John F. Burns on the Hanging of Saddam Hussein

In a real sense, ever since his capture in December of 2003, Saddam Hussein had become irrelevant. The only issue was whether Americans and Iraqis could work together to establish the rule of law in Iraq to replace the madness that existed under Saddam Hussein. The trial was intended to subject Saddam Hussein to the rule of law while, at the same time, helping to establish the legitimacy of the new Iraqi government. Maliki is no Saddam Hussein but we are far from creating the democracy or the rule of law that was going to inspire the Middle East. And, unfortunately, the incompetence of Bush and his advisers, is increasingly exacting a price in Iraq and further damaging our foreign policy and our position in the world. Here's some excerpts from John F. Burn's story in The New York Times:

The taunts Mr. Hussein endured from Shiite guards as he stood with the noose around his neck have made headlines around the world, and stirred angry protests among his fellow Iraqi Sunnis. But the story of how American commanders and diplomats fought to halt the execution until midnight on Friday, only six hours before Mr. Hussein was hanged, is only now coming into focus, as Iraqi and American officials, in the glare of international outrage over the hanging, compete with their versions of what happened.

(snip)

It is a story of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, trying to coerce second-tier American military and diplomatic officials into handing over Mr. Hussein, first on Thursday night, then again on Friday. The American push back was complicated by the absences of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top American military commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who were both out of Iraq on leave. The American message throughout was that rushing Mr. Hussein to the gallows could rebound disastrously, as it did.

It is a story, too, of the Americans disagreeing among themselves. After a final call to Mr. Maliki at 10:30 p.m. Friday, American and Iraqi officials said, Mr. Khalilzad concluded that there was no prospect of persuading the Iraqis to delay the execution and passed that message to Washington. The conclusion found little favor with the military, who were the ones who had to transport Mr. Hussein to the gallows.

For General Casey and Mr. Khalilzad, close partners here, the messy ending for Mr. Hussein was made worse by the confirmation this week that Mr. Bush will soon replace both men as he refashions his Iraq war policy.

(snip)

In interviews with dozens of American and Iraqi officials involved in the hanging, a picture has emerged of a clash of cultures and political interests, reflecting the widening gulf between Americans here and the Iraqi exiles who rode to power behind American tanks. Even before a smuggled cellphone camera recording revealed the derision Mr. Hussein faced on the gallows, the hanging had become a metaphor, among Mr. Maliki’s critics, for how the “new Iraq” is starting to resemble the repressive, vengeful place it was under Mr. Hussein, albeit in a paler shade.

The war in Iraq never made much sense and to this date it still remains unclear what we are trying to accomplish. It is also becoming increasingly clear that we are not in control in Iraq and we will become even less in control in Iraq as we hand off more responsibilities to the current government, such as it is. It is also becoming abundantly clear that our president and his advisers do not know what they are doing. There is even the embarrassment of a statement being issued in Bush's name last week (while he was sleeping) as if everything were in order when in fact the hanging was turning into a fiasco that is now symbolic of the larger war. There is now even the risk that the Bush Administration will topple the Maliki government which will only increase the chaos while perhaps committing us to crisis after crisis in the midst of a civil war. We need to leave.

We need to draw down and rebuild our foreign policy before Bush pulls us into a broader conflict. The president has nothing more to offer.

Thomas Friedman's Position Four Years Later

Sometimes Thomas Friedman gets it mostly right. Here's the end of his column in the New York Times today (link is to the main page):

Now President Bush wants a "surge" of more U.S. troops to Baghdad, in one last attempt to bring order. Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, "Hey, let's have a baby, that will bring us together." It never works.

If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won't help. And if the underlying willingness to share power and resources is not present among the major communities in Iraq, adding more U.S. troops won't help either. Adding more troops makes sense only if it's to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don't see them.

As Saddam's hanging underscored, Iraqis are doing things their way. So maybe it's time to get out of their way.

