A Little More International Perspective on the Air Strike

Juan Cole has offered at least some insights into Qatiab Hezbollah and where it may go after its leader was killed.

Qataib Hezbollah is part of the al-Fath Alliance in the Iraqi Parliament, which has 48 members.  That might not same like much out of a total of 329, but it is the second largest group.  (The largest is the "Forward" alliance with 54).  Al-Fath is also part of the governing coalition and Qataib Hezbollah is under the nominal command of the Prime Minister.  

Cole predicts that al-Fath may start mobilizing angry mobs as well as militias.  

This has confused some Americans.  Large crowds were protesting Iranian influence in Iraq and corruption.  Then large crowds started protesting the US presence.  What is going on?  The obvious answer is, these large crowds do not contain the same people.

Qataib Hezbollah/the Popular Mobilization Forces/al-Fath are not anything close to a majority (remember, 48 seats out of 329).  But they are a significant minority and highly mobilized and determined significant minorities can be formidable, especially if they have their own private army.

Never asked is to what extent the youth demonstrators protesting Iranian influence and corruption speak for a majority of Iraqis.  Americans tend to assume that they do, but that is because we like their message.  

And in any event, just because the youth demonstrators resent Iranian domination, does not necessarily mean that they welcome US domination.  We made that same mistake back in 2003, assuming that just because Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, they must necessarily love us.  

Stay tuned.

!!!

And, now an event powerful enough to drive impeachment into the background.

US forces bombed an Iranian convoy in Iraq, killing Iranian General Qassim Suleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Quds, the intelligence service that runs the Iranian secret police and terrorist proxies throughout the world) and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of Qataib Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian militia that attacked the US embassy in Iraq, together with a spokesman for the militia and two others.

According to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Suleimani's forces were planning additional attacks on US troops and diplomats throughout Iraq.  If so, Suleimani was extraordinarily rash and arrogant in his actions and certain to overreach sooner or later.  (Sooner, it turned out).

So what to make of this?  I don't have the slightest idea.  Still, a few uninformed comments.

First, clearly this was a brilliant tactical operation, supported by some extraordinary intelligence, so congratulations to our forces for a job well done.

Second, although Suleimani has headed Quds for some 20 years, it seems unlikely that this will be a decapitation strike that brings down the whole organization.  Quds, by all accounts, is an entrenched bureaucracy that will be able to replace its leader.

Third, Suleimani's replacement may very well be just as bad, if not worse, but it seems unlikely that he will be as competent.  By all accounts, Suleimani was extremely competent.  Quds will not collapse or moderate, but it may be thrown into temporary confusion and permanently weakened.

Fourth, I have no idea whether Qataib Hezbollah will survive.

And finally, I do not know enough to even speculate on the long-term ramifications.  I have heard everything from this is the beginning of the end of all Iranian influence throughout the region to this will engulf the Middle East in a massive war.  (All from experts, by the way).  So I will refrain from predictions and watch events unfold.

One inexpert comment, though.  In general, optimism is not a good bet in the Mideast.

Could We Have Prevented ISIS with Earlier, Stronger Intervention

So, could we have avoided the godawful mess we are facing with ISIS by intervening earlier and more forcefully?  This editorial offers the typical interventionist argument that we could.

If only we had left a small residual force (about 15,000) in Iraq, it argues, we could have stabilized the country and prevented the rise of ISIS.  Advocates of this viewpoint never explain exactly how that was supposed to work.  If the much larger force we had in place earlier failed to keep Iraq stable, why would a mere 15,000 men be sufficient to defeat ISIS?  The answer now appears to be that the small contingent would have reigned in the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki and kept him from oppressing the Sunnis so they would not have felt the wish to revolt.  Since Iraq was relatively peaceful at the time, the American people would have accepted the small residual force.  But this ignores a rather important actor in Iraq -- the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki.  He wanted our troops out, as did the vast majority of Iraqis.  Attempts to negotiate terms for them to stay failed. Interventionists effectively want us to have left a force in place against the wishes of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people.  Maintaining troops in a foreign country against the wishes of the government and the populace is generally considered an act of war.  Furthermore, despite claims that our troops would have restrained Maliki, it is probably not too far-fetched to believe that one reason Maliki wanted our troops out was that he did not want to be restrained.  He wanted to proceed with the oppression of the Sunnis that led to the rise of ISIS.  Look, you can force people who hate each other to kiss at gunpoint, but you can't make the love each other.  A force kept in Iraq against the wishes of the Iraqi government and people might very well have found itself at war with the government and with the Sunni rebels when they returned.

The editorial also argues, as interventionists often do, that if only we had intervened early and forcefully on behalf of the moderate insurgents in Syria, ISIS could have been prevented from arising there.  The problem was that the so-called "moderate" insurgents were always difficult to detect with the naked eye.  The arms we did ship them very often ended up in the hands of militant jihadis.  The time to prevent Syria's ghastly civil war was before it started.  And even then it would probably have ended up like Egypt.  It did not take long after the downfall of the government for the nice guys to go down in Egypt.  Still, Egypt did avoid civil war, which certainly made its fate better than Syria's.  But once the civil war broke out, there was little we could do to prevent the most militant jihadis from coming to the fore.  And keep in mind that ISIS was the result of a split within the insurgents.

Simply put, revolution and civil war are a messy business, difficult to control or restrain.  Foreign intervention tends to be met with counter-intervention, and simply to prolong the war and make it bloodier.  Certainly I trust that no one would dispute that Iran and Saudi Arabia have made things worse by intervening on their respective sides.  I see no reason whatever to think that our intervention would have gone any better.

