Ukraine War

 We now know the two likely candidates in the presidential election (Biden Declares 2024 Bid; Possible Rematch in Sight, New York Times, April 26, 2023: A1, A12).

We also know very clearly where Mr. Biden stands in defense of Ukraine.

Mr. Trump and his associates have had dealings with both Kyiv and Moscow.

Mr. Trump needs to state clearly his position going forward with the Ukraine war.

Ukraine war and our future climate

 Oped in Cambridge Day

The Ukraine war and our future climate - Cambridge Day

Bringing the Ukraine war home to Boston

 Oped in Cambridge Day

The Ukraine war is far away. Imagine it here. - Cambridge Day

The next war: Financing

Linda Bilmes is right -- we do not have a game plan for the financing of the next war on evil. We need one. I would suggest a surcharge of ten percent on all income taxes. This will have minimal impact on the poorest among us but will raise an adequate amount of money from those able to afford the extra taxes.

Alternatively, we could make the surcharge refundable when the payer pasees 70. This would enforce saving for ones old age but that would not amount to much for the poor who need it most. So it is not quite a win-win.

Sent to Boston Globe

Sharing the Sacrifice

December 24th. 2006
Published in the New York Times, December 27th. 2006.

Any serious reconsideration of our strategy in Iraq must go far beyond Iraq. There must be a change In America itself.
Up to now,  the burden of the war has been born by those fighting and their families. To be credible, the President must also demand sacrifice from the rest of us. At the very least, a war tax should be imposed so that we pay for the war rather than passing the cost on to our children.
Anything less would show the President to be uninterested in prosecuting the war and singly intersested in trying to protect his ego.

New York Times version [Please scroll Down]

Iraq Troop Levels

December 20th. 2006
Sent to but not published in the Boston Globe

Your report (Bush seeks to expand strained military, Boston Globe, December 20, 2006: page A2) suggests that President Bush is planning on deploying up to 35,000 more troops to Iraq. This is the very worst of the four alternatives he could have chosen; withdrawal; maintain the status quo, small troop increase; massive troop increase.
I would favor the withdrawal option; but if we are to increase troop levels then only a massive increase will have any chance of success.
Before the war began General Eric Shinseki estimated that we would need several hundred thousand troops for the occupation of Iraq. We should note that he was talking about an Iraq in the immediate aftermath of defeat by American troops. That is he was talking about a subdued Iraq. Three years later, Iraq is at war with itself, so it stands to reason that a large infusion of troops will be required to subdue the insurgency and return the streets of Baghdad to peace and to retake Anbar province. If the General was talking abut 200,000 occupying troops in 2002/3, the required number now must be at least 300,000 troops for the pacification of Iraq.
If that number is impossible to provide, then we should withdraw. Sending in a relatively small additional contingent would make little difference to our pacification efforts and just put more troops at risk. That is totally unacceptable.

Your columnist Mark Leibovich notes a variety of answers to the critical Jeopardy question for the November 7th crowd: Why did you vote for the Iraq war?( New York Times, October 21st, 2006: Section 4, pages1 and 4)

He fails to appreciate the truly accurate answer of Joseph Biden: the legislators did not vote for war; they voted to give the President the option of going to war.

You see at that time, it was a vote designed to give the President leverage in calling Iraq to account before the United Nations. It exemplified realpolitik at its best.

It is hard to remember the sequence of events from 2001 to the beginning of the war on March 20th 2003. Up until November 2002 (that is until the President had the support of the Senate and House of Representatives through the vote) the Iraqis refused to allow UN inspectors to undertake inspections for Weapons of Mass Destruction on Iraqi territory. By the end of November, inspections under the direction of Hans Blix were under way. The vote to grant the President war powers had achieved its purpose, the Iraq regime was being called to account for its actions.

We have forgotten too that Hans Blix called on the US and Britain to give his inspectors the "hard intelligence" that they claimed to possess so that his inspectors could go to check out that information on the ground. The failure of the US and Britain to do so should have roused our suspicions that all was not well with the intelligence -- its invalidity has been amply demonstrated in the past years.
Where we went wrong -- the Senate, and the House, and the country, and all of us -- was the failure to recognize the importance of the inspector's reports in mid February 2003 that there was no evidence of WMD in Iraq, so that we were in no immanent danger from Iraq. That should have led to a re-evaluation of the war power resolution and its potential repeal based on the changed situation. We failed to do so and we are reaping the tragic consequences today.