I would argue that Bush is less interested in making one last attempt to bring order to Iraq than he is in one of two things: avoiding accountability and looking for another war to distract people from his fiasco in Iraq. Bush's many follies, of course, are difficult to ignore at this late date.

If you get a chance (and can locate it in the next day or two), take a look at Maureen Dowd's Wednesday column where she tells us what people were really thinking at Ford's funeral after reading Bob Woodward's excerpts from his interviews with the former president; it's Maureen Dowd in her best Washington gossip mode—priceless. It will take another election or two but we clearly need a changing of the guard in Washington and a healthy dose of fresh ideas and fresh energy.

Saddam Hussein Execution Fiasco Damages US Foreign Policy

Bush likes to compare his fiasco in Iraq to World War Two. But Saddam Hussein's trial and execution bore no resemblance to the trials at Nuremberg and their largely successful effort to reestablish law. It is a simple fact that Saddam Hussein's execution alone resembled an old-fashioned lynching and has done our foreign policy harm. The Huffington Post noticed what Tom Brokaw had to say about the execution:

Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who delivered a eulogy at President Gerald Ford's funeral today, appeared this morning on the Don Imus radio show. Brokaw agreed with Imus that it is "difficult to imagine" how the execution of Saddam Hussein "could have turned out worse."

"[W]e portray ourselves around the world as the champions of democracy and the rule of law," Brokaw said, yet Hussein's execution "resembled the worst kind of nightmare out of the old American West." As a result, Hussein, who "had disappeared, in effect, as some kind of a symbol over there, suddenly becomes a martyr."

The Nuremberg trials that followed in the aftermath of the defeat of Germany were not perfect but they came far closer to the idea of what justice can be by several orders of magnitude compared to what happened to Saddam Hussein. We all know Saddam Hussein was a thug and we all knew that the evidence against him was considerable, though the crime for which he was hung was one of his lesser atrocities.

At Nuremberg, evidence for most of the major crimes against the defendents was presented, but there seemed to be a deliberate attempt not to delve too deeply into Saddam Hussein's crimes. That in itself was a mistake. It allows people to assume he took many secrets with him.

At Nuremberg, as I recall, the lawyers survived to the end of the trial. That was not the case in the prosecution of Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqis and Americans might have muddled through Saddam Hussein's execution if his hanging had simply been done according to a sense of respect for the rule of law and the sensitivities of the Sunnis (and there are reports that Americans on the scene tried to mitigate a number of problems ahead of time but received little or no help from Washington—and no help from Maliki). But America's reputation has once again been badly damaged by the Bush Administration's failure to get the job done in a reasonable manner. And it further bolsters the belief that we are in the middle of a bitter civil war and have no place in the chaos that is becoming Iraq. Iraq is a strategic blunder. Iraq is not going to be a model of democracy and respect for legal process and protections any time soon. In fact, Bush, despite his photo ops and slogans, doesn't have a clue about what we're doing in Iraq and what we're trying to accomplish.

Keep in mind that Saddam Hussein is not the issue regarding his execution. The issue is consequence. What are you trying to do? What are the likely consequences if you allow certain things to happen? We now have the Sunnis more furious at us than ever and we have the Shiites furious at us. In overwhelming numbers, both groups want us to leave Iraq. In reality, we have simply become one more confusing and deadly factor for average Iraqis in the middle of the current chaos. It is no wonder than hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing Iraq, if they can afford it. Most Iraqis cannot.

Bush's incompetence has become the biggest obstacle to peace in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Sending more troops will only prolong the disaster.

Evidence That It's Time to Leave

It's time to start drawing down in Iraq. Bush has made a strategic blunder based on ignorance and deception. He shows no sign that he knows what he's doing. John Burns and Marc Santora of The New York Times have a report on certain aspects of Saddam Hussein's hanging that suggest we have little left, if anything, to accomplish in Iraq:

...just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq’s new Shiite rulers who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Mr. Hussein.

