The New Reality Of A Multipolar World

The Medvedev Doctrine and American Strategy

By George Friedman/Stratfor

The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:

1. The war in Iraq was moving toward an acceptable but not optimal solution. The government in Baghdad was not pro-American, but neither was it an Iranian puppet, and that was the best that could be hoped for. The United States anticipated pulling out troops, but not in a disorderly fashion.
2. The war in Afghanistan was deteriorating for the United States and NATO forces. The Taliban was increasingly effective, and large areas of the country were falling to its control. Force in Afghanistan was insufficient, and any troops withdrawn from Iraq would have to be deployed to Afghanistan to stabilize the situation. Political conditions in neighboring Pakistan were deteriorating, and that deterioration inevitably affected Afghanistan.
3. The United States had been locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, demanding that Tehran halt enrichment of uranium or face U.S. action. The United States had assembled a group of six countries (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) that agreed with the U.S. goal, was engaged in negotiations with Iran, and had agreed at some point to impose sanctions on Iran if Tehran failed to comply. The United States was also leaking stories about impending air attacks on Iran by Israel or the United States if Tehran didn’t abandon its enrichment program. The United States had the implicit agreement of the group of six not to sell arms to Tehran, creating a real sense of isolation in Iran.

In short, the United States remained heavily committed to a region stretching from Iraq to Pakistan, with main force committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of commitments to Pakistan (and above all to Iran) on the table. U.S. ground forces were stretched to the limit, and U.S. airpower, naval and land-based forces had to stand by for the possibility of an air campaign in Iran — regardless of whether the U.S. planned an attack, since the credibility of a bluff depended on the availability of force.

The situation in this region actually was improving, but the United States had to remain committed there. It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians: For the foreseeable future, the United States had no significant forces to spare to deploy elsewhere in the world, nor the ability to sustain them in extended combat. Moreover, the United States was relying on Russian cooperation both against Iran and potentially in Afghanistan, where Moscow’s influence with some factions remains substantial. The United States needed the Russians and couldn’t block the Russians. Therefore, the Russians inevitably chose this moment to strike.

On Sunday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in effect ran up the Jolly Roger. Whatever the United States thought it was dealing with in Russia, Medvedev made the Russian position very clear. He stated Russian foreign policy in five succinct points, which we can think of as the Medvedev Doctrine (and which we see fit to quote here):

• First, Russia recognizes the primacy of the fundamental principles of international law, which define the relations between civilized peoples. We will build our relations with other countries within the framework of these principles and this concept of international law.
• Second, the world should be multipolar. A single-pole world is unacceptable. Domination is something we cannot allow. We cannot accept a world order in which one country makes all the decisions, even as serious and influential a country as the United States of America. Such a world is unstable and threatened by conflict.
• Third, Russia does not want confrontation with any other country. Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop friendly relations with Europe, the United States, and other countries, as much as is possible.
• Fourth, protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is an unquestionable priority for our country. Our foreign policy decisions will be based on this need. We will also protect the interests of our business community abroad. It should be clear to all that we will respond to any aggressive acts committed against us.
• Finally, fifth, as is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbors. We will pay particular attention to our work in these regions and build friendly ties with these countries, our close neighbors.

Medvedev concluded, “These are the principles I will follow in carrying out our foreign policy. As for the future, it depends not only on us but also on our friends and partners in the international community. They have a choice.”

The second point in this doctrine states that Russia does not accept the primacy of the United States in the international system. According to the third point, while Russia wants good relations with the United States and Europe, this depends on their behavior toward Russia and not just on Russia’s behavior. The fourth point states that Russia will protect the interests of Russians wherever they are — even if they live in the Baltic states or in Georgia, for example. This provides a doctrinal basis for intervention in such countries if Russia finds it necessary.

The fifth point is the critical one: “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests.” In other words, the Russians have special interests in the former Soviet Union and in friendly relations with these states. Intrusions by others into these regions that undermine pro-Russian regimes will be regarded as a threat to Russia’s “special interests.”

