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Jeremy Young, primus inter pares of Progressive Historians , had breakfast with noted military writer, Iraq war critic and professor, Colonel Andrew Bacevich and has a a review of Bacevich’s lecture at Indiana University:

Generally, one doesn’t think of columnists as being engaging speakers, so I was pleasantly surprised when Bacevich proved the exception to the rule. He held forth for about forty-five minutes before a crowd of about 200 people, packed into a room that seated about 75. Bacevich’s main argument was that in the aftermath of 9/11, the administration had developed what he termed the “freedom agenda,” which rested on three assumptions: that American military power was invincible, that the greater Middle East was ripe for transformation, and that it was possible for Americans to instill democracy in the region at a minimal cost. Subsequent events, of course, have proved all three of these assumptions wrong. Today, Bacevich argued, America’s military and foreign policy strategy has failed — and worse, the Bush Administration has no comprehensive, moral strategy to replace it.

….I asked Bacevich what he thought our future defense spending priorities should be. His response was that we should focus on beefing up our navy, and secondarily on maintaining our air superiority, while cutting budgets for the army and marines. For those of you who read this blog, that’s suggesting a combined 2GW/3GW force to meet a 4GW threat — a clear no-no in strategic theory. When one of my fellow grad students pressed Bacevich on the navy question, he admitted to being a Mahanian and said we needed a strong navy to deter pirates!

Read the rest here.

Bacevich has a sense of humor. Multibillion dollar platforms to take out jerry-rigged Somali and Indonesian gunboats manned by illiterate tribesmen?

Blogfriend Charles Cameron alerted me to a very interesting and important post by Dr. Tim Furnish, a professor of Islamic Studies and an expert in Mahdism in particular, who managed to contact and interview a spokesman of Ansar al-Mahdi, the shadowy, Shiite-based Mahdist movement in Iraq ( Jamestown Foundation report here).

Father Knows Best (Especially When He’s the Mahdi)

….3) Is al-Mahdi the same as the Twelfth Imam returned from ghaybah?
Yes, it is quite true to say that Imam al Mahdi is the twelfth Imam Mohammed bin Hassan (p) returned from ghaybah, and also true to say that his son Sayid al Yamani (Ahmad al Hassan) also can be named Mahdi.
4) Is al-Yamani’s group Jund al-Sama’ or Ansar al-Mahdi?
al Yamani group called Ansar al-Mahdi or Ansar Allah, supporters of Imam Mahdi (p) and supporters of Sayid Ahmed Hassan al Yamani; the messenger  and guardian and the Imam Mahdi (p).
We are unrelated to the so-called (Jund al-Sama’ ), and there is great difference between us. Ansar al-Mahdi say that Ahmed Hassan (p) is the promised Yamani, a branch of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) and his son , while the group Jund al-Sama’ deny the existence of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) in total.
5) Do al-Yamani and his group have any connection to Moqtada al-Sadr and the Jaysh al-Mahdi?
No relationship whatsoever between us and Moqtada al Sadr and his army Jaysh al-Mahdi, in a passage names as it is known.
6) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of the American-sponsored Iraq government in Baghdad?
The government has to be based on the principle of the Governorship of God and must derive its legitimacy from God and from Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p).
7) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of vilayet-i faqih in Iran?

Not valid as the answer became clear to you from the previous question.

8 ) What sort of state in Iraq does al-Yamani envision? A caliphate? A Mahdiyah?
Government, which al Yamani see it is the government based on the principle of Governorship of God. Whatever you want to call it as the term crossing, but the lesson in reality is substance and meaning.
9) What will be the Mahdi’s role once he is revealed?

Imam al Mahdi will reveal justice and installment and will be published uniformity across the globe, and re-link the right relationship of God with humans after regrettably interrupted by the ego.

Read the rest here.

Historically, the world has previously seen a Mahdist regime in the Sudan in the 19th century, a mystical and xenophobic movement that slaughtered an Anglo-Egyptian expedition led by General Charles “Chinese” Gordon and was later destroyed in retaliation by the British under the implacable Lord Kitchener ( with a young Winston Churchill on hand, watching Sudanese Mahdist cavalry charge suicidally straight into British cannon and machine gun fire, swords in one hand and Qurans in the other). The terrorist group led by Juhaiman Saif al Otaiba  that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and that were killed to the last man by elite KSA troops ( RUMINT says a  hastily converted platoon of French special-ops – whatever, dead is still dead) were Sunni Mahdists.

As I understand Mahdism, the Mahdi would transcend the normal strictures of the Quran and have the power to set them aside or issue new ones and in this fashion, Mahdism would not be unlike the claims put forth by the leaders of apocalyptic Christian sects in the West, famously David Khoresh’s Branch Davidians or splinter groups among fundamentalist Mormons. The relatively eucumenical attitude of Ansar al-Mahdi reported by Furnish might be one example of “transcending” customary beliefs.

The English translation of the captured AQI/ISI Diary, courtesy of  DefenseLink’s Blogger’s Roundtable.  Some redacting.

MountainRunner gets a special, solo, Recommended Reading today.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner – “Departure Assessment of Embassy Baghdad”

This is simply an utterly amazing “must read”. An excoriating, damning and devastating cri de coeur  by an insider, leveled at the institutional culture of the State Department bureaucracy and Foreign Service that has not had a top to botom, clear the decks, clean slate, reform since the 1920’s. Kudos to Matt for printing this document – it should be a far bigger story than it is. Had an equivalent arisen in the Defense Department over Iraq, it would be front-page news in The New York Times for a week. Easily. A few excerpts:

….After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. 

….Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up.  It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken

…. Likewise, the State Department’s culture of delay and indecision, natural to any bureaucracy, is out of sync with the urgency felt by the American people and the Congress in furthering America’s interests in Iraq. The delay in staffing the Commanding General’s Ministerial Performance initiative (from May to the present) would be considered grossly negligent if not willful in any environment.  I would venture to say that if the management of the Embassy and the State Department’s Iraq operation were judged by rules that govern business judgment and asset waste in the private sector, the delays, indecision, and reorganizations over the past year, would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal. In light of the nation’s sacrifice, what we have seen this past year in the Embassy is incomprehensible.

Read the rest here.

Count me as somebody who believes that the State Department is grossly underfunded for the tasks at hand and that the public is too seldom aware of the dirty and dangerous jobs that FSO regularly undetake, far from glamorous and comfortable European postings. However, systemic reform of State and the Foreign Service is several decades overdue and this post screams as to why. When your net effect ranges from useless to obstructive, it’s time to go.

Steve DeAngelis of ERMB had an excellent post on Iraq that I believe has a lot of resonance for historians:

“Dealing with Iraq’s Great Depression”

“When Americans think about the Great Depression of the 1930s, they think about soup kitchens, unemployment, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Those people who managed to remain employed during the depression were considered fortunate. To some extent that is the situation facing people in southern Iraq (the northern Kurdish sector is booming in comparison). The U.S. just announced a new approach for dealing with the lack of jobs and the lack of security in the south. It is a mixture of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs [“U.S. Plans to Form Job Corps For Iraqi Security Volunteers,” by Karen DeYoung and Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, 7 December 2007]. Once again it is the U.S. military leading the way.

“The U.S. military plans to establish a civilian jobs corps to absorb tens of thousands of mostly Sunni security volunteers whom Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government has balked at hiring into local police forces. The new jobs program marks a sharp departure from one of the most highly touted goals of the so-called Sunni awakening, which was to funnel the U.S.-paid volunteers, many of them former insurgents, into Iraq’s police and military.”

The program aims at alleviating two of the most crucial challenges facing southern Iraq — jobs and security. As DeYoung and Paley report, the program is aimed primarily at Sunni citizens who have been unable to find work under the Shi’ite regime. The program has raised questions, however.

“President Bush and Gen. David H. Patraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, have said the volunteers have played a major role in the recent downturn in violence and would provide a key element of local security as U.S. forces draw down. Plans to reconfigure the program raise new questions about the permanence of security and political structures the United States has sought to impose on Iraq.”

The Bush administration’s program seems to be based on three assumptions. First, people need jobs so they can once again feel good about themselves and support their families. Second, jobs help the security situation by eliminating many unhappy and unemployed people from the list of potential insurgent supporters and, by giving them a stake in the future, Sunnis will get involved in the war against the insurgents. And third, the job program reduces sectarian violence by getting Sunni and Shi’ites working side by side.

Read the whole thing here.

The period of the Great Depression and the later postwar occupation is rich with potential lessons and analogies for exercises in state-building in Iraq or elsewhere. Steve mentioned the Civilian Conservation Corps as a model, probably one of the most popular public memories of the New Deal. a program where adolescents and young men of all backgrounds did public works and environmental projects under the supervision of active and retired U.S. Army NCO’s .

Iraq certainly does not lack for oportunities to repair or improve infrastructure, something that would both create jobs and future platforms to facilitate economic growth as well as enmeshing local elites in positive partnerships with coalition forces. My suggestion here, to build on Steve’s New Deal paradigm, would be to complement any physical construction -jobs effort with one of the New Deal’s least appreciated major programs which would be even more appropriate for Iraq today than it was for the United States in the 1930’s, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

What makes the RFC, originally created by the Hoover administration but given expanded powers under FDR, different from other New Deal agencies was the focus on reestablishing liquidity and the extension of lines of credit to private banks and businesses on a sound financial basis but one with a realistic adaptation to the conditions of the Depression. This was made possible by the astute judgment of the imposing Texas financial wizard who headed the RFC, Jesse H. Jones. Chairman Jones, historian Jordan Schwarz wrote:

“He could be an expedient lender; frequently he accomodated schemes of dubious creditworthiness, and New Dealers remained suspicious of Jones’ personal coziness with bankers and big business. Ironically, RFC-financed programs such as rural electrification were dear to their hearts and made possible profounder consequences for American society than those of almost any other New Deal program” [1]

Jones’ discernment  of  a borrower’s viability was such that out of the $ 2 billion 1930’s gold dollars in credit extended to banks, local governments, corporations and small business concerns during the Depression, nearly every loan was repaid. More remarkably, Jones disproportionately targeted the relatively undeveloped South and West for the RFC assistance in building networks of finance capitalism that made possible the later Sunbelt Boom of the 1960’s.  In his person, Jones combined a wealth of experience in entrepreneurial capitalism and banking with an intimate “local knowledge” of the political, social and economic conditions giving him a degree of success that made him irreplaceable to FDR.

A RFC on the Euphrates could only work in close collaboration with Iraqis who possess the prized “local knowledge” that we lack – mostly former Iraqi central bank types leavened with key Kurdish and Shiite equivalents with an American holding the pursetrings but the Iraqis vetting borrowers for viability rather than collateral, much the way Jones himself did in the cash-poor South and West. The effort could be enhanced by a separate microloan program, perhaps funded by NGO’s, attached to coalition commands to get smaller enterprises off the ground and help revive local economies.

If great care is exercised, state capitalism in Iraq can become a catalyst for the growth of the liberal markets of actual capitalism.

1. Schwarz, Jordan  The New Dealers:Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.  Alfred A. Knopf. New York 1993