US Military Leadership Failure in Iraq

On at least two counts, it seems like the war of choice that the US embarked on in Iraq has quickly turned into another Vietnam for the Bush White House. First, it has become a war which many people believe can no longer be won. Secondly, for members of the US military top brass, the war has increasingly exposed their inability to exhibit leadership expectations. One would recall that some analysts of the Vietnam war argue that long after it became obvious that the US military would be unable to dominate the situation in Vietnam, rather than find the courage to convey that assessment to their civilian leaders, the top brass preferred to play along in what became known as card-punching all in the bid to protect their careers. It is happening again, this time in Iraq.

Since General Shinkeshi gave his candid opinion during Congressional hearings on what he felt were the right estimates of the number of troops he thought was needed in Iraq, and was retired for it, no other serving members of the top brass has been willing again to convey their candid assessment of the situation of things on the ground in Iraq. A front-page story in the USA Today yesterday indicated that attacks on the transportation of supplies for the military in Iraq have been on the increase. From the military point of view, the implications of that story are enormous. As skilled managers of violence, US military top brass are not unaware of the fact that the inability to guarantee supplies to a highly complex outfit like the US military in a theater of operation is not a child’s play after all. There are other related indicators of the inability of the US military so far to dominate the situation in Iraq. Those are in the sense that the US military even at this stage still finds it difficult to move around the entire theater of operation in Iraq—in the air and on the ground—without hindrance. Yet, it does not seem as the top brass have summoned the courage to convey the true implications of that to their civilian leaders. If they do, there is little doubt that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their advisers will certainly be showing some inclinations towards modifying their insistence that they will not accept anything short of “victory” in Iraq. Military victory is unlikely under the aforementioned state of affairs.

The only members of the top brass who have expressed their candid assessment of the situation of things in Iraq are those who are no longer in active service. The inability of the top brass who are still in active service to express such candid assessment is plainly a failure of leadership. One is at a loss as to what the US military establishment and the Bush White House are hoping to make out of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Someone recently mentioned in a conversation that he would not wish the military situation of things in Iraq today on his worst enemy. The top brass must help with the right leadership.

How Is the General Doing So Far?

Here at IkengaComments, our informed assessment has been that US support for Pakistan’s dictator, General Pervez Musharraf is a misguided gamble that has very high chances of unraveling in a manner which could shift US geopolitical calculations in that part of the world into a pitiful situation. Staking so much on the continuity of an individual, a dictator for that matter who is in power in such a precariously volatile society cannot but merit such a bleak assessment.

Mr. Musharraf’s travails since he sacked the Chief Justice have not fared that well. He has faced increasing open challenge to his regime from several sections of the Pakistani civil society ever since. If the US is less jittery about the opposition that lawyers and other notable members of the Pakistani civil society have mobilized against him in response to that singular action, the opposition that he is now facing from radical Islamists will be serious cause for worry for the Bush White House given the conviction that the end of his dictatorship will not be good for the success of the War on Terror, WoT.

The stand-off currently going on between his regime and a radical mosque in Islamabad, is not likely to unfold and end favorably for him. The opposition that his removal of the Chief Judge fanned could have emboldened the Islamists who are involved in this stand-off. The heavy gun shots fired at the aircraft he was flying in yesterday is a clear escalation of the uncertainty he is faced with. Knowing how dictators function, Musharraf will occupy himself henceforth with the task of survival. He will do that by using every trick at his disposal to manipulate the US for support even as he strives to suppress those who are opposed to his dictatorship in Pakistan. The US will be quite eager to aid his efforts to suppress the Islamists. But the unfortunate thing about that is that the General may not be quite willing to go after the Islamists in a decisive manner. The Islamists will make life increasingly difficult for him if they sense any shift in what may have been a secret pact between him and them. In other words, there is a clear risk in pressing the General to move decisively against the Islamists. On the other hand, if the status quo ante sustains, it may not last that long. The non-Islamist opposition may not relent that easily in their quest to curb what it considers the General’s excesses. In deed, so far, the General is not doing that well.

Humanity Must Protect Itself

Critics of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, WoT in general and the invasion and occupation of Iraq insist that it is so ill-conceived, wrong-headed, and ill-executed that rather than achieve their executors’ proclaimed outcomes of making the world safer from Islamist terrorism, will and are exacerbating the scourge by doing otherwise. It does not take the services of a seer for an honest observer to discern from the deluge of news reports each week that the world is far from being safe from the heartless individuals who wrap themselves with the jihadist banner of Islamism and present themselves as willing zealots ready to embark on any manner of terrorist acts that unleash terror on unsuspecting people.