Thus, the Georgian conflict was not an isolated event — rather, Medvedev is saying that Russia is engaged in a general redefinition of the regional and global system. Locally, it would not be correct to say that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. It would be correct to say that Russia is creating a new structure of relations in the geography of its predecessors, with a new institutional structure with Moscow at its center. Globally, the Russians want to use this new regional power — and substantial Russian nuclear assets — to be part of a global system in which the United States loses its primacy.

These are ambitious goals, to say the least. But the Russians believe that the United States is off balance in the Islamic world and that there is an opportunity here, if they move quickly, to create a new reality before the United States is ready to respond. Europe has neither the military weight nor the will to actively resist Russia. Moreover, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas supplies over the coming years, and Russia can survive without selling it to them far better than the Europeans can survive without buying it. The Europeans are not a substantial factor in the equation, nor are they likely to become substantial.

This leaves the United States in an extremely difficult strategic position. The United States opposed the Soviet Union after 1945 not only for ideological reasons but also for geopolitical ones. If the Soviet Union had broken out of its encirclement and dominated all of Europe, the total economic power at its disposal, coupled with its population, would have allowed the Soviets to construct a navy that could challenge U.S. maritime hegemony and put the continental United States in jeopardy. It was U.S. policy during World Wars I and II and the Cold War to act militarily to prevent any power from dominating the Eurasian landmass. For the United States, this was the most important task throughout the 20th century.

The U.S.-jihadist war was waged in a strategic framework that assumed that the question of hegemony over Eurasia was closed. Germany’s defeat in World War II and the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War meant that there was no claimant to Eurasia, and the United States was free to focus on what appeared to be the current priority — the defeat of radical Islamism. It appeared that the main threat to this strategy was the patience of the American public, not an attempt to resurrect a major Eurasian power.

The United States now faces a massive strategic dilemma, and it has limited military options against the Russians. It could choose a naval option, in which it would block the four Russian maritime outlets, the Sea of Japan and the Black, Baltic and Barents seas. The United States has ample military force with which to do this and could potentially do so without allied cooperation, which it would lack. It is extremely unlikely that the NATO council would unanimously support a blockade of Russia, which would be an act of war.

But while a blockade like this would certainly hurt the Russians, Russia is ultimately a land power. It is also capable of shipping and importing through third parties, meaning it could potentially acquire and ship key goods through European or Turkish ports (or Iranian ports, for that matter). The blockade option is thus more attractive on first glance than on deeper analysis.

More important, any overt U.S. action against Russia would result in counteractions. During the Cold War, the Soviets attacked American global interest not by sending Soviet troops, but by supporting regimes and factions with weapons and economic aid. Vietnam was the classic example: The Russians tied down 500,000 U.S. troops without placing major Russian forces at risk. Throughout the world, the Soviets implemented programs of subversion and aid to friendly regimes, forcing the United States either to accept pro-Soviet regimes, as with Cuba, or fight them at disproportionate cost.

In the present situation, the Russian response would strike at the heart of American strategy in the Islamic world. In the long run, the Russians have little interest in strengthening the Islamic world — but for the moment, they have substantial interest in maintaining American imbalance and sapping U.S. forces. The Russians have a long history of supporting Middle Eastern regimes with weapons shipments, and it is no accident that the first world leader they met with after invading Georgia was Syrian President Bashar al Assad. This was a clear signal that if the U.S. responded aggressively to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Moscow would ship a range of weapons to Syria — and far worse, to Iran. Indeed, Russia could conceivably send weapons to factions in Iraq that do not support the current regime, as well as to groups like Hezbollah. Moscow also could encourage the Iranians to withdraw their support for the Iraqi government and plunge Iraq back into conflict. Finally, Russia could ship weapons to the Taliban and work to further destabilize Pakistan.

