Well, there’s some hope…or is it ass covering (you went to war w/out ever negotiating???), a gesture to appease Daddy & the Realists, did he convince Idiot Boy that he will totally lose Iraq if he goes after Iran, or will Baker have the leverage to get things done? Bubble Boy authorizes Jim Baker to talk to Iranians
WASHINGTON – While his handlers worked assiduously on Tuesday to ensure that US President George W Bush did not run into his Iranian nemesis, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in the corridors of the United Nations, a legendary fixer for the Bush family announced that the White House had cleared him to meet with a “high representative” of Tehran’s government.
Former secretary of state James Baker, who co-chairs a bipartisan, congressionally appointed task force called the Iraq Study Group (ISG), said that the timing of the meeting with that representative, whom he declined to name, had yet to be
arranged, but that permission for such a meeting to take place had been granted.
…
Such a meeting would no doubt feed speculation that Baker, a consummate “realist” who reportedly has been privately critical of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, could help tilt the balance of power within the administration in favor of fellow realists, centered in the State Department.
They generally support greater flexibility in dealing with perceived US foes in the region, and against right-wing hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney who have steadfastly opposed engagement with both Iran and Syria.
Indeed, Baker also announced on Tuesday that his task force would meet this week with the foreign minister of Syria, against which the Bush administration has mounted a diplomatic boycott for almost two years. The task force has already met with Damascus’ ambassador in Washington, as part of a series of meetings with Washington-based envoys from Iraq’s Arab neighbors.

Posted by: jj | Sep 21 2006 6:32 utc | 3

I disagree with Gardiner’s claim that a rational case couldn’t be made for the invasion of Iraq and that by implication the Bush White House is just barking mad: Iraq was defenseless, had oil and was under a sanctions regime that was beginning to fall apart. “Something had to happen”. Now this is where “ill informed” and “dirt stupid” begins and we all know the rest.
Ditto in Lebanon: Ragtag Hezbollah seemed an easy target.
In both cases the downside seemed (and so far has been) quite limited. The same cannot be said of an attack on Iran. Regionally and globally the potential downside is awesome, a fact which isn’t lost on anyone. Putting myself in the shoes of a “senior militaristic administration official”, I talk tough, hope I scare people, but am not ready to enter the history books as the biggest villain since Benedict Arnold. Also I would have very real concerns that the military-industrial-complex will decide to take me out if I double up again in the Middle East. After all they did take out JFK when he appeared to veer out of control and lose them the Cold War.
There are all sorts of “filters”, not just one.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 21 2006 11:46 utc | 5

from a European friend…
The US invaded Afgh. for the pipeline, and as a adventure, a second trial balloon after Yugoslavia. Thumbing their noses at the Russkies, as well. Then, on to Iraq.
It did those things because it could, no matter what the varied motives were, one of the main ones certainly being simply to keep the military-industrial complex going. War, for the sake of war. The US did not need or want Iraqi territory, or workers, pistachios, figs, or desert sands, or anything (footnote, control resources in the future..).
It wanted very simply to do what it can, what it is primed to do, conquer, invade, and make money, for a large part at the expense of the US taxpayer. The rationale of re-drawing the map of the ME, creating a new ME, has some validity, in the sense that many planners certainly believe in it, in line with the Great Game, version 7b. Those who hold the control of black gold hold the world in their palm. But between the dream and the gritty ground there are so many steps, the dream is quasi-mystical, a group think figment, hope and bluster, in contrast with a clear rationale, steps and fallback plans.
So it is a ‘can – do’ or ‘can’t – do’ kind of enterprise. Reality is whisked away, but at some point it bites simply because it has been conveniently and sneakily set aside, not taken into account, and suddenly, unexpectedly, rears its uncoiffed head. What if? What if? Yes indeed.
Real men want to go to Teheran, from the sky, of course, as it is the most polluted city on earth, and on the ground there are several millions of soldiers or quasi-soldiers.
The circle can’t be squared, US soldiers in Iraq would be toast, the Shiite part might be taken over, the Straits being blocked would quickly crash several economies (Japan first) and provoke a world wide recession, the Gulf states could/would not up their production, there would be riots in the US; China and Russia together, with W EU trailing behind as usual would reach their flash point and loose their cowardly tolerance. As the people in charge (BushCo, USuk, neo-cons, or whatever description du jour) are basically where they are for their own personal power, profit and comfort, and have nothing to propose to the people of the world, they will act like Mafia bosses, or leaders of sects, they will go the mile when the traffic can bear it, but if not, they stop and re-coup.

