…a principle is being established that does great credit to the Iraqis who signed it and to the coalition forces that made it possible. If it were not for the general American feeling that oil is a substance too dirty even to be mentioned in polite society, this consideration might even influence the current debate about an “exit strategy.” One would like to know, of those who advocate leaving Iraq, whether they are happy to abandon the control of its fabulous wealth to be parceled out between the highest or most ruthless bidders…
It’s not actually law yet, as the hydrocarbon law has been passed by the Council of Ministers but not yet by the Iraqi Parliament. The Maliki government set for itself a deadline of May 31 to complete the Parliamentary approval, so keep a sharp eye on the calendar.
I’ve long considered this the litmus test for the elected government. This law is the foundation of a federal Iraq — if the law goes on the rocks in Parliament I would suggest preparing the lifeboats.
The recent hydrocarbon law, approved after much wrangling by Iraq’s council of ministers, deserves a great deal more praise than it has been receiving. For one thing, it abolishes the economic rationale for dictatorship in Iraq. For another, it was arrived at by a process of parley and bargain that, while still in its infancy, demonstrates the possibility of a cooperative future. For still another, it shames the oil policy of Iraq’s neighbors and reinforces the idea that a democracy in Baghdad could still teach a few regional lessons.
To illustrate my point by contrast: Can you easily imagine the Saudi government allocating oil revenues so as to give a fair share to the ground-down and despised Shiite workers who toil, for the most part, in the oil fields of the eastern region of the country?* Or picture the Shiite dictatorship in Iran giving a fair shake to the Arab-speaking area of Khuzestan, let alone to the 10 percent of Iranians who are both Sunni and Kurdish? To ask these questions is to answer them. Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East…
Christopher Hitchens asks “Hard questions, four years later”
Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.
What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train? The question isn’t as easy to answer as some people would have you believe…
Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey just completed an assessment trip to Iraq/Kuwait 9-16 March. Many thanks to Michael Yon for posting McCaffrey’s “After Action Report” memorandum. Michael emailed:
All his trip reports are excellent resources for helping one understand the true situation here in Iraq. The man is blunt, and knows his business.
I would only add that Gen. McCaffrey’s report is quite comprehensive. So please don’t give up reading the beginning paragraphs detailing “The Problem”. At the end of the report there are also solutions:
5. THE WAY AHEAD:
In my judgment, we can still achieve our objective of a stable Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, not producing weapons of mass destruction, and fully committed to a law-based government. The courage and strength of the US Armed Forces still gives us latitude and time to build the economic and political conditions that might defuse the ongoing civil war. Our central purpose is to allow the nation to re-establish governance based on some loose federal consensus among the three major ethnic-factional actors. (Shia, Sunni, Kurd.)
We have very little time left. This President will have the remainder of his months in office beleaguered by his political opponents to the war. The democratic control of Congress and its vocal opposition can actually provide a helpful framework within which our brilliant new Ambassador Ryan Crocker can maneuver the Maliki administration to understand their diminishing options. It is very unlikely that the US political opposition can constitutionally force the President into retreat. However, our next President will only have 12 months or less to get Iraq straight before he/she is forced to pull the plug. Therefore, our planning horizons should assume that there are less than 36 months remaining of substantial US troop presence in Iraq. The insurgency will continue in some form for a decade. This suggests the fundamental dilemma facing US policymakers.
The US Armed Forces cannot sustain the current deployment rate. We will leave the nation at risk to other threats from new hostile actors if we shatter the capabilities of our undersized and under-resourced Army, Marine, and special operations forces. The Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs must get Congress to provide emergency levels of resources, manpower, and energy into this rapidly failing system. If we do not aggressively rebuild —the capability of the force actually deployed in Iraq will also degrade— and we are likely to encounter a disaster.
The primary war winning strategy for the United States in the coming 12 months must be for Ambassador Ryan and General Petraeus to focus their considerable personal leadership skills on getting the top 100 Shia and Sunni leaders to walk back from the edge of all-out civil war. Reconciliation is the way out. There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels. Military power cannot alone defeat an insurgency—the political and economic struggle for power is the actual field of battle.
