The history now pretty clearly shows that the White House and DoD didn't seem to think that a long-term occupation was necessary. Rumsfeld and Cheney seemed to think that they could hand the entire country over to Ahmed Chalibi and everything would be fine, despite a decade's worth of warnings from State and the CIA that Chalabi was as dishonest and corrupt as an Iraqi could be without being a blood relative of Saddam's.
Granted, that didn't stop everyone in the Bush Administration from blaming their proconsul, L. Paul Bremmer for everything that went wrong. Read any of their memoirs. The one recurring theme is "Our ridiculous lack of any planning whatsoever had nothing to do with it. It was all Bremmer's fault!"
If you've read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's magnificent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - and if you haven't, you really should - you know that the CPA was its own, completely separate disaster. It was staffed from top to bottom with Republican political hacks that were determined to engage in weird social experiments directly out of the American Enterprise Institute. For example, Bremmer saw to it that the Iraqi people had a flat tax before they had reliable electricity. It was the single most unserious occupation operation in American history.
Of course, that's not why some 4,500 American soldiers and innumerable Iraqi civilians died after Saddam was driven from power. That was directly caused by CPA Orders Number 1 and 2, which de-Baathified the Iraqi civil service and disbanded both the military and police. As a consequence an insurgency that was estimated to be about 3,000 immediately ballooned to 300,000, or roughly twice as large as the U.S military presence in Iraq. Because the Americans were devoting their resources to finding weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist instead of providing security until it was too late, anarchy prevailed for the next four years.
The Coalition Provisional Authority's spokesman was Dan Senor. During his time in Iraq, he gave Rajiv Chandrasekaran one of the greatest quotes I've ever read. "Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."
With a record like that, how could he not become a senior foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney? If you've been following Governor Romney's international travels this past week, you'll see that it's going swimmingly.
Mr. Senor, 41, is an unusual hybrid: He is a policy wonk, media maven, successful author and financier. He made headlines last weekend when he told reporters that if Israel launched a pre-emptive unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Romney “would respect” that decision, a claim Mr. Senor softened somewhat in a later statement.If in fact Mr. Senor used the word "pre-emptive" strike in regards to Iran, that's a cause for concern because it indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
For his part, Mr. Romney said in an address on Sunday that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons “must be our highest national-security priority,” but made no mention of an Israeli attack.
I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating. An attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would not, as a matter of both international law and common sense, be pre-emptive. Pre-emption rests entirely on the imminence of a threat. Since there wouldn't be a deployable weapon, let alone a stated threat that one would be used forthwith, the Iranian program does not pose an imminent threat.
Such a strike by Israel, the United States, or anyone else would meet the definition of a preventative war, and those are illegal under any reading of international law and tradition. President Eisenhower spoke eloquently when he said "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."
The point is that pre-emption and prevention, despite what most Americans currently choose to believe, are not interchangeable. They are separate and distinct from one another. One is legal and righteous, the other is criminal. Someone who can reasonably be expected to hold a senior national security post in a potential Romney Administration should know the difference.
Then it got worse.
The trip has attracted its share of controversy. Mr. Romney departed from official U.S. policy and described Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel,” “culture.” Such a comment is “racist” and “shows a lack of knowledge,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.From time to time, conservative politicians will ward-heel their way over to Israel and promise that they'll move their embassies to Jerusalem when they get themselves elected. Canada's Joe Clark did this in 1979.
But, like Clark, they never actually do it, mostly because they get a good look at reality as soon as they take office. There isn't a Muslim country in the world that will accept foreign embassies in Jerusalem so long as that city's status remains unresolved. And we still have to deal with Muslim countries, mostly because there are so many of them and they have so much oil. You might not like that, but it remains a fact.
The Israelis never really expect said politicians to follow through on this stupid promise, but those politicians have their credibility damaged in Israel's eyes for having made it in the first place, as I'm sure the aforementioned Joe Clark will tell you. In making such a colossally stupid promise, you manage to pull off the impressive feat of enraging Muslims and Jews. And for what?
As for the "Palestinian culture" remark, not only was that an enormous foreign policy gaffe, it was incredibly idiotic as a domestic political matter. Romney's home state of Michigan is much closer than it has any business being. Because it has more Arabs per square foot than anywhere else in America, I'm pretty sure it won't be for much longer.
Not only was Romney himself born and raised in Michigan, Dan Senor himself was the communications director for the first and only Arab-American United States senator, Spencer Abraham ... of Michigan. If Mitt were to win the Wolverine State, his path to the White House become immeasurably easier, since he'd also probably pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota with it.
The Governor then went on to praise Israel's health care system, citing all kinds of spending to GDP numbers and health outcomes, while ignoring that a central facet of it is, you guessed it, an individual mandate. As I said at the great and good Velociman's place this morning "If one created an individual mandate in the state one governed, suggested that his party campaign on Wyden-Bennett (which contained an individual mandate,) and then went on to praise a foreign health care system with an individual mandate without being asked ... Well, reasonable people might begin to suspect that one doesn't have a huge problem with individual mandates."
Everyone is still focusing on Romney's Olympic disaster in England, which was more funny than anything else. But what he did in Israel was worse by several degrees. They were not only entirely self-inflicted wounds, they were wounds of some consequence.
Look, I don't know if either of those gaffes were Senor's idea, but I do know that it's his job to stop Romney from making them. When his candidate is overseas (which I think is a brutally stupid thing to do in a modern campaign, anyway. The deepest wound John McCain inflicted on Obama four years ago was the "Celebrity" ad that used footage from the The One's Berlin visit.) Dan Senor's single biggest responsibility is to keep his fucking mouth shut! The single easiest way for a candidate to get himself in trouble is to make with the goddamned talkee-talk, especially when he's anyplace more foreign than Wayne County.
I don't take any pleasure in writing this. Whenever I've seen him on TV, Senor has struck me as a decent breed of cat. We're roughly the same age, we grew up in the same hometown (although I only learned that this morning,) we both have a deep interest in foreign policy, and we both have bad hair. The only difference between Dan Senor and I is that he has a great education, a cool job, a ton of money and a hot wife. Oh, and I never took part in destroying the Middle East.
Other than that, it's like we're connected at the soul.
But if you were still wondering why I think Mitt Romney's going to lose this election, the Israel trip is instructive.
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