The Progressive Response

Volume 8, Number 17
June 29, 2004

Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)

The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.

John Gershman, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org) and co-director of FPIF. He can be contacted at <john@irc-online.org>.

 

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

PAYING THE PRICE: THE MOUNTING COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR
By the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus

THOUGHTS ON CORDESMAN'S "POST-CONFLICT" LESSONS FROM IRAQ
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)

OF RESOLUTIONS AND RHETORIC, OF PROMISES AND PERFORMANCE
By Ian Williams

TENET RESIGNATION EXPOSES ACCELERATING IMPERIAL INTRIGUE WITHIN BUSH ADMINISTRATION
By Jim Lobe

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME (FROM KOREA)
By John Feffer

BUSH AND CASTRO FACE OFF
By Laura Carlsen

THE REAL "SCARY MOVIE" WON'T BE ON ELM STREET THIS SUMMER
By Nancy Snow

 

II. Letters and Comments

ORCHIDS

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY CANNOT RESCUE BAD POLICY

 

I. Updates and Out-Takes

PAYING THE PRICE: THE MOUNTING COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR
By the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus

(Editor’s Note: With the transition in Iraq scheduled for June 30th it’s time for an accounting of the costs of the war in Iraq. The following is an excerpt from the complete report which is available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406costsofwar.html).

The Bush administration has declared that on June 30, 2004 the United States will “transfer sovereignty” to Iraq. We are being told that this is a great victory for democracy. And yet, after 15 months of war and occupation in Iraq, and even with public support for the war plummeting, there is still little understanding in the United States about the real costs of the war. For many people, informed debate has been difficult since so much of what they have been told by the Bush administration has turned out to be untrue. Even many former government and military officials from both parties and the various high-level investigating panels, now recognize that the central premises of the Bush administration in launching this war were lies: Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein did not have operational ties to al Qaeda.

This report offers evidence that we have paid a very high price for the war and have become less secure at home and in the world. The destabilization of Iraq since the U.S. invasion has created a terrorist haven that did not previously exist in Iraq, while anti-American sentiment world-wide has sharply increased.

The authors of this report at the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus believe that a central precondition to an informed debate over next steps in Iraq is a comprehensive accounting of the costs of this war and occupation--costs that will continue to accrue for the people of the United States, Iraq, and the world long after June 30. Most Americans are somewhat aware of the body count for the United States and its allies, now amounting to 952 dead and 5,134 wounded. Yet, most are not aware that the number of Iraqis killed is more than 10 times the number of Americans who have lost their lives. Most don’t know or haven’t thought about how many children could have obtained health insurance or how many elementary school teachers could have been hired with the $151 billion spent on the war so far. Most don’t know the enormous financial burden shouldered by the majority of U.S. military families. Most don’t know that the billions spent on the war have expanded an already huge budget deficit that will greatly burden the next generation. Most are barely aware of the legion of other costs--economic, human, environmental and more--born by millions of people in Iraq and around the world.

Conversely, most Iraqis, the people in whose name the Bush administration fought the war on false pretenses, understand the costs of war and occupation for their society. In the latest polls, conducted by U.S. occupation authorities themselves, Iraqis overwhelmingly oppose the continuing occupation. Indeed, the majority of Iraqis now state that the occupation has made them less secure.

THOUGHTS ON CORDESMAN'S "POST-CONFLICT" LESSONS FROM IRAQ
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new policy report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406lessons.html).

Anthony Cordesman, the thoughtful incumbent of the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, titled his May 19, 2004 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “The ‘Post-Conflict’ Lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Cordesman presented a devastating critique of the pervasive lack of planning and preparedness throughout the Executive Branch in general and the Pentagon and White House in particular for translating success in war into success in peace.

Cordesman places the military assaults against Afghanistan and Iraq within the larger “war on terrorism,” which also includes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--with the distinction that the Iraq adventure was war by choice. But he clearly rejects the notion of a “clash of civilizations,” seeing instead a clash of interpretation within the Islamic world, to which the U.S. and its western allies are observers.

Unfortunately, in large measure because of the “West’s” (including the developed economies in the Far East) heavy dependence on petroleum originating from Muslim countries, the U.S. has become an ever-more involved and active “participating observer.” What began during World War II as an effort to preclude Arab support for Nazi Germany turned into covert subversion in the 1950s and generally unquestioned support of oil-rich non-democratic regimes even through the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Ironically, the fact that these “friendly” regimes were growing richer and richer meant that the traditional non-military levers of U.S. influence--economic aid and private sector development--that proved so potent in helping Western Europe rebuild after World War II were meaningless. What were left were military-to-military interactions, which again because of oil revenues, came down heavily on weapons purchases and contracts for maintenance, repair parts, and training support.

