeks ago:

And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years.

Oops

A Congressional Research Service report released yesterday concluded that federal ethics laws treat Vice President Cheney's annual deferred compensation checks and unexercised stock options as continuing financial interests in the Halliburton Co.

[via Political Wire]

A great article in Foreign Affairs on how Bush managed to bungle the diplomacy leading up to war. It's long, but worth the read for those that are having a problem understanding why Bush's approach to Iraq was a bad idea.

What went wrong? Why, when the leader of the free world went to war with a brutal and hated dictator, did so many countries refuse to take America's side? How much collateral damage was caused in the process? And what lessons can be learned from this debacle? After extensive debriefings of key participants in Europe and at the United Nations, as well as of a number of informed American diplomats, some important lessons from the recent crisis are starting to emerge.

First, the fact that Washington's justification for war seemed to shift as occasion demanded led many outside observers to question the Bush administration's motives and to doubt it would ever accept Iraq's peaceful disarmament. Second, the United States failed to synchronize its military and diplomatic tracks. The deployment of American forces in the Middle East seemed to determine American policy, not the other way around, and diplomatic imperatives were given short shrift. Third, the failure to anticipate Saddam's decision to comply partially with UN demands proved disastrous to Washington's strategy. Fourth, the belated effort to achieve a second Security Council resolution could still have succeeded, had the United States been willing to compromise by extending the deadline by just a few weeks. But such a compromise was not forthcoming, which leads to the last lesson: the Bush administration's rhetoric and style alienated rather than persuaded key officials and foreign constituencies, especially in light of Washington's two-year history of scorn for international institutions and agreements.

I'm linking to this more for my own memories sake than anything else due to a conversation I had about a German museum conservator with fond memories of Cowboys and Indians and Thieves and Policemen and the subsequent search for this article which I read last year. In any case, it's somewhat interesting. So is this.

Alex Biber's day job is designing semiconductor technology. Away from work, he becomes Beaver, a Cheyenne warrior.

Biber the engineer drives on the autobahn and wears blue jeans. Beaver the brave wears hand-tanned buckskin and rides a horse, commanding the steed in an ancient language once used by Plains Indians. Biber, his wife and two daughters live in a 91-year-old farmhouse, but the family vacations in tepee villages in humid Central European forests.

This kind of puts things in perspective.

[via Coyote Gulch]

Kevin Drum points out some Iraqi arithmatic by the LA Times and wonders what formula the Administration is using for Afghanistan.

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that President Bush's $87 billion funding request isn't going to do the job. $55 billion more will still be needed for postwar reconstruction.

We already allocated $79 billion a few months ago, and 79 87 55 = 221. I'm not sure exactly what period these funding requests cover, but at a guess that's $221 billion over the course of perhaps 15 months, or about 2% of GDP. That's a lot of dough.

I'll need some time to wrap my head around this number, but in the meantime here's something that continues to genuinely perplex me. Let's take the hawks at their word that Iraq is a front on the war against terror, and that stabilizing Iraq is a key part of winning the war. You might not believe it, but that's their case.

But if it's true, then surely stabilizing Afghanistan is at least as important? In fact, given the large amount of known al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan and the continuing Taliban presence there, you could make a pretty good argument that keeping a lid on Afghanistan is more important than Iraq.

But in any case, surely it's not a mere one-tenth as important, as the administration seems to think based on its troop commitments and reconstruction funding there? Especially given the continuing reports that this is the place where the terrorists are regrouping, not Iraq.

We've had some interesting discussion of late here in the 0xdeadbeef compound on the price of victory, and in the spirit of keeping those comments from scrolling anymore, I'm pinging the thread instead. Feel free to ping some more if you have other thoughts ;)

Fred Kaplan has a good piece in Slate on the historic opportunity 9/11 presented to America, and how Bush bungled it.

But the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures — and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

Ever since the crumbling of the Soviet Union, foreign-policy specialists had been wondering how to create a new world order for an era that lacked a common enemy. Now, suddenly, here was that enemy. And here was a moment when the world viewed America with more empathy than it had in the past half-century. An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era — much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.