At the moment, the United States faces the strategic problem that the Russians have options while the United States does not. Not only does the U.S. commitment of ground forces in the Islamic world leave the United States without strategic reserve, but the political arrangements under which these troops operate make them highly vulnerable to Russian manipulation — with few satisfactory U.S. counters.

The U.S. government is trying to think through how it can maintain its commitment in the Islamic world and resist the Russian reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union. If the United States could very rapidly win its wars in the region, this would be possible. But the Russians are in a position to prolong these wars, and even without such agitation, the American ability to close off the conflicts is severely limited. The United States could massively increase the size of its army and make deployments into the Baltics, Ukraine and Central Asia to thwart Russian plans, but it would take years to build up these forces and the active cooperation of Europe to deploy them. Logistically, European support would be essential — but the Europeans in general, and the Germans in particular, have no appetite for this war. Expanding the U.S. Army is necessary, but it does not affect the current strategic reality.

This logistical issue might be manageable, but the real heart of this problem is not merely the deployment of U.S. forces in the Islamic world — it is the Russians’ ability to use weapons sales and covert means to deteriorate conditions dramatically. With active Russian hostility added to the current reality, the strategic situation in the Islamic world could rapidly spin out of control.

The United States is therefore trapped by its commitment to the Islamic world. It does not have sufficient forces to block Russian hegemony in the former Soviet Union, and if it tries to block the Russians with naval or air forces, it faces a dangerous riposte from the Russians in the Islamic world. If it does nothing, it creates a strategic threat that potentially towers over the threat in the Islamic world.

The United States now has to make a fundamental strategic decision. If it remains committed to its current strategy, it cannot respond to the Russians. If it does not respond to the Russians for five or 10 years, the world will look very much like it did from 1945 to 1992. There will be another Cold War at the very least, with a peer power much poorer than the United States but prepared to devote huge amounts of money to national defense.

There are four broad U.S. options:

1. Attempt to make a settlement with Iran that would guarantee the neutral stability of Iraq and permit the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces there. Iran is the key here. The Iranians might also mistrust a re-emergent Russia, and while Tehran might be tempted to work with the Russians against the Americans, Iran might consider an arrangement with the United States — particularly if the United States refocuses its attentions elsewhere. On the upside, this would free the U.S. from Iraq. On the downside, the Iranians might not want —or honor — such a deal.
2. Enter into negotiations with the Russians, granting them the sphere of influence they want in the former Soviet Union in return for guarantees not to project Russian power into Europe proper. The Russians will be busy consolidating their position for years, giving the U.S. time to re-energize NATO. On the upside, this would free the United States to continue its war in the Islamic world. On the downside, it would create a framework for the re-emergence of a powerful Russian empire that would be as difficult to contain as the Soviet Union.
3. Refuse to engage the Russians and leave the problem to the Europeans. On the upside, this would allow the United States to continue war in the Islamic world and force the Europeans to act. On the downside, the Europeans are too divided, dependent on Russia and dispirited to resist the Russians. This strategy could speed up Russia’s re-emergence.
4. Rapidly disengage from Iraq, leaving a residual force there and in Afghanistan. The upside is that this creates a reserve force to reinforce the Baltics and Ukraine that might restrain Russia in the former Soviet Union. The downside is that it would create chaos in the Islamic world, threatening regimes that have sided with the United States and potentially reviving effective intercontinental terrorism. The trade-off is between a hegemonic threat from Eurasia and instability and a terror threat from the Islamic world.

We are pointing to very stark strategic choices. Continuing the war in the Islamic world has a much higher cost now than it did when it began, and Russia potentially poses a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world does. What might have been a rational policy in 2001 or 2003 has now turned into a very dangerous enterprise, because a hostile major power now has the option of making the U.S. position in the Middle East enormously more difficult.

If a U.S. settlement with Iran is impossible, and a diplomatic solution with the Russians that would keep them from taking a hegemonic position in the former Soviet Union cannot be reached, then the United States must consider rapidly abandoning its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redeploying its forces to block Russian expansion. The threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was far graver than the threat posed now by the fragmented Islamic world. In the end, the nations there will cancel each other out, and militant organizations will be something the United States simply has to deal with. This is not an ideal solution by any means, but the clock appears to have run out on the American war in the Islamic world.