A sufficient but not necessary condition of success is adequate resources to build an Iraqi Army, National Police, local Police, and Border Patrol. We are still in the wrong ball park. The Iraqis need to capacity to jail 150,000 criminals and terrorists. They must have an air force with 150 US helicopters. (The US Armed Forces have 100+ medevac helicopters and 700 lift or attack aircraft in-country.) They need 5000 light armored vehicles for their ten divisions. They need enough precision, radar-assisted counter-battery artillery to suppress the constant mortar and rocket attacks on civilian and military targets. They should have 24 C130’s—and perhaps three squadrons of light ground attack aircraft. I mention these numbers not to be precise—but to give an order of magnitude estimation that refutes our current anemic effort. The ISF have taken horrendous casualties. We must give them the leverage to replace us as our combat formations withdraw in the coming 36 months.
Finally, we must focus on the creation of a regional dialog led by the Iraqis with US active participation. The diplomatic process in the short run is unlikely to produce useful results. However, in the coming five years—it will be a prerequisite to a successful US military withdrawal —that we open a neutral and permanent political forum (perhaps in Saudi Arabia) in which Iraq’s neighbors are drawn into continuing cooperative engagement. A regional war would be a disaster for 25 years in the Mid-East. A continuing peace discussion forum may give us the diplomatic leverage to neutralize these malignant forces that surround and menace Iraq.
6. SUMMARY:
We have brilliant military and civilian leadership on the ground in Iraq. General Dave Petraeus, LTG Ray Odierno, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have the country’s treasure and combat power at their disposal. Our cause is just. The consequence of failure will be severe.
The American people hold that the US Armed Forces are the most trusted institution in our society. The polls also show that domestic opinion is not calling for precipitous withdrawal. However, this whole Iraq operation is on the edge of unraveling as the poor Iraqis batter each other to death with our forces caught in the middle.\
We now need a last powerful effort to provide to US leaders on the ground —the political support, economic reconstruction resources, and military strength it requires to succeed.
Barry R. McCaffrey
If we can use the sociology of science to foretell where science is headed, we could save a lot of money not having to in fact do the research. The climate issue is full of surprises and this one just about takes the cake for me. Now I’ve seen everything!
I’m not qualified to comment on Dr. Hansen’s work — though I cannot help but notice the frequent press focus on Hansen’s pronouncements on climate science/climate policy [many of which seem to be about being muzzled - no opinion on the truth of that charge]. For sure, Hansen is effective at attracting coverage, as evidenced by “Silenced — 1,400 Times [$$]” — just published March 27th by the Wall Street Journal:
…Naturally, Mr. Hansen claims he’s being muzzled by the government.
The story came to a head last week at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in which Mr. Hansen testified that “for the sake of the taxpayers” he “shouldn’t be required to parrot some company line.” He complains that in December 2005 he was told by NASA bureaucrats that he would have to obtain official clearance before granting press interviews, giving public lectures or posting articles on the Web. More heinous still, a 23-year-old NASA spokesman rejected a request by National Public Radio to interview Mr. Hansen.
That would seem to make the climate scientist something of a martyr for truth, which in his case means the imminence of global warming doom. But as Republican Congressman Darrell Issa observed, the climate scientist managed to give 15 interviews that same month, and that’s just a fraction of the 1,400 interviews he’s granted in recent years. There’s also the fact that all NASA scientists are required to obtain official permission before speaking to the press, a detail Mr. Hansen shrugs off as beneath his dignity.
In contrast, I have closely followed the work of Roger Pielke, Jr. on science policy. Roger is a highly valued Seekerblog reliable source. Without comment, here is Roger’s March 29th post:
NASA’s Jim Hansen has discovered STS (science and technology studies, i.e., social scientists who study science), and he is using it to justify why the IPCC is wrong and he, and he alone, is correct on predictions of future sea level rise and as well on calls for certain political actions, like campaign finance reform.
In a new paper posted online (here in PDF) Dr. Hansen conveniently selects a notable 1961 paper on the sociology of scientific discovery from Science to suggest that scientific reticence can be used to predict where future research results will lead. And he finds, interestingly enough, that they lead exactly to where his views are today.
