This CS Monitor story reports that morale among US troops in Iraq has “hit rock bottom”. I used to use this phrase in relation to the university I worked at during the Kemp-Vanstone era, but then realised it was a mistaken metaphor, since it implies a zero level. In fact, no matter how low morale is, it can always go lower.

In relation to Iraq, the inapplicbility of the metaphor the current situation is clear. The griping reported in the story is nothing compared to, say, Vietnam, where desertion and ‘fragging’ (murder of officers, with the weapon of choice being a fragmentation grenade) were routine events [there was an isolated case of this kind during the Iraq war, but nothing since].

But it’s hard to see any alternative to a long occupation or any way that morale among the occupying forces can go, other than down. For a successful war of liberation, what was needed was multilateral support, ideally including support from Islamic countries willing to supply peacekeeping forces, and an internationally recognised alternative government ready to take over in a relatively short period.

Maureen Dowd has never really got back into her groove since the end of the Clinton culture wars, a topic she made her own. This NYT column (reproduced in today’s SMH), criticises the Bush administration as suffering from attention deficit disorder. The same metaphor was circulating in the blog world nearly a year ago, as this post illustrates.

I haven’t had time to comment on events in the Middle East since a relatively optimistic post on Israel/Palestine a couple of weeks ago. Since then we’ve had a full cycle of pessimism and optimism, with things currently looking as good as they have in a long time – a ceasefire from the main militant/terrorist groups and the withdrawal of Israel troops/Zionist occupation forces from much of Gaza (readers take their pick regarding preferred terminology. But as the pessimists, notably including regular commentator PM Lawrence will no doubt point out, we’ve been here before and gone nowhere but backwards.

In Iraq, things are turning out much as I thought they would before the war, though the extent of looting has surprised me. Some pro-war commentators gloated when it was reported that many of the treasures of the National Museum had been removed for safe keeping before the fall of Baghdad, and that the total loss was ‘only’ 6000 items rather than the 60 000 initially estimated. This seems bizarre to me, in view of the fact that it was also reported about the same time that Iraq’s main nuclear facility had also been looted. The absence of any attempt to secure this facility is a pretty clear indication that the Administration knew there weren’t any weapons there, but the resulting spread of radioactive material is still a disaster.

The central question now is whether, having largely conceded that the pretext for the war was incorrect, if not bogus, the Coalition will deliver on the promise implicit in claims about a war of liberation, that is, a genuinely democratic and prosperous Iraq. I opposed the war because I did not think Bush would deliver, but I still hope to be proved wrong.

Via Brad de Long I recently saw this post from Jim Henley on the failure of Appeal Courts to impose significant constraints on the US government’s policy of secret detention of terrorist suspects. Henley says

For those of you reading these words I have one request:

COULD I GET A LITTLE ALARMISM HERE, PLEASE?????

What has the appeals court authorized?

Secret detentions.

Please say those words aloud. “Secret detentions.” Now use them in a sentence:

The US government engages in the practice of secret detentions.

The US government has broadly asserted its right to engage in the practice of secret detentions.

A federal appeals court has affirmed that the US government may engage in secret detentions.

The biggest single step in this regard is the creation of the category of “enemy combatants” applied both to people taken prisoner in Afghanistan and elsewhere (for example Pakistan), allegedly in the course of the war aagainst terror. More significantly the category has been applied to Jose Padilla, a US citizen arrested in the United States allegedly after returning from a meeting with Al Qaeda.

Until recently, I haven’t been too alarmed about all this. It seemed likely that as with most wartime excesses, the Administration would moderate its claimed powers, and, if not, that the courts would constrain them. In particular, I thought that the actions in the Padilla case would ultimately be declared illegal and that the Administration would be happy enough having had a couple of years to operate outside the normal limits.

But this optimistic view looks increasingly untenable.
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I’ve also posted my article Why war is bad for health from the Fin of 8 May. Here’s the conclusion.

In the absence of large-scale discoveries of weapons, attention has focused on the undoubted benefits of overthrowing an evil and oppressive dictator. This is a form of foreign aid and can usefully be compared to other aid programs. The total budget of the USAID, the main US agency for development and humanitarian assistance is $8.7 billion for the coming year. That is, the money already spent on the Iraq war could have doubled USAID’s budget for the next five years.