From Ancient Greece to Modern Babylon

OK, quick break from ancient Greece because the Iraq War is back in the news and I just can't resist weighing in.  The Republican candidates are being asked if it was a mistake and the consensus answer is that in the clear light of hindsight it was a mistake, but President Bush was misled into it by faulty intelligence.  Hawkish Democrats like Hilary Clinton are saying much the same.  I weigh in as one who opposed the war from the start but never doubted that Saddam had chemical weapons and was open to persuasion on biological weapons.

Let's start with some links.  Paul Krugman links to three: Josh Marshall pointing out that Bush deliberately misrepresented the intelligence to make the case for war; Greg Sargent pointing out that plenty of people, faced with the same intelligence, did not see that it make the case for war; and Duncan Black arguing that in any event, being right was less important to the in crowd than being part of the Washington Consensus.  Of these articles, Marshall's is by far the best.  That many people opposed the war should go without saying (but then again, I was one of the people who opposed it, as were most people I knew).  Black is always more snark than serious analysis.  But Marshall makes an important point.  The intelligence was, indeed, wrong, but Bush did not simply go along with it.  He did his utmost to make it sound a lot worse than it really was.  On the subject of weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence of the day really did believe that Saddam had chemical and possibly biological weapons, but not nuclear weapons.  Bush and other members of his administration ran around talking about WMD and strongly implying that they meant nuclear weapons without quite coming out and saying so (most notoriously Condoleeza Rice who said that we didn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud).  They also talked about "terrorism" and "taking the fight to the enemy" in such a way as to imply without quite saying that Saddam was responsible for 9-11.  These may not have been technical lies, but they insinuated something false with the intent to be understood that way.  I am not one who believes that there is any moral distinction between lying and making a technically accurate but deliberately misleading statement meant to be understood in an inaccurate way.  Or, as one famous critic of the Iraq War said:

We also learned in accounting class that the difference between "making a definite single false claim with provable intent to deceive" and "creating a very false impression and allowing it to remain without correcting it" is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of jail. Even if your motives are noble.

Others argue that since the whole Washington consensus believed that Saddam had WMD, there was no deception involved, only intelligence failure. The obvious problem with that argument was that in the buildup to the war, the Bush Administration clearly thought the intelligence was faulty in the opposite direction -- that it was underestimating the menace Saddam posed.  Administration officials regularly visited the CIA urging them to reconsider or pointing out sources they thought would show a greater threat.  They even created the Office of Special Plans to sift through intelligence data for anything that could justify the invasion.  I am prepared to concede that the Bush Administration did not know that Saddam really did not have a chemical or biological, let alone nuclear arsenal or ties with al-Qaeda.  No doubt they sincerely believed these things did exist and the intelligence community was just missing them.  In other words, the Administration was trying to frame a man they believed to be guilty.  But to say, how were we supposed to know, the intelligence misled us when you spent the whole buildup to the war arguing that the intelligence was missing the severity of the threat is grossly disingenuous.

Or, put differently, to say that the Bush Administration, the intelligence community, and the Democrats were all wrong so why the fuss is to assume that there are no degrees in being wrong. But, of course, there are.  Take a very simple example -- the game of guessing how many beans in this jar. Suppose the real number is 488.  A person who guesses 500 is technically wrong because the true number is 488, but for all intents and purposes the guess is right because it is as accurate as anyone has the ability to be.  Someone who says 400 beans or 600 is wrong, but reasonable.  Someone who says 200 beans or 1000 clearly is not so good at this game.  Someone who says 5,000 beans or 50 does not have a good enough sense of scale to be playing at all.  And anyone who says five beans, or 50,000 is just plain nuts.

So then, in the case of Iraq the jar is painted black so no one can actually see the beans, and Saddam is not allowing anyone to lift the jar.  The intelligence community calculates the capacity of the jar at 500 and estimates that there are 500 beans in the jar.  They know the jar might not be all the way full.  It never once occurs to the intelligence community that there might be no beans at all in the jar.  The Democrats accept the 500 bean estimate as accurate and acted accordingly.  The Bush Administration, by contrast, argues that the intelligence community has grossly underestimated the number of beans in the jar, and there must be at least 5,000.  Argument goes back and forth between the Administration and the intelligence community, with the Administration insisting that the intelligence community is grossly underestimating the number of beans and the intelligence community saying that an estimate of 5,000 is simply not credible.  After some wrangling, they agree on a compromise number of 1,000.  Then they actually open the jar and discover that it is empty. Sorry, but the Bush Administration does not get to argue that the intelligence community led it to believe that there were 1,000 beans or even 500.  Yes, there was a general, unquestioned consensus about 500 beans.  But anyone insisting on 5,000 beans or even 1,000 was a whole lot more wrong than the general Washington consensus.

Of course, to make the analogy really work, instead of beans we should be talking about pellets of poison about the shape and size of beans, in the hands of a known sociopath.  Yes, the overwhelming consensus was that he had some poison pellets, but 500 is simply not the same as 5,000 and does not necessarily call for the same response.  Or if you just can't believe anyone would think there could be 5,000 poison pellets in a jar with only a 500 pellet capacity, maybe the dispute would be about the quality of the poison.  The intelligence community recognizes that the sociopath can only make poison in a crude home lab and therefore the threat is manageable because the poison in the pellets is not all that strong.  The Bush Administration insists that they treat it as industrial grade poison of a quality that the sociopath simply lacks the capacity to make.  Then it turns out that there is no poison in the jar at all.  Once again, both parties are wrong, but the intelligence community is more realistic in its threat-level assessment than the Administration.