What evidence does Dr. Hansen provide to indicate that his views on sea level rise are correct and those presented by the IPCC, which he openly disagrees with, are wrong? Well, for one he explains that no glaciologist agrees with his views (as they are apparently reticent), suggesting that in fact his views must be correct (a creative use of STS if I’ve ever seen one;-). If holding a minority view is a standard for predicting future scientific understandings then we should therefore apparently pay more attention to all those lonely skeptics crying out in the wilderness, no?
I find it simply amazing that Dr. Hansen has the moxie to invoke the STS literature to support his scientific arguments when that literature, had he looked at maybe one more paper, indicates that Bernard Barber’s 1961 essay, while provocative is not widely accepted (see, e.g., this book or this paper). And even if one accepts Barber’s article at face value which argues that scientists resist new discoveries (Thomas Kuhn, hello?), what Dr. Hansen doesn’t explain (as he is throwing out the IPCC model of scientific consensus) is why his views are those that will prove to be proven correct in the future rather than those other scientific perspectives that are not endorsed by the IPCC. (Dr. Hansen appears to ignore Barber’s argument in the same paper suggesting that older scientists are more likely to be captured by political or other interests when presenting their science.)
Roger Pielke, Jr. notes an unbelievable attack on transparency by the US Congress: Read on…
According to a column in the Wall Street Journal Congress, in its wisdom, has decided to prohibit the ability of its Congressional Research Service (CRS) to publish reports documenting congressional earmarks, or targeted spending inserted in appropriations bills (aka “pork-barrel spending”). This is a bad decision.
The thinking in Congress must be that if they don’t report the existence of earmarks then no one will know what is going on. As has been documented time and again here we see an effort to shape political outcomes by manipulating the availability of information. In this case the incentives are not partisan, but institutional, as members of both political parties in Congress have a shared incentive to keep earmarks out of the public eye. Earmarks are often associated with irresponsible public spending (e.g., the Alaska “bridge to nowhere”) and are especially problematic in the R&D enterprise, as I’ve discussed here previously.
Congress is doing the public a disservice by seeking to aggressively limit information on spending that it makes available to the public. This behavior is likely to be counterproductive when at the same time several Congress committees are conducting useful investigations of the Executive branch’s heavy-handed information management strategies. In general, openness and transparency are good principles, and that is the case here as well.
Here is an excerpt from the WSJ column:
Nothing highlighted Congress’s spending problem in last year’s election more than earmarks, the special projects like Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members drop into last-minute conference reports leaving no opportunity to debate or amend them. Voters opted for change in Congress, but on earmarks it looks as if they’ll only be getting more smoke and mirrors.
Democrats promised reform and instituted “a moratorium” on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (CRS)–a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency–has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. “They claim it’ll be transparent, but they’re taking away the very data that lets us know what’s really happening,” says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. “I’m convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS.”
Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. “CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals,” stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan.
When Sen. Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina submitted earmark inquiries recently, they were both turned down. Each then had heated conversations with Mr. Mulhollan. The director, who declined to be interviewed for this article, explained that because the appropriations committees and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were now preparing their own lists of earmarks, CRS should no longer play a role in the process. He also noted that both the House and Senate are preparing their own definitions of earmarks. “It is not appropriate for us to continue our research,” his directive states.
That is sophistry. The House rule making earmarks public, which was passed in January, doesn’t apply to earmarks for fiscal year 2007, the year Mr. Coburn wanted his report on. There is no Senate rule, and a proposed statute defining earmarks hasn’t become law. OMB’s list of earmarks applies only to fiscal year 2005.
And in any case, CRS works for Congress, so it is bizarre for it to claim work being done by the executive branch as a reason to deny members information it was happy to collect and release in the past. When I asked a CRS official if the new policy stemmed from complaints by appropriations committee members, she refused to answer the question, citing “confidentiality” concerns. . .
Today squeeze plays on CRS are not uncommon, and they have come from both parties. In the 1990s, GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey was so angry with a CRS report questioning the workability of a flat tax that he temporarily zeroed out the agency’s budget. Rep. Henry Waxman, as a member of a Democratic minority, demanded and got revisions to CRS reports on how prescription drug pricing rules in his bills would work. “Everyone expects Waxman and others to be even more insistent on getting what they want now [that he’s in the majority],” says another CRS staffer.
