The Washington Independent - U.S. news and politics - washingtonindependent.com: Stories by Spencer Ackerman

Let's Buy Both!

Spencer Ackerman — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:38:21 GMT

The Corrections isn't that great a novel, but there's this one passage in it that speaks to an existential question about blogging: is it reporting or commentary? Gary, the lachrymose elder son of the Lambert family, is wrestling with his changing feelings for his wife, Caroline. For a reminder of what it is he needs from her, and an affirmation of why only she can deliver it, Gary mentally scrolls through a collection of his favorite musings from Caroline, "an All-Time Caroline Ten." Number six is particularly memorable for what it says about Gary's needs: "Let's buy both!"

It's no great secret that for some people, blogging represents the devolution of journalism to the level of heh-indeed amplification. That's not so surprising. Lots of bloggers -- some busy with day jobs, others for whom blogging is a day job -- would prefer to leave the gathering of information to others. And for a lot of journalists, blogging is what you do with notebook scraps that can't make it into your main story -- an afterthought, in other words, or a pleasant distraction. Like Gary and Caroline, bloggers and journalists have a vague sense that they need each other, but they're not sure why they feel the way they do, nor have they come to any stable agreement about how they fit together.

"All-Time Caroline Number Six" offers a few answers. As everyone else has noted here, The Washington Independent's mission can be boiled down to Buying Both. We've watched, with trepidation, how newspapers in financial difficulty jettisoned their investigative staffs, and we've viewed, with frustration, how rare it is for TV news to go beyond the superficial. But we've noticed with excitement how powerful and immediate blogging can be. It lets you build a story sequentially, combining the bricks of what's already been reported with the mortar of thinking aloud about what's yet to be known and what it all means. To that, we want to add the journalistic spadework of getting new data and synthesizing it in relevant ways. All of a sudden a relationship premised on vague attraction and mutual misunderstanding becomes a lot healthier.

That's what I've tried to do for the last few years. By the way, hi: I'm Spencer Ackerman, and I'll be writing about national security and foreign policy for The Independent. It's what I've done for the past five years, ever since I came to Washington from college, but I've never been comfortable figuring out just one format for my work. I've done investigative reporting for opinion outlets, using both investigation and opinion to (hopefully) inform the other. Like my partner in crime Laura, I come to The Independent from Talking Points Memo, the pioneer in crossbreeding blogging and reporting, and I'm also a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, the gold standard in liberal opinion magazines that manipulate the Intertubes. Before that I was at The New Republic for a couple of years, and I've also written for The Nation, Salon, The Atlantic, Men's Health, The Washington Monthly, Slate, and other places.

What I've tried to do is report and inform about the vast apparatus of national security in a way that's free of euphemism, blandishments, unstated premises or easy answers. Here, I'll take it all on: intelligence, the military, diplomacy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism, detentions, interrogations, contractors, arguments about the way this all works and should work. I don't and won't always succeed, and that's why I need to argue back and forth with bloggers who take issue with my stuff. It's curious when highly-trained professional journalists act as if their material is beyond reproach from online critics -- after all, journalism's essence is to explore the crevasse between what exists and what we're told exists. That's the impulse that animates me, and what animates this Web site, which will marry this format to that purpose. We're interested at The Washington Independent in Buying Both, as it turns out to be a bargain.

The Disco Before the Breakdown

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:21:44 GMT

So things may not be so great in Iraq after all: suicide bombing is back, crucial reconciliation measures appear to be a hoax, the U.S. is bombing neighborhoods it once called success stories, and there are a ton of Sunni militiamen standing outside the political process, waiting to see if the Shiite-controlled government will embrace them. But at least the multiethnic, oil-rich city of Kirkuk hasn’t exploded, right? That’s something, huh? Bill Kristol, I see you nodding.

Well, just wait six months. Last year, the Kurds and the Baghdad government—both of whom claim Kirkuk and tedt other northern Iraqi areas as their own—agreed to delay a constitutionally-guaranteed referendum on the future of Kirkuk and other cities. That’s been the U.S.’s preferred strategy since the occupation began in 2003: finality over the status of Kirkuk-plus will lead whoever loses the referendum (probably the Baghdad government) to start shooting. The hope among everyone but the Kurds, who call Kirkuk their Jerusalem, is that they can punt the Kirkuk issue downfield forever. But Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish president/warlord, says there’s no way he’ll accept another delay, according to Ned Parker in the LAT:

"Iraqi Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani fired back at his Arab opponents who argued that Kirkuk—a home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens—is no longer subject to an article in the Iraqi Constitution calling for a general referendum on disputed territories to be held by the end of 2007.

There is no turning back,” Barzani said in Irbil. The referendum must be conducted in the next six months.

Last week, the Kurdish-dominated provincial council in Kirkuk declared that if the referendum doesn’t happen by June 1, the Kurds have the right to take the city by force.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole translates reports from the Arabic press saying that Arab political parties in Baghdad have formed what the Kurds see as an anti-Kurdish alliance to deny them Kirkuk. It says a lot about Iraq that the only cross-sectarian coalitions to emerge are threatening to other sectarian interests.

Stay, Stay Monkey With Me

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:01:02 GMT

If we have to start an unnecessary and catastrophic war with Iran, please, Lord, let it be based on stuff like this.

The Navy has a monkey on its back.

Since at least 1982, U.S. Navy ships plying the Persian Gulf have been taunted by mysterious radio transmissions that are alternately obscene, nonsensical, racist, infantile, misogynistic and menacing. Sometimes they threatened U.S. ships; at other times they simply babbled away, all night, in falsettos.

I Don't Want to See it on My Windowsill

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:26:59 GMT

Win Butler from the Arcade Fire endorses Barack Obama. That’s out of bounds! Butler says on record that he doesn’t want to live in his father’s house (i.e., America) no more. He lives in Montreal. Sorry, man, but you should have stuck out the Bush years in the U.S.A. if you want to influence this election.

State Dept. Security Holds Diplomats in Limbo

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:00:00 GMT

photo: In October, State Department’s internal magazine ran a favorable piece on the agency’s new security clearance process which many foreign service officers are questioning.