The recent terror-related events in Britain involving well-educated individuals from Iraq and India do not just underscore the view that the world is increasingly unsafe; they should also be cause for worry for every sensible person anywhere in the world. For one, Britain was never a target of Islamist terrorism prior to its involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Apart from Spain, which under the previous government was also a member of the clique of three that embarked on the invasion of Iraq with Mr. Bush, no other society has been targeted by Islamist terror as much as Britain since the invasion of Iraq. The lives of unsuspecting members of society have been turned upside down in virtually every part of the world because of the looming prospects of terrorist attacks. International travelers and other users of air transportation are so concerned of their safety these days that some of them resort to executing or updating their will each time before they embark on trips. We know where it all began, but we do not know when it will end.

Meanwhile, US politicians, particularly the ardent Republicans who blindly lined up support for the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq are finding it just expedient to re-calibrate their position on the occupation just to suit their political survival. In the last few weeks the gradual shift in the support of the occupation noticed in some Republican Party senators is evidently inspired by fear that they might loose their seats in their re-election bid next year. The latest shift in stance of support was expressed just yesterday by New Mexico’s Pete Domenici who is facing re-election next year. Earlier, it was the turn of Virginia’s John Warner, who is also billed for re-election next year. The troubling aspect of the shift in the support of these individual US senators for the occupation of Iraq is that it is just enough to enable a campaign stance that could translate into a message to win as many votes from many of the voters whose initial support for the invasion and occupation has completely soured. Mr. Domenici who is “not calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops” merely railed against an “Iraqi government [which] is not making measurable progress”. He is calling “for a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to continuing home”. How that path will unmake all the wrong-headed aspects of the policy of invasion and occupation is yet to be figured out.

It is high time for the rest of the world to rally and come up on their own with anti-terror policies capable of succeeding. Someone mentioned the other time that such a policy will necessarily not involve the US so along as it is intent on waging the WoT as it currently conceived it. Humanity cannot afford to continuing living in fear and stress. The world must rally and begin the task of protecting and saving itself.

Nigeria’s Dysfunctional Leadership Spawns Hostage Taking

Every time there is news about Nigeria these days, it is bad news. Bad news, not in the sense that Nigerians and their country are being smeared in a conspiracy of sorts in the international press. It is bad news that come straight from bad acts perpetrated in Nigeria by either Nigerian officialdom or through neglects by it. One is talking about the regular news of hostage-taking that takes place these days in the Niger Delta where much of the hydrocarbons that provide 85% of the revenue that sustains Nigeria’s dysfunctional supra-national state, are extracted from.

Refusal by Nigeria’s dysfunctional leaders to respond honestly to the demands by inhabitants of the Niger Delta to be allowed a fair share of the wealth that accrues from the hydrocarbons that are extracted in such reckless manner which destroys and degrades their environment, has spawned shameful acts of hostage-taking by militants and even brigands that are flashed almost regularly in the international media. Up until today when a 3-year-old child of a British oil worker became their latest victim, the hostage takers have specifically concentrated on mostly foreign oil workers. In all cases, they released their victims after holding them for some time. They have consistently indicated that their intention has been to draw attention to the plight of inhabitants of the Delta who exist in unconscionable poverty even as the wealth realized from the resources that are taken from their homeland is stolen and shared out by Nigeria’s corrupt rulers.

One cannot take the liberty to condone their acts of hostage taking. At the same time, the harshest condemnation is reserved for Nigeria’s leaders who have let this state of affairs perpetuate itself. It is absolutely clear that the Nigerian supra-national state and the corrupt individuals that operate it are incapable of subduing the militants and brigands who are responsible for these acts. Why then have they refused to hearken to demands made by aggrieved nationalities in the country for an equitable restructure of the polity to give all excluded groups a sense of belonging? Amongst other reasons, their refusal bothers on the sort of irresponsibility that derives from dysfunctional disposition. It is only dysfunctional leaders who will care next to nothing about the atrocities that they inflict on their society so long as they feather their nests. Many Nigerians are sick and tired of a dysfunctional leadership that presides over their affairs in ways that spawn anger and acts of brigandage from aggrieved groups. Nigeria’s rulers are as responsible as the de facto perpetrators of acts of hostage taking in the Niger Delta. Reasonable people the world over must lend their condemnation for not just the hostage takers who have now resorted to abducting babies, but also for Nigeria’s corrupt and dysfunctional leaders.

