An irresponsible exit from Iraq

PREFACE: Scroll past the sources or click on #exitexposition to skip ahead to my commentary on the issue.

In today's New York Times (23SEP12), Michael Gordon reports that despite the insistence by Obama supporters that he responsibly ended the mission in Iraq and their touting of our Iraq withdrawal as a foreign policy success for Obama, in fact, President Obama fumbled away the Iraq mission at a critical turning point.

In 2011, Max Boot reported in the Wall Street Journal about Obama's failure in the SOFA negotiation with Iraq. As Walter Russell Mead notes, it is unseemly, even shameless, for the Obama reelection campaign to tout our Iraq withdrawal as a foreign policy success when it is actually a failure with long-term consequences.

To wit, earlier this month (09SEP12), NBC's Richard Engel provided a thumbnail sketch of the anti-liberal turn of the Middle East, now including Iraq, since the Arab Spring and concluded, "What happens if the [sic] Washington continues to watch from afar?". He warns that al Qaeda has been damaged but not defeated, which means the terrorist cancer remains dangerous if it's not countered correctly. Engel refers to the American tactical victory over al Qaeda in Iraq and our broader tactical success combating al Qaeda under President Bush, and then warns of the dangers of alienating Sunnis and also al Qaeda's intelligent 'shifting antigen' adaptive capability. Engel argues sufficient American forces and commitment on the ground have reliably consistently hurt al Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, whereas the American retraction under President Obama has enabled al Qaeda to make inroads with anti-government forces in the Arab Spring, such as the reformed tactics al Qaeda is now employing in Syria.

23OCT12 add: Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler calls out President Obama's attempt to spin his egregious failure with Iraq as an intentional foreign policy success.

February & March 2013 add: In The World Today, Associate Fellow at Chatham House Nadim Shehadi upholds the Iraq intervention to object to President Obama's restraint from intervening in the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Syria. In the 25MAY12 New York Times Weekly, Mr. Shehadi applied the lessons of Iraq to Syria (working link).

20MAR13 add: In the New York Times, David Sanger describes Obama officials Seeking Lessons from Iraq. But Which Ones? The article shows that their bias against the Iraq mission has handicapped policymakers in the Obama administration with the consequence that President Obama's various errors with Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria have resulted from or at least were enabled by the OIF stigma, the keystone premise of Obama's foreign affairs.

23JUL13 add: Ambassador Ryan Crocker urges, "The United States has a Strategic Framework Agreement with Iraq. We must use it to engage more deeply with the Iraqi government, helping it take the steps to ensure internal cohesion. This was a major challenge during my tenure as ambassador, 2007-2009, and the need now is critical."

U.S.-Iraqi Relations, Embassy of the United States Baghdad, Iraq:

The Strategic Framework Agreement for a Relationship of Friendship and Cooperation between the United States and the Republic of Iraq (PDF version full text - 647 KB) [fact sheet] guides our overall political, economic, cultural, and security ties with Iraq. This agreement is designed to help the Iraqi people stand on their own and reinforce Iraqi sovereignty, while protecting U.S. interests in the Middle East. The SFA normalizes the U.S.-Iraqi relationship with strong economic, diplomatic, cultural, and security cooperation and serves as the foundation for a long-term bilateral relationship based on mutual goals.

23JUN14 add: The Daily Beast reports, Obama Flips on Immunity for U.S. Troops in Iraq.

29JUN14 add: In The Daily Beast, Columbia professor Stuart Gottlieb says, Blame The Obama Doctrine For Iraq.

03JUL14 add: In the Washington Post, Ali Khedery, possibly the most experienced US official from Operation Iraqi Freedom, explains Maliki and the hard-won opportunity for a different course for Iraq that was thrown away under Obama. Reidar Visser criticizes the Khedery article.

19AUG14 add: In War On The Rocks, Nadia Schadlow explains the necessity of sufficient peace operations with an illustration of the compounding harms that have resulted from President Obama's withdrawal and withholding of peace operations from Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Oddly though, Schadlow says, "The complete withdrawal [by President Obama from Iraq] was equivalent to President Bush’s now infamous “mission accomplished” speech in 2003," when in fact, that speech marked the transition from OIF's major combat operations against Iraq to OIF's peace operations with Iraq, which is the very policy that Schadlow is advocating.

08SEP14 add: In the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen compares current events to President Bush's foresight in his 2007 warning about the risks of a premature withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

23SEP14 add: Columbia University Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies video of panel discussion “ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and the US” provides a succinct explanation of ISIS and its origin.*

* Note: Saddam's regime was not a secular bulwark, as it is often erroneously represented by OIF opponents. Saddam's terrorism included jihadists, including affiliates of al Qaeda, and he had undertaken the sectarian radicalization of Iraqi society since the Iran-Iraq War. The Saddam regime's terroristic rule was why the de-Ba'athication was considered necessary, per UNSCR 1483 and Public Law 105-338, by the Coalition Provisional Authority. CPA senior advisers provide clarification on the de-Ba'athification. Learn more about the CPA perspective here.