In the pinstriped world of the State Department, it’s rare for the glory to transit beyond the usual cast of White House appointees and longtime diplomats. But this month, an obscure bureaucratic entity, the Office of Personnel Security and Suitability (PSS), got its due. The department’s internal magazine, State, lauded PSS for overhauling the ways it handles officials’ security clearances—critical for a diplomat to do his or her job. The once-cumbersome process is now “one of the fastest and most efficient within the federal government,” State beamed. PSS’s chief Don Reid even got a gold star from the White House – a Meritorious Senior Professionals and Executives Presidential Rank Award, the equivalent of a lifetime recognition prize—in October.

But while Foggy Bottom congratulates PSS and Reid, a former Air Force officer, many Foreign Service officers tell a different story. To them, Reid has perverted the security-clearance process, not improved it. Under previous administrators, it took a lot to get a security clearance suspended: if there was a question about a diplomat’s loyalty or conscientiousness, agents would go after his or her clearance, a career-ending move. These days, though, minor disciplinary infractions—a domestic dispute, or allegedly disobeying a verbal directive—have led to immediate clearance suspension, forcing diplomats to pack their bags for Washington. Critics say PSS considers suspending clearances to be a mark of success in and of itself, regardless of whether its investigations actually protect national security.

Firing a diplomat who contests a suspension is against the department’s rules, so many under investigation have simply been assigned busywork while the appeals process drags on. What’s more, these officials say, PSS exercises little oversight over how its agents carry out their responsibilities, allowing diligence to morph into vendettas. The effect has been to turn experienced diplomats – at least 70—into schedulers and motor-pool technicians at a time when the department is desperate to fill overseas positions, owing to increasing demands for Foreign Service officers in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Daniel Hirsch is a 48-year old veteran management officer. When the Iron Curtain collapsed, Hirsch traveled to the heart of the old Soviet Empire to open new U.S. embassies in Bishkek and Tashkent. Unlike many of his colleagues, Hirsch says he wants the most dangerous posting of all – Baghdad – to help an expanding embassy get off the ground. Only he can’t. PSS investigators in 2003 looked into a report that Hirsch slapped his wife, which he admits is true. From there, they discovered a decades-old photograph of Hirsch during a trip to Israel, dressed like an Israeli soldier. They stripped his clearance on suspicion —which, five years later, has yet to be proven—that Hirsch is an Israeli agent, something he vehemently denies. Now, without a clearance, he’s stuck pushing papers in Human Resources. “When your clearance is suspended, you can’t bid on ordinary jobs,” Hirsch lamented. “If you believe State does something useful, then it doesn’t make sense.”

Nor is he alone. Les Hickman, a consular officer who speaks Arabic, had his clearance stripped in 2003 after being suspected of involvement in an visa-fraud scandal when he was stationed in the U.S. embassy in Amman. An investigation found that a Jordanian working in the embassy had accepted bribes to expedite visa claims. An official with State’s Diplomatic Security bureau, which oversees PSS, told Hickman’s lawyer that PSS had cleared Hickman of the visa-fraud charge in 2004. But almost four years later, his clearance is still suspended. Now he’s an event planner in the Human Resources, arranging the retirees’ annual reunion gala.

Bill Savich, a 49-year old embassy security officer, lost his clearance in another bureaucratic quagmire. In 2002, he was accused of an inappropriate relationship with a Russian employee of the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok. Despite following reporting requirements to the letter – he insists the relationship was purely platonic – Savich, a 20-year veteran, now hands out parking passes in the State Department motor pool.

None of the three has ever been charged with a crime, which would have happened if the State Department possessed credible evidence that they posed a risk to national security. More to the point: all are still State employees, owing to departmental rules that prevent an employee from being fired while he or she contests a clearance suspension, which all of them are doing. All three had time on a recent January afternoon for a very long lunch at an Indian restaurant in Foggy Bottom.

It used to be that the standard for security clearance suspension or revocation was evidence of an employee’s danger to national security. The Foreign Affairs Manual, which serves as the department’s official list of rules and regulations, predicates the entire security-clearance process on ensuring “that the department employ and retain in its service only those persons whose employment or retention is found to be clearly consistent with the interests of the national security.” Its specific guidance for the revocation or suspension of a clearance depends on determining that an employee’s clearance status “is not clearly consistent with national security interests.”

Over the last three years, however, the standards have shifted. PSS still seeks to protect national security. But it’s also gone further. Disciplinary matters are now cause for clearance suspension. The standard “used to be ‘is this person trustworthy or loyal, or not,” said Hirsch. “Now it’s a disciplinary standard – ‘did this person do something improper’?”

Savich is a case in point. The reason that PSS yanked his clearance wasn’t that the Russian consulate employee was a security risk. It was because he was said to have violated an oral directive to cease contact with her – a directive Savich insists he never received, and which he says a Human Resources investigation found no evidence was ever issued. “Never in five years, never, have they provided me with specific security concerns about myself or the relationship,” Savich said. A State Department spokesman said the department will not comment on specific employees’ cases.

The clearance changes have tracked with those in the office’s leadership. In 2002, Secretary Colin L. Powell brought in two military officials to run the bureau of Diplomatic Security. Frank Taylor, the DS chief, and Don Reid, his deputy in charge of PSS, were both Air Force investigative officers, who, according to Savich, brought in “a military view of the world,” alien to the State Department culture. Following the lead of their bosses – and, most likely, the post-9/11 atmosphere of zero tolerance for security concerns – PSS investigators took an overzealous approach to their jobs.

Suspending clearances, and not successful national-security investigations, became PSS’ measure of its success, critics say, outraging many who came into contact with investigators. In August 2005, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel wrote to Taylor’s successor, the since-resigned Richard Griffin, that a PSS investigator interviewed him about a suspect diplomat. “He asked leading, subjective questions, and started to distort my own words to match his preconceptions,” the officer wrote. “[I]f my experience is commonplace, there may be a cancer growing in the Diplomatic Security Service.”

