4 More Years In A No-Go Zone!

4 more years! The horror of it! W (the slacker) draws cheers from the National Guard convention in Las Vegas. We are slipping and sliding toward Baghdad rooftoops and helicopters lifting off with poor, wretched refugees clinging to the struts. If this is (fair & balanced) despair, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
Iraq: it's worse than you think
by
Scott Johnson and Babak Dehghanpisheh

As Americans debate Vietnam, the US death toll tops 1000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger.

Iraqis don't shock easily these days, but eyewitnesses could only blink in disbelief as they recounted last Tuesday's broad-daylight kidnappings in central Baghdad. About 5pm, on a quiet side street outside the Ibn Haitham hospital, a gang armed with pistols, AK-47s and pump-action shotguns raided a small house used by three Italian aid groups. The gunmen, none of them wearing masks, took orders from a smooth-shaven man in a grey suit; they called him "sir." When they drove off, the gunmen had four hostages: two local NGO employees – one of them a woman who was dragged out of the house by her headscarf – and two 29-year-old Italians, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both members of the antiwar group A Bridge to Baghdad. The whole job took less than 10 minutes. Not a shot was fired. About 15 minutes afterward, an American Humvee convoy passed hardly a block away – headed in the opposite direction.

Sixteen months after the war's supposed end, Iraq's insurgency is spreading. Each successful demand by kidnappers has spawned more hostage-takings – to make Philippine troops go home, to stop Turkish truckers from hauling supplies into Iraq, to extort fat ransom payments from Kuwaitis. The few relief groups that remain in Iraq are talking seriously about leaving. US forces have effectively ceded entire cities to the insurgents, and much of the country elsewhere is a battleground. Last week the total number of US war dead in Iraq passed the 1000 mark, reaching 1007 by the end of Saturday.

US forces are working frantically to train Iraqis for the thankless job of maintaining public order. The aim is to boost Iraqi security forces from 95,000 to 200,000 by sometime next year. Then, using a mixture of force and diplomacy, the Americans plan to retake cities and install credible local forces. That's the hope, anyway. But the quality of new recruits is debatable. During recent street demonstrations in Najaf, police opened fire on crowds, killing and injuring dozens. The insurgents, meanwhile, are recruiting, too. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once referred to America's foes in Iraq as "dead-enders," then the Pentagon maintained they probably numbered 5000, and now senior military officials talk about "dozens of regional cells" that could call upon as many as 20,000 fighters.

Yet US officials publicly insist that Iraq will somehow hold national elections before the end of January. The appointed council currently acting as Iraq's government under interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is to be replaced by an elected constitutional assembly – if the vote takes place. "I presume the election will be delayed," says the Iraqi Interior Ministry's chief spokesman, Sabah Kadhim. A senior Iraqi official sees no chance of January elections: "I'm convinced that it's not going to happen. It's just not realistic. How is it going to happen?" Some Iraqis worry that America will stick to its schedule despite all obstacles. "The Americans have created a series of fictional dates and events in order to delude themselves," says Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who recently met with Allawi and American representatives to discuss the January agenda. "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."

America has its own Election Day to worry about. For US troops in Iraq, one especially sore point is the stateside public's obsession with the candidates' decades-old military service. "Stop talking about Vietnam," says one US official who has spent time in the Sunni Triangle. "People should be debating this war, not that one." His point was not that America ought to walk away from Iraq. Hardly any US personnel would call that a sane suggestion. But there's widespread agreement that Washington needs to rethink its objectives, and quickly. "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility," says a senior US diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose."

It's not only that US casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on US forces in August – the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that US troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting – a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that US troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior US military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."

US military planners only wish they could. "What we see is a classic progression," says Andrew Krepinevich, author of the highly respected study "The Army and Vietnam." "What we also see is that the US military is not trained or organized to fight insurgencies. That was the deliberate choice after Vietnam. Now we look to be paying the price." Americans aren't safe even on the outskirts of a city like Fallujah. Early last week a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into two U.S. Humvees nine miles north of town on the four-lane concrete bypass called Highway 10. Seven Americans died. It was one of the deadliest blows against US forces since June, when Iraqis formally resumed control of their government.

As much as ordinary Iraqis may hate the insurgents, they blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. Three months ago Iraqi troops and US-dominated "multinational forces" pulled out of Samarra, and insurgents took over the place immediately. "The day the MNF left, people celebrated in the streets," says Kadhim, the Interior spokesman. "But that same day, vans arrived in town and started shooting. They came from Fallujah and other places and they started blowing up houses." Local elders begged Allawi's government to send help. "The leaders of the tribes come to see us and they say, 'Really, we are scared, we don't like these people'," Kadhim continues. "But we just don't have the forces at the moment to help them." Last week negotiators reached a tentative peace deal, but it's not likely to survive long. The Iraqi National Guard is the only homegrown security force that people respect, and all available ING personnel are deployed elsewhere.