01OCT14 add: In his memoir, Worthy Fights, Obama Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta blames President Obama's apparent desire to disengage from Iraq with a passive-aggressive approach to the SOFA negotiation.

11NOV14 add: New York Times reports Sunnis who fought side by side with the Americans in the COIN "Surge" and Sunni Awakening have been slaughtered by ISIS.

02-24FEB15 add: In Mosaic, Michael Doran connects the dots on President Obama's fundamental transformation of US strategy in the Middle East based on rejection of President Bush's approach with Iraq and reorientation of American ME policy to empower Iran.

12FEB15 add: Politico reports on Iraqi Sunni leaders of the Anbar Awakening during the Bush administration who have been abandoned by the Obama administration.

19FEB15 add: In Foreign Policy, Ali Khedery blames President Obama's stand-off orientation and slate of decisions with Iraq since taking office in 2009 for the deteriorated situation, not just the troop pull-out in 2011.

February 2015 add: In The Tower, Michael Pregent, an advisor in OIF from 2005 to 2006 and 2007 to 2010, shares his observations of the constructive role the US did have (but not enough) and could and should have had in Iraq vis-à-vis Iran. (h/t)

17MAR15 add: In Foreign Affairs, Rick Brennan, a senior advisor in OIF from 2006 to 2011, describes "the bungling of the Iraq exit". (h/t)

07APR15 add: In Politico, Emma Sky, an OIF official and then senior advisor in OIF, laments the progress and opportunities lost in Iraq due to Obama's sharp deviation from Bush with an approach that favored Iran's encroachment in Iraq. In Politico, an object of Sky's criticism, Ambassador Chris Hill, tells his side; transcripts of Secretary Clinton's April 2009 remarks in Baghdad.

17APR15 add: In Slate, more from Emma Sky. In Telegraph, more about Emma Sky.

09MAY15 add: In Rudaw interviews, more from Ali Khedery and General David Petraeus's assessment of what went wrong in Iraq.

05JUN15 add: In Foreign Affairs, more from Emma Sky.

11JUN15 add: Bloomberg View reports on a Sunni Iraqi sheik of the Anbar Awakening who is now marginalized due to the abandonment by the Obama administration.

25JUN15 add: In Foreign Policy, Duke professor Peter Feaver notes the prevalence of blaming Bush for current events in Iraq in this Politico article and asks, instead, How Much Responsibility Does Obama Bear for Where Iraq is Now?

25JUN15 add: Wall Street Journal reports that Iraqis don't believe the US wants to defeat ISIS in light of their memories of the US defeat of AQI.

22JUL15 add: In a Fox News interview, General Ray Odierno believes Iraq was on the right track before the US pulled out and Iraq's current crisis could have been prevented with a continued US military presence.

30NOV15 add: In the Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn describe the cascading failings of the Obama administration in the War on Terror, many of them stemming from the course change with Iraq.

28FEB16 add: At the Lawfare blog, Syrian pro-democracy activist Ammar Abdulhamid cites President Bush's Freedom Agenda and Operation Iraqi Freedom to explain that President Obama's course deviation in order to 'lead from behind' has gravely harmed the moderate reformers in the Middle East who relied on American leadership of the free world.

11MAR16 add: Kyle Orton criticizes President Obama's radical course change, especially with Iraq, "empowering Iran against its neighbours, notably the Gulf States, since Iran had heretofore been contained". Orton's criticism cites to Jeffrey Goldberg's article in the April 2016 The Atlantic.

16JUN16 add: "The final report of the CNAS ISIS Study Group proposes a strategy based on four key interlocking efforts and then describes how these efforts can be applied region by region in western Iraq, eastern Syria, southwest Syria, and northwest Syria." [Link to report is dead — summary here.]

10JUL16 add: In The National, Hassan Hassan criticizes Western "leftists or anti-imperialists" for "fighting the Iraq war through Syria" and thus enabling the humanitarian toll in Syria caused by the Assad regime and its allies, especially Iran and Russia.

15AUG16 add: In ProPublica and the Washington Post, Jeff Gerth and Joby Warrick report on the multiple ways the Obama administration degraded then eliminated the vital multi-thread US-Iraq relationship.

25AUG16 add: In the International Business Times, Kyle Orton criticizes President Obama for not enforcing his "red line" against the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons to quell domestic protests. Contrast Obama's enabling of Assad to the humanitarian component of the answer to "Did Iraq failing its compliance test justify the regime change?". President Obama's inhumane choices with Syria are a logical consequence of the stigmatization of President Bush's strict enforcement when Saddam failed his "final opportunity to comply" (UNSCR 1441) with UNMOVIC.

28SEP16 add: At Just Facts Daily, fact-checker James Agresti corrects President Obama and Secretary Clinton's "brazen lie" that the SOFA compelled the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq.