Similarly, investigators began to go on fishing expeditions to obscure flimsy evidence against employees whose clearances they suspended. In July 2004, Hickman’s lawyer received an email from an official in Diplomatic Security’s Visa Fraud investigations division. “We (Visa Fraud) closed out our angle on the investigation and were unable to substantiate any of the visa fraud allegations,” the DS official wrote. By then, however, Hickman was also facing another charge: he had an improper sexual relationship with a woman in his office (not that the relationship, which Hickman flatly denies, threatened national security).

In response to the uptick in clearance suspensions – and to his own personal employment purgatory – Hirsch and colleagues requested in 2006 that the department’s inspector general look into PSS. The IG’s subsequent report, released in September 2006, found investigators “appeared free of bias or prejudice” and administers the revocation process “equitably.” Hirsch considers it a whitewash. “It didn’t involve any witnesses [to the actual cases] and it only looked at closed cases,” he says, suggesting that ongoing cases – like those of himself or Savich or Hickman – might be more illustrative. It’s worth noting that Howard “Cookie” Krongard was the IG when the IG’s office looked at PSS. Krongard resigned in December after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found evidence that Krongard scuttled delicate investigations.

The State Department did not make Reid available for an interview. Nor did it respond to repeated and detailed questions about changes to PSS or the security-clearance process. If State responds after the publication of this story, check our staff blog for updates.

State’s revisions of its security clearance process have come at an inopportune moment. In late October, the department was so short-staffed at its Baghdad embassy that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened to forcibly reassign personnel to Iraq, prompting a bitter town-hall meeting of outraged Foreign Service officers at Foggy Bottom. The reassignment never happened. But to combat the diplomatic deficit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the director of the Foreign Service, Harry Thomas, announced last month that embassies worldwide will trim personnel by 10 percent, citing “severe staffing shortfalls.” Now, in other words, may not be the best time to yank the clearances of experienced diplomats who don’t pose national-security risks. Inside the State Department, the security clearance process is well understood to have exacerbated the staffing crunch. This month, the American Foreign Service Association released a poll finding “excessive penalties for security infractions/investigations” made the diplomats’ list of top-ten grievances.

For their part, Hirsch, Hickman and Savich have banded together to resist what they consider the basic unfairness of the clearance-suspension process. In 2005, they, with another colleague, formed an organization called Concerned Foreign Service Officers, representing about 70 diplomats and civil-service officials currently in bureaucratic limbo. The group publicizes cases of questionable clearance-suspension, works with members of Congress to raise awareness about PSS, and even maintains a diplo-horror-story blog, Dead Men Working.

But whatever impact the group has on PSS, none of the three believes he can help himself. “There’s not much hope to make this right,” Hickman said, walking along Pennsylvania Avenue back to his human-resources drudgery. Perhaps the best they can hope for is a laudatory article in State magazine about how great the motor pool is these days.

Update: This piece has been corrected. An earlier version incorrectly identified Frank Taylor as Frank Thomas. We regret the error.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:03:56 GMT

Eight years on, John McCain is the victim of another vile smear in South Carolina by something calling itself Vietnam Veterans Against McCain. (They don’t deserve a link.) The line of attack is that McCain somehow betrayed his fellow POWs in Hanoi, when in fact, McCain—son of the Admiral in charge of U.S. Pacific Command—famously refused an early release if it meant his fellow inmates remained imprisoned. He was tortured for five years, and now, once again, he’s being Swiftboated. McClatchy’s Jim Morrill has the campaign’s response:

In a conference call with reporters, Orson Swindle, a fellow POW, described the charges as “slander.” He called it “a collection of half truths and misinformation, and they’re simply done to try to destroy John McCain in the election Saturday.”

True enough. But.

There’s an unfortunate irony at work here. Earlier this month, my friend Chris Hayes uncovered an astonishing fact for The Nation. McCain, victim of precisely this kind of Swiftboating in 2000, actually took a huge chunk of cash from the actual Swift Boat Veterans For “Truth” who maligned John Kerry’s Vietnam record in 2004:

The most notable recipient of Swift Boat largesse is John McCain, erstwhile front-runner and Stand Up Guy. When the Swift Boat ads were first unleashed, McCain was alone among his Republican colleagues to condemn them. A fellow Vietnam veteran, a good friend of Kerry’s and a former target of smears about his own service, McCain called the ads “dishonest and dishonorable,” a “cheap stunt,” and he urged Bush to condemn them. But in pursuit of the GOP nomination, McCain ditched the mantle of maverick for that of hack, and his once-floundering, possibly rejuvenated campaign has been aided along the way by $61,650 from Swift Boat donors and their associates. “There is such a thing as dirty money,” said Senator Kerry in a statement, after The Nation informed him of McCain’s FEC records. “I’m surprised that the John McCain I knew who was smeared in 2000 and thought so-called Swift Boating was wrong in 2004 would feel comfortable taking their money after seeing the way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves.” (McCain’s office did not return calls for comment.)

Sail in the Swift Boat, drown in the Swift Boat, Senator.

State For Hillary?

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:02:00 GMT

Apropos of my piece on the State Department, I ventured over to one of my guilty pleasures: State’s super-awesome DipNote blog. Alas, Foggy Bottom isn’t exactly poring over my stuff, but it does appear to be invested in the presidential contest. The current lead post is about nuclear terrorism, and starts off asking what "Senator Hillary Clinton, President George W. Bush and the Pope have in common." The answer is that all three "are very concerned" about the threat of nuclear terrorism.

So far so good. But take a look at the graf that follows:

Last week, at the Democratic primary debate at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, the very first question posed by moderator Charles Gibson was about the threat of nuclear terrorism. Confronted with a hypothetical scenario of a nuclear-equipped al-Qaeda, Senator Clinton said, “I think it’s important… because obviously that’s the most direct threat to the United States.” She then went on to describe five steps she would take in that scenario.

And then we’re out. No mention of what any other Dem candidates had to say about nuclear terrorism at the debate. For the record, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson all took on the question, and at considerable length—so much so that it makes blockquoting selective, so just click the link for the transcript if you think I’m pulling a fast one or being unfair to the post’s author, Tara Foley. The omission is, shall we say, rather conspicuous.