The instability of this largely one-dimensional relationship was further exacerbated by the propensity of many uninformed or under-informed U.S. elected officials to create categories and gross generalizations about non-European countries and their peoples. Emerging from the Vietnam War (actually a regional war also involving Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand), the Nixon administration selected “reliable” client-states whose military forces--liberally supplied and advised by the U.S.--could and would act as surrogates for U.S. interests.

Viewed from the White House and Congress, a vital U.S. national interest--assuring the unimpeded flow of petroleum from the Gulf--warrants a robust U.S. presence in the region. As noted earlier, however, the only tangible category to exert influence is military, both supplying client states and having an actual, robust U.S. military presence. The latter, largely confined to a training mission for the Saudi National Guard (really a praetorian guard) and a variable naval presence until the “tanker wars” of the mid-1980s, became a larger, seemingly permanent--and therefore objectionable to conservative Muslims--presence after the first Gulf War. And this presence provided a point of transference by which hatred of secular, “apostate,” or otherwise “illegitimate” Muslim regimes focused on the United States.

(Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. army colonel and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)

OF RESOLUTIONS AND RHETORIC, OF PROMISES AND PERFORMANCE
By By Ian Williams

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406resolutions.html).

On June 8 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1546--a combined road map and time table for the end of the American occupation in Iraq. The world welcomes penitent sinners, and even though the repentance was forced and expedient, the Security Council equally pragmatically blessed the belated conversion of the U.S. to multilateral paths of righteousness.

Any reading of its final text should be compared to its three previous drafts, and weighed against the triumphalism from the “Pentagon Intellectuals” a year ago when George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” Indeed it bears favorable comparison even with the wild hopes Washington entertained when it first mooted a new resolution some months ago, before the absence of WMD’s combined with the presence of vicious torture in Abu Ghraib to convert what seemed to have begun as a tactical electoral ploy into a wholesale diplomatic rout. The resolution is hardly a declaration of Iraqi independence--but as a road map it is far less likely to lead to forty years in the wilderness. It looks particularly good in comparison with meaningless routine pledges from the Quartet powers to the Palestinians about ending the occupation.

The problem facing the Security Council has been that of the apocryphal lost traveler in Ireland, who asks for directions and is told “Well, if I was you, I wouldn’t be startin’ from here.”

The other Council members could have simply refused to deal with what the UN still coyly calls “the Situation between Iraq and Kuwait.” They could have tried to condemn the U.S. invasion outright in a resolution and seen it vetoed, which would have had a doubly dire effect: of destroying any chances of bringing the U.S. back inside the Charter--and direct dire consequences for the movers.

Even in the General Assembly, despite ringing denunciations of Kofi Annan and the UN in many Arab capitals, the President of the Assembly, Jan Kavan, could not find a single nation prepared to put its name to an explicit resolution. Instead, France, Germany, Russia and other members of the Security Council moved to recognize the reality of the occupation, while at no point recognizing the legitimacy of the invasion. There was no mood of cutting off Iraqi noses to spite American faces.

The text and tenor of the earlier resolutions showed the Security Council on the defensive against U.S. and British demands. They were also helped along by some appreciation for the U.S. trying to come back into the multilateral fold after its foray into international lawlessness, even if this owed less to contrition than to Washington’s discovery that they could not sell Iraqi oil on the world market without a UN seal of approval.

By the time the text of 1546 was being negotiated in May, the balance of power had tilted completely. The torture pictures and stories combined with American casualties to blunt the President’s re-election prospects at home.

(Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs.)

For more analysis from Foreign Policy in Focus:

Blackmail Efforts of the Bush Administration at the UN End in Failure This Time
By Ian Williams (June 3, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406blackmail.html

Bush Administration Seeks UN Escape Hatch
By Ian Williams (June 3, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406escapehatch.html

The Resolutionary Road to a Transition in Iraq
By Ian Williams (May 26, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405iraqtrans.html

TENET RESIGNATION EXPOSES ACCELERATING IMPERIAL INTRIGUE WITHIN BUSH ADMINISTRATION
By Jim Lobe

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406tenet.html.)

The abrupt resignation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet adds new grist to Washington’s rumor mills, already churning at warp speed due to the ongoing prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq and reports that the Bush administration’s favorite in Baghdad turned over critical information to Iran.