October 2016 add: At the Hudson Institute, Michael Pregent and Kevin Truitte briefly summarize the current situation in Iraq and course of events that led up to it, and introduce the possible solution of an autonomous West Iraq. My criticism of the brief is the authors' omission of the US and UN legal framework that controlled decisions on partition and de-Ba'athification and omission of factual background on the de-Ba'athification and Saddam regime terrorism.

November 2016 add: In The Tower, Jamie Palmer ties the opposition to the Iraq intervention to the opposition to the Syria intervention, including the Syria intervention advocates who opposed the Iraq intervention.

27NOV16 add: In The Cipher Brief, Charles Duelfer calls for a re-alignment of US policy on Iraq essentially to the status quo ante before President Obama.

19JAN17 add: In Fox News, General Jack Keane and Maseh Zarif of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) advise President Trump to "zero on the following lessons from the Surge: 1. The national interest should always prevail over public opinion and short-term political calculations. ... 2. Recognize when your policy is failing and be willing to change it. ... 3. There is no viable substitute for American military power in certain crises. ... 4. Military action is a critical component – not the totality – of a successful anti-Islamic extremist campaign. ... 5. Securing the peace demands continued effort." (h/t)

13FEB17 add: In Foreign Policy, Michael Knights, echoing Ambassador Crocker's 18JAN09 unheeded warning to President Obama, cautions President Trump not to break the already fragile US-Iraq relationship and advises Trump to provide a counterweight to Iranian influence.

23MAR17 add: In the Washington Post, Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi invokes the Strategic Framework Agreement to explain, My country needs more help from the U.S.. (h/t)

17JAN19 add: In the Wall Street Journal, Michael Gordon reports that the newly published US Army 2-volume study of OIF "asserts that the “surge” of reinforcements that President George W. Bush sent to Iraq in 2007 succeeded in reducing the level of violence in the country. But the study adds, the failure by the Obama administration and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to come to terms on an agreement to extend the U.S. military presence undermined the prospect of stabilizing the country politically. As the troop withdrawal deadline approached, the study asserts, relations between the U.S. military command in Iraq and the U.S. Embassy also “devolved into a level of dysfunctionality,” further undermining the prospects for success." The Army Times's report. See The U.S. Army in the Iraq War: Volume 1 and executive summary covering 2003-2006, and Volume 2 and executive summary covering 2007-2011. My criticisms are the Army study overall is short of primary sources, Volume 1 mischaracterizes the casus belli as Iraq's demonstrated WMD stockpiles (the casus belli was Iraq's confirmed ceasefire breach), Volume 2 mischaracterizes OIF as a preemptive war (OIF was primarily a compliance enforcement), the Volume-2 executive summary wholly omits reference to the overarching conditions-based Strategic Framework Agreement, and the study report itself only briefly cites the "broader SFA" and incorrectly implies the SFA does not cover security. In fact, the SFA was the fail-safe. While the short-term 2008-2011 Status of Forces Agreement is predominantly cited, the long-term conditions-based SFA is why there was a follow-on SOFA negotiation under President Obama rather than a set-in-stone exit, why the 2011 withdrawal was "unexpected" in spite of the 2008-2011 SOFA, why Obama promised (though then reneged) a compensatory civilian presence, and why the US military subsequently effected a conspicuously simple return to Iraq.

05JAN20 add: In Politico, Michael Knights uses the occasion of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani to urge the US-led coalition and Iraqi government to recommit to rehabilitating the Iraqi nation-building project to, in effect, its 2008-2009 condition.

21JUN23 add: The American Enterprise Institute's "The Iraq War Series 20 Years Later" convened panels of decision makers and experts to discuss The Conduct of the War and The Aftermath. I reviewed the panel discussions here.

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Michael Gordon's report of President Obama's poor leadership with the Iraq mission contrasts sharply with Gordon's report of historic leadership by President Bush with his decision for the counterinsurgency "Surge".

Building a nation to secure the peace does not happen faster than raising a child. Based on America's experience as leader of the free world, just the opening stage of building a nation even in relatively straightforward conducive conditions should normally and reasonably be expected to require a decade. See the World War 2 nation-building examples, where US military forces continue to serve in evolving roles, and more contemporary to Iraq, the peace operations with Kosovo and Afghanistan, which both pre-date OIF and are also ongoing. Indeed, long before OIF and the discovery that Saddam's rule was in fact "far worse" (UNCHR) than outsiders realized, the international community understood Iraq required comprehensive rebuilding on a generational scale. Yet despite normal nation-building expectations heightened by the particular challenges of Iraq, President Obama cut short the peace operations with Iraq at a severely premature 8 years. Imagine the consequences if the US had withdrawn peace operations from Europe and Asia in the late 1940s or early 1950s like the US pulled out of Iraq at the 8-year mark. President Obama should have stayed the course from President Bush like President Eisenhower stayed the course from President Truman. Instead, Obama fumbled away the possibility of a reliable, long-term American partner in Iraq with an astonishingly passive-aggressive approach to the SOFA negotiation.