It’s refreshing that State is willing to experiment with blogging. The Pentagon has a blogger outreach program in its press shop, but it certainly doesn’t have its own blog. But State is still an apolitical part of the machinery of government. It shouldn’t be wading into a presidential election.

I Could Write Something About Iraq's Fractured Politics...

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:22:00 GMT

... but I’d just end up stealing from Abu Aardvark anyway.

The Crime vs. The Cover-Up

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:11:57 GMT

Marty Lederman has a typically excellent post trying to make sense of the CIA’s 2005 destruction of videotaped interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. Read the whole thing, as the kids say, particularly Marty’s speculation about how Jose Rodriguez, the agency official who actually ordered the tapes destroyed, probably received wink-wink nudge-nudge guidance from his CIA superiors who didn’t really want the tapes preserved. But then Marty gets to the heart of the matter:

No one is talking about this. But it is really rather remarkable that the CIA decided not to videotape its investigations of high-level al Qaeda officials. This is an enemy bent on committing horrifying terrorist acts. Our intelligence about that enemy is minimal, and therefore any information we obtain from these interrogations could be of critical importance. (That was, recall, the justification for the “enhanced” techniques in the first place.) We have not used these techniques in the past, and we are uncertain how effective they will be. It’s a learning process. Moreover, the information gleaned from these interrogations, presumably in a foreign language not known to most of the officials dealing with the terrorist threat, might be quite difficult to interpret. It may be very hard at first to understand just which responses from the detainees are important and which are not, and how their responses fit into the broader intelligence-gathering efforts of the intelligence agencies. Under the government’s frequently invoked “mosaic” theory of intelligence gathering, one might not know the true value of particular intelligence for some time, until it can be viewed in a broader context, alongside a great deal of other intelligence collected before and after. More than likely, the information can best be understood and appreciated only by officials not present during the investigations.

As it happens, I’m working on a longer piece about precisely this point. The amount of available base knowledge about al-Qaeda was tremendously small in 2002, when the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, took place. What’s more, the available base of experience with interrogation was… well, you’ll have to wait for my piece.

In the meantime, to brush up on what exactly happened with the CIA tapes controversy, check out this timeline compiled by TPM’s Paul Kiel and myself.

Now That Totally Belongs on an Inside Page

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:59:04 GMT

Remember all that stuff about benchmarks in Iraq? And how—huzzah!—the Iraqi government had spent nearly 25 percent of its 2007 capital budget on reconstruction? The White House does, for two reasons: first, the U.S. has mostly given up on large-scale reconstruction projects, preferring to kick that can to the Iraqis; and second, reconstruction is a sign of improved security, something the Bush administration is desperate to portray. So, huzzah again: almost a quarter of the Iraqi budget has gone to reconstruction, quoth the White House, the surge has worked, etc.

Only there’s one problem: that figure was bogus.

Walter Pincus reports that the Government Accountability Office studied the White House-promoted claim and discovered that the real figure is 4.4 percent. Kind of a big difference, no? Well, not if you’re an anonymous State Department official desperate to spin a veteran reporter away from a real story. Says that official:

The real test is: Are we seeing the effects of these capital expenditures on the ground? And we are seeing it," he said. "Services are being delivered [and the] slow, downward spiral of worsening services has stopped and is starting to come back." Delivery of services, he said, is "our number one goal" in Iraq for 2008.

Luckily for that official, Pincus’s editors decided to run a story of such importance on page. Not like this is about a war or anything.

Line of the Day

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:36:19 GMT

Leon Wieseltier on the Democratic primary:

Plainly experience is no promise of wisdom or success. We know this from, well, experience.

He goes on to undermine the point, but it’s still a brilliant line.

Gates: Surge Done By July

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:38:54 GMT

photo credit: lauren burke, wdcpix

In March, General Petraeus will deliver The Surge: First Blood Part II to Congress. But Secretary Bob Gates is already indicating that no matter what Petraeus assesses, the surge comes to an end in July. From his presser today:

Well, first of all, I—all the evidence available to me now suggests that we will be able to complete the drawdown of the five brigade combat teams that General Petraeus recommended last September, and that that take place by the end of July. Obviously we will wait to see General Petraeus’s evaluation in March, in terms of what we might be able to do after July.

Of course, necessity demands that the surge brigades come home by July, since that’s when they’ll hit the end of their 15-month deployment. And, more broadly, ending the surge doesn’t mean the end of, you know, the war.

What Is Mowaffaq al-Rubaie Talking About?

Spencer Ackerman — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:55:02 GMT

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, has an op-ed in The Washington Post decrying a partition of Iraq along ethno-sectarian lines. That’s to be expected: partition is vastly more popular among Americans than among Iraqis, and al-Rubiae, in any event, is a member of what’s shaping up to be a new, permanent security architecture in Baghdad. (He’s served as "national security adviser," whatever that means, since 2004, despite two national elections and three changes of leadership.) Partition would weaken Baghdad’s power, thereby goring al-Rubaie’s ox. So far, so sensible. More notable is that al-Rubaie’s argument leads him to a place he doesn’t go explicitly: that the current political structure in Iraq can’t hold.

So here’s al-Rubaie’s big complaint:

The current political framework is based on a pluralistic democratic vision that, while admirable, is entirely unsuited to resolving this three-way divide. [ie, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds.] It ignores underlying issues and expects that a consensus will emerge simply by enacting a liberal constitutional legal order.

Sure thing, widely noted, not particularly controversial. Furthermore, al-Rubaie doesn’t make an explicit argument about this, but he rejects partition, saying its something Iraq must “avoid” and putting it on the same plane as “civil strife.” So what needs to happen?

Resolution can be achieved only through a system that incorporates regional federalism, with clear, mutually acceptable distributions of power between the regions and the central government.[snip]

The shape of a reconstructed, federal Iraq could vary, but it should permit the assignment of nearly all domestic powers to the regions, to be funded out of a percentage of oil revenue distributed on the basis of population. The federal government should be responsible only for essential central functions such as foreign policy (including interregional affairs), defense, fiscal and monetary policy, and banking. Regional parliaments and executives would govern their areas. A federal parliament with a new upper house could manage governance at the national level. A regional political structure would allow for the development of religious, cultural and educational policies more suited to areas’ populations than a central government could create. A regional framework for economic policy would also fit better with traditional trade patterns and markets.