America Is Challenged Again By Its Own Presidency

Ronald Reagan’s presidency saddled America as a society with the challenge of looking at itself in the mirror and telling itself nothing but the truth about what it saw. However, American society woefully failed itself in that regard. Rather than disclose that the man Reagan lacked the intellectual capacity required for the highly demanding office he occupied, the society shielded his lack of that capacity all in the bid to protect the US presidency, an office which is so highly exalted by a good majority of Americans to the point that stokes their conviction that it is divinely-ordained to provide the leadership necessary for the so-called shining city on the hill to lead the rest of humanity out of decadence.

The eagerness to flaunt Mr. Reagan’s superb communication skills was almost suffocating. His affliction with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive ailment that cripple’s the mental capacity of its victims slowly but decisively over the course of time was probably kept from public view until it became impossible to hide successfully any more. Even then, the preference was to portray him as a cowboy riding away into the sunset but to nowhere in particular. Rather than come clean and admit that there was nothing but hollow to the man, Edmund Morris, who was commissioned to write Mr. Reagan’s authorized memoir and given unfettered access to him in the White House and even after he left the place at the end of his mandatory two terms, claimed instead that his subject was impenetrable. To the effect that what he produced as a memoir 14 years later in 1999 was a faction in which he blatantly tried to portray him as an exceptional gift from God to the rest of the world.

George W. Bush’s presidency has saddled America with a challenge almost similar to the one it unsuccessfully grappled with in Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. This time, some sections of the American society, including some mass media channels are effectively trying to sanctify themselves in their efforts to factually portray what The New Yorker starkly describes as “the callow, lazy, and ignorant President”. The four-part series in Washington Post last week entitled, “ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY” will remain one of the more explicit proof of this description of Mr. Bush. More than anything else, the series expose the systematic manner with which Mr. Cheney has taken advantage of Mr. Bush’s apparent hollowness to become “the most influential public official in the country” even though he occupies ‘what John Adams called’ “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. The Post series authored by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker are so revealing that there is hardly much doubt in the minds of many Americans about who is actually in charge of their affairs during the Bush presidency. The only initiative that Bush went out of his way to take without Cheney’s clearance was his unsuccessful appointment of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court. According to the Post series, that rebellion was quickly shot down by Cheney who after muttering derisively to an associate that Bush “Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself” engaged his “right-wing allies to upend Miers”. That was how Cheney finally compelled Bush to return to the short list of five appellate judges that he prepared and kept handy ahead of time, to select Samuel Alito

It took the invasion of Iraq by false pretences to awaken sections of the American society to the task of grappling the challenge that it is faced with in the Bush presidency.

The Post-9/11 Question

Right after the unconscionable Al-Qaeda-scripted and directed terrorist attacks on the US in the morning of September 11, 2001, a question started making the rounds in key US-based mass media channels, particularly conservative talk radio: “Why Do They Hate Us?” The ‘They’ in the question refers to ‘the rest of the world’, and the ‘Us’ refers of course to the ‘US’. Up till date, the one answer to that question that floated most on conservative talk radio here in the US was that the rest of the world hates the US because its loves democracy and that the attach is the manifestation of the hatred of the US by the rest of the world. For any objective analyst or observer, it was an answer that begged the question because people in every corner of the world mourned with Americans over those acts: major newspapers in many parts of the world went out of their way to proclaim in extra-ordinary pieces of editorial that “We Are All Americans!” The inherent truth in this proclamation underscored the support and justification expressed by many people all over the world for the invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by the US to punish Al-Qaeda and its leaders for their terrorist attacks on America.

But beyond Afghanistan, in its reaction to those attacks, the Bush White was completely taken by its sworn conservative credentials. Going by the tenacity that it exhibited as it fished around for excuses and justifications to invade Iraq on the grounds that it was involved in the attacks, there has been little doubt that Mr. George Bush himself, his vice, Mr. Dick Cheney, and the range of their high-ranking aides all subscribe to the answer to the aforementioned question peddled on conservative radio that the rest of the world hates America because it loves democracy. Proof of this was partly revealed in a Washington Post story Monday July 2 on Mr. Bush ineffectual attempts to understand the isolation he is experiencing at a time when his presidency is about to end. In the absence of factual evidence, no one except perhaps Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their supporters, believes any more that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks. There is no doubt that many are disappointed in Mr. Bush and his administration as a result.