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 21 2006 15:49 utc | 7

Alabama,
There is sense and there is sense. It was possible in 2002 to articulate a sensible realpolitik case in favor of forced regime change in Baghdad. Sensible and criminal are not mutually exclusive categories. Looking at a map in 2002, while basking in one’s own imagined invincibility, an invasion of Iraq could be made to sound rational.
Ditto for Lebanon in 2006: Completely misinformed by some of the more deranged Christians in Lebanon (who are still as good as ever at selling their own self-delusions to others) the Bushies and Israelis really seem to have believed that a large majority of Lebanese would turn on Hezbollah. In doing that they were able to create a rational case for war. When it comes to “serious action on Iran”, no such pain-free day dreams are possible. The Iranians are a different caliber altogether and not just militarily:
Iran ally Chavez got a standing ovation yesterday at the UN. Something like 115 UN members out of 192 have come forward and lined up behind Iran on the enrichment issue.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 21 2006 16:54 utc | 9

Basically history shows that you have to kill the original inhabitants to the tune of 70%, or whatever it takes to make them downtrodden peoples in parks, reservations, or open air camps. Malaysia is often cited as a counter example but Billmon went into that.
The rigid psychologically ingrained doctrine of apartheid in South Africa was accepted for a long time, by the inhabitants – an organised society with its rules and ways of functioning, all the rest, is some ways like the US ’before’ as it was supported and encouraged by foreign powers who made money out of the system. Then it cracked, without violence, partly because it was so! entrenched, and remains so today, the situation on the ground is not brilliant, in fact it is horrible.
Israel went the slow German route, as it understood that after the first spates of killing and expropriations it would not survive without showing clean hands and rock solid arguments against its racims – so it avoided outright extravagant genocide for the remaining people and went the legal route, with controls, papers, permits, road blocks, all the rest, ending up by creating Bantustans, or Ghettoes, with the perpetually pending carrot of offered separate statehood – oh! if only a decent interlocutor could be found! – and much victimhood and hand-wringing and false sincerity to fool the West, which it did, with super PR. No concentration camps there…. just serious meetings with officials in a pristine democracy… genuine efforts to put a stop to terror..
The US killed off the Indians. But now, it is on foreign ground, with no experience, no knowledge, and no aims. It cannot, in Iraq, hold the Green Zone, safe roads, military bases, camps and prisons, build a spider web on wild territory, without killing directly many millions of people, thereby sacrificing tens of thousands of its own. It is unacceptable today, and anyway, that is not what the US wants, or wanted. It wanted shock and awe, then grinning natives saving to buy cell phones, eat in MacDos, and turn over the oil fields for ‘reconstruction’ – made necessary by the destruction of shock and awe. With coffers of US companies going bling bling and Iraqis running subsersive art shows! Amply reported in the press – what glorious freedom!

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 21 2006 19:23 utc | 11

Well, if you add this speculation from DKos to the O’Donnell idea that mounting pressure to get Iranian oil production back up to speed (by removing the current US sanctions) is behind the current crisis with Iran — then indeed, faced with the prospects of a US washout in both Iraq and Iran — the administration may go for broke and do it (in Iran) anyway, seeing that there is not much more that can be lost. Betting the last dollar (or life) on the longshot that bombing Iran will bring about regime change and a reversal of fortune (literally speaking).

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 21 2006 20:28 utc | 13

Is European code for naive/gullible?
The Bush administration seeks a full-blown World War III between the West and Islam.
Attacking Iran serves this goal.

Posted by: Carl Nyberg | Sep 21 2006 22:59 utc | 15

Guthman Bey, on the chance that I’m missing the boat, and in all good humor, let me rephrase what I thought I was trying to say: in one particular part of the world (a rather large one), variously called the Middle East or the Near East, something cannot be done by military forces that can be, and has been, done in other parts of the world: an uninvited army cannot invade and occupy its cities. If an army should try to do this, it will be destroyed inside the city it tries to occupy. You can’t “take” Baghdad, for example, the way you could “take” Paris, or Berlin, or Rome in WW II. Or so the common wisdom would have us understand.
I happen to believe that this is actually true, and for this reason I was really puzzled (to say the least) by the decision of Operation Iraqi Freedom to “take” Baghdad. No number of troops–not a million soldiers–could havetaken and held that place (unless, of course, they were to exterminated every man, woman and child in the city). To put it in your own words, no numbers could suffice to do this job.
If this is indeed the case, then the American military seems to have gone on a sort of suicide mission when entering, and staying, in Baghdad (not to mention a few other cities in the vicinity). I suspect that Jay Garner understood this very well, and I’d really like to know exactly who fired him.
This hypothesis would certainly apply to Iran and Afghanistan, and who knows who else besides. Militarily regarded, the whole mad adventure is a kind of suicide mission–a way to downsize the military. We sent off our forces to be killed, which is not a nice way to treat one’s fellow citizens.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 22 2006 1:07 utc | 17

…”in the army” should read “under arms”.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 22 2006 2:11 utc | 19

So these Middle Eastern cities are obviously populated by monstrous man-eating wild beasts. Sounds like a fun horror movie. Freddie Kruger lives there too, but his name is now Ahmad. Less happy with your theories about semitic beast-men will be the few surviving old Nazis. They were convinced they were the real thing, but now it turns out they were only sissies.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 22 2006 4:26 utc | 21

