Is PM Maliki Throwing The War?

Two days ago very disturbing testimony was offered by the former chief of the anti-corruption effort established three years ago in Iraq. Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi made a very convincing appearance before Rep Henry Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding the extreme methods employed (or at least countenanced) by the al-Maliki government to prevent effective investigation and prosecution of corruption by Iraqi officials at all levels including the most senior.

Reports of al-Radhi's allegations and its aftermath haven't exactly littered the electronic landscape but the WaPo gave good coverage http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100401305.html. A non-US perspective of value is offered by http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=22568.

History leads the Geek to accept al-Radhi's tale of corruption and gangland type murders to be accurate. History also compels the Geek to predict that without a rapid, robust, and effective US response to the endemic corruption in the Iraqi regime, all the security efforts to date will go down the drain.

In short, unless the stables in Baghdad are cleaned very well and very rapidly, all the military success, all the deaths and killing, will have meant zero, zip, nada.

Anyone aware of two facets of recent history could (and would) have predicted massive governmental corruption in the wake of the US invasion. The first historical trajectory is that of Iraq itself during the years following the Gulf War of 1991.

The years of the sanctions saw Iraq become a morass of corruption. Everyone who could put his hand in the pile, grabbed all he could and elbowed latecomers aside. This universal corruption was evident even from open sources. It should have been even more obvious to the current administration with its access to pan-source base intelligence.

The neocon ninnies within the current administration were so gripless that they must have believed unbridled theft was a species of free enterprise. That is the only charitable explanation for the US having invaded without any mechanisms in place to check the continued looting and plundering of the public trough by the men who came to power under our tutelage.

That the US did not and does not have the will or capacity to drain the Great Dismal Swamp presided over by the al-Maliki government was made manifest by the total absence of intellectual and moral courage exhibited by our State Department at the Friday hearings. The schmuck on the spot was a deputy secretary of state named Larry Butler.

Butler, presumably operating under instructions which he didn't desire to violate no matter how much the American national interest might benefit by his so doing, hid behind the ultimate cover of the scoundrel--National Security. Despite fulsome praise of al-Radhi's character and integrity, Butler refused to say anything that might be taken as supporting or agreeing with the ousted Judge's testimony.

Any such agreement could only take place, Butler repeatedly insisted, behind the guarded doors of an executive session of the committee. Of course, Butler, like anyone who has been around DC more than a couple of hours, knows that executive session testimony is leaked even before the transcript has been made.

But, leaks aren't "official." Leaks can be plausibly denied. At the worst, leaks become the sort of twisted, passive voiced "mistakes-have-been-made" non-explanation, non-apology.

This brings us to the second prong of history.

The US has been down this road before. Counterinsurgency and host government corruption seem to be the ham and eggs combo of violent politics.

Our first post-WW II adventures in counterinsurgency in Greece and the Philippines showed that unpleasant linkage between internal instability and hands reaching for the money stream. In both countries US personnel on the ground and in Washington had to make exceptional efforts to facilitate the growth of fiscal and political integrity within the regimes we were supporting. Our successes and the means by which we achieved them remain little more than an unexamined footnote to the two wars.

The US defeat in South Vietnam was in part, arguably in large part, the result of our inability to assure an increase in governmental and military integrity on the part of the South Vietnamese. Documents declassified over the past quarter century show again and again that we were aware of the miasma of corruption hanging over Saigon. They show that we were aware that the rottenness in Saigon was desperately imperilling our efforts against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

The documents also show that we were only willing and able to address the problem on a sporadic and ad hoc basis. The largest single reason for this was the absence of a South Vietnamese equivalent of al-Radhi.

Al-Radhi exists this time around. He and his documents give a chilling account of so much that is so rotten in Baghdad. He is a one man transparency project. He is a war winning asset.

But, only so long as We the People and our "representatives" have his story, his facts and figures, his naming of names out in the full light of open public testimony.

There is one more requirement if al-Radhi is going to be able to help us assure that all our efforts and losses will end with a better state of peace in Iraq. The State Department, which means the current administration, will have to match al-Radhi's openness.

The current administration has to take a firm grip on reality. It will take more political hits by admitting that it has not been able to do diddly to limit the epidemic of corruption in Baghdad. So what? The current administration screwed the pooch the moment the Commander Guy said, "OK" to the invasion.

The Geek is not so addicted to fantasy that he expects the current administration to own up to having made a world-class blunder with its "regime change" hallucination. No. What the Geek would like to see is the current administration follow the lead of the US military in recent months.

"How's that?" You ask.

The military has done something the Geek would never have really, really believed it could. It changed its doctrine for counterinsurgency. It has invited "human terrain" academic specialists to give direct, in-the-field assistance to its units. In short, the US military services, under the pressure of looming failure, woke up, smelled the coffee, and started to fight the right war in the right way.

The current administration owes it to those who have already been killed in pursuit of its hallucination of a liberal, pluralistic, democratic Iraq to match the military in intellectual and moral courage. No skulking around in executive session practicing government by leak and counter-leak. No nasty little personal attacks against outspoken bringers of unwanted bad news as was the case Friday. (The snideness was from Rep Dan (Brain-dead) Burton a Republican from Indiana.)

The State Department, the Secretary of State, and others in the loop have to match our military in getting a grip on reality. Not simply because it is the right thing to do.

No.

It must be done because our dead demand it. It must be done because our national future demands it.