The trouble here is that Iraq isn’t the U.S. or, say, Canada. It doesn’t have a tradition of decentralization or federalism. When I was in Mosul in March, I sat in with a Provincial Reconstruction Team from the U.S. as it tried to make sense of how much leeway the provincial council had over its own budget. The not-particularly-stable answer, after a ton of research and debate: some, but not much. The province basically bids on service proposals put forward by the Baghdad ministries—and, if memory serves (and my understanding was accurate in the first place), at least half of the council’s budget comes from Baghdad anyway. In other words, federalism isn’t an organic concept here.

And that’s exactly why discussions about federalism vs. partition tend to bog down in Baghdad. To non-Kurdish Iraqis, the term "federalism" either means "partition" directly, or serves as a stalking horse for it. For Kurdish Iraqis, the same goes—only they like that. The more robust a proposal for federalism—al-Rubaie proposes five regions, for instance—the hotter the opposition to it gets. Alternatively, sometimes discussions about federalism (which is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, it should be noted) get so heated that its chastened (Arab) advocates articulate a vision of federalism not significantly distinct from the status quo.

Barring some massive political or sectarian sea change, the sectarian counterweights to al-Rubaie’s proposal are so numerous as to be probably insurmountable. And that just leaves us where we already are: a center that doesn’t hold, "entirely unsuited" to the interests and desires of Iraq’s competing sectarian groups. I’ve heard people say that the Awakening Councils consist of Sunnis more sympatico with federalism. And, you know, maybe. But I’ve only heard that said by military officials or others invested in the idea that a solution to one problem (i.e., the fight against al-Qaeda) is a solution to all problems (i.e., sectarian acrimony.)

Mary, Help!

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:02:37 GMT

... as General Clark once said. Seriously, Mary, I don’t know anything about finance. Like, total financial illiteracy right here. I’m pretty sure I overpay my taxes by mistake. What should I think about this apparent Wall Street meltdown? Should I take my money out of my mattress? Should I have the Indy make my check out to cash?

Iraq Veterans To Testify at Their Own 'Winter Soldier'

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:51:39 GMT

On three frigid days in early 1971, more than 100 Vietnam veterans gathered at a Detroit hotel to indict the most contentious American war of the 20th century. In measured tones, occasionally quivering with emotion, they described what the war had done to them as much as what the war had done to the country. The veterans talked about abuses made routine, like throwing prisoners out of helicopters, torturing Viet Cong detainees or mutilating enemy corpses. Many had never told their stories before. Sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, they called their investigation the Winter Soldier project, after a line from Thomas Paine’s famous denunciation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot [who] will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”

Vietnam, by 1971, was the most domestically divisive U.S. conflict since the Civil War. Yet the public displayed little desire to hear from those who prosecuted the war about what was done in its name. What little press coverage Winter Soldier received was largely hostile. A short, un-bylined New York Times story portrayed “young veterans of the Vietnam war quietly [telling] of their ‘war crimes.’”

But while the investigation itself may have made little immediate impact, its disclosures would reverberate for decades. “We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals,” a 27-year old Navy veteran, John Kerry, told the Senate about what Winter Soldier uncovered. The bitterness that testimony sowed in other Vietnam veterans, who felt betrayed by Winter Soldier, stayed alive through 2004, when the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth falsely maligned Kerry’s service record as payback. Now, with another intractable conflict proving to be another defining moment in American history, some veterans of the Iraq war intend to take up the Winter Soldier banner. On March 13, Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization inspired by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, will convene at the National Labor College just outside of Washington to say, in so many words, that it’s all happening again.

“What’s happening now is no different than over the past five years,” said Geoff Millard, 27, the president of the group’s Washington chapter. “It’s the result of systematic problems in the way we fight an occupation. It’s not that we’re going to outline these huge atrocities. It’s how the systematic nature of occupation is oppression.” This time around, Winter Soldier will have what its predecessor didn’t: digital video to back up the charges.

The critique that the Winter Soldier investigation presents is both subtle and incendiary. Throughout the course of the war, the public has become agonizingly familiar with its excesses, most notably the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the deliberate killing of civilians at Haditha. Winter Soldier, according to the veterans’ group, won’t expose the next big Iraq scandal. What it will do instead is argue, through testimony from soldiers and Marines who fought the war, that standard military behavior in Iraq can look more like Abu Ghraib or Haditha than the public perceives.

“I do believe that the profession of soldiering is fundamentally an honorable one,” said Perry O’Brien, 25, an Afghanistan veteran and key leader of Winter Soldier. “But the disconnect between the [soldiers’] code and what soldiers are asked to do in the war is the source of a tremendous amount of guilt that many of us carry around. Kids grow up wanting to be GI Joe and save lives. But military policy is dictating that people do terrible things, things that violate their conscience, and then have the psychological burden of carrying that around, because the military says you can’t talk about it. Soldiers live with it and die with it.”

Organizers estimate that perhaps 45 to 55 Iraq veterans, and some from Afghanistan, will testify to such “terrible things” at Winter Soldier. Liam Madden, 23, a Marine veteran of Iraq who’s now a student at Northeastern University, came up with the idea for a second Winter Soldier in late 2006 with his fellow IVAW members Aaron Hughes in Chicago and Fernando Braga in New York. “The people I’ve talked to who are testifying are going to talk about their experiences in Iraq, how they’re put in positions to harm the people of Iraq and harm the image of America because of the position they’re put in, and the complete injustice involved in that,” Madden said. “Other people will talk about how a run-of-the-mill day in Iraq is. It adds up to a checkpoint here, a house raid there, a house raid there, a house raid there, to a population of Iraqis who can’t tolerate you any longer.”