But you, who have attacked President Bush for his failure to understand the nuance in the situation, should have made sure your columnist recognized the nuance implicit in the vote for the war option and should be educating your readers about the realpolitik aspects of that vote, not sneering at those who are trying to explain their actions with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Rumsfeld's army

To the Editor

Donald Rumsfeld was not quite accurate when he said: Hey you go to war with the army you've got (T. L. Friedman, Insulting our troops and our intelligence, New York Times, November 3, 2006: A27).

What he should have said was: you go to war with the army I gave you.

According to Cobra II and Fiasco, Rumsfeld abandoned the Army's carefully Time Phased Force and Deployment Lists for both Afghanistan and Iraq. These lists are developed so that the right kinds of troops are deployed to the battlefield at the right time. By abandoning these plans, the civilian managers in Defence Department substituted their own judgement for those of the troop commanders. As a result, not only did we not have enough troops, we did not have the right kinds of troops on the ground. We are paying the price for that today.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to take Mr Friedman's advice and vote to throw the rascals out. I do not become an American citizen until November 8th. 2006.

Iraq. Who Pays

Bob Herbert (New York Times, Op-Ed, October 12, 2006) is one of many who has called for shared sacrifice in the war against terror. He points out that only one group is sacrificing – members of the armed forces, their families, and, in the case of national guard members, their employers.

In the current Iraq war, America is sacrificing  three things: the lives of its young men and women, its money, and its honor.

Right now, the young are paying or potentially paying the cost of all three. The youth are those dying and maimed in Iraq. With deficit financing of the war, the young will have to pay for it in the next twenty years. Only the privates, specialists, and sergeants of Abu Ghraib have had their honor tarnished while Donald Rumsfeld continues as Secretary of Defense and John Yoo teaches at Berkeley Law.

This cannot to be allowed to continue.

As in all wars the young men and woman will have to continue to do the fighting.

We, the public, must take up the challenge of paying for the war now. It would be unconscionable to leave the financial payments to today's youth. We must devise a pay-as-you-go scheme. Inevitably this will mean raising taxes which will be anathema to the anti-tax Republican conservatives – but it is their war and our war and we and they must pay for it.

Finally, it is the administration that must pay the cost in dishonor. I think we are stuck with the President, a weak but charming fellow, who was at the mercy of his entourage. Vice-President Cheney who promulgated so many of the half truths that brought us to this war and who continues to press for CIA torture despite overwhelming evidence that torture is ineffective in eliciting accurate and timely information should do the honorable thing and resign. Resignation is also required of Secretary Rumsfeld who administered a Pentagon where with a wink and a nod torture of prisoners was countenanced, who planned an invasion with insufficient troops to stabilize a post-war Iraq, and who continues to mismanage the logistics of the war and its strategic goals. Secretary Rice who was unable to get the holidaying President to take notice of the 9/11 intelligence should also step aside.

This is what America needs, this is what our troops deserve: a shared sacrifice where the non-combatants pick up the financial cost and where the administration oligarchs pass out into the wilderness to help America restore its "sacred honor."

Troop Levels in Iraq

March 13th. 2006
Sent to but not published in the New York Times

President George Bush said today that future troop levels in Iraq will depend upon the situation on the ground.
Why do I not believe him?
Before the Iraq war began, General Shinseki told him and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that we needed 300,000 soldiers to pacify Iraq. [Paul Wolfowitz pooh-poohed this number as he thought there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq as there had been in Kosovo where the General had served.] We did not get those 300,000. In the early stage of the occupation, Pro-Consul Bremer told him and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that we needed more troops to control the just-beginning insurrection. We did not get more troops.
The consequences for Iraq have been devastating: the looting that occurred just after the fall of Saddam (and continues in remote archeological sites to this day); and the full scale insurrection that is now under way with dozens of Iraqis killed each day and with the destruction of hallowed religious sites.
No, I do not believe Mr. Bush. I do believe that there will be a draw-down of American troops later this year, but it will occur as the 2006 election season gets closer and will have nothing to do with the state of play in Iraq itself.