In January 2009, President Bush handed President Obama a hard-won turnaround success in strategically critical Iraq to build upon. The US was fulfilling the principal objective of bringing Iraq into compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions stemming from UNSCR 660 (1990). Looking ahead from the COIN "Surge", post-Saddam Iraq was clearly headed the way of Germany, Japan, and South Korea as a key regional strategic partnership. In May 2011, at the dawn of the Arab Spring, Obama described the historic opportunity for peace in the Middle East where "Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress".

Concurrently, OIF had set up a better stable and ethical path to deal with Iran that relied on 3 prongs: stabilize Iraq as an American ally, increase sanctions pressure, and support civil reform in Iran. President Obama, instead, did the opposite of all three.

When the 2008-2011 status of forces agreement (SOFA) was signed at the close of the Bush administration, Iraq was improving sharply. Alongside the SOFA, the US and Iraq signed the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA), whose conditions-based guidelines constituted the overarching law-and-policy frame for the long-term US-Iraq relationship.

In the near term, the 2008-2011 SOFA transitioned the US-led presence in Iraq from UN authorizations to a US-Iraq bilateral arrangement. The UN authorizations for the occupation and peace operations had been annual, so the 3-year arrangement was also a transition to a longer timeframe.

The 2008-2011 SOFA neither barred nor required a particular subsequent arrangement for President Bush's successor. The Arab Spring hadn't happened yet when the SOFA and SFA were signed, so the degeneration of the Arab Spring, especially in neighboring Syria, wasn't then a risk factor. If the trajectory of Iraq's progress had continued on pace, especially in relation to the 2010 elections in Iraq, it was conceivable for the US-led peace operations with Iraq to reduce significantly by 2011. The 2008-2011 SOFA provided a 3-year window for the next President to stay the course and advance Iraq's progress in the critical formative stage, then assess the situation and determine the transition to the next US-Iraq arrangement in accordance with the SFA's guidelines, analogous to Eisenhower's decision on the American global posture when post-WW2 transitioned to the Cold War.

Instead, President Obama contravened the Strategic Framework Agreement. As Emma Sky explains, Obama's disengaged approach to Iraq from the outset sharply deviated from Bush's developmental approach to Iraq. PM Maliki altered his approach in reaction to President Obama. Based on conditions in Iraq in 2011, with the added risk factor introduced by the Arab Spring, US-led peace operations were needed past 2011. But as Rick Brennan explains, Obama's disengaged approach to Iraq from the outset of his presidency continued through his disengaged approach to the SOFA negotiation. Add: Speculatively, Obama may have insisted passive-aggressively on an Iraqi parliamentary SOFA because the SFA was sufficient legal basis to house partnership arrangements via executive agreement. The partnership arrangement since mid-2014, such as it is, for US troops serving in Iraq is housed in executive agreement.

Excerpt from A Farewell Warning On Iraq (18JAN09) by David Ignatius:

[Ryan] Crocker arrived as ambassador in Baghdad in March 2007. Bush had already decided on a surge of additional U.S. troops there, but Crocker remembers wondering in the early days, "How on earth are we going to make this a better place?" A virtuous cycle slowly took hold: Newly confident Sunni Muslims began fighting al-Qaeda; Shiites decided they didn't need protection from the death squads of the Mahdi Army; and finally all the major Iraqi parties came together to endorse Crocker's appeal for a status-of-forces agreement and the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The key to success in Iraq, insists Crocker, was the psychological impact of Bush's decision to add troops. "In the teeth of ferociously negative popular opinion, in the face of a lot of well-reasoned advice to the contrary, he said he was going forward, not backward."

Bush's decision rocked America's adversaries, says Crocker: "The lesson they had learned from Lebanon was, 'Stick it to the Americans, make them feel the pain, and they won't have the stomach to stick it out.' That assumption was challenged by the surge."

Soon, Iraq will be Barack Obama's problem. And I ask Crocker what mistakes the new administration could make. He answers that he thinks it will avoid these errors, but he lists them anyway: "Concluding that this was the Bush administration's war, that it's stable enough now, that we don't want to inherit it, so we're going to back away."

Most of all, says Crocker, policymakers need to understand that this is a long game. A lasting change in Iraq isn't an on-off switch: "Not this year, not in five years, maybe not in 10 years."

We forget now that the 'shock and awe' war to oust Saddam's regime was a resounding success. The high cost cited by anti-Iraq critics mostly occurred in the post-war stage, ie, the security and stabilization, nation-building, and transition phases. Michael Gordon reports that a faction of officers and diplomats pushed for a rudimentary COIN strategy years before the COIN "Surge", but were rejected in favor of giving more time to the Coalition Provisional Authority and civilian-centered initial post-war plan. In other words, military-centered counterinsurgency was the emergency back-up plan for Iraq when it should have been the starting strategy for the post-war occupation. The history of Iraq after Saddam could have been very different; based on what I've heard, there was a 'golden hour' in the immediate post-war in 2003 when our leverage and control in Iraq were at their maximum and the Iraqi people hoped for and expected us to deliver on our promises of liberal reform. The Coalition Provisional Authority was dedicated and intellectually capable. However, the initial post-war plan proved to be practically insufficient for the competition on the ground where the ruthless enemy seized the initiative, and we lost the 'golden hour'.