The story is that Mr. Bush has been spending a lot of time with individual theologians, historians, philosophers, and leading authors or groups of them that he invites to the White House to help him seek answers over light refreshments to an array of questions that include: “Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?” He does not yet appreciate that his preference for the answer to the question spawned by conservative radio is largely responsible for all the failing policy initiatives, particularly on Iraq, he has taken so far, and that they are largely responsible for souring turn in his presidency.

Although no one knows at this point what his invitees tell Mr. Bush in response to the many questions that he tables before them, every one of them who has said anything so far is convinced that he is a highly isolated individual, and that he is highly fixated on Iraq. According to a former aide who recently visited with him: “Nothing matters except the war. That’s all that matters. The whole thing rides on that.” That fixation is to the degree of disengagement from serious governance issues. His friends who made excuses for him insist that he is not oblivious of the responsibilities of the presidency. But that incompetence that pervades every aspect of his presidency so far still lingers. Rather than engage New York Congressmen that he invited to accompany him to a school in Harlem to promote his education program on issues of importance he preferred to talk baseball aboard Air Force One. One of them, Democrat Charlie B. Rangle, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which was involved in a tough negotiations with the White House on trade pacts at the time was so disappointed in Mr. Bush’s preference to talk baseball instead of serious legislative issues. Rangle’s observation that: “He talked a lot about the Rangers. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about” was to say the least aptly dismissive of one who he felt lacked the capacity for rising up to what the occasion demanded. Can Mr. Bush's reported capacity or "terrific knack of not looking through the rearview (sic) mirror" to absorb the massive wreckage produced by virtually all his policy initiatives indicate anything in his personality with regard to particularly his evident incompetence as president?

Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with the right answer(s) to the post-9/11 question for himself may be the greatest undoing of his presidency so far. The US, indeed, the world is worst off for it.

The Immigration Reform Debate in the US

Beyond the charges of nativism and xenophobia that proponents of comprehensive immigration reform in the US might level at those Americans who advocate otherwise, the recent failure of the Immigration Reform Bill twice in the US Senate in less than two months is cause for a more conscientious soul-searching in both camps. Such an endeavor is necessary particularly for the reasons that it will lay bare the core issues in the immigration reform debate and pave the way for durable solutions to a major problem that knocks at the heart of what American society is all about and what most Americans aspire for.

The efforts made by representatives of those thirteen colonies that canalized into the birth of what they called the United States of America erased in the most fundamental way the possibility of any one of them ever reverting to the desire to chart the sort of independence existence which might set it separate and apart from the other members of the Union. This is in terms of forging another society distinct in language and culture from the Union itself. The slave-owning states in the South of the Union that attempted such a reversion when they found that their continued subscription to its Charters posed a mortal danger to slavery as the basis of their civilization provoked the Civil War. At the end not only that they were defeated and dragged back into the Union, they also lost the basis of their plantation-based agricultural economy. Perhaps the failure of their rebellion convinced them once and for all that they are part and parcel of a mainstream society that subscribes to one language, etc. Ever since, the idea of a separate existence doesn't hold currency in any meaningful way in America.

The Hispanics who cross into the US in large numbers in search of economic opportunities seem to have failed to realize that their determination by default perhaps to cling fast to their Latino cultures—including their language—is being seen as a challenge to what America is all about. The evident and gradual shift to bilingualism in the conduct of some official business is big cause for worry amongst many Americans who now see Hispanics as invaders who are determined to either over-run their society or establish a visibly different society within the United States. Americans were horrified to see Hispanics re-write their national anthem in Spanish language, wave different flags other than the US flag even as they sort support to be legalized. It is common place these days to hear complaints of rude and blatant behavior by Hispanics from many Americans. Americans are highly concerned about what they perceive as threats to displace them in their own society by people who give them cause to perceive them as insensitive Hispanics. There is anger towards Hispanics these days.

On the other hand, many Americans have failed to realize that better economic climate in Latin America is the most effective antidote to large-scale Hispanic immigration into the US. A better economic climate can be achieved in Latin America through more equitable policy initiatives by the US to wards Latin American countries. Polls have shown that Americans are not entirely averse to the idea of immigration reform. They seem to be averse to any endeavor which will encourage people to subvert the core of their society. Comprehensive immigration reform in the US will not be possible unless the aforementioned issues are properly understood and addressed.