The project’s interview and verification committees are just getting started. But glimpses of the expected testimony are beginning to emerge. One of the early interviewees, a medic, told IVAW about treating a two-year old shot in the thigh by U.S. soldiers, and witnessing “the mutilation of the dead,” according to Jose Vasquez, 33, a former Army sergeant who heads Winter Soldier’s verification team. The public should expect to hear about “unnecessary killing of noncombatants on the battlefield,” said Vasquez, an anthropology graduate student at the City University of New York. (Vasquez himself filed as a conscientious objector after finding himself unable to participate in the Iraq war.) Indeed, a frequent theme among group members in interviews has been the intensity of manning checkpoints, where Iraqi civilians can die for simply not approaching a checkpoint slowly enough to reassure an apprehensive soldier who doesn’t speak their language.

Yet the organizers of Winter Soldier will consider the event a failure if it appears to blame soldiers and Marines for the war. “Imagine you’re out on a convoy and you get hit by an IED,” Millard said. “And the SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] is you fire in that direction of that fire that came in. That’s indiscriminate. Civilians get killed in that. It’s not the soldier’s fault. It’s not the civilian’s fault. It’s the occupation’s fault.” Millard, a recently-discharged Army National Guardsman from upstate New York, served in Iraq as a general’s assistant in Tikrit from October 2004 to October 2005. His job involved briefing senior officers on daily violent incidents and it led Millard to renounce the war as beneath the dignity of his comrades. “The common U.S. soldier is not a bloodthirsty animal,” he said. “The problem is the occupation of Iraq itself.”

For Pete Hegseth, 27, the executive director of the pro-war Vets For Freedom, the distinction that Mallard’s group seeks to draw is untenable. Hegseth served with the 101st Airborne Division from 2005 to 2006 in Baghdad and Samarra. Winter Soldier, to him,will treat the honor of U.S. service personnel as collateral damage in the organization’s attempt to stop the war. “I’d ask, ‘Is what you saw U.S. policy, or is it an unfortunate occurrence?’ Let’s be real here,” Hegseth said. “Did your company commander tell you to shoot women and children, or to maximize casualties? No! We don’t do that. To talk about systematic brutality is essentially indicting the military as being complicit in war crimes.”

Worse, Hegseth feared, will be the impact Winter Soldier has on U.S. troops currently in Iraq. “They’re making a concerted effort to make claims about atrocities,” he said. “We live in a satellite world, where information is disseminated immediately. We’re connected. Every single mud hut, home or apartment in Iraq has a satellite dish, and they hear what goes on in our country. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know it would be something that people who don’t like us in Iraq beam around the Muslim world. It could be turned against the troops on the battlefield.”

Hegseth said he didn’t want to overstate his case, but the investigation could have real consequences. “What I’m not going to do is say because they do this there’ll be more attacks, but I don’t think it would do anything to improve sentiment toward the American soldier on a foreign battlefield.”

Millard doesn’t dismiss Hegseth out of hand. “I would totally agree that there aren’t first sergeants who get up—and if there are, they’re extremely rare—that would ever get up and say, ‘We’re gonna kill women and children today.’ No!” Millard said. “But why do women and children get killed? Because of the systemic problems within the occupation, which is why we want to bring the occupation to an end.” He’s less sanguine about the idea that Winter Soldier will get U.S. troops killed. “You know what endangers our soldiers? Having them in Iraq,” he said. “I’m pretty sure no soldiers are going to die at Winter Soldier. I’m not a fortune teller, but I’m pretty damn sure we’re not gonna kill any U.S. soldiers. But I’m pretty sure on that date, U.S. soldiers are gonna get killed in Iraq.”

Another telegraphed critique is that Winter Soldier’s presenters will lie about their service. It’s a reprise of a long and bitter controversy surrounding the first Winter Soldier. In a 2004 National Review cover story, Mac Owens, a professor at the Naval War College and a Vietnam veteran, called the investigation “a lie.” More recently, Rush Limbaugh referred to antiwar veterans as “phony soldiers.” That’s something Iraq Veterans Against the War has already faced. Last year, Jesse Adam Macbeth, 23, lied about killing civilians in Iraq in a video that appeared on YouTube and referred viewers to Iraq Veteran’s Against the War’s website.

That’s where Vasquez’s verification process comes in. First, the group will keep on file in its Philadelphia national office a copy of each testifier’s military service record, known as a DD-214 form. After interviewing the potential testifier, Vasquez’s committee—made up of a team of twelve veterans around the country—will reach out to members of his or her unit for corroboration. A network of journalists currently in Iraq will reach out to Iraqi civilians in the relevant cities and towns for independent eyewitness accounts. Finally, IVAW will file Freedom of Information Act requests with the Pentagon for relevant corroborating or refuting information, assisted by a task force of the National Lawyers Guild to expedite the process. “We’re laying our credibility on the line,” Vasquez acknowledged.

And while media coverage of Winter Soldier may not be any more attentive or sympathetic than in 1971, this time there are some technological work-arounds. Iraq Veterans Against the War plans to host live streaming video of the conference on its website, where archived footage of direct testimony will remain. What’s more, during the testimony itself, Winter Soldier will have an advantage that its Vietnam-era predecessor didn’t: digital video. Practically every soldier in Iraq packed a camera or a video recorder or a camera-enabled phone, and several are bringing what they recorded to Winter Soldier. It will be much harder to ignore testimony backed by video—especially if those videos go viral on YouTube. “We’re already starting to receive a fair amount of footage and photographs corroborating these stories,” O’Brien said. “It will be very different for the right wing to say we’re lying [at the second Winter Soldier investigation]. These photographs exist.”

The attacks on their credibility may be guaranteed, but the group draws strength from a sense of veterans’ espirit d’corps. Its DC office, in the working-class northwest Washington neighborhood of Petworth, is a brown brick rowhouse that doubles as Millard’s home. The study, kept polished and immaculate, resembles a Tactical Operations Center, with humming computers topping neat rows of desks. Downstairs are air mattresses and bedding for vets in need of a place to crash, weights and a punching bag for their workouts, and nearly every Nirvana CD to aid their catharsis.