That being said, adjustment with a harsh learning curve is usual in the competition of war and peace. OIF just demanded a steeper learning curve for the peace operations of the post-war than the major combat operations of the war that deposed Saddam's regime due to the kind of enemies that adapted to the particular institutional weakness ingrained by the Powell Doctrine.

President Bush eventually approved the COIN "Surge" — over strong opposition to COIN by Democrats, from within the military, and even from within his administration — to correct for the Powell Doctrine and earn a second chance to win the peace. With the success of the Petraeus-led COIN "Surge", we paid dearly for a second chance but we won another opportunity to secure our gains, win the post-war, and build the peace on our terms in Iraq. Instead, as one more and perhaps final 'what might have been' of Operation Iraqi Freedom, rather than stay the course, President Obama chose to deviate and remove the vital peace operations needed for Iraq, first by failing to secure the next partnership arrangement for continued military peace operations and then by reneging on the pledge for a commensurate civilian force to replace the military peace operations.

We can only speculate the difference counterinsurgency might have made in Iraq had it been implemented from the outset of the post-war. I fear we will also speculate in the future whether we left Iraq too early to cement a constructive course for our erstwhile ward.

Note: Go here for prefatory explanation of the law and policy, fact basis of the decision for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Links after the Chris Stevens assassination

Following my post reacting to the assassination of Ambassador Stevens, here is a round-up of related perspectives and insight:

Ann Coulter points out that, in contrast to the Arab Spring, the American Revolution was controlled by our Founding Fathers, not a mob overthrow. Coulter includes a President Obama quote from his speech on Libya last year that is ironic given the attack's pretextual protest over an obscure youtube clip: "[We] must stand alongside those who believe in the same core principles that have guided us through many storms: . . . our support for a set of universal rights, including the freedom for people to express themselves".

Forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman explains terrorist networks. His conclusion: "So in 2004, Al Qaeda has new leadership. In a way today’s operatives are far more aggressive and senseless than the earlier leaders. The whole network is held together by the vision of creating the Salafi state. A fuzzy, idea-based network really requires an idea-based solution. The war of ideas is very important and this is one we haven’t really started to engage yet." Thanks to Belmont Club commenter Highlander.

Ed Husain overlooks political Islam.

Ambassador Stevens warned about extremists near Benghazi in 2008.

White House asks Google to take down youtube clip. Does the youtube clip constitute an exception to protected First Amendment speech? No. Reminder: President Obama taught ConLaw at Chicago Law. Half-serious question: I wonder if Nakoula can be charged under 'bullying' statutes, given that their liability is judged by the effect and impact on the victims.

Why the attacks on broadly West-identified targets? The Islamists identify the youtube clip as merely a symptom of the cause, Western values. Obama wants to blame the youtube clip as the cause; if the problem is thus defined, the solution can be focused on domestic actors. In his September 20, 2001 speech to Congress, President Bush famously said, "They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." At the time, President Bush was mocked. Bush was right.

Libyan President al-Megarif contradicts US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice on the basis of the attack. Defining the problem frames the solution. The way the Libyan president is defining the problem would seat Libya in the War on Terror against the Islamists, thus demanding greater American involvement in Libya as the solution and calling Obama’s hands-off strategy to the Arab Spring into question. Whereas Ambassador Rice is attempting to define the problem so the incident is a one-time ‘spontaneous’ incident and therefore no basis for greater American involvement nor indictment of Obama’s strategy. Last year, Obama pointedly contrasted the American roles in post-Qaddafi Libya and post-Saddam Iraq. But Libya is now taking a step closer to needing US intervention in post-Qaddafi Libya. The US seems to be running from that approaching call for help. Reminds me of the US State Department spokesmen who did their best to avoid using the term "genocide" during the Rwandan genocide in order to avoid US intervention in Rwanda. The Islamists primary purpose is to clear the field of local competitors in order to construct an Islamist future in the Middle East. The 'protest' of the youtube clip is a competitive maneuver to equate Free Speech with anti-Islam. The Arab Spring liberals are associated with Free Speech. Most vulnerable are the Arab Spring liberals, and it looks like we're abandoning them and conceding the Arab Spring to the Islamists.

Wow — connection made. Susan Rice was on President Clinton's National Security Council as the Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping from 1993 to 1995. Rice was instrumental in the US avoiding the defining label of "genocide" for the Rwanda genocide in order to avoid the solution of US intervention. Rice appears to be repeating the same tactic responding to the Stevens killing in order to limit the US reaction and uphold the Obama policy for post-Qaddafi Libya.

Marc Thiessen says Obama's Middle East policy has actually been on the wrong side of history: illiberal, supportive of autocrats, leading from behind the mob, even cutting funding to democracy promotion while claiming to support liberals, thus helping to explain the Islamist surge in the Middle East.