Whether Tenet, who also served for seven years as the director of central intelligence (DCI)--a post that theoretically oversees all of Washington’s 16 intelligence agencies--was pushed or decided to resign of his own accord is the question of the day. And, if he was pushed, why now, just five months before the presidential election?

In a speech to CIA employees at the agency’s headquarters outside Washington on Thursday June 3, Tenet insisted that his decision was based exclusively on the “well-being of my wonderful family--nothing more, nothing less.”

Bush himself echoed that, albeit in rather curious circumstances. Just a few minutes after a routine photo opportunity on the White House lawn with visiting Australian Prime Minister John Howard, the president reappeared before reporters to say Tenet had informed him of his decision to leave “for personal reasons” Wednesday evening.

“I told him I’m sorry he’s leaving,” Bush, who appears to have had an unusually warm relationship with Tenet and had long resisted right-wing pressure to fire him, said haltingly. “He’s been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him.” As has become customary, Bush took no questions and simply walked away.

But, as Tenet himself anticipated in his farewell, some observers suggested his decision may not have been entirely voluntary and could, in fact, mark the first of a series of high-level administration departures over the coming weeks as Bush’s re-election campaign struggles to persuade voters to forget about setbacks in Iraq. “I think he’s being pushed out,” said former CIA Director Stansfield Turner in an interview on CNN. “The president feels he has to have someone to blame.”

“They want to use him as a scapegoat for everything that’s gone wrong,” one congressional aide said. “But I don’t think that’s going to work. While the CIA obviously fell down in major ways, everyone knows by now that the Pentagon has been at the heart of this whole mess.”

(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)

For more analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus:

Prisoner Abuse Calls into Question America’s Position of Moral "Exceptionalism"
By Jim Lobe (May 19, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405moralex.html

From Iraqi Occupation to Islamic Reformation: Neocons Aim Beyond Baghdad
By Jim Lobe (April 9, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0404neocons.html

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME (FROM KOREA)
By John Feffer

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406troopsout.html.)

The vortex of Korean politics can make even Donald Rumsfeld sound like the most radical Korean peace activist. “After the cold war,” he declared on June 3, “U.S. forces have been stationed in South Korea for too long.” The occasion was the announcement of the largest U.S. troop reductions from the Korean peninsula since the Korean War armistice, which took place 51 years ago this month. The Pentagon is withdrawing one-third of its forces from South Korea and sending a portion of them to Iraq.

The Pentagon announcement comes just before a third round of Six-Party Talks that bring together the United States, North and South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia. The previous two rounds went nowhere and expectations for this third round are low. The United States is insisting on CVID or the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear programs--before any substantive compromise can be hammered out. Having declared North Korea beyond the pale, the Bush administration is stuck in a theological hole: any form of negotiations looks suspiciously like “supping with the Devil.” North Korea, meanwhile, has broached various scenarios whereby they freeze and then dismantle their programs in exchange for energy, economic incentives, security guarantees, or a mixture of the three.

The complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea would certainly have its drawbacks. South Korea is spending more now on its defense than ever before and the Defense Ministry has called for an additional 13 percent increase in the military budget to compensate for the disappearing U.S. troops. The peace movement in Japan and Okinawa also want to bid farewell to U.S. troops, so the shifting of U.S. forces eastward, while a boon for the Korean peace movement, would not necessarily be a plus for the region as a whole. Still, U.S. troop withdrawal from the Korean peninsula would be such an enormous step toward resolving inter-Korean tensions that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Beset on all sides for its Iraq policy, the Bush administration needs a foreign policy victory. It needs to demonstrate that it isn’t ignoring the Korean peninsula. And it needs to show the world that the United States, if only after 51 years, does eventually bring home its troops.

(John Feffer (www.johnfeffer.com) is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) and the author, most recently, of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories).)

For More Analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus:

It’s Our Party (and We’ll Cheer If We Want To)
By John Feffer (April 30, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0404ourparty.html

Between Kim Jong Il and a Hard Place
By John Feffer (March 1, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402kimjongil.html

Hexagonal Headache
By John Feffer (September 4, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0309nk.html

Six Countries in Search of a Solution
By John Feffer (August 26, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0308korea.html

BUSH AND CASTRO FACE OFF
By Laura Carlsen

(Editor’s Note: Excperted from a new commentary from the IRC’s Americas Program and available in full at http://www.americaspolicy.org/columns/2004/0402cuba.html.)

The recent exchange of threats between the Cuban and U.S. governments may seem like more of the same stand-off rhetoric that has characterized relations between the two since the Cuban revolution 45 years ago. But as a Cuban political transition approaches and aggressive new U.S. policies call for regime change and tighter economic sanctions, a dangerous confrontation may be brewing.