We do not expect the United States to take this option. It is difficult to abandon a conflict that has gone on this long when it is not yet crystal clear that the Russians will actually be a threat later. (It is far easier for an analyst to make such suggestions than it is for a president to act on them.) Instead, the United States will attempt to bridge the Russian situation with gestures and half measures.

Nevertheless, American national strategy is in crisis. The United States has insufficient power to cope with two threats and must choose between the two. Continuing the current strategy means choosing to deal with the Islamic threat rather than the Russian one, and that is reasonable only if the Islamic threat represents a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat does. It is difficult to see how the chaos of the Islamic world will cohere to form a global threat. But it is not difficult to imagine a Russia guided by the Medvedev Doctrine rapidly becoming a global threat and a direct danger to American interests.

We expect no immediate change in American strategic deployments — and we expect this to be regretted later. However, given U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip to the Caucasus region, now would be the time to see some movement in U.S. foreign policy. If Cheney isn’t going to be talking to the Russians, he needs to be talking to the Iranians. Otherwise, he will be writing checks in the region that the U.S. is in no position to cash.

Related Special Topic Page

• The Russian Resurgence

Reprinted, by permission, from Stratfor



current-events

Hillary laughs and Iran gets bombed

For some time now I have been tracking the developments as this administration pushes for a strike on Iran, if not a full-blown bombing campaign. While real progressives shy away from any expansion of the conflict in the Middle East, it has become increasingly apparent that many leading figures, including, evidently, the entire Senate (with only a couple of exceptions) buy into the notion of some sort of punishing blow on Iran, probably quite soon.

To name but one prominent Senator who recently voted up the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, on Amy Goodman’s recent “Democracy Now!” radio program, Hillary Clinton actually laughed at Senator Mike Gravel when he violently protested her vote on Kyl-Lieberman. This was followed by Seymour Hersh's observation that she was beholden to "Jewish money", by which he meant AIPAC and the rabid pro-Zionists in her New York constituency. What Senator Gravel (and any number of commentators as well) missed was the full extent of his misapprehension – Hillary’s laughter was of a two natured kind: the laugh of the guilty party who has been found out and affects a cavalier attitude, and hysterical relief that Gravel had not revealed her more basic rational, one that Gravel is either not privy to or has not signed on for.

In her heart of hearts, Hillary Clinton is a fervid believer - along with the majority of the Democrats and Republican leadership in Congress - in the US policy of Full Spectrum Dominance in support of corporate transnationalism, aka “globalization.” [See below]

… the "moderates" in the[Bush] administration, as well as the leading Democratic candidates and virtually everyone in the Democratic Party leadership -- have been supporting the threat of war against Iran for years, in large part because they share the illusions of power that go with being the militarily dominant state in the world. [Their] chief illusion is that one can and should use U.S. power to coerce an uncooperative state.

The entire spectrum of political leadership in this country now appears to accept that idea, which is an indication of just how far U.S. military dominance has tilted the policy debate in this country. - Gareth Porter in The Huffington Post (my emphasis)

Key policy makers going back to the Wilson administration have been pushing for total American military hegemony. In this policy - backed by the über-rich for whom these policies were designed - they were joined by the Neoliberal economic cheerleaders (including the Clintons), because it means complete American military, political and economic control of the world and outer space.

Simply put, this policy is most recent revision of the philosophy - first formulated by President Woodrow Wilson - that the United States must carry “democracy” (not to mention American commercial interests) to less enlightened states, by force if necessary.

