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Robert McNamara's Memo To The Bush/Obama Hawks

By Steve Hynd

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam conflict, has died aged 93. Over at Hullabaloo, D-Day reminds us of McNamara's cautionary message for future U.S. leaders, comprising eleven causes and lessons he listed coming out of Vietnam.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

D-Day writes:

If this isn't an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don't know what is... I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Certainly in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan - and in their determination to pursue "strategic ambiguity" in the region over Iran - modern U.S. leaders seem hell-bent upon ignoring McNamara's hard-won wisdom.

Back in 2004, Douglas Saunders interviewed McNamara and asked him for his views on the Iraq invasion. The former SecDef was sure it was yet another massive mistake ignoring those 11 cautionary lessons.

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."

On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since "the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."

Obama's people are too busy reading Ricks, Nagl and Kilcullen to read Revelations, but the unshakeable certainty that America has the right and duty - the White Man's Burden by either divine mandate or through simple technocratic superiority - to re-shape other nations is still omnipresent.

"Out, America out!"

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has a piece on the Iraqi celebrations I mentioned yesterday which are happening in advance of the formal pullout of US troops from their cities which is on schedule to conclude today.

"Out, America, out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

Across town, the virtual absence of American troops and helicopters, the cheerfulness of Iraqis in military uniform, and the cries of joy gave this scarred, bunkered capital a rare carnival-like atmosphere. Iraqi police and army cars were decked with ribbons, balloons, plastic flowers and new flags. A few Baghdadis drove under the sweltering midday sun honking horns as passengers hung out the windows waving flags and yelling euphorically.

In Basra, the sentiment was inscribed on walls with spray paint: "No No Americans." Another graffiti artist instructed: "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty."

Yet, despite the celebrations, as Spencer Ackerman points out, this is a withdrawal in name only.

Milestones don't always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence.

What these Iraqis are celebrating isn't this shadow of withdrawal, it's the idea of returned sovereignty, the concept of withdrawal. If I were Tom Friedman I'd probably write they were celebrating the platonic ideal of an end to their occupation.

Let's not forget that it is an accidental and mismanaged occupation -  one never planned for - which the whole world knows was born from outrageous lies. And that even so, as US officials and officers talked about helping Iraq find its feet again these past six years, they've continually betrayed those promises by looking out for often petty and mean U.S. national interests instead of Iraqis. Neither should we forget that there have been only minor convictions for all the brutality, torture and abuse, and mostly minor sentences even then.

But if Iraqis are celebrating the first flavor of an end to that occupation, they're not celebrating reconstruction or reconcilliation. They're not celebrating peace. Tom Ricks and others are correct that there will be a spiral of upward violence as the U.S. stiffener departs the Iraqi central government's backbone. (Although Ricks is a special case as he pleads that Petraeus and Odierno are geniuses for the Surge even while he argues the Surge didn't work.) There will be some level of civil war in Iraq yet, whether it's between Shia and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Shia money-grabbers in the oil-rich South or a combination of all three.

That's not an argument for extending the occupation, though. It was always an argument for shortening it. Imagine if the U.S. and it's allies had never invaded but an act of God or Alien Space Bats had destroyed Iraq's Saddam-era leadership, devastated the nation's infrastructure, killed thousands and displaced millions anyway. Of course there would have been a multi-sided civil war. Without Saddam's repression keeping a lid on and with those other stresses to society, the fractures and imbalances in Iraq would have split wide open exactly as they did - the only difference being no U.S. occupation to focus a goodly portion of those stresses upon, to magnify and perpetuate them. The same conditions will obtain after the US leaves, whenever that is, and would have obtained at any time in the last six years.

The point, blindingly obvious to jubilant Iraqis celebrating some meagre sovereignty today, is that all of that is their problem, never ours. The Pottery Barn Rule was never "you broke it, you own it". It was always meant to be "you broke it, pay for it, and get the f**k out of our store before you make things worse!"

US Pullout From Baghdad "Like A Wedding"

By Steve Hynd

It's been too long coming, and it's still only a withdrawal in name only with 131,000 troops still in the country. But the pro-war boosters who told us the Iraqis wanted to be occupied were oh-so wrong.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. troops pulled out of Baghdad on Monday, triggering jubilation among Iraqis hopeful that foreign military occupation is ending six years after the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a "victory."

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill.

..."The American forces' withdrawal is something awaited by every Iraqi: male, female, young and old. I consider June 30 to be like a wedding," said Ahmed Hameed, 38, near an ice cream bar in Baghdad's upmarket Karrada district.

June 30th has been declared "National Sovereignty Day" by the Iraqi government.

