Can either of the presidential candidates get us out of Iraq? And as long as we're asking, will either presidential candidate KEEP us out of IRAN?

"Of all the unintended consequences of the US invasion of Iraq, surely the most paradoxical is the way it has boosted Iran's position in the region. . . .

"With America's Iraqi allies urging the United States to negotiate with Iran, and with the Iranians themselves eager for such contacts, the Bush administration's resistance seems puzzling. Indeed, Washington's refusal to engage in vigorous regional diplomacy may be its most serious political blunder of all. If the United States is ever to withdraw from Iraq, reaching some accommodation with Iran would seem essential."

-- Michael Massing, in "Embedded in Iraq," in the
July 17 New York Review of Books

"It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon."

-- Thomas Powers, in "Iran: The Threat," in the same NYRB

Much to absorb in the new New York Review of Books, starting with -- yes! -- a new book review by Russell Baker, which is where I went first, and which I want to talk about later. The next most grabbing piece for me is the one I've quoted from above, and to appreciate why, you need to know that Michael Massing has been one of the most relentless and uncompromising journalistic opponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And now here he is, embedded in Iraq?

His daylong embed took him to the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, a once "solidly middle-class district full of ex-Baathists," which was "taken over by al-Qaeda in Iraq," imposing "an Islamic reign of terror," against which Shiite militiamen "waged their own bloody war on the population, with mutilated bodies regularly turning up on the street. More than two hundred US soldiers had died there in the first half of 2007 alone." The neighborhood has been brought back, however, thanks to "the Sunni backlash against al-Qaeda and the parallel adoption of counterinsurgency tactics by the US military," and is now "a showcase for visiting journalists and pundits."

It's a fascinating experience, the embed proper, but for that you'll have to read Massing's own account. Back in safe quarters, here's how he sums up the experience:

As I'd expected, my embed had provided little opportunity to hear the Iraqi point of view. Rather, it offered a look at the war through the eyes of the US military, and in that respect it had been very revealing. On the one hand, it had left me with little doubt about the very real gains the surge had brought about, and about the effectiveness of the Petraeus-led counterinsurgency strategy. The situation in Dora had obviously improved, and the combination of aggressive raids, large-scale detentions, and mixing with the community (together with the Sunni Awakening) had had a big hand in achieving that.

At the same time, I'd gotten a look at the crushing effect the war is having on the troops. The breakdown in the Army has advanced so far that in a mere thirteen hours, I could see the rising dissatisfaction, anger, and rebellion within it. The message from the soldiers themselves was that keeping so large a force in the field over the long term seemed unsustainable.

With virtually no opportunity to get genuine Iraqi perspectives, Massing sought out "Iraq specialists at American and British universities and think tanks who, traveling into and out of the country, are less beholden to government dogma."

He learned, for example, about a heavily funded but little-publicized major U.S. initiative, a "political surge" -- "a huge state-building campaign, spearheaded by a sharp expansion in the US advisory effort."

The campaign got under way last summer. Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and reinforce dams. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in Baghdad and elsewhere to help repair infrastructure, improve water and electrical systems, and stimulate the economy. One main goal was to use some of Iraq's new oil wealth ($41 billion in 2007 alone) to create jobs that would help occupy the legions of aimless young men who might otherwise join the country's many militias.

About a year has passed since the campaign began. And from talks with several Green Zone visitors who are familiar with it, I learned that, by and large, it has been an utter failure. "Dysfunctional" is how one visiting adviser described it, citing bitter interagency battles, micromanagement from Washington, and an acute mismatch between the skills of the advisers and the needs of the Iraqi government. "What we have," he said, "are cattle calls -- a bunch of random people sent over with widely varying skills who can't speak the language, who've never worked in this type of environment, and whom the Iraqis didn't even ask for."

But more than anything, Massing learned that the influence of Iran, which he went to Iraq thinking was exaggerated by U.S. officials, is wildly understated.