President Wilson’s vision was one that some political scientists call “moral.” In modern times, this has been transmogrified and revised into what some call transnationalism, or globalization. These policies are not subject to public debate, by the way, but arise from the secret meetings of economic cabals such as the Bilderberg Group and Rockefeller’s only slightly more public Trilateral Commission. These cabals are not composed of darkly evil people looking to be the masterminds behind One World government; they all believe that they are helping to build a more humane, just and economically-flattened transnational world; to Tom Friedmanize the planet, as it were. To a realist’s eye, it’s all hokum, of course; just gussied-up royal prerogative. On the other hand, it bears repeating that J. Paul Bremer, prior to his appointment as governor pro tem of Iraq, was the president of Kissinger Associates, advisors to transnational corporations looking to make a fast buck in Third World countries. Closely associated with the Clintons is Mack McLarty, a Kissinger alum. As Adam Smith might put it, they are all motivated by pure greed.

In this regard, one only has to look at Bill Clinton’s bombing and invasion of Bosnia to confirm that the Clintons are of the same mind on the use of military might in pursuit of foreign policy goals. It’s also worth mentioning that this is one of the core beliefs of the Neoconservatives: the promotion of democracy and Neoliberal economic policy to benighted régimes, regardless of the social or cultural milieu that underlie monarchial, authoritarian, and/or theocratic states such as Iran or even Saudi Arabia.

As for our relations with democratic states whose economic policies aren’t in sync with ours, it is significant that when it was revealed that the Bush administration actively helped plan and finance the military coup that ousted democratically-elected Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2002, Hillary – or any other leading senator for that matter - didn’t utter so much as a squeak.

The whole point is, of course, control of the oil, and with it, the economic destiny of the world.

Additional sources:

1) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)

2) Simon Reich, What is Globalization? Four Possible Answers (The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1998)

3) Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

4) Howard Zinn, The Uses of History (from a broadcast on Democracy Now!, 11/24/06)

current-events

Why Congress caved to Bush

I don't like Patrick Buchanan very much. In fact I despise him, but the guy knows enough to call a spade a spade. Why did the Democrats in Congress stab their constituency in the back? Pat lays it out in no uncertain terms.

Why Congress caved to Bush

By Patrick J. Buchanan

05/25/07 "WorldNetDaily" -- -- The anti-war Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.

For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.

Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.

Yet, today, there are more U.S. troops in Iraq than when the Democrats won. More are on the way. And with the surge and retention of troops in Iraq beyond normal tours, there should be a record number of U.S. troops in country by year's end.

Why did the Democrats capitulate?

Because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they fear the consequences if they put their anti-war beliefs into practice. Because they are afraid if they defund the war and force President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops, the calamity he predicts will come to pass and they will be held accountable for losing Iraq and the strategic disaster that might well ensue.

Democrats are an intimidated party. The reasons are historical. They were shredded by Nixon and Joe McCarthy for FDR's surrenders to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, for losing China to Mao's hordes, for the "no-win war" in Korea, for being "soft on communism."

The best and the brightest – JFK's New Frontiersmen – were held responsible for plunging us into Vietnam and proving incapable of winning the war. A Democratic Congress cut off aid to Saigon in 1975, ceding Southeast Asia to Hanoi and bringing on the genocide of Pol Pot.

Democrats know they are distrusted on national security. They fear that if they defund this war and bring on a Saigon ending in the Green Zone, it will be a generation before they are trusted with national power. And power is what the party is all about.

Yet, not only does the situation in Iraq appear increasingly grim, with rising U.S. and Iraqi casualties, other shoes are about to drop that will reverberate throughout the region.

Support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his war in Lebanon a debacle and his leadership denounced by a commission he appointed, is in single digits. Waiting in the wings is Likud super-hawk "Bibi" Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, who compares today to Munich 1938 and equates Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

If and when Bibi comes to power, he will use every stratagem to provoke us into attacking "Hitler."

Also drumming for war on Iran are the floundering neocons and the Israeli lobby. Under orders from the lobby, Nancy Pelosi stripped from a House bill a stipulation that Bush must come to Congress for authorization before launching an attack on Iran.