Rationale for War

December 19th. 2005
Sent to but not published in the New York Times

The President in his recent speech claimed that Iraq was a threat to America prior to the invasion even if there were no weapons of mass destruction and even if there was no link between Iraq and the terrorists..



I don't understand. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link to the terrorists. So where was the threat? Will someone please explain.

Decision Making

Date: December 14th., 2005
Sent to but not published in the New York Times

To: The Editor, New York Times



I was horrified to read in Maureen Dowd's column (Times, December 14th 2005, A35) that according to Jack Murtha "when they were planning the invasion [of Iraq], the administration wouldn't let one of the primary three star generals in the room."



When I was teaching MBA's in 1973 (the year George W. Bush entered the Harvard Business School) my colleagues and I taught, among other things, that in complex situations and if managed properly, group decision making was superior to individual decision making because the variety of points of view expressed by group members would result in a decision that better reflected the facts of the situation. We also taught that having the people who were going to execute the subsequent actions participate in decision making had two useful consequences: as already mentioned  increasing the relevant knowledge brought to bear; and  increasing peoples' commitment to the decision.



Excluding a key group member violated both those recommendations.



George W. Bush must have skipped classes at the Harvard Business School on those days.

Why did we go to war?

Date: December 1st., 2005 Sent to but not published in the New York Times


Despite President Bush's upbeat assessment yesterday, every step we take in Iraq is a mis-step.



The latest to come to light is the possibility that the Army has been "placing" positive stories in the Iraq press. These showcase the good things that America is doing in Iraq.


The problem is of course twofold. First, that is the kind of thing Saddam used to do, so our protestations of a higher morality, like the case of Abu Ghraib ring hollow in the ears of the Iraqis. We need to demonstrate and act out that higher morality not just talk about it. Second, those are probably the stories that President Bush and his inept intelligence suppliers used to provide the underpinnings of yesterday's speech. We have come to belive our own propaganda!



Everything we touch in Iraq turns to dust. It is time to withdraw.

Apt Words

Date: November 18th., 2005
Sent to but not published in the New Yorker

George Packer (The Spanish Prisoner, New Yorker, October 31st, 2005: 84) quotes Dos Passos' 1927 lament "America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul."
How apt those words are today. The strangers are us. We have allowed the administration to lure us into an unjust war. We have allowed the administration to evade accountability for flawed intelligence, for torture (and the torture memos), for inadequate armor for vehicles and people, and for the big lie, currently in progress, of attacking the Iraq war's critics.
We truly lament for the nation.

Shared Sacrifice

Date: November 16th., 2005
Sent to but not published in the Los Angeles Times

The president calls for shared sacrifice. Many commentators and letter writers have pointed out that only one group is sacrificing – members of the armed forces, their families, and, in the case of national guard members, their employers.

In the current Iraq war, America is sacrificing  three things: the lives of its young men and women, its money, and its honor.

Right now, the young are paying or potentially paying the cost of all three. The youth are those dying and maimed in Iraq. With deficit financing of the war, the young will have to pay for it in the next twenty years. Only the privates, specialists, and sergeants of Abu Ghraib have had their honor tarnished while Donald Rumsfeld continues as Secretary of Defense and John Yoo teaches at Berkeley Law.

This cannot to be allowed to continue.

As in all wars the young men and woman will have to continue to do the fighting.

We, the public, must take up the challenge of paying for the war now. It would be unconscionable to leave the financial payments to today's youth. We must devise a pay-as-you-go scheme. Inevitably this will mean raising taxes which will be anathema to the anti-tax Republican conservatives – but it is their war and our war and we and they must pay for it.

Finally, it is the administration that must pay the cost in dishonor. I think we are stuck with the President, a weak but charming fellow, who was at the mercy of his entourage. Vice-President Cheney who promulgated so many of the half truths that brought us to this war and who continues to press for CIA torture despite overwhelming evidence that torture is ineffective in eliciting accurate and timely information should do the honorable thing and resign. Resignation is also required of Secretary Rumsfeld who administered a Pentagon where with a wink and a nod torture of prisoners was countenanced, who planned an invasion with insufficient troops to stabilize a post-war Iraq, and who continues to mismanage the logistics of the war and its strategic goals. Secretary Rice who was unable to get the holidaying President to take notice of the 9/11 intelligence should also step aside.

