Genesis of the Escalation

Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com offers a chilling narrative about how the "surge" escalation came to pass.

Some highlights.

The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report. "Although the president was publicly polite," the Washington Post reported, "few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new 'way forward' in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme. As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton."

Donald Rumsfeld had been sacrificed as the secretary of defense, but his replacement, Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA and member of the ISG, turned from skeptic into team player. The Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command; and Gen. George Casey, commander in Iraq, all opposed the "surge" as no answer. Cheney and the neocons saw their opposition as the opening for purging and blaming them. The Joint Chiefs were ignored and sidelined,
Abizaid was forced into retirement and Casey was removed (sent into internal exile as Army chief of staff). Their dissent, leaked to the Washington Post for appearance in the paper on the day of Bush's "surge" speech, was an extraordinary gesture by the senior military leaders to distance themselves from impending failure.

Also intriguing is the discussion about the differences between the Clinton Administration's approach to Bosnia and the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq, outlined in last night's speech.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, full sovereignty was not granted through an election -- to this day -- which would have turned over the country to one of the three contending religio-ethnic groups and fomented opposition insurgencies. Instead, the U.S. led in organizing a broad range of international partners and institutions in creating a structure of stability that is a basis for gradual democratic development. By contrast, the election Bush promoted in Iraq was political grandstanding in the name of "democracy" that incited the exclusion of Sunnis and aggravated civil warfare. Almost everything in place in Bosnia and Kosovo is absent in Iraq. The former is an example of U.S. leadership, the latter a case study in amateurish blundering. Moreover, Bush has turned "democracy" into a synonym for failure.