Liberals and Islamists facing off in Libya. This event recalls my observation at Professor Nacos's blog that the critical contest is not between the US and Islamists but between Muslims and Islamists where the winner will declare the loser is the intolerable apostate. Pakistani Raza Rumi discusses the intra-Muslim contest.

Middle East unrest . . . blame the Soviets? This book says Russian interference in the Middle East is severely underestimated.

Washington Post fact-checker charts the Obama administration's changing story on the Benghazi attacks.

CNN on Libya spiral; more CNN on Libya disintegration.

Washington Examiner on Obama's foreign policy.

Another consequence of President Obama's purposely anti-Bush, arms length, deferred to surrogates, but still interventionist Libya policy: U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands.

Money quote:

The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests.

The elephant in the room that pundits are studiously ignoring is that current events justify President Bush's choices in the Middle East. However, that admission by the media would open the door to re-evaluating Bush's record in a positive light that casts a contrasting critical shadow on Obama's Middle East policies, which would be a reversal of the punditry's dominant narrative. Bush merely applied the logical means necessary to achieve a liberal foreign policy, while Obama's histrionic rejection of Bush's methods (except for drone assassinations, which Obama has expanded dramatically) has invited failure in our foreign affairs.

It seems the Obama administration believes that a cheaper hedging failure and defeat of America on the world stage is preferable to a deeply invested commitment to victory and success.

Kyle Orton justifies the Libya intervention: "instability was coming to Libya no matter what the West did, and the main problem with the intervention was that it wasn’t early enough, forceful enough, or protracted enough".

Our Middle East choices: autocrats, Islamists, liberals

See the benchmark, Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa, 19MAY11.

The contest for dominance in the Middle East is a 3-way contest between autocrats, Islamists, and liberals. We want the liberals to be dominant. However, due to urgent political economic needs, we historically worked with the autocrats in power, who at least participated in the conventional nation-state system. The autocrats checked (repressed) both populist threats, Islamists and liberals, to the autocrats' dominance.

Political scientists from the 'realist' school that guided our foreign policy during the Cold War believe that liberal dominance in the Middle East is an unrealistic option. Therefore, they believe the realistic option in the Middle East is working with autocrats who will repress Islamists, even if the cost is sacrificing the liberals who are most compatible with us.

In the Arab Spring at Step One, we used the various tools of our superior power in the nation-state system to help defeat autocrats on behalf of the liberals. However, removing the autocrats' check on the liberals also removed the autocrats' check on the Islamists. The Islamists are less affected and influenced than the autocrats by our conventional power, so we need the liberals to check the Islamists at Step Two. But in the post-autocrat populist contest, the Islamists are far more powerful than the liberals. The liberals need sufficient smart assistance from the liberal West in order to have a feasible chance (note: not a guarantee) of winning dominance over the Islamists.

11JUL16 note: An alternative I wasn't aware about when I wrote this post in 2012 was a ME autocrat leveraging his terrorist ties with Islamists to attack the liberals, in spite of the surface enmity between the autocrat and Islamists. This is reported to be the dynamic between the Assad regime, its allies, and ISIS in Syria.

The best example of sufficient smart assistance to liberals competing with Islamists in the Middle East is the Bush-era counterinsurgency "Surge" in Iraq. President Bush understood the dynamics of our 3 choices in the Middle East when he championed liberals in the Middle East with the Freedom Agenda, but President Obama dropped the Freedom Agenda and decided to implement a more 'realist' foreign policy. Obama's change in course, though popular with opponents of Bush's foreign policy, rendered the West ill-prepared to assist the liberals in Step Two of the Arab Spring.

In fact, Saddam's regime was noncompliant, threatening, rearming, tyrannical, radicalized sectarian, and terrorist. When it came time to put up or shut up on behalf of liberals in Iraq, Bush put up. If we want — need — the liberals to defeat the Islamists and achieve dominance of the Middle East, then Obama and the West need to put up in Libya and the rest of the Arab Spring.

Earlier, I asked the presidential candidates whether liberalism still defines American foreign policy. What kind of leadership do we need now from President Obama and the West? See the New York Times article on President Bush's decision for the "Surge" in Iraq.

Benghazi attack and the clash of civilizations

The assassination of Ambassador Stevens [graphic picture] with 3 other Americans yesterday at the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya was likely retaliation for the killing of Libya-born al Qaeda commander Abu Yaya al-Libi. The armed assault on the consulate, possibly conducted by members of Libyan Islamist group Ansar al Shariah, was apparently disguised with the pretext of a protest, reminding of the attack on the embassy in 2000 movie Rules of Engagement. Reports say the other 3 Americans killed were foreign service officer Air Force veteran Sean Smith and two Marines not yet identified. (Update: The other 2 American dead have been identified as Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.)