This is what America needs, this is what our troops deserve: a shared sacrifice where the non-combatants pick up the cost and where the administration oligarchs pass out into the wilderness to help America restore its "sacred honor."

Date: November 12, 2005
Sent to but not published by the Boston Globe

President Bush sometimes speaks the truth, but he rarely speaks the whole truth. Yesterday's Wilkes-Barre address (President steps up attack on war critics, Boston Globe, November 12th. 2005, A1, A12) was correct that early in the run up to the Iraq war everyone believed that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone was basing their beliefs on the same information.
But that "everyone knows" level of confidence was undermined by the reports of the UN Weapons inspectors between October 2002 and the first days of war. They reported finding no significant WMDs.
It is worthwhile examining the time line very carefully because it puts the Senate War resolution of October 2002 in a very different context than it is usually provided. On September 16th 2002, Iraq accepted the return of the inspectors; this followed by four days G. W. Bush's speech to the UN laying out the case for war. By September 30th, the Iraqis were dragging their feet and proposing unacceptable (to the US) conditions for the return of the inspectors including the exclusion of eight Presidential sites from their remit. On October 10th. The War Resolution passed Congress. In the weeks that followed, Iraqi recalcitrance collapsed and by November 18th. the inspectors were on their way to Iraq with no restrictions on their activities. The War resolution was just what was needed to get the inspectors into Iraq. As such it was a brilliant piece of realpolitik. Over the next four months, the inspectors did their work in Iraq. On February 14th., Hans Blix the chief inspector says that Iraq is in compliance with the disarmament agreement that ended the first Gulf War. March 20th. The War begins.
Yes, up until February, it was plausible to claim that we all knew that Iraq had WMDs; after February, no one could claim that position. The UN inspectors suggested that there was no causus belli. That should have been enough to derail the juggernaut. Alas it did not.
Men and women are dying in Iraq today because we failed to hold the administration accountable for the truth. We must not allow George W. Bush to continue with his misleading half-truths today.

Selective Memory of David Brooks

Date: November 5th., 2005
Sent to but not published by NewsHour

Comment on Brooks and Shields, November 3rd. 2005
Your commentator, David Brooks, did us all a disservice in his, almost hysterical, diatribe against Democrats for their insistence that Bush led us into a war under false pretences. He said that everybody -- former President Clinton, the French, the Germans, etc --knew that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
That was true in September-October 2002 when negotiations for the return of Weapons Inspectors to Iraq were under way. The Iraqis were stalling and proposing unacceptable exceptions to the reach of the inspectors until the passage of the War Resolution by Congress on October 10th 2002. That gave the President the leverage he (and the United Nations) needed. Within six weeks the inspectors were in Iraq on the ground with no restrictions on their movements. By February 2003, the inspectors reported that they had found no evidence of a large scale WMD program. The causus belli was shattered.
That did not impede the Bush administration's inexorable rush towards war and hostilities began on March 20th.
Mr. Brooks failed to mention this complex exercise of realpolitik. Nor did Mr. Lehrer or Mr. Shields point out this omission. They should have.
The American (and British) mistake was not to call for a second Congressional (Parliamentary) resolution about Iraq once it became clear from the weapons inspectors that the initial intelligence was probably incorrect.
NewsHour owes us an amplification.