The Loyalty lease is expiring

By Fester:

Col. Pat Lang on the upswing in large scale bombings in Iraq:

The most important component of the policy package shorthanded as "The Surge" was not the increased US combat presence, however helpful that was.  The most important thing was the successful effort to woo Sunni insurgents away from active or tacit support of the takfiri jihadis and into the "friendly" category.  We did that, and well.  They were not wholeheartedly converted "born again" friends of Brother Dave Petraeus?   What a surprise!  We used money to bring them to our side?  How terrible!  Does that mean that their hearts were not pure!!  Ah, the world is a sad place and this kind of work is always like herding cats.

Now the Americans are clearly leaving.  Power is steadily shifting towards the Shia dominated government that the Americans created.  That Shia government does not seem inclined to honor the variety of overt and implied "promises" that the Americans made to the "Sons of Iraq," etc.  The government's actions toward their Sunni "brothers" surely indicate that this is true.

In that situation it is to be expected that Sunni Arab hostility to the takfiri jihadis will wane and it is waning.  That is why it is possible for there to be more and more suicide bombings.  Get the message?

There are two ways to avoid further difficulty - 1.  The government should understand that bloody minded oppression of the Sunni Arabs will mean unending low level warfare in Iraq, and 2.  Someone should keep paying off the Sunnis sub rosa. 

Me in 2005:

• The Sunni Arab community believes it will receive a much better deal by outlasting the US and imposing either rent against a Shi'ite dominated government for non-violence or a military victory that is far more favorable to them then currently participating in the political process.
• Sooner or later the US will get out of Iraq in some fashion; the Sunni Arab community will stay in Iraq no matter what.

Me in 2007:

The overarching Iraqi Sunni Arab political goal is a return to their previously privileged positions within Iraqi society, thus receiving the economic, political and cultural rents that they previously were collecting...

It is looking more likely that the lease with the option to buy the Sunni Arab tribal loyalty is running out with little chance of that option being picked up.  The dynamic has been to either strengthen the Sunni Arab tribal elites or see an increase in violence.  That dynamic is playing out in Mosul and Baghdad as well as in the disputed areas near Kirkuk's oil fields and oil distribution systems.  The Sunni Arabs are potentially re-asserting their capacity to be veto players. 

Quiet Week in Iraq

By Fester:

Peace, prosperity, persuadable puppets and flat taxes have been achieved in Iraq. 

That is the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the lack of coverage of such a quiet week in Iraq.  Why, almost nothing happened, I had to go digging for the following incidents:

6/24/09 Kurds are claiming Kirkuk as their own

6/24/09 Large car bomb in Sadr City kills at least 50

6/24/09 5 seperate fatal or multi-casualty incidents in Mosul

6/23/09 Kurds declare central government control over Kurdish oil reserves unconstitutional 

6/21/09 9 police in Baghdad are killed in clashes

6/21/09 More fighting in Mosul

6/20/09 Large truck bomb kills at least 60 in northern Iraq

And this is only a slight bump up in violence from recent baseline but this is not an unusual week, or portion thereof.  This is only an excerpt of reported incidents and fatalities.  There are two hundred or so individuals who are dead in these incidents.  There are massive conflicts over resource claims which are fundamentally zero sum in nature and thus prone to intense conflict and a potential stabilizer of Iranian influence may be removed as Iran may turn inwards. 

And this is what 'success' looks like and it is what the COIN advocates are pointing to as a positive outcome instead of an opportunity to exit after massive ethnic cleansing, communal violence and system destabilization as well as the creation of a massive cohort of men who have plenty of experience in fighting against the United States as urban guerrillas. 

Hypocrisy thy name is Republicans

Commentary By Ron Beasley

If the Republicans have one bit of policy consistency it's hypocrisy.

In reversal, GOP balks at war funding

 House Republicans are preparing to vote en bloc against the $106 billion war-spending bill, a position once unthinkable for the party that characterized the money as support for the troops.

For years, Republicans portrayed the bills funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as matters of national security and accused Democrats who voted against them of voting against the troops.

In 2005, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) went so far as to say sending troops into battle and not paying for it would be an “immoral thing to do.” And just last year, more House Republicans voted for the war supplemental bill than did Democrats, who opposed the legislation because it did little to wind down the military effort in Iraq.

But Republicans say this year is different. Democrats have included a $5 billion increase for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help aid nations affected by the global financial crisis. Republicans say that is reason enough to vote against the entire $106 billion spending bill and are certain voters will understand.

The Democrats had better not do what we did!

A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) noted the Republican support for the version that did not include the IMF funding and accused Democrats of politicizing the issue by including non-war-funding provisions.

“It is the Democratic leadership that is playing politics with our troops by insisting on using them as leverage to pass over $100 billion in global bailout money for the IMF,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman.

However, Republicans also have used the supplemental war bills to advance non-related priorities. In 2006, Republican senators included $4 billion for farm programs and $700 million for a railroad project on the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast.