With Democratic contenders reciting the mantra "All options are on the table," and Iran defying U.N. sanctions, pursuing nuclear enrichment and detaining U.S. citizens, Bush has a blank check to launch a third war.

Lebanon is ablaze. Gaza is ablaze. The Afghan war is not going well. The Taliban have a privileged sanctuary. The NATO allies grow weary.

In Pakistan, the most dangerous country on earth – one bullet away from an Islamic republic with atom bombs – our erstwhile ally, President Musharraf, is caught in a political crisis over his ouster of the chief justice.

Presidents Musharraf in Islamabad, Kharzi in Kabul and Siniora in Beirut, and Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, sit on shaky thrones. No one knows what follows their fall. But it is hard to see how it would not be crippling for America's position.

With such volatility in this crucial region of the world, with such uncertainty, it is easy to see why Democrats prefer to be the "dummy" at the bridge table and let Bush play the hand.

The congressional Democrats are cynical, but they are not stupid. If the surge works and U.S. troops are being withdrawn by fall 2008, they do not want it said of them that they "cut and ran" when the going got tough, that they played Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill.

And if the war is going badly in 2008, they know that the American people, in repudiating the party of Bush and Cheney, have no other choice than the party of Hillary and Pelosi and Harry Reid.

That is why congressional Democrats are surely saying privately of the angry anti-war left what has often been said by the Beltway Republican elite of the right: "Don't worry about them. They have nowhere else to go."

And that is why the anti-war left was thrown under the bus.

Copyright 1997-2007 - WorldNetDaily.com Inc.

current-events

It's still about the oil

US soldier guards Iraqi oil facility

Well, let's see how we're doing there in ol' Iraq.

Hmm, it doesn't look good. General Pretaeus is saying that "there is no military solution"; then he condradicts himself and says, "As citizens feel safer, conditions will be set for the resumption and improvement of basic services."

Duh, how does he figure that citizens will "feel safer"? From what I read, 50,000 Iraqis a month are fleeing the country, as I have previously pointed out. Among those leaving Iraq are the blue-collar technicians who used to run the "basic services." At this rate, there won't be anybody left in the country to vote for the new, unified, and harmonious government, much less "improve" what's left of a country and oil industry in freaking ruins.

President Bush continues - against every standard of sane or reasoned thinking - to hope against hope for some kind of victory in Iraq, any victory, even going so far as to grudgingly start talking about "benchmarks."

However, let's make one thing perfectly clear: the only benchmark that really counts for Bush and his neo-con cabal (and plenty of Democrats are secretly in agreement with these thugs) is the "oil law," and remember, when push comes to shove - fuck "victory" - it's still all about the oil.

current-events

Tenet cries into his beer

The International Herald Tribune has obtained a copy of George Tenet's new book, "At the Center of the Storm," due out Monday. In it, Tenet unleashes his frustration at what he perceived as shabby treatment by the folks in the White House.

He pours a lot of vitriol over the figurative heads of the administration, and in no uncertain terms, although he never directly criticizes the president by name. Also, he whines just a little too much that he was a "patsy." (And him a grown man ...)

Anyhoo, some random quotes:

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years.

Nor, he adds, "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Tenet admits that he made his famous "slam dunk" remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on Bush's decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of "Meet the Press" last September in which Cheney twice referred to Tenet's "slam dunk" remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

"I remember watching and thinking, 'As if you needed me to say 'slam dunk' to convince you to go to war with Iraq,'" Tenet writes.

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. "It may have worked more than three years ago," he wrote. "My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence."

As violence in Iraq spiraled, beginning in late 2003, Tenet writes, "rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess."

There's more at: Tenent Denounces Cheney

Why Abizaid has to go

Lots of waterfront property here

As the House Democrats pound the committee room tabletops and demand of Condi Rice what the hell she really thinks the word "surge" means (the Dems are in fine rhetorical form, now that the Republicans have had to relinquish important committee leadership positions to the Dems), one important detail that has slipped under their radar is the replacement of Gen. John Abizaid (a ground-pounding Army commander and head of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East) with Adm. William Fallon, currently the commander of the Pacific Command (PACOM), a Navy avaitor guy.