Read on…
Kathryn Jean Lopez reports on a John McCain blogger telecon:
On the pork in the Iraq Bill, [McCain] calls it “obscene.”
”I strongly recommend to the White House that the president read the list of pork to the American people when he vetoes this bill.”
And regarding pork and honest brokers:
Tom Coburn is the best thing that has happened to the United States Senate in years.
Roger Pielke, Jr. just posted a long and insightful essay on this issue. The essay defies summarization.
An interesting Strategy Page dispatch — what has been the impact on Kuwait?
March 26, 2007: One of the unequivocal winners in Iraq is, Kuwait. As long as Saddam controlled Iraq, Kuwait faced the threat of Iraqi invasion. Even before Kuwait became independent (in 1961, of British protection, which it had sought over the last few centuries), the newly formed (in the 1920s) country of Iraq insisted that Kuwait was simply a province of Iraq.
For thousands of years, who “owned” what is now Kuwait, was never an issue. There was no there there. Kuwait bay, however, provided a good anchorage at the head of the Persian Gulf, and Indians and Arabs established a trading post. Arab fishermen also developed a good business diving for pearl bearing oysters. Still, the Ottoman Turks never bothered to occupy the place, believing it not worth the effort. But once oil was discovered in the 1930s, Kuwait became a valuable place indeed. Saudi Arabia also had a claim, but never pushed the issue, because the ruling family of Saudi Arabia (the Sauds) had been assisted in their conquest of Arabia by the Kuwaitis. So, in a manner of speaking, the Saudis owned the Kuwaitis. Debts like this mean something in the Middle East.
But with Saddam gone, and the Sunni Arabs no longer controlling Iraq, Kuwait is much less likely to be threatened by Iraq. Partly that’s because Kuwait was seen as an enemy of Saddam, and supporter of anti-Saddam Iraqis. Moreover, a third of Kuwaitis are Shia. The Sunni majority has learned to get along with the Shia, and the Shia majority in Iraq respects that. Thus, while many Iraqis still believe that Kuwait should belong to it, the presence of American troops in Kuwait (even after U.S. forces leave Iraq), makes it unlikely that Iraq would make another grab for Kuwait.
Read on…
The Harlem Success Lottery - read and weep…
Note that Ms. Moskowitz quotes her charter school costs of 75% of NY State union-controlled schools. This is not unusual - the latest study I’ve read indicated that excellent-efficient schools country-wide cost about 67% of the monopoly schools while delivering the high quality product.
If New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver isn’t otherwise occupied, perhaps he could stop by the Harlem Success Academy in Upper Manhattan later today.
The public charter school, which opened last year, is holding an admissions lottery at 6 p.m. to fill 105 kindergarten slots for next year from the 500 or so families who’ve applied for them. Harlem Success was founded by Eva Moskowitz, a reform-minded Democrat who formerly served as a New York City Councilwoman specializing in education issues.
In an interview this week, Ms. Moskowitz described the naked emotions on display at such lotteries, which are a common method for deciding who gets to attend these independently run public schools. “I thought I knew a lot about school choice and ed reform,” she said. “But until I’d done the lottery last year I didn’t understand the desperation.
“Unlike their middle-class counterparts who can use real estate to determine where their kid is going to school, my exclusively black and Latino parents’ only option is to go through this process. And literally, people are praying and shaking and hoping to get into a school.”
As for Mr. Silver, the Democratic lawmaker is single-handedly blocking a bipartisan attempt by Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer and the GOP-controlled state Senate to lift New York’s current cap of 100 charter schools, which was reached last year. Mr. Silver is beholden to the teachers unions, who oppose charters because they operate outside of union work rules.
Ms. Moskowitz is baffled by his intransigence. “In his bill, he’s proposed further lowering significantly the funding for these schools,” she said. “I’m already educating these kids at 75 cents on the dollar, compared to a traditional public school. And we’re getting results. Sixty-six percent of our first-graders are reading at a second-grade level. We’ve been open 126 days.”
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