Ambassador Stevens apparently was visiting Benghazi to attend the opening of an American cultural center. A consulate is a diplomatic outpost, not a fully equipped embassy, which would help explain the light security. The terrorists chose a 'soft' target to attack the temporarily vulnerable US Ambassador and accomplished their mission. A troubling question is why the security for the American diplomats wasn't stronger given the recent series of Islamist attacks on security forces, and diplomatic and cultural targets with poor response by Libyan security forces. The 2 dead former Navy SEALs apparently were bodyguards for the Ambassador. I wonder if the elite quality of his bodyguards made Stevens overconfident about his security, perhaps believing they could save him from any situation.

This account cites a Libyan minister saying the Americans moved to a safer location but the Libyan guards directed the attackers to the 2nd location. Secretary Clinton says the Americans and Libyans fought side by side against the attackers, but I haven't heard of any Libyan casualties to match the American dead. (Update: Apparently, the outnumbered and outgunned Libyan guards declined to defend the consulate but surviving staff were taken to a safehouse and the firefight occurred at the 2nd location.) The New York Times provides more details on the sequence of events. Reuters reports the involvement of many more staffers and Marines than 1st reported and a heavy assault on the supposedly secret safehouse (which again, may have been revealed by the consulate guards) during the evacuation. How was it that 4 died when 37 staffers were able to escape?

The full-spectrum fluid War on Terror continues apace. The contest is between autocrats, Islamists, and liberals. We can defeat the autocrats, but we need the liberals to defeat the Islamists. But the liberals cannot compete with the Islamists without our help. Maybe Ambassador Stevens's death will galvanize the Obama administration to intensify American investment in peace-building in Libya, perhaps with COIN.

Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods died in the line of duty in service to their country. Rest In Peace.

21JAN15 add: State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) for Benghazi report.

Regarding the wider series of attacks on Western targets, it doesn't take a lot of insight to understand that the enemy understands himself to be engaged in a total clash of civilizations. His world order is incompatible with the world order we champion (or used to champion) that includes the UN and other Western nations and organizations. The fact that we don't want a clash of civilizations with him won't stop his clash with us.

The enemy doesn't mind war. War is change. War is the creative destruction needed to eliminate the competition. The enemy's greatest objection is to our kind of peace, a world order based on fundamentals that are incompatible with his fundamentals. For example, all of Operation Iraqi Freedom is labeled by most people as a "war" (I've done it as lazy shorthand, too). In fact, the war ended when we achieved regime change. However, the post-war in Iraq has been far bloodier and costlier than the war because the terrorists are most threatened by our post-war peace-building construction.

The heart of the War on Terror is not the war, but rather the competition to define the new order that emerges from the destruction of the old order. Bush understood that. Many leaders in the West do not.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, who headed the 1st post-war UN delegation to Iraq and was quickly assassinated, rejected US security in order to distinguish the UN's constructive role from the US mission. He didn't understand that Western construction of post-Saddam Iraq was the most urgent threat to the enemy in his clash of civilizations. I wonder if Ambassador Stevens, despite his extensive personal experience with Libya, made the same mistake as Vieira de Mello in believing his mission of peace would protect him. I wonder if Stevens failed to understand the particular peace he sought for Libya is the thing that the enemy is most dedicated to killing in his clash of civilizations against us.

A question for Romney and Obama about liberalism in American foreign policy

President Obama, Governor Romney, is liberalism dead as the defining and galvanizing principle of American (and American-led Western) foreign policy?

Vladimir Putin accuses the American-led West of acting in dangerous short-sighted opposition to corrupt and brutal but also stabilizing autocratic governments to achieve regime change, but without effectively fostering a viable liberal substitute. Rather, Putin says the US, by acting in opposition to autocrats without building a liberal substitute in replacement, is effectively empowering the competing 3rd party in the conflict: radical Islamist revolutionaries.

Perhaps Putin is also making an implied comparison of Obama's haphazard arms-length actions intervening in the Syria crisis to the eventual fall-out of American arms-length opposition to the Soviet Union's efforts in 1980s Afghanistan in the conflict that originally empowered al Qaeda for their modern transnational revolution.

In the Libya crisis, Obama stretched the novel and controversial international legal theory of Responsibility To Protect past the breaking point to use American power to effect regime change. Obama even touted his legally sloppy, politically limited, ad hoc Libya intervention as the smarter alternative to the Iraq intervention. Yet after regime change, Obama neglected to build a new liberal government in Libya to replace Qaddafi's regime. Libya has since fallen into chaos where Islamists have flourished.

As painful as it is to concede (and setting aside the apparent collusion of the Assad regime and its allies with the terrorists), Putin has a point. In the Arab Spring countries, the liberal activists who appealed to the West have been pushed aside in the regime changes. Without the right support from America, such as we eventually learned to provide Iraq with the counterinsurgency "Surge", the region's liberals simply aren't strong enough to compete for dominance first against the autocrats and then the Islamists.

President Bush recognized a collaborative, patiently assisted, controlled transition would be necessary for liberal reform to succeed in the Middle East:

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy. In the short-term, we will work with every government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer-term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region. Democracy and reform will make those nations stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism at it source. Democratic institutions in the Middle East will not grow overnight; in America, they grew over generations. Yet the nations of the Middle East will find, as we have found, the only path to true progress is the path of freedom and justice and democracy.