Several commentators have picked up on this odd move, but I think that Michael T. Klare over at The Nation has the best heads up.

The choice of Fallon to replace Abizaid was highly unusual in several respects. First, this is a lateral move for the admiral, not a promotion: As head of Pacom, Fallon commanded a larger force than he will oversee at Centcom, and one over which he will exercise less direct control since all combat operations in Iraq will be under the supervision of Gen. Dave Petraeus, the recently announced replacement for Gen. George Casey as commander of all US and allied forces. Second, and more surprising, Fallon is a Navy man, with experience in carrier operations, while most of Centcom's day-to-day work is on the ground, in the struggle against insurgents and warlords in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Part of the explanation for this move, of course, is a desire by the White House to sweep away bitter ground-force commanders like Abizaid and Casey who had opposed an increase in US troops in Iraq and argued for shifting greater responsibility for the fighting to Iraq forces, thereby permitting a gradual American withdrawal. "The Baghdad situation requires more Iraqi troops,"
not more Americans, Abizaid said in a recent interview with the New York Times.

For this alone, Abizaid had to go.

But there's more to it. Abizaid, who is of Lebanese descent and served a tour of duty with UN forces in Lebanon, has come to see the need for a regional solution to the crisis in Iraq--one that inevitably requires some sort of engagement with Iran and Syria, as recommended by the Iraq Study Group. "You have to internationalize the problem, you have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he told the Times. "You just can't apply a microscope on a particular problem in downtown Baghdad...and say that somehow or another, if you throw enough military forces at it, you are going to solve the broader issues in the region of extremism."

If engagement with Iran and Syria was even remotely on the agenda, Abizaid is exactly the man you'd want on the job at Centcom overseeing US forces and strategy in the region. But if that's not on the agenda, if you're thinking instead of using force against Iran and/or Syria, then Admiral Fallon is exactly the man you'd want at Centcom.

Why? Because combined air and naval operations are his forte. Fallon began his combat career as a Navy combat flyer in Vietnam, and he served with carrier-based forces for twenty-four years after that. He commanded a carrier battle wing during the first Gulf War in 1991 and led the naval group supporting NATO operations during the Bosnia conflict four years later. More recently, Fallon served as vice chief of naval operations before becoming the head of Pacom in 2005. All this means that he is primed to oversee an air, missile and naval attack on Iran, should the President give the green light for such an assault--and the fact that Fallon has been moved from Pacom to Centcom means that such a move is very much on
Bush's mind.

The recent replacement of General Abizaid by Admiral Fallon, along with other recent moves announced by the Defense Secretary, should give deep pause to anyone concerned about the prospect of escalation in the Iraq War.

Contrary to the advice given by the Iraq Study Group, Bush appears to be planning for a wider war--with much higher risk of catastrophic failure--not a gradual and dignified withdrawal from the region.

Make no mistake, Gentle Readers, this president has shown time and again that he has his own agenda, and regardless of the wishes and desires of the Ameircan people, he will kill as many Arabs (even though Iran is actually full of Aryans, not Arabs) as he possibly can before he is dragged off the stage of history, his legacy of death fully secured in the history books, and let the next guy clean up the mess.

Update: David Corn has a rumor to pass on:

The Abizaid ousting reminded me of a story a retired Army colonel told me last spring. This source still spends much time with Army commanders, occasionally as a consultant and as a participant in strategic discussions held at the Army's various institutions. He noted that he had recently been talking to Army commanders at a military war college. His colleagues said that Abizaid routinely visited their institution and would "walk the halls" complaining that he had no options in Iraq, that he did not know where to aim his guns, where to dispatch his troops. He was wringing his hands. This description made it seem that Abizaid had concluded that Bush's war was probably lost and that Abizaid was (justifiably) depressed. Which would mean that he was living in a reality-based hell. No wonder he had to go.