Alabama,
Google is your friend.
The Guardian

Former US general Jay Garner, who was placed in overall charge of the “interim government”, is annoyed by the efforts of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, to impose several controversial Iraqis as advisers in the government.
They include Ahmed Chalabi, head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, who will be offered an advisory post in the finance ministry. Mr Chalabi was previously convicted in his absence of a multi-million dollar banking fraud in Jordan, though he denies the charges.
Mr Wolfowitz wants posts in other ministries to go to Mr Chalabi’s nephew, Salem, and to three of his close associates, Tamara Daghestani, Goran Talebani and Aras Habib

Guardian

Describing his dismissal after he called for elections , he said: “The night I got to Baghdad, [the defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld called me and told me he was appointing Paul Bremer as the presidential envoy … The announcement … was somewhat abrupt.”

openDemocracy

On his way to Iraq, Garner asked the neo-conservative Douglas Feith, the under-secretary of defence for policy, for the planning memos and documents for post-war Iraq. Feith told him there were none.
Garner was never shown the state department’s seventeen volumes of planning titled The Future of Iraq, or the CIA’s analyses. Feith’s former law partner, Michael Mobbs, was appointed head of civil administration. Mobbs had no background in the middle east or civil administration. “He just cowered in his room most of the time”, one former ambassador recalled. Mobbs lasted two weeks.
Garner was “a deer in the headlights”, said Timothy Carney, an ex-ambassador recruited for Orha. Feith and the neocons assumed their favourite, Ahmed Chalabi, and his exiles would seamlessly take power and the rest would be a glide path. After defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed the looting of Iraqi ministries – “freedom’s untidy”, he said – the US officials supposedly building the new Iraq took weeks to survey the charred ruins. “I never knew what our plans were”, Garner said.
Rumsfeld personally tried to cut every single state department officer from Garner’s team. Soon, Garner fell into disfavour and a replacement was sought. Moderate Republicans, like William Cohen, former secretary of defence, were vetoed as not the “right kind of Republican”. L Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, an experienced rightward-leaning diplomat, was selected. Henry Kissinger told Colin Powell at the time that Bremer, who had worked at Kissinger Associates, was “a control freak”.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 22 2006 6:55 utc | 23

dan of steele: “Soon Garner fell into disfavour and a replacement was sought.”….Yes, I remember that, but I never did learn who actually did “the seeking of the replacement”. I’ve already done some googling, by the way, and I’ll do some more….
Point being that Garner knew the terrain. And Guthman Bey, this isn’t a theory I’m talking about, and it isn’t mine, and it definitely doesn’t concern “semitic beast-men”. It concerns some local conditions of warfare that can be learned on site, by people who’ve made mistakes–often people coming from the site itself–and whose lessons are not always forgotten. Call it “cultural”. It would take us into a study of the word “assassin,” designating a precursor, I suspect of the “suicide bomber,” and perhaps a tour as well through the works of the easily-dismissed Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling probably wrote the script for the firing of Garner, and I’ll try to find it in his “Collected Works”.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 22 2006 14:17 utc | 25

alabama
maybe there is something with the big announcement w made putting Rice in charge of all that stuff over there at the time.
no links right now and the neocons are all quite silent when it comes to that period of time.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 22 2006 14:55 utc | 27

Is European code for naive/gullible?
Maybe.
This piece, by J. Pinkerton, in the American Conservative, in Oct. 2004, reviews history and gives advice, humorous and serious at once, well worth reading:
7 Habits of Highly Effective Imperialists
Self-help for those who oppose self-rule
link

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 22 2006 16:02 utc | 29

haste makes for typos, I find…

Posted by: alabama | Sep 22 2006 18:12 utc | 31

Oh yes those mythical assassins of Alamut… always good for Western campfire tales, especially as the joints move from hand to hand. Hitler too had his guerilla organisation of “assassins” planned: they were called “der Werwolf”. Never got off the ground though. Too many occupiers. Too much order. Nowhere to hide. Life went on without werewolves.
Now, if Rummy had been in charge of the US military in World War 2… who knows maybe the werewolves would be howling to this day.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 22 2006 23:34 utc | 33

Huh? Urban Cairo is now supposed to have been the home turf of the assassins? Semitic beast-men again lurking in shadows of the bazaar ? Besides, surely you must know that the British successfully occupied and administered Cairo, as had the Ottomans. So what’s your point man? And why am I even bothering to argue with you, since you aren’t bothering to put together a coherent argument?
Yes with hindsight it’s clear that Garner was less stupid than Bremer and his bosses in Washington. Since there were only about 50,000 actual US fighting troops in Iraq even in 2003, it was patently impossible to control a country of 20 million people. No irrelevant analogies nor oriental beast-men were needed to come to that conclusion, just some common sense. Ergo Mr Garner appears to have thought, let’s best not try, let’s instead have quick elections and fuck off. That was not grandiose enough for some and axed he was. Garner also got terrible press while in charge, and he looked and sounded like a jerk on tv, which didn’t help.
Meanwhile if it turns you on to revel in bloodthirsty orientalist mysticism, have fun.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 23 2006 4:47 utc | 35