It seems certain, however, that the war will herald a sustained increase in military expenditure of at least $US100 billion per year. A more reasonable comparison, therefore, is the ambitious proposal of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs. The Commission aimed to achieve, for all a poor countries, a two-thirds reduction of 1990 child mortality levels, a three-fourths reduction of 1990 maternal mortality ratios and an end to the rising prevalence of major diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

As the Commission pointed out, in addition to the humanitarian benefits of saving as many as 8 million lives per year, reductions in mortality are directly correlated with a reduced frequency of military coups and state collapse. These provide the breeding ground for terrorism and dictatorship and ultimately lead, in many cases, lead to US military intervention. The estimated cost for the Commission’s seemingly-utopian program over the next decade is estimated at between $US 50 billion and $US 100 billion per year.

War is sometimes necessary in self-defence. But when war is adopted as an instrument of policy, it is often counterproductive and almost never cost-effective.

Jack Strocchi has engaged in some justified gloating at my expense in relation to the Israel-Palestine peace talks where progress has been much better than I expected, though success is still far from being assured.

Sharon’s concession that the Israeli occupation is untenable, and apparent acceptance of a contiguous Palestinian state means that there is now no logical alternative to a deal similar to the Clinton plan of a few years ago. Although Sharon would undoubtedly like to keep substantial parts of the West Bank, the logic of the process will push it towards a limited exchange of territory. But Sharon is still hedging, and may be hoping to wait out the notoriously short US attention span. Still, Bush, prodded by Blair, has gone a lot further than I thought he would, and has dragged Sharon with him.

Having made this concession, I’ll point out that, as I predicted, the Bush Administration is making just as much of a mess of the occupation of Iraq as it did in the case of Afghanistan, and for the same basic reason. They have been prepared to spend billions of dollars and lots of attention on war, but almost nothing on peace.

In an odd sense, the postwar mess in Iraq has been good for the Israel-Palestine peace process. It’s clear now that if the peace process fails, the chances of a successful outcome in Iraq would be greatly reduced by resurgent anti-US feeling throughout the region. That along with the failure to find WMDs and the gradual realisation that Iraqi casualties were much higher than first claimed, would discredit the case for war, although this would probably take the form of gradually disillusionment (as with Gulf War I) rather than a sharp swing in public opinion. So Bush has a lot riding on this, and Blair even more so.

Like Gary Sauer-Thompson, I’m still trying to interpret Sharon’s apparent conversion to the cause of Palestinian statehood, after months in which he appeared to be doing his best to derail the “roadmap for peace”. Can Bush have really applied the pressure to achieve this? Or is it just another tactical retreat? We’ll have to wait and see, but for once there seems to be some ground for optimism

Tim Dunlop links to this report in the Christian Science Monitor providing survey estimates that the number of civilian deaths in the war on Iraq was between 5000 and 10 000. (Thanks also to Jack Strocchi who alerted me to the same piece).

Tim quotes the following claim from Bush

With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

and implies that these figures may prove him wrong.

My view is that, if serving in the Iraqi army and obeying orders makes you ‘guilty’ then Bush’s claim has been validated. I think it’s clear that the number of Iraqi soldiers killed was many times greater than the number of civilians, and must have been in the tens of thousands. Many of these ‘guilty’ soldiers were conscripts, and all faced the threat of being shot for desertion if they did not fight. And civilians are still dying in large numbers as a result of the chaos produced by the war, including crime and breakdown of basic services.

The decision to overthrow Saddam by force and to impose a government of occupation has imposed a huge moral responsibility on the countries that took that decision. As I’ve argued previously, producing a sustainable Iraqi democracy will take years of effort and cost tens of billions of dollars. The US was prepared to spend the billions on war, but it has budgeted almost nothing for the peace.

Running about a month behind the Zeitgeist, PP McGuinness picks up the Old Europe/New Europe meme (the new European states will be pro-market, more friendly to the US etc). Oddly enough he picks on Vaclav Klaus, who recently became President of the Czech Republic, succeeding his former ally and more recent opponent Vaclav Havel.

In fact, Klaus’ career is an illustration of why the Old Europe/New Europe thesis is wrong on nearly every point, and McGuinness tacitly concedes as much.
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Kevin Drum at Calpundit posts on the disarray in the reconstruction plan in Iraq. He focuses on the fact that postwar Iraq has been very different from what was expected by the Administration – many fewer refugees but much more civil disorder and much less enthusiastic cooperation with the occupying powers.

The big problem, though, is lack of commitment.
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