Iraq, the unraveling (XXIV): U.S. embassy vs. U.S. military, again

Geez, I wish we had folks representing us who know something about America. It's our guys hanging out there with their asses on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, our money paying for these follies, and the idea that our on-the-ground leadership needs be expert on the locals in order to be effective badly misreads our interests.

Iraq has been butt-deep in US experts. Result: a morass. Let's try having someone in charge who cares about how it turns out for the USA and - if that means saying screw it to the Iraqis - so be it.

BTW, medical science is still wondering who had the brain transplant, TR or Odierno. And now, for his second transformation, Odierno is posing as representative of American political interests. All you Iraq hands: how about seeing it through an American lens ... which might just get us shut and clear of this whole (Bush-created) mess.

That's pretty disturbing.

I've been disturbed about the quantity of dispatches relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan coming from what seems like the military point of view (and the military commanders' point of view in particular) to the detriment of understanding the aims of the political and diplomatic sides and even dismissing the strategic/political adjustments being made under a new administration. That Ricks would seem to give Odierno the benefit of the doubt here is an example of what I'm talking about.

These Foreign Policy blogs are a great service, but the reporting on the personalities in the news is starting to feel a bit like the rest of Beltway journalism, from health care on, in that it's lost in the blow-by-blow, missing the big picture, and constrained by the biases and agendas of the insider sources. And the nuggets of wisdom filtered through the press from the foreign policy establishment is a sign that these figures know little more about what America should do now than they did when Bush was in office.

Thanks for the good news. I'm glad we have someone like Christopher Hill doing the right thing in Iraq. It's good to know that men like Hill are taking charge and ignoring the pentagon fake expert liars. I guess if Davey boy was there every thing would be ship shape! Everything Davey does is perfect. Davey is the smartest man in the world. I just don't understand why the smartest man in the world can't produce any victories for America. Oh, sorry, I forgot, Davey doesn't work for America, he works for the pentagon. Victories are bad, the wars might end. No money in peace, ya know!

Unity of command problems? I thought the tax payers provide lavish funds for our perfumed princes to learn about this kind of stuff at their little "War Colleges". Looks like the brutal thug Odierno is college dumb, like the rest of the perfumed princes that have ruined the Army and Marines. Odierno's military bearing is pathetic, he looks like a steroid juiced bouncer at a strip club. I feel sorry for our enlisted soldiers being led by this loser.

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What was the expertise that prompted candidate Barack Obama to declare that we must transfer our effort from Iraq to Afghanistan? During the few years that he was a lecturer on constitutional law (!), then an Illinois state senator, he could not also have been an expert on Central Asia, could he? If not, someone must have been prompting him to make that declaration. Will that person now step forward?

If no such person, then there is a theory that, like all of our recent presidents, Barack Obama is simply a narcissist, and - as is the way with that personality - he likes to project authority and confidence even when he does not know beans about anything, especially foreign policy.

With our politicians in bed with corporate America and PAC-political lobbysts, we are on "auto-pilot" in search of "just" wars. The solution from this disease is so easy and yet so difficult because of the way our political system is structured.With corporate lobbysts having their on internal matters and PACs highjacking our foreign policy, we are screwed.

Someone please save America,ban lobbying and campaign contributions of all kinds.As a topping, we need term limits for Congress and the Senate.

Dear Mr. Ricks, isn't this getting a bit old? You have been predicting the 'unravelling' in Iraq for years now, and yet it still doesn't come. Is there an expiration date for your predictions? Are you making mountains out of mole hills regarding Odierno/Hill? Will you keep writing about the 'unravelling' until your last breath? You seem like a very important pundit, and I for one would like to hear more of your fresh opinions on places like Somalia and Yemen.

In the 1950's, we were taught that Russia, or the USSR, was evil because they wanted to take over the world by force. Then we were told that cold war was over and we could see they were just like us. I always thought it meant that they were good people too, but then I realized it meant they, like us, are planning to take over the world by force, but no reason not to play along with them. I find it astonishing that the one subject going on that is most scary is one the press won't touch: The Pentagon has taken over the world and no one really knows what they plan to do about it. Obama surely has no clue, or at least he has zero say in the matter. We are officially a military state and though it isn't clear when the coup d'etat happened, it is still in full metal jacket.

It is frightening to me that the military is in a power struggle with civilian authority. The military is suppose to do what it is told by civilian authority. Churchill had a great comment concerning this subject, but I can't locate it. I bet you know it Mr. Ricks.

More interesting that any disagreements between Odierno and Hill is the address made in the UN General Assembly a few days back by Iraqi president al-Maliki. In that lengthy series of addresses from sundry heads of government, the speakers' times were limited, and they tended to unburden themselves of one central issue pressing on their mind.