(snip)

The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home. Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans’ concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video recordings made just before Mr. Hussein fell through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. ...

(snip)

American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq’s to decide.

While privately incensed at the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki government — frustrated at what they call the government’s failure to recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation.

Let's be clear about some of the elements here. We have a president in Washington who doesn't know what he's doing. On occassion, we have people in Iraq who understand elements of the situation quite well but who are hampered by confusion in Washington. We have an elected leader in Iraq whose position depends somewhat on undemocratic elements who nevertheless are members of the Iraqi parliament. If we lean too hard on Maliki to do things the way they reasonably should be done, we undermine his legitimacy. If we don't lean on him,we are tainted by his poor decisions. All too frequently, our own ideas about what should be done about this particular situation or that leader or that city block or whether to bomb so-and-so is not very good partly because of poor local intelligence and all too often because of poor judgment by someone in the Green Zone or someone back in Washington.

And then there are those in Washington who would like to get rid of Maliki. These are the same folks who gave us Chalabi and Allawi, two would-be Iraqi leaders who are no better than Maliki. We've been down such a road in the past and it's not going to lead anywhere. Joe Lieberman, John McCain, various neoconservatives and various elements of our media need to stop pretending that George W. Bush is suddenly going to figure out what he's doing. We don't need a 'troop surge.' We need to get out of Iraq. We begin by calling a regional conference and by starting to draw down. Iraq is a fiasco. It's gone on long enough.

Saddam Hussein Has Been Executed

On Saturday, Iraq time, Saddam Hussein was hanged.

In Iraq, the violence, the tortures, the murders, the sectarian strife, the stream of refugees, the insurgency, the death of Americans, the incompetence of the Bush Administration and the chaos will go on.

The Forgotten War in Afghanistan

The unfinished war in Afghanistan continues. The name of Osama bin Laden is sometimes trotted out by the Bush Administration for political purposes but the hunt for him has largely languished. If he's across the border in Pakistan, and that seems likely, there is little interest in the Pakistani government in pursuing him. The perpetrator of 9/11 remains at large. In a twist of fate, though he had nothing to do with 9/11, Saddam Hussein will be executed within 30 days for other crimes, and the civil war and insurgency in Iraq will continue, if not worsen. But Iraq is the strange war we did not need. In a real sense, the death of more than 600,000 Iraqis and more than 3,000 American soldiers and contractors is a steep price to pay for the execution of Saddam Hussein.

But I was talking about Afghanistan. You don't hear much about Afghanistan on the nightly news. It is the forgotten war. Here's a story by Nick Allen in the Daily India, of all places:

As winter grips Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan, US troops and Taliban and other insurgents are winding down after a year of fierce but inconclusive fighting in a barren swathe of Central Asia where everything has still to be won.

The first December snow brought a lull in the constant skirmishes, roadside bomb and suicide attacks and rocket strikes against the Bermel base by the border with Pakistan, where soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division will ship out next month after a gruelling 12-month tour.

(snip)

While Pakistan's leadership stresses its commitment to the war on terror, US officers feel not enough is being done there to suppress the Taliban, and claim the insurgents sometimes even receive help from Pakistani units along the porous 2,500 km border.

'We don't really trust the Pakistani military too much,' said Captain Jason Dye, the commander at Bermel.

Frustration is evident in the ranks.

In early late 2001, Afghanistan was clearly a winnable war. Most Afghans seemed tired of the Taliban, or at least tired of twenty years of war, a period that began with the invasion by the Soviet Union in its last throes of power. When the Americans first arrived, things looked promising. But the war continues largely due to neglect by the Bush Administration as their interest turned to an unneeded war in Iraq. I have sympathy for the Afghans and for Americans halfway around the world.

David Ignatius of The Washington Post has written an article about Bush that seems designed to evoke sympathy for the president. Given how much of our policies in the last six years have been steeped in arrogance and deception, I find it hard to feel that sympathy. The sympathy that Ignatius seems to feel should be directed elsewhere.