Path Dependence in the Iraq War

Date: October 3rd., 2005
Sent to but not published in the New York Times

The present strategy and tactics for the prosecution of the war in Iraq are not leading to victory. A number of commentators (notably Andrew Krepinevich) have argued that we can turn the current situation around if we employ more troops and change our strategy to the "oil-spot" strategy. This involves pacifying a small segment of the country (or City of Baghdad) and then gradually expanding the perimeter of the pacified portion until more and more of the country is pacified. This means occupying and holding ground rather than the current tactics of smash and grab that have characterized the US's approach so far.
I fear that this is too late. Success in war, as in most things, is path dependent. That is, the viable options available today are constrained (either practically or psychologically) by the decisions made in the past. In practice, there is nothing (except Shinseki's 200,000 troops) to stop us adopting the oil-spot strategy, but psychologically the situation is very different.
Both Americans and Iraqis have been strongly influenced by the Bush administration's decisions of the past two years. Americans have been devastated by the reliance on inaccurate intelligence information that led to the declaration of war. We all remember the administration telling the inspectors "we know exactly where the WMDs are." We couldn't understand why they didn't tell the inspectors the locations (The administration argued that it was because intelligence sources would be compromised). We now know they didn't tell the inspectors because they couldn't. There were no WMDs. Americans were disappointed by the UN's decision not to replace its destroyed mission with a bigger and better one; the flight of the UN represented an early and major victory for the insurgents. Americans were devastated by the prisoner abuses of Abu Ghraib; they are outraged by the lack of accountability for this abuse at the highest levels in the military and the government and the seeming approval of this abuse by the now-Attorney General; those that know are disgusted by the administration's resistance to Senator John McCain's demand that prisoners should be treated according to the principles laid down in the Geneva convention and the torture treaties which are embodied in the US Army Field Manual.
The Iraqis who welcomed the Americans as liberators were outraged in the first days after the war as coalition troops stood by (except for guarding the oil ministry) as Iraq was looted. They were aghast as the National Museum was broken open and its irreplaceable treasures were scattered to the four corners of the earth. They were distressed as reconstruction contracts were given to foreign contractors using foreign employees rather than to local businesses who had the capacity to undertake most of the work and who would have employed local labor. Like Americans, Iraqis were outraged at the abuse of prisoners. Any moral high ground occupied by the Americans in comparison with the regime of Saddam Hussein was lost the night those soldiers took their incriminating digital photographs and distributed them around the world.
Neither Americans nor Iraqis have much confidence left in the Bush Administration. After all that is gone before can we believe the oil-spot strategy? We have an Army that cannot even keep the green zone bomb free. We have a presence on the ground in Iraq that cannot control the road from downtown Baghdad to its airport. Surely that is the test of the futility of adopting the oil-spot strategy. If we could do it, we would at least have done it in that small corner of Iraq. Or if it could be done, we would have expanded the areas around Iraqi police stations and recruiting centers, but we haven't done that. It seems that we are incapable of implementing the strategy on the ground in Iraq. Can anyone provide convincing evidence that it can work? Can anyone estimate the number of troops that it will take to make it work?
Perhaps prior to the discovery that Iraq lacked WMD, the oil-spot strategy might have worked. Perhaps prior to the looting, the oil-spot strategy might have worked. Perhaps prior to Abu Ghraib, the oil-spot strategy might have worked. Now, after all that has happened, I fear that this oil-spot strategy will generate yet another stain on America's honor with the implementation involving a scorched earth policy with inhabitants confined, not to the safety of their ancestral villages, but to concertina wire surrounded concentration camps. That, no doubt, is the way we would do the implementation.

The Lost War

Date: August 22nd. 2005
Sent to but not published by the New York Times

The war in Iraq is lost.
We lost the war when we entered it for false reasons.
We lost the war when we let Iraqis riot in the aftermath of the downfall of Saddam.
We lost the war when we failed to provide enough men and equipment to occupy the country.
We lost the war when the UN quit Iraq after the destruction of its staff and offices in Baghdad.

And our biggest defeat, we lost the war when we abandoned our principles at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
We should withdraw now from Iraq. With US troops there holding the circle, the Iraqis have little incentive to develop their own competencies in internal control. With the US still there, the Iraqis have little incentive to make the compromises needed to achieve a stable federal democracy. The Iraqis need to be left to stand on their own two feet.

Date: June 26th.. 2005
Sent to New York Times

Good leaders lead by example.
The image (Sunday Jun. 26, p A8) of Donald Rumsfeld sitting inside the secure shell of a heavily armored Rhino Runner while the troops he leads travel in unarmored Humvees says a lot about what is wrong with our prosecution of the Iraq war.
Good leaders share the risks undertaken by their subordinates. Good leaders accept responsibility when things go wrong. Good leaders ensure that their subordinates have the resources needed to get the job done. Good leaders clarify what needs to be done to achieve the goal.
The top echelon of the Bush administration have failed in each of these aspect of leadership.