Al-Maliki's issue: pleading with the UN to remove all regulations that offer a fig leaf of legality for the continued presence of US and other Coalition forces in his nation.

The clear implication of this speech, much unreported within the US and lavishly reported elsewhere, is that the Iraqi government is bending every possible effort to get foreign forces out of the country at the earliest possible date. And in the context of this Ricks article, the clear implication of THAT is that ambassador Hill has a much better handle on the future of the US military in Iraq than do the local leaders of the US military. Time to start mapping the farewell victory ceremony.

The hallmark of Chris Hill's pre-Iraq career was a February 2007 agreement with North Korea that the North began violating within weeks of signing it, and for which the North demanded the lifting of sanctions President Obama later had to reimpose when the North predictably walked away from the deal and tested a nuke. The deal also required Hill to coopt the Federal Reserve into returning $25 million in criminally derived funds to Kim Jong Il (see 18 U.S.C. 1957). Hill suppressed intelligence that North Korea was building the Syrians their own nuclear reactor, drawing furious reactions from Republicans and Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee. He overlooked repeated violations of UNSCR 1718, allowing North Korea to continue selling weapons abroad, thus weakening the international counter-proliferation framework that President Obama is now trying to rebuild. He was repeatedly deceptive in concealing North Korea's numerous cheats, obfuscations, and refusals to disclose or disarm.

On issue after issue, Christopher Hill excused North Korea from its agreed obligations -- to come clean on uranium enrichment, fully disclose its nuclear programs, disclose or turn over weapons or fissile material, disclose and halt proliferation activities, return the Japanese abductees (or their remains), or address its crimes against humanity. He had promised various members of Congress that those terms were non-negotiable, but then duly negotiated them all away until we were holding an empty bag. Hill knew by 2007 that his deal was falling apart, yet he spent the next year asking Congress to agree to more concessions while knowing full well that we'd get nothing in return. And we see the result.

http://newledger.com/2009/04/christopher-hill-deep-kimchee-for-iraq/

Hill alone isn't responsible for that, of course. Secretary Rice and President Bush knew exactly what was happening. They couldn't be bothered with national security interests when they had their legacies to think about.

Fortunately, Iraq is a sleepy backwater were Christopher Hill can't possibly do our national interests any more harm.

An historical look (recently voiced by Rory Stewart) at British administration around the globe indicated success when the administrators lived many years in a region, knew (and were rigorously tested on) the local languages, and had to manage their own budget and security with minimal home-nation assistance. More recently, Frank Kitson noted that when it came to providing counter-insurgency assistance to another nation, the ambassador should be (without question) the lead and there should be clear relationships and organization of subordinate civil, military and police organizations. Certainly politics drives strategy. Kitson likely assumed that ambassadors were experts in their regions, which may not be the case here.

State today is bound by quality of life expectations that diplomatic staff will move more frequently than in the 18th and 19th centuries, and lacks a significant impetus to develop the kind of regional expertise of a few hundred years ago: Americans don't emigrate to the developing world.

As long as all the soldiers and all the diplomats know they're going to be returning to the USA in a matter of a couple of dozen months at most, there's little incentive to really learn the languages and customs or sort out command structure problems.

Odierno is sort of a bull in a china shop who tried to have a "kinetic" relationship with Iraq. He can't understand that Iraq will never put up with an American Proconsul like Bremer again-- especially not a ham-fisted general. Hill, on the other hand, replaced Zinni at the last moment as Obama's signal that we're leaving. Odierno doesn't want to realize that the price of postponing the plebiscite on the SOFA accord is letting loose of the Baghdad Gov. Gates may have been fooled by McChrystal when the latter deceived him that he's a guy who wants to do more with less. But Odierno's species is given away by his specific anthropomorphic form. You don't send in a gorilla to make nice. That's why Hill replaced Zinni. It may all be unwinding because what Bush hath wroth cannot be undone: through Bremer he institutionalized the Shia-Sunni split under guise of anti-Bathists in order to divide and conquer-- it was all about the oil man...and now that China's got it we have no more business there. So even if the phony surge unravels because, well, it was phony-baloney as the Saudis and Kuwaitis keep feeding cash to Sunnis and Iran to Shias, we can only get out of the way because, as Hill was told often by Maliki, if we let the big gorilla loose they'll call a plebiscite and we all know how lovable Odierno and his predecessor are amongst Iraqis (hint: every Iraqi over 10y/o knows that the Surge was an architecture imported from Israel and no Iraqis like to see themselves as America's Palestinians.