Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi finance minister who now advises the Iraqi prime minister, has a new book out called The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace that rips the "incompetent" U.S. occupation. He slams the "monumental ignorance" of those Bush officials and pundits who pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. "More perceptive people," he writes, "knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society." The book is a stinging indictment. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell should read it and weep. But they won't.

Appearing on NPR's Diane Rehm Show today, Allawi, the cousin of Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister in 2004, made one of the smartest points I've heard about Bush's ongoing surge. First, he sort of justified the current presence of US troops in Iraq:

The current government and the military--the Iraqi security forces--are incapable of controlling the situation, so the presence of US forces is to some extent and essentially a requirement for survivability of the government in the near term, but in the medium term. And by that I mean over the next 12 to 18 months. Maybe over the next two years, some kind of mechanism has to be worked out where by Iraqi control over the security situation is established, otherwise we'll never have a sovereign or even a quasi-sovereign government. So America's military involvement right now is necessary, I believe, in the short term to secure and stabilize parts of the country, but it will not solve the problem of the inability or the incapability of the central government to (a) articulate the national vision and (b) have the necessary security forces to implement, as it were, the popular will.

Then Rehm asked if "the presence of the US forces enabling that government to find a solution or hindering it from doing so?" Allawi offered a sophisticated but troubling answer:

It's a paradox, frankly, because on the one side the presence of the United States and the current surge may allow the present government to extend its control and authority, but at the same time it does not change the fact that certain political forces are now in control of the government and therefore will strengthen these political forces, which may not necessarily work to the advantage of either articulating a national vision or having a kind of unified military and security strategy. So the American military presence and the surge has contradictory objectives--one of them is necessary, but it would lead to a result that is not necessarily welcome.

Talk about nuances. The surge might help the current regime gain control, but the current regime (which Allawi advises) is controlled by forces (I suppose he means fundamentalist Shiites) that are not interested in national reconciliation. So the surge may benefit those who are at odds with US aims in Iraq.

Last week, Bush, while speaking about the Iraq conflict, said. "It's not a civil war; it's pure evil." That's a comic-book depiction--in keeping with Bush's practice of discussing Iraq in the most simplistic of terms. Allawi paints a gray-imbued picture. If he's right, Bush is asking US soldiers to sacrifice lives and limbs not for liberty and security but for a paradox. Certainly, Bush is not sharing this point with the public, and one can wonder if he even understands it.

Posted by David Corn at April 9, 2007 02:34 PM