Will Iraq's troubles get even worse? "The insurgency can certainly sustain what it's doing for a while," says a senior US military official. Many educated Iraqis aren't waiting to find out. Applicants mobbed the courtyard of the Baghdad passport office last week, desperate for a chance to escape. Police fired shots in the air, trying to control the crowd. "Every day there is shooting, gunfire, people killed, headaches for lack of sleep," said Huda Hussein, 34, a Ph.D. in computer science who has spent the past year and a half looking for work. "I want to go to a calm place for a while." It's too bad for Iraq – and for America – that the insurgents don't share that wish.

With John Barry in Washington

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

The S-Word

One of the most ridiculous scenes this year was watching W congratulate his British stooge—Tony Blair—during the European summit meeting because the United States had handed over sovereignty to a puppet government in Iraq. W and his gang were so desperate to field a so-called sovereign government in Iraq that they accepted—no, sought—UN involvement in creating an interim Iraqi government. W wrote "Let Freedom Reign" in the margin of the memo slipped to him by Condi. I guess W couldn't spell "Ring." W's illiteracy aside, his foolish assertion that he could hand over sovereignty as if it were a bowl of peas betrays the depth of his ignorance. Our puppet regimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan are headed by men who were—prior to the War on Terror—on the CIA payroll. Neither Iyad Allawi nor Hamid Karzai has any claim to legitimacy because both of them were CIA stooges. W doesn't get it. Condi doesn't get it. However, in all likelihood, we're going to get it and it won't be pleasant. If this is (fair & balanced) geopolitics, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Violating 'Sovereignty': Questioning a Concept's Long Reign
By CARLIN ROMANO

Everywhere the S-word wreaks havoc. Iraqi terrorists kill hundreds of Americans and Iraqis to protest infringement of sovereignty by the Great Satan. Africans massacre other Africans because European-imposed "sovereign" borders clash with tribal allegiances.

Serbs and Albanians, Irish and British, Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Russians and Chechens, Georgians and Abkhazians, French and Corsicans, Spanish and Basques, Mexicans and Zapatistas, Kurds and Turks (not to mention Kurds and Iraqis, or Kurds and Syrians), Chinese and Taiwanese (not to mention Chinese and Tibetans, Chinese and South Koreans, Chinese and Russians, Chinese and Indians ... ), all want to split heads over sovereignty.

It doesn't end there. In the United States, less bloody battles -- some more than 200 years old -- continue between the states and national government over sovereignty. In Europe, the evolution of the European Union into what some already call the "United States of Europe" now provokes regular battles about where E.U. law violates national sovereignty. In the rarefied world of international law, lawyers -- regular customers of the many international institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, that routinely crimp national sovereignty -- shake their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Who says murky ideas don't matter?

But head shaking tends to be a silent art form, like mime. Onlookers observe it for a few minutes, then pass on. So an odd contrast persists.

As an explosive real-world political idea, sovereignty propels international armies and costs untold lives. As a historical concept within political philosophy -- roughly defined by one scholar as "supreme authority within a territory" -- it remains a back-alley matter, outside the main arena.

Compared with idealistic de jure notions like "justice" and "democracy," it's often a de facto embarrassment. Compared with relatively coherent concepts like "desert" or "entitlement," it's a mongrel: born in "divine right" theology and circumstance, barely coherent at best, terminally ambiguous at worst, preternaturally dangerous.

That Alan Cranston (1914-2000), the four-term Democratic senator from California, left among his papers an important essay defying the disconnect between fuzzy jurisprudential idea and volatile real-world catalyst makes perfect sense. As a young journalist in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Cranston published a tabloid English translation of Mein Kampf, with anti-Nazi notes, selling half a million copies for 10 cents each before Hitler's publishers blocked its distribution by suing him for copyright infringement.

He knew the power of ideas.

Cranston's posthumously published essay, recently issued as The Sovereignty Revolution (Stanford University Press), begins dramatically: "It is worshiped like a god, and as little understood. It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name. It is at once a source of power and of power's abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful. It is sovereignty."

An indefatigable international diplomat, Cranston insists on his subject's enormous sway: "The fires of passionate crusades to achieve, assert, or defend sovereignty for one purpose or another or to avenge some breach of it light up the night skies of our time like some giant uncontrolled forest fire raging all over the world."

Most of Cranston's essay alternates between reporting the bare bones of multiple world crises rooted in the vagaries of his subject, and advancing a few basic positions. He argues that when people understand sovereignty as the absolute power of a government over its own territory and citizens, a shield against the intervention of other governments, nongovernmental organizations, and outside powers, it is an illegitimate and dangerous medieval idea. At best, sovereignty should be understood as the right of people to determine their own destinies. Such sovereignty, he maintains, delegable to governments through democratic process, is the only legitimate form, and political history in the West happily continues to head in that direction.