Millard, like many soldiers, switches from intensity to self-depricating humor in the same sentence. His tattoos, peeking out from his black IVAW hoodie, mark him as the punk rock kid he was growing up in Buffalo, N.Y. And the unity that the hardcore scene preaches is evident in his attitude toward his fellow veterans, no matter their politics. Vets for Freedom, he says, should tell their own service stories. “I think the American public should hear their experiences as well, not just IVAW. We’re the ones just happening to take the initiative to tell the American people, because we feel they don’t get these stories,” he said. “I think the American people need to hear the experience of not just us but all veterans, from veterans themselves.” As Millard spoke, an Iraq vet, who had arrived unannounced on his doorstep at four that morning, was upstairs napping.

For Iraq Veterans Against the War, there is more at stake than just its reputation, veterans’ dignity, or ending the war. On the table at Winter Soldier, as they see it, is the transformation of both military culture and the relationship of veterans to American democracy. “We joined this incredibly honorable profession, driven by this code of honor, yet what we do needs to remain hidden,” O’Brien said. “It’s a necessary evil, supposedly, that needs to be hidden from the rest of America,” he continued. “Winter Soldier One was a direct confrontation with this idea that what soldiers do needs to remain hidden. It established a tradition – it happened once, with Winter Soldier [in 1971], and if it happens again, it’s a tradition. Obviously, none of us want future wars. But if they happen, we need to have soldiers come back and tell their stories.”

Image from “Winter Soldier, The Film” courtesy of Millarium Zero

Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly named Geoff Millard’s hometown as Troy, NY and listed him as the Washington chapter co-chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Millard is from Buffalo, NY, and is the president of the Washington chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. The Washington Independent regrets the errors.

Binge and Purge

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:39:36 GMT

Two years ago or so, I asked Kanan Makiya —the complex Iraqi dissident intellectual who did so much to rid the world of Saddam Hussein—about the blunders of the U.S. occupation. He didn’t pause before citing de-Baathification as the single biggest error the U.S. and successive Iraqi governments committed. De-Baathification, in the hands of a sectarian government, had become de-Sunnification, in both perception and reality, convincing Sunnis that they had no stake in the future of Iraq. His answer was more than a little ironic. As an adviser to the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project in 2002, Makiya had advocated the creation of a de-Baathification committee modeled after South Africa’s post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And in practice, the de-Baathification commission that Makiya lambasted was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, Makiya’s political patron.

Reversing the de-Baathification commission’s purges has been an official U.S. priority since Congress made it one of the famous "benchmarks" for progress on sectarian reconciliation last year. And earlier this month, it seemed hope was on the way: after a pronounced delay, the Shiite-led Iraqi parliament finally passed a law aimed at scaling back de-Baathification. Only the Sunnis didn’t get any reassurance from the law. The closer they looked, the more they realized it not only didn’t provide for the reinstatement of Sunnis purged from government service—remember that Iraq has always had a command economy, so no government service means no livelihood, a point often difficult for Americans to understand—but it might even allow for further purges. One Sunni parliamentarian called it "a sword on the neck of the people."

The Washington Post takes a closer look today:

More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by Iraq’s presidency council, acknowledge that its impact is hard to assess from its text and will depend on how it is implemented. Some say the law’s primary aim is not to return ex-Baathists to work, but to recognize and compensate those harmed by the party. Of the law’s eight stated justifications, none mentions reinstating ex-Baathists to their jobs."The law is about as clear as mud," said one U.S. senior diplomat.

Once again, the law itself allows for a seven-member commission to determine how exactly to implement its measures. That commission is picked by the sectarian Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki and confirmed by the Shiite-dominated parliament. If there’s one thing the de-Baathification commission experience instructs, it’s that discretion built into a law in a country with no rule of law and fratricidal sectarianism is a designed-in guarantee of corruption.

And it might even be worse than that. A former Saddam-era Iraqi military officer believes that if he exercises his options under the law, he’ll be marking himself for street justice from a Shiite death squad.

Kareem, who was a senior Baath Party member, said the new law does grant him the right to a pension, which would greatly benefit his family. He has not had a steady salary in five years, and has been living off the charity of friends and relatives, but said he would not attempt to claim the pension."This law is bait," he said. "I have to go back to Basra and apply for the pension through several measures. If I get killed, nobody will know who did it."

It’s worth remembering that the men who will kill Kareem are the same people that U.S. troops are dying in Iraq to keep in power.

'It Boils Down to Trust'

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:06:57 GMT

One of the signature achievements of the surge, according to General David Petraeus and the White House, has been the creation of so-called "Concerned Local Citizens" groups—that is, bands of tribal fighters, mostly Sunni and including many former insurgents, who have agreed to take U.S. cash (and in some cases weaponry) if they pledge to fight al-Qaeda. The groups, also known as Awakening Councils, currently stand at 80,000 fighters, 80 percent of which are Sunni. They’re outside the chain of command of the regular Iraqi security forces. And the U.S. military, for months, has relied on the councils for information, including targeting information, about who the U.S. should go after in the name of fighting al-Qaeda.

But many of these groups consist of former insurgents. Many have an agenda that isn’t the U.S.’s. How does the U.S. really know that these groups are truly targeting al-Qaeda, instead of manipulating the U.S. military?

According to Rear Admiral Greg Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in Iraq, it’s simple. Trust.

"The sense is, as we partner with tribal chiefs, the chief knows who’s working for him," Smith said when I asked him about the reliability of these bands on a blogger conference call this morning. "You’ve got to put some trust and confidence in these people." That trust, he said, isn’t built overnight, and the U.S. will have a "relationship" with a tribal leader before committing resources to him or including him in a program.

But is that all it amounts to? Trust?

"It boils down to trust," Smith confirmed. "And over time, you can earn it or lose it." In response to a follow-up from Cogitamus’s Nicholas Beaudrot, Smith reminded that in Diyala Province, Colonel David Sutherland, commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, had to fire and even arrest some CLC members. (Sutherland confirmed that to me in an October conference call.) He meant that as a defense of the U.S. military’s vetting process, but it also gives a sense of the trustworthiness of these so-called allies.

