Tuesday, April 01, 2003When in England at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush.Great story. But whenever I get anything like this I always check, usually at The Urban Legands site. Sure enough, they have the scoop on this story. As so often turns out with a great story, reality is quite different. In this case, reality is actually much more interesting and displays why I have a tremendous amount of respect for Powell. The big conference was the World Economic Forum at Davos in January and you can read the entire transcript of his speech and the Q/A afterwards. It was a former Archbishop who asked a question and it was not whether we were empire building in Iraq. It was a somewhat convoluted question dealing with the proper use of soft or hard power, when to use each and how we should. He was worried that the US may be relying too much on hard power instead of soft power. Powell then gave an incredibly eloquent answer, ambly expressing the views of most Americans. Simply, We do not like to use hard power. We prefer soft but if hard is the only way, we will not shirk from using it. I do not disagree with this. The disagreement comes from what point must be reached before hard power needs to be used. My favorite quote from his repsonse is this:He answered by saying that, "Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return."
It became very quiet in the room.
I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan. So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.After he finishes this, there is loud applause. Not a silent room.Then he next speaks the part that was quoted in the story, although there is substantial editting to make it more powerful and, in fact, more disrepectful of the audience. His real wordds are just as important and heartfelt but they do not have the hard edge that is present in the story.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.Not as pretty as the story. Powell's answer to this one question was interrupted twice by applause. His entire speech was interrupted 8 times. The first question was put to him by the Secretary General of Amnesty International. The one following was by a businessman. Both asked very good questions in a respectful fashion. Powell answered bot with the same measure of respect, never dismissive in his response. He showesd a strong sense of humility and a sharp sense of history. The truth is SOOO much more complex and interesting than the skewed message in the email. If you want to get tears in your eyes, read the answer to the last question. The moderator asked Powell how 9/11 had affected him personally. This man is someone I would trust with my country. My major worry has been that his views have become more marginalized in the Administration over the past year, if not longer. There are strong conservative views opposing his moderate ones. When several wanted to go after Saddam within days of 9/11, not because Iraq was involved but because it fit their strategic views, Powell more than anyone else forced the focus back to Osama. If Powell can avoid the long knives and forge a strong political career separate from Bush, he could have a huge effect on the future course of America. At least in my (no so humble) opinion. How his career will play it is not knowable but here is one person's opinion. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:07:29 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:20:27 AM -
The momentum of violence
On Saturday, an Iraqi man drove a bomb-laden taxi into a U.S. checkpoint and killed four American soldiers.
Today, U.S. troops fired at an Iraqi van that failed to stop at a checkpoint. It was full of women and children. Seven to ten of them (the reports are conflicting) are dead now.
Why are we in Iraq, again?
Oh, right. We're there to disarm Saddan Hussein. That's sometimes what the Bush administration has declared as its goal for the war. At other times it has said we aim for "regime change." At other times it has said that we are fighting to "liberate" the Iraqi people, or to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq. Still other times, it has painted the war as an extension of the post 9/11 "war on terrorism."
This war is still young -- as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts it, there's more of it ahead of us than behind us -- and it is certainly too early for anyone to foresee its outcome. But it has been underway long enough to see how catastrophically these 13 days of combat have narrowed the possible positive outcomes for the U.S. Unless some lucky U.S. pilot manages to drop a smart bomb directly on Saddam Hussein's head -- and, this time, hits him -- there are now very, very few ways this conflict can conclude well for the U.S., and there's a constantly widening universe of bad endings.
That's because war has its own dynamic, in which violence easily proliferates while limits are constantly challenged and restraints erode. U.S. forces entered Iraq apparently expecting Iraqi citizens to greet them as liberators, throw down their arms and dance in the streets. There was only one chance for that to happen, and it is now past. Instead, we have an army surrounded by foreign civilians -- who Americans must assume are hostile until proven otherwise. That assumption, necessary for U.S. soldiers' self-defense, will lead to more accidents like today's shot-up van. More slaughter of civilians, in turn, will lead to more Iraqi anger at Americans, and more suicide attacks.
Whether on the small scale of the drama at a checkpoint or the large scale of the bombing of Baghdad, this is the U.S.'s dilemma: The harder we push for victory by unleashing increasingly indiscriminate force against Saddam and the Iraqis, the more we stiffen the resistance of Iraqis defending their country, and the more we lay the groundwork for a disastrous postwar military occupation -- a tragedy in which American soldiers will be cast in the role of the Israeli patrols in the West Bank or the British troops stationed in Belfast.
Let's figure that there are Iraqis who are diehard Saddam Hussein supporters; Iraqis who are indifferent; and Iraqis who hate Saddam. The U.S. war plan -- apparently influenced by the perspective of Iraqi exile leaders -- assumed that the diehards would be limited to top government officials and the pampered legions of the Republican Guards, and that the Saddam-haters would predominate, particularly in southern Iraq (where the Shiites had already rebelled once against Saddam, and been brutally repressed as a result).
Instead, it looks like there is a significantly broader group of diehards -- Baath party officials, fedayeen irregulars, Iraqis who for whatever reason have tied their fortunes to Saddam's regime and are willing to fight and die for it. And the Saddam-haters are awfully quiet -- whether because they have been intimidated by the diehards or because they dislike foreign invaders more than they dislike their dictator, we can't know.
And then there are those indifferents in the middle -- the undecideds. The U.S. is now bombing their country and killing their neighbors. They may not love Saddam. I don't think they're going to like their "liberators" a whole lot, either.
As former C.I.A. officer Robert Baer tells Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, "The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam... If we take 50 or 60 casualties a day and they die by the thousands, they're still winning."
I've tried to imagine the best-case scenario for the U.S. from this point forward: The Marines and the Third Infantry resume their march north to Baghdad and defeat the Medina division of the Republican Guard, while the British slowly pacify Basra and the small U.S. force in the north secures Kirkuk and Mosul with the assistance of the Kurds. Then, somehow, we manage to move in to Baghdad, defeat the forces defending it with a minimum of civilian casualties and apprehend Saddam Hussein himself -- who never resorts to chemical or biological "weapons of mass destruction" as the noose closes.
This is certainly within the realm of possibility. But it seems as dangerously close to wishful thinking as the U.S.'s original war plan. In order for it to happen, everything has to go right for the U.S. And if we've learned anything from the first 13 days of war, it's never to assume that everything is going to go right.
More likely, one or many of the following will happen somewhere along the line: Guerrilla warfare against U.S. forces and supply lines will increase. U.S. reprisals will kill more Iraqi civilians. Saddam will deploy chemical weapons and the U.S. will retaliate with a wider campaign of bombing against Baghdad. Civil war may break out between pro-Saddam and anti-Saddam factions in regions over which the invading forces have not yet achieved full control. Terrorist attacks against Americans, abroad or in the U.S. itself, will proliferate. Al-Qaida will win over a whole new generation of recruits weaned on the image of the U.S. as murderer of Iraqi Arabs.
Somewhere amid all this bloodshed we will also supposedly be helping Iraqis build a new democracy.
Vietnam bequeathed us the bitter remark, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Every day the Iraq war continues we march a little closer to playing out that paradox on the scale of an entire nation. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:22:55 AM -