Republicans also embraced the war supplemental in 2007 — advanced by the Democratic-controlled Congress — that included an increase in the minimum wage.

And the Democrats are ready:

“Anytime there was a Democrat [who] raised concern on some of these supplementals, he was tarred as being anti-troop,” said a House Democratic leadership aide.

The Democratic aide charged House Republicans with “hypocrisy” for opposing a bill because of the IMF funding, which amounts to less than 5 percent of the proposed spending in the legislation.

“It seems like they’re putting the interest of the Republican Party and the ability for them to develop a campaign narrative ahead of the interest of the troops,” he said.

All that said I applaud them.  We need to get out of Iran and Afghanistan and not giving money to the IMF is a really good idea too.
 

Reconciliation at the end of a gun

By Fester:

Stability and political reconciliation have been the strategic objectives of the United States in Iraq for at least the past three years. The tamping down of violence in Baghdad and Sunni Arab dominated areas of Iraq from the level of the most violent places on earth to just some of the more violent places on earth has been rightly trumpeted as a good thing. However reconciliation has been a much more cantankerous process as there are significant and profound differences among all major competing interest groups as well as the ability of most groups (major and minor) to play the violent spoiler.

Agence France Presse reports that the senior Sunni who had bought into the government/political process was assassinated today:

A teenage gunman went on the rampage in a Baghdad mosque on Friday, killing five people including a Sunni Muslim MP in a grenade and gun attack, officials and witnesses said.

he slain lawmaker was identified as Harith al-Obaidi of the Iraqi Islamic Party, part of the National Concord Front.

Reuters reports that al-Obaidi was the head of the Accordance Front, which is the largest Sunni Arab bloc in the government.

What is the impact of this attack? If the attacker was a disaffected Sunni Arab or foreign jihadi, the impact is minimal as the attack is just part of the ongoing and multi-year brawl between the tribal power networks and the jihadi networks for dominance with the Iraqi Sunni Arab communities.

However, IF the attacker was a Shi'ite or affiliated with Shi'ite miltias, I think this attack would heighten the already justified Sunni Arab fear that their leadership and elite cadres will forever be targetted by the Shi'ite dominated machinery of the state as well as the militias.

Only Fit For Burning

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has an article on the status of U.S. psyops in the Iraqi media:

As'ad AbuKhalil, a political science professor at California State University who writes the Angry Arab blog, said the campaigns are ridiculed in the Arab world.

"They have a very crude tone and content, and the narrator sounds like Saddam's own propagandist," he said. "The Arabic used also is awkward, clearly translated from English texts most likely drafted in some office on K Street. One is struck by the extent to which the ads show Iraqis as Westernized and secularized."

..."All Iraqis know that these organizations are supported" by the U.S. government "with the aim of normalizing the occupation," said Abdul Kareem Ahmad, a lawyer in Salahuddin province. "I say to the Future Iraq organization: If those funds had been given to the poor and the widows, Iraq would have become a pioneer in social welfare. Millions of dollars go into the pockets of war profiteers who believe victory in Iraq can be won through the media using underground movies."

Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, said her friends and relatives ridicule the ads.

"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," she said. "Everyone knows they're American -- not Iraqi-made."

Much of the production of the billboard ads, video slots and free newspapers has long been contracted out to private American media companies, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Other efforts, like the US-military produced "Baghdad Now" newspaper are the product of military psychological warfare units. Either way, they're singularly ineffective with most Iraqis comparing the U.S. psyops campaign unfavorably to that of Saddam.

A U.S. Army officer in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could express criticism of the product, said the Iraqi soldiers at his outpost mock the publication and are more interested in the editorially independent Department of Defense newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and in the magazines soldiers get in the mail.

"They say it's childish," the officer said. "Baghdad Now makes a good fuel source at the Iraqi checkpoints."

Not even fit to wrap fish in.

So, of course, the Powers That Be, having been shown corporate and military powerpoint slides about how clever everyone is being, have decided to expand the Epic Fail.

Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, recently told lawmakers that the administration is working on a strategic communications plan for that region that draws on the lessons of Iraq.

"This is an area that has been woefully under-resourced," Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month. "The strategic communications plan -- including electronic media, telecom and radio -- will include options on how best to counter the propaganda that is key to the insurgency's terror campaign."

I tell you, the U.S. military and government are institutionally incapable of waging an effective people-centric counterinsurgency campaign. They say they can, on paper, but when the theory hits reality institutional inertia and exceptionalist arrogance does for them every time.

You Can't Trust The Dully Torygraph

By Steve Hynd

A goodly number of my blogging friends have recently posted about a story from the UK's Daily Telegraph which quoted the former Abu Graib abuse investigator, retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, as saying that the pictures from Abu Graib that the Obama administration were supressing showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency".

The pushback was swift and fierce. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters that the Telegraph had shown "an inability to get the facts right," while White House press secretary Robert Gibbs took things one giant step further by launching a general assault on the British press. "You're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other," he said.