The U.S. has seen this movie before—in fact, literally. In "Charlie Wilson’s War," there’s a poignant scene in which a Congressman played by Ned Beatty travels to Afghanistan and pledges to the Afghan mujahideen that they’ll have the U.S.’s support, even screaming "Allahu Akbar!" along with the cheering crowd. The audience understands that many of those same mujahideen, given 15 years, became the Taliban. Instead of learning from that experience, in Iraq, the system for ensuring that we’re not handing cash to the next Mullah Omar—or even the next Osama bin Laden—is nothing more than a tribal chief convincing a U.S. lieutenant colonel to trust him.

Donald Rumsfeld: Still There

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:06:34 GMT

Remember Donald Rumsfeld? He seems like a bad dream. And yet here he is, popping up in Washington to talk about how the U.S. needs a Ministry of Propaganda. Here’s what he told Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s Danger Room:

We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities. We do not with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what’s it’s about and what it means. And talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists. They’re doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas.

Uh, yeah. First, let’s just note that Rumsfeld has always preferred the idea of technology to actually, you know, learning about technology. "Pods are there"? Does he mean iPods? Podcasts? And to mention "talk radio" in the same breath as e-mail or these mysterious pods—what in the world is this septuagenarian talking about? Rumsfeld probably just learned how to program his VCR.

Second, when Rumsfeld tried a version of this in miniature in Iraq, his actual fix was comically stupid. The Pentagon hired the Lincoln Group to pull off a propaganda campaign designed at discrediting the insurgency. It amounted to planting fake news stories in the Iraqi press written by soldiers that said things like the insurgents "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud." For this, the Pentagon spent more than $25 million and arguably broke the law.

Finally, Rumsfeld manage to be the first secretary of defense in history not just to botch two wars, but to botch two wars simultaneously. For that, no one should ever listen to this man ever again. Whatever he says is discredited by the sheer fact that he’s the one saying it. He should be legally obligated to end of all his sentences with, "...but, on the other hand, I’m a total jackass."

The Woody Allen Counterinsurgency

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:32:09 GMT

So the Pentagon alerts me to an upcoming conference call with Colonel Wayne Grigsby, a brigade commander operating south and east of Baghdad. "Most recently," the e-mail DOD sent reads, "the brigade conducted Zelig Sunrise, a combined coalition forces and concerned local citizens operation, focused on an area near Salman Pac."

Hold up. Zelig Sunrise? As in… the 1983 Woody Allen faux-documentary? I know General Petraeus believes in the economy of force in counterinsurgency, but Woody Allen doesn’t exactly inspire fear in the hearts of men. (And "sunrise"?) Maybe Grigsby told his battalion commanders, "Gentlemen, at 0400 tomorrow, the insurgents are getting touched like Soon-Yi Farrow Previn!"

'Tough Negotiators'

Spencer Ackerman — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:33:03 GMT

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In November, the Bush administration announced that it would do something in Iraq it has resisted for four years: negotiate a long-term bilateral military commitment with the Iraqis. General Douglas Lute, the White House’s so-called "war czar," immediately told reporters that force levels and basing rights would be on the table. When I asked a spokesman for the Iraqi government about permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, he didn’t rule it out. And indeed, the U.S. Army has been preparing for this prospect for years. If it looks like U.S. troops will be in Iraq forever, that’s because the Bush administration, before it leaves office, is preparing to ensure U.S. troops will be in Iraq forever.

In the Times, Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers lay out what’s at stake in the upcoming negotiations, which are set to conclude by July. It’s a valuable piece, since it provides the blueprint for how the administration will spin the bilateral accord. First, they’re saying—in Bob Gates’ words—that the U.S. has "no interest in permanent bases." Second, they’re saying that the Iraqis are "tough negotiators" and "not supplicants." And finally, they’re saying that the U.S-Iraq deal won’t "tie the hands of the next president." All three statements are literally true and substantively false.

Sure, the deal won’t say, as with Guantanamo Bay, that the U.S. will have a 99-year lease on the Baghdad International Airport complex. That’s because of the fear that any such specificity would require congressional approval that the Democrats will not grant. So it’s not hard to see what will happen: the commitment will simply be open-ended, the text will call for review in X number of years. Hence the next president’s hands are untied and the Iraqis will push for constraints, etc. But look at history. It took the Philippines nearly 100 years to get the U.S. out of Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base. That’s because the fact of the U.S. presence creates additional, subordinate facts—economic dependency in the area around the base, for one, and more fundamentally, a political dependency on the U.S. for a security guarantee, which is the whole point of the bilateral deal. In Iraq, a weak central government requires the U.S. to keep it alive against its multitudinous armed adversaries, a weakness that Iraq’s sectarian quasi-democracy actually fuels. (Elections in Iraq tend to become sectarian census counts in a power struggle.) So while the Iraqis may push back, no Iraqi government that could actually take power—one led by the Sadrists, for instance, or the harder-line Sunnis—would actually kick the U.S. out. That in turn drives a divide between the fearful Iraqi government and the anti-occupation Iraqi populace, further entrenching the government’s dependency. Nouri al-Maliki and his successors have to think: Without the U.S., will I be strung up on a lamppost?

The whole idea of the deal—and its timing—is to tie the hands of the next president. It’s true that the president won’t formally be constrained, particularly if the deal won’t be subject to Senate approval. But diplomacy is funny thing. It contains its own social force—what Jonathan Rauch insightfully terms Diplomats worldwide work hard to ensure the promises their governments make survive political transitions. All the incentives of geopolitics are toward stasis: Bush’s assurances need to be kept by his successor, otherwise it’s difficult for that successor to get other countries to trust his/her commitments to them. A mercurial United States is not something the rest of the world likes, regardless of the merits of the changed policy. At the very, very least, Bush’s successor faces an uphill battle to undo the bilateral deal—and that’s before the Iraqis start griping about the U.S. not keeping its word and the domestic press runs with that storyline. And, fundamentally, that’s exactly why the Bush administration is negotiating this deal before leaving office. But once again, the administration will tell the American people that an indefinite occupation in Iraq is a bug—things aren’t going so badly that we need to leave! or they’re not going so well that we can afford to leave!—when it’s, in fact, a feature.