He meets with CNN's man in Baghdad, Michael Ware:

[A]ll he wanted to talk about was Iran. "Iran's agents of influence go to the top of the Iraqi government," he said. "Twenty-three members of the Iraqi Parliament are permanent members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard." Hezbollah operatives, he said, were training JAM members in guerrilla warfare, while a senior member of al-Qaeda was being sheltered in Iran. Even the Kurds were in deep with the Iranians, he said. Under Saddam, for instance, Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan who is now president of Iraq, ran weapons and communications lines through Iran. Finally, there was Ahmad Chalabi, the influential former exile who had urged the Americans to invade and then fallen out with them, allegedly over his ties to Tehran. "All the time, he was working for Iran!" Ware told me.

This leads Massing to the observation I quoted at the outset:

"Of all the unintended consequences of the US invasion of Iraq, surely the most paradoxical is the way it has boosted Iran's position in the region."

Of course the Bush regime has not only declared itself unwilling to negotaiate with Iran, but has aggressively primed the primitive nativist element of American "thought" with the idea that negotiation is evil -- or, worse, wimpy.

With America's Iraqi allies urging the United States to negotiate with Iran, and with the Iranians themselves eager for such contacts, the Bush administration's resistance seems puzzling. Indeed, Washington's refusal to engage in vigorous regional diplomacy may be its most serious political blunder of all. If the United States is ever to withdraw from Iraq, reaching some accommodation with Iran would seem essential.

Trying to make sense of this, I recalled something [British Iraq specialist] Toby Dodge had told me: "When the Americans go home, the Iranians will inherit the earth." Iranian hegemony over Iraq: that is the Bush administration's worst nightmare. The Iraq invasion was designed to project American power in the region at Iran's expense; instead, it has done the exact opposite. And so it dawned on me: no matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush administration doesn't want to leave, since if it does, Iran, in one way or another, will take over. That helps explain recent reports that Washington, in negotiating a long-term status of forces agreement with Iraq, is determined to maintain nearly sixty bases there indefinitely -- a position the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki is strongly resisting.

At this point, a short paragraph (dealing with the Obama and McCranky positions as stated so far) from the end, Massing inserts a footnote:

In his new book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq (Simon and Schuster, 2008), NBC correspondent Richard Engel relates a fascinating hour-and-a-half interview he had with George Bush in 2007 in which he urged the President to undertake a major diplomatic initiative in the Middle East—the only way, Engel argued, some degree of stability could be achieved in Iraq. Bush dismissed the idea, telling Engel that the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years." Engel also writes that Bush "seemed genuinely surprised" at the suggestion that US actions in Iraq are helping Iran.

Now is that our Chimpy all over, or what? He's the one who'd go to war with Iran in a heartbeat, the one who tells us that everything that happens in Iraq is Iran's fault, and he's "genuinely surprised" that anyone might think that Iran has been empowered beyond imagining, and at virtually no cost, by Chimpy's excellent adventure in Iraq.

There is, by the way, a separate piece in this issue of NYRB by Thomas Powers, whom we last encountered deep in gloom over the prospects of our extracting ourselves from Iraq anytime in the near (or not-so-near) future. The new piece is called "Iran: The Threat," or at least I assume this is the title Powers intended for the piece. This is how it appears on the contents page and on the piece itself. The cover line has it differently, though: "The Threat to Iran." And indeed, after carefully weighing the threat from Iraq, he pursues the question of why -- if not for offensive might -- Iran might want nuclear weapons.

The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration's threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush's restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.

As Powers pointed out in the earlier piece mentioned above, by going military with Iraq, the brain-dead American neocons created a hellish situation that can't be ended except with a military solution, of which there is none available. And yet it's clear that both Chimpy the Prez and his puppetmaster, "Big Dick" Cheney, really want to add a war in Iran to the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, an idea that Powers demonstrates nicely is just about insane any way you look at it.

And yet, as Powers points out, "It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon."

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