This month restrictions to tighten the U.S. embargo against Cuba go into effect. The measures will cost U.S. taxpayers some $59 million dollars--and that’s just for starters.

The new policies are the result of a 500-page report from the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, charged with developing plans “to bring an end to the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and to prepare to assist a post-Castro Cuba,” in the words of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega.

The commission recommendations include increased support for Cuban dissidents, further restrictions on travel and remittances to the island, stepped-up propaganda efforts and measures to exert more international pressure on the island.

(Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), online at www.americaspolicy.org)

THE REAL "SCARY MOVIE" WON'T BE ON ELM STREET THIS SUMMER
By Nancy Snow

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405scary.html.)

“Scary Movie 3” may be hitting U.S. theaters this month but the real nightmare won’t be on Elm Street, but on the streets of Fallujah, Baghdad, and Cairo. U.S. public diplomacy is “a disaster,” according to former U.S. Information Agency (USIA) director Joseph Duffey, under whom I served as an educational exchange and cultural affairs specialist from 1993-1994. It’s not really a stretch to say that young Army Pfc. Lynndie England of West Virginia has become the new face of U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East, with her cigarette-dangling smiling face and thumbs up posing next to a leashed Iraqi prisoner of war. It looks as much fun to her as an ‘Animal House’ reunion party. Was she instructed to “soften up” the prisoners? It doesn’t really matter, because the images of her and her co-conspirators are being played around the clock by Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya TV in cafes, living rooms, and meeting places.

Edward P. Djerejian, director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and chair of a U.S.-Government sponsored commission that investigated U.S. public diplomacy to the Middle East in 2003, is now just as apoplectic in his pleas as Duffey. “Where I come out is with the old Woody Allen adage: ‘90 percent of life is showing up,’” he told Copley News Service recently. “And we’re not showing up in a significant manner in the Arab and Muslim world in promoting and explaining…(to) these populations our values, our policies, and much more needs to be done.” (Perhaps that’s part of the problem--the U.S. is showing up all too often.) Djerejian is the same person who endorsed the following in “Changing Minds, Winning Peace” that was submitted to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Appropriations Oct. 1, 2003:

Surveys show that Arabs and Muslims admire the universal values for which the United States stands. They admire, as well, our technology, entrepreneurial zeal, and the achievements of Americans as individuals. We were told many times in our travels in Arab countries that ‘we like Americans but not what the American government is doing.’ This distinction is unrealistic, since Americans elect their government and broadly support its foreign policy, but the assertion that ‘we like you but don’t like your policies’ offers hope for transformed public diplomacy.

In no place in Djerejian’s report was there any critical discussion of U.S. foreign policy to the Middle East because policy is always off the table when trying to influence, engage, and win hearts and minds.

(Dr. Nancy Snow is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the California State University, Fullerton and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Information War (Seven Stories Press) and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).)

II. Letters and Comments

ORCHIDS

Re: Pentagon Report Argues Torture is Legal in War on Terror (http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406torturelegal.html)

Orchids to the author. I bought Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire [ed note--for an excerpt see http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html) and this is truly frightening. Bush not only asserts his right to make war but has an enormous military with over 700 bases around the world. With our fleets of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, how can the American people believe that these are for defense? As you stated: Bush claims the unlimited right to wage war. This is terrifying. I call for DISARMAMENT NOW!

--John H. St. John, st.johnj@cox.net

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY CAN NOT RESCUE BAD POLICY

Re: Tale of Two Who Jumped Ship (http://www.fpif.org/papers/0405taleoftwo.html)

This was an interesting discussion of advertising and public diplomacy. It was disappointing that there was little discussion of the resignations of these two women.

There is no need to advertise “America.” Everyone knows about America, and millions of ordinary people worldwide would love to live in America.

There appears to be a need, though, to promote American policy. Unfortunately the policies, like the nation, do not promote themselves by their self-evident benefits. Might it be that the policies are unpopular in the wider world because they serve American interests to the detriment of others?

The crucial difference between marketing consumer goods and marketing policies is that consumer goods are purchased in a free market by free choice, while policies are implemented by political institutions with police and military enforcement. If policies are to promote good will, it falls to policymakers to emulate free market values in their policy decisions: policies must be crafted such that the will of those affected by them is aligned with that of the policy makers. No easy task, but the correct method. Public diplomacy cannot rescue bad policy.

--A P Taormina , info@ecologicco.net

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