Finally, sovereignty as a defense against outside intervention to stop extraordinarily unacceptable behavior by a government against its people is always, in Cranston's view, heinous and unjustified. International covenants on genocide and human rights similarly demonstrate the world community's declining appetite for claims of such absolute state sovereignty.

The late senator doesn't crowd these views with pages of historical scholarship in his slim book, but the approach accords quite well with that material. With any luck, The Sovereignty Revolution will draw some much-needed learning into current public debate. For even light skimming of sovereignty's history reveals its crucial impact on today's events.

Some scholars, such as the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, trace sovereignty's essence back to the enduring mystical authority thought to survive a pope in the Roman Catholic Church. Most trace sovereignty back historically to the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648 (which ended the Thirty Years' War and curtailed internecine religious warfare and the power of the Holy Roman Empire), and philosophically to the work of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. By the Peace of Westphalia, Europe's leaders agreed not to interfere in one another's affairs (though, of course, they continued to do so). Hobbes, in his work, contended that sovereignty resided absolutely, in all matters, in a power (e.g., the "Leviathan") presumptively above the law.

Dan Philpott, the University of Notre Dame political scientist who offers the definition of "supreme authority within a territory" in his excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject, draws attention to facets of the concept important for current purposes. He writes that if sovereignty assumes authority, then authority, as the philosopher R.P. Wolff outlined, assumes both a right to command and a right to be obeyed. Philpott, author of Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2001), notes that a "holder of sovereignty derives authority from some mutually acknowledged source of legitimacy -- natural law, a divine mandate, hereditary law, a constitution, even international law. In the contemporary era, some body of law is ubiquitously the source of sovereignty." Yet much media discussion of sovereignty ignores the issue of whether a thug regime -- e.g., Saddam Hussein's -- has in any sense earned a right to be obeyed, and thus earned sovereignty.

Similarly, Philpott observes, "territoriality is now deeply taken for granted" in the sense that simple presence within a geographical area presumptively places someone under a particular sovereignty. But a case such as that of the Kurds, a stateless people who have suffered under Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian sovereignty without any moral acceptance of that rule, shows how sovereignty often plays out merely as a recognition of power, not an acknowledgment of just power.

Such historical and philosophical perspective suggests that moral foreign policy must cut through the threshold concept of sovereignty instead of allowing it to be a conversation stopper. It must push on to sovereignty's etiology, to issues of justice, democracy, and legitimacy. Debates that reflexively criticize, for instance, the United States for violating Iraqi sovereignty, or Israel for violating Palestinian sovereignty, or Russia for violating Chechen sovereignty, make little sense if one doesn't explain why the supposedly violated sovereignty deserves that status.

Yet too many participants in public debate fail to scrutinize sovereignty, just as they fail to dissect most political concepts more abstract than an oil pipeline.

Statesmen and officials often take the concept for granted despite knowing from diplomatic experience that its contours shift like a sea-beaten shore. At the same time, political theorists too rarely educate the public on the ideas that political theorists know best. Only a few modern thinkers, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Jacques Maritain (the latter of whom thought we must "get rid of" sovereignty), have given the notion the attention it deserves, building on criticisms of absolute sovereignty once voiced by Hugo Grotius and Francisco Suarez.

Newspaper and TV pundits perform worst of all. They simply put their minds in park, brandishing the concept as one more club instead of parsing its dimensions. To be fair, even if pundits possess the learning to explain sovereignty's intricacies, they may well think, "Why step into something so deep when Hannity or O'Reilly will cut me off after 20 words, or the Times op-ed page is giving me just 450 words?" "Sovereignty" thus gets bandied about as if it were an ostensible natural kind, like "apple" or "cow."

Not every political scientist, it should be noted, opposes sovereignty's influence in public policy. In The Case for Sovereignty (AEI Press), a recent study, Cornell government professor Jeremy Rabkin contends that a "post-sovereign" world would encourage terrorism, erode national loyalties, and spur even greater international conflict.

Of course, an even bolder "pro-sovereignty" world might alternately encourage Russia's 89 "semi-autonomous" republics, Indonesia's roughly 250 ethnic groups, and Africa's 2,000-odd tribes toward national ambition. Maybe every person should be an independent country. Can't beat those diplomatic passports.

But let the public debate begin. There's nothing more important for scholars to analyze than a political concept arguably driving much of the world's violence. The disconnect between public innocence about sovereignty, and the scholarly world's wisdom about the notion, victimizes everyone.

Carlin Romano is critic at large of The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education