Bush understood the elementary requirements for championing liberalism, so that when the enemy broke the initial plan for building up post-Saddam Iraq, the essential element of the President's commitment to secure and build the peace was sufficient for US forces to make the necessary adjustments to hand off Iraq to his successor as the potential pivotal difference maker in the region. Subsequently in May 2011, at the dawn of the Arab Spring, Obama marked the historic opportunity for peace in the Middle East where "Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress":

Indeed, one of the broader lessons to be drawn from this period is that sectarian divides need not lead to conflict. In Iraq, we see the promise of a multiethnic, multisectarian democracy. The Iraqi people have rejected the perils of political violence in favor of a democratic process, even as they’ve taken full responsibility for their own security. Of course, like all new democracies, they will face setbacks. But Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress. And as they do, we will be proud to stand with them as a steadfast partner.

In his benchmark May 2011 address, President Obama pledged US support, which Arab Spring activists took to heart to risk their lives. But Obama chose to break from his predecessor's commitment to the policy of securing and building the peace. The President subsequently proudly reneged his pledge of US support, resulting in destructive effect for the Arab Spring activists.

Having inherited a winning hand with a historic opportunity to lead the peace, President Obama instead chose to deviate with a plainly misguided and feckless 'lead from behind' approach to the Arab Spring that has actively unseated autocratic regimes willy nilly, yet abandoned relatively liberal factions, while leaving the chaotic conditions on the ground in which jihadist (both al Qaeda-type Sunni and Iran-type Shia) Islamists thrive. Now, with American protection removed from Iraq by Obama, Iraq is in growing danger, too. In comparison, turning his back on the Green Revolution in Iran almost seems benign.

Obama's orientation on Iraq has benefited Iran. Operation Iraqi Freedom had set up a better stable and ethical path to deal with Iran that relied on 3 prongs: stabilize Iraq as an American ally, increase sanctions pressure, and support civil reform in Iran. President Obama, instead, did the opposite of all three. Whether that was due to partisan shortsightedness, incompetence, or deliberate intent has been unclear but a clear pattern has emerged of Obama favoring Iran. President Obama's Iraq policy has been consistent with favoritism towards Iran evinced by his position on the Green Revolution in Iran, in contrast to his position on the Arab Spring, and possible pre-Presidency secret agreement with Iran for favorable terms in post-Bush nuclear negotiations. The prospect of Iranian cooperation on Afghanistan may have been a factor, too.

President Obama's fundamental deviation from President Bush's foreign policy, particularly disengaging Iraq and dropping the Bush Freedom Agenda, has been disastrous and wasted the costly, painfully hard-won, foundational progress achieved under Bush.

We have to start over again. Or not . . .

President Obama, Governor Romney, is America still the 'Leader of the Free World' that actively champions and affirms a liberal world order? Do American leaders still believe liberalism is viable and worth competing for as an international organizing principle?

If America is and you do, then pick up President Bush's definitively liberal course. Learn from Bush's start-up failures and successes, and do it better, wiser, and smarter, but do it — lead the free world. If America is no longer the 'Leader of the Free World' and you do not believe that a liberal world order is worth competing for, then know that acting to tear down an existing autocratic order in a country without empowering a viable acceptably liberal substitute invites the grave danger of empowering an aggressive, opportunistic 3rd party — such as al Qaeda and their fellow travelers — to fill the vacuum we irresponsibly leave behind with an equally or more intolerable organizing principle than the autocrats.

"In the century we're leaving, America has often made the difference between chaos and community; fear and hope. Now, in a new century, we'll have a remarkable opportunity to shape a future more peaceful than the past -- but only if we stand strong against the enemies of peace."
-- President William J. Clinton announcing Operation Desert Fox, December 16, 1998

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud."
-- Military historian T.R. Fehrenbach

07SEP12 addendum: NBC's Richard Engel provides a thumbnail sketch of the anti-liberal turn of the Middle East since the Arab Spring and concludes, "What happens if the [sic] Washington continues to watch from afar?". However, Engel undermines his question by sidestepping a thoughtful exploration of the hard choices we face there. Engel only implies the bad-or-worse nature of our options in the Middle East with his premise that the liberal promises of the Iraq intervention and the Arab Spring have drowned in the region's religious tribal contests. Engel also warns that al Qaeda has been damaged but not defeated, which means the terrorist cancer remains dangerous if it's not countered correctly. He refers to the American tactical victory over al Qaeda in Iraq and our broader tactical success combating al Qaeda under President Bush, and then warns of the dangers of alienating Sunnis and also al Qaeda's intelligent 'shifting antigen' adaptive capability. Engel argues sufficient American forces and commitment on the ground have reliably consistently hurt al Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, whereas the American retraction under President Obama has enabled al Qaeda to make inroads with anti-government forces in the Arab Spring, such as the reformed tactics al Qaeda is now employing in Syria.