I didn't write about the story, because there was something about it that made me uncomfortable - the Telegraph's history of only passing aquaintance with journalistic integrity. In an email to a friend last week I wrote: "I'm fairly sure even the notoriously spin-full Dully Torygraph wouldn't make up s**t and present it as a direct quote of a retired US general, but it is possible - the Torygraph has a terrible reputation for warping and wholesale-creating stories." I wasn't the only one to feel that way.

Now, Gen. Taguba has confirmed to Salon that the Telegraph took his words and played with them.

 Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba denied reports that he has seen the prisoner-abuse photos that President Obama is fighting to keep secret, in an exclusive interview with Salon Friday night.

On Thursday an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Taguba, the lead investigator into Abu Ghraib abuse, had seen images Obama wanted suppressed, and supported the president's decision to fight their release. The paper quoted Taguba as saying, "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

But Taguba says he wasn't talking about the 44 photographs that are the subject of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit that Obama is fighting.

"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said -- but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

So Taguba says he has seen so-far unreleased photos of rape, but the Telegraph made up the connection to the particular photos that are the subject of this FOIA request. An important distinction when it comes to journalistic accuracy but one that's no difference at all when it comes to the far larger question of US cover-up of crimes. It simply begs the question of how much else we haven't seen from Abu Graib yet, as well as what might be in these pics that is so bad it can't be released for fear of Iraqis rising up in a general killing spree of US troops.

Thers at Whiskey Fire:

I think it's gotten to the point where it's clear the "worst" images exist -- and one way or another, they're bound to appear, sooner or later.

The issue now is how they are going to appear. Will it be with full disclosure and a transparent commitment to accountability? Or a leak, a scandal, and an embarrassing attempt at a legalistic explanation for what's inevitably going to look like a coverup -- because, good intentions or not, that's what it will be?

I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that a release will put troops in danger, but I also think we're past that point. Taguba said the pictures exist, somewhere. I don't think he's lying. I don't think they can be forever suppressed. Best to expose the shame and show justice was done. If doing so would pose too much danger to the troops, then the troops should be immediately sent home, because then it's not at all clear what they're fighting for, anyhow, something that's already pretty goddamn murky enough. Are Americans who we say we are, or not? That's the question.

Meanwhile, today the Telegraph's bloggers are kicking up a snowstorm, trying to redirect the story into being about Gibb's unwarranted attack on the British press as a whole. But the truth is fairly simple there: Britain's tabloids - the Sun, Daily Mail and the rest - have only a passing aquaintance with the truth. The Telegraph, staffed by rejects from the Daily Mail and a core of hardline neocon shills, likewise. The Pentagon knows this because it's used the Telegraph as a plausibly deniable outlet for agitprop to be imported back to the US often enough in the past. But the rest of Britains broadsheet newspapers - the Guardian, Indie, Herald, Scotsman and even Murdoch's Times - are as accurate, as ethical, as prone to stenography and as partisan as any of America's great newspapers. Gibbs was off base, Whitman was dead on.

MoveOn, CAP and The Wars

By Steve Hynd

Tom Hayden at The Nation is highly critical of the way in which anti-war groups like MoveOn have suddenly gone quiet following Obama's election, and accuses them of political expediency.

Silence sends a message. The de facto MoveOn support for the $94 billion war supplemental reverberates up the ladder of power. Feeling no pressure, Congressional leadership has abdicated its critical oversight function over the expanding wars, not even allowing members to vote for a December report on possible exit strategies.

Michael Hastings, who was Newsweek's Baghdad correspondent, backs up Hayden today in no uncertain terms:

I’ve mentioned this before: the startling lack of indignation by the anti-war left over our current course in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Obama wins, and the most influential online liberal organization obediently shuts up. Remember, we’re going to be in Iraq and Afghanistan at least until 2019. We still have over 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and we’ll have close to 70,000 in Afghanistan by the end of the year. (Which rivals the highest total number of Americans deployed overseas in the past eight years.)

Why has it been so easy for Moveon to just, uh, move on, from what had been their signature issue of Bush era? Part of it has to do with the fact that with an all volunteer force, the war is solely a political issue for them. (For the most part.) No skin is on the line for the folks at Moveon; they don’t have to fight the war, and never really feel the impact of the war. There’s not a draft, no real sense on the home front that we’re fighting a war at all. So it’s much easier to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when a sudden silence in opposing the war can be rationalized away as an expedient political position, despite all the worrying signs that these wars are nowhere near conclusion. The issue becomes intellectual, not actual. It’s easy to make political compromises when only your principles are at stake.

But it's not just MoveOn. Other groups like theCenter for American Progress have been far less vocally critical than they should have been about the benchmarkless, Bush-repeating Af/Pak