But George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice did not take that path.

After the mosque bombing in Najaf last week, Fareed Zakaria says we could be in for a "hellish ride" if the Administration doesn't abandon its attempts to keep the peace "unilaterally and on the cheap". He sees hints of a possible turnaround (or more infighting) in Gen. John Abizaid's comments to the New York Times last week.

Abizaid's interview is a powerful admission that on the two most important postwar issues — the number of forces and the nature of the occupation — the Bush administration got it badly wrong. The only question now is, will the administration finally recognize its errors? It might already be too late to achieve a great success in Iraq. But it is not too late to avoid a humiliating failure.

The mysteriously positive Ken Joseph Jr — the young Assyrian Christian pastor I've conspiracted on before — returns with an upbeat update from the ground in Baghdad.

Despite the recent bombings, Baghdad looks dramatically different. The stores are full of supplies. The streets are crowded with people and cars. The buses are working and police are on the streets, directing traffic.

At night the streets are full of pedestrians, many families with children. I am at a loss to reconcile what we see on the ground with what is being reported.

The "regular people" are much better off than they were. Security has improved with Iraqi police everywhere, telephones are starting to work, electricity, while off and on, is relatively stable, the stores are full of food, and, little by little, people are getting jobs back.

Pensions have been paid on time. The schools are working and people for the first time have hope and a future.

It's not all water and wine in the Pastor's eyes though:

The problem for Christians is very different. The Americans do not appear to be requiring a secular constitution as they did in Japan or a limited regional autonomy.

This is a serious problem for us. They are already giving their blessing to the dual system so common in Muslim countries: the recent citizenship changes allow for a 2-year wait for Arabs (read Muslims) and a 9-year wait for non-Arabs.

We are beginning to feel that if the United States will not demand that the constitution be secular with a strong prohibition against religious involvement by the government and limited autonomy, then we will have to pull Assyrian Christians out of the country.

But even his bad news sounds like a veiled message from the Administration, or at least its friends on the Christian Right.

While he seems fairly authentic and most everything he says seems reasonable, I'm still not convinced this guy isn't spinning for the Administration. He keeps popping up with very convenient opinions at very convenient times, in very convenient publications.

The NY Times on Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus — commander of the 101st Airborne Division, and someone who understands what Iraq needs. We need more like him.

The ethnic makeup of the north — a diverse blend of Arabs, Kurds, Turkoman and tribes — is less hostile to the American presence than the troublesome Sunni triangle around Baghdad, although it has the potential for ethnic strife. But that only partly explains the military's relative success here.

Other elements are the early deployment of a potent American force large enough to establish control, the quick establishment of new civil institutions, run by Iraqis, and a selective use of raids to capture hostile groups or individuals while minimizing the disruption to local civilians.

Another factor has been an American commander who approached so-called nation-building as a central military mission and who was prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized.

An Army general who holds an advanced degree in international relations from Princeton, General Petraeus was steeped in nation-building before he arrived in Iraq. He served as the assistant chief of staff for operations for SFOR, the international peacekeeping force in Bosnia. His division is also well suited for its mission. Unlike an armored unit, it has lot of infantry soldiers — nearly 7,000 — to conduct foot patrols and stay in touch with the local population. It also has 250 helicopters to travel across northern Iraq.

"We walk, and walking has a quality of its own," the general says. "We're like cops on the beat."

Andrew Sullivan's back from vacation and is losing faith in the Administration.

So far, I've been manfully trying to give the administration the benefit of the doubt, especially given the media's relentlessly negative coverage of Iraq. But they're beginning to lose me, for the same reasons they're losing Dan Drezner. They don't seem to grasp the absolutely vital necessity of success in Iraq. And I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.

Hmmm, sounds familiar:

Those that are deceiving themselves into thinking Bush actually plans to follow through with the Grand Plans to democratize the Middle East are living in a fantasy world as should be readily apparent by now. Just because you hope something will happen doesn't mean Bush has any intention of letting it happen. And even if he does, the chances of it resulting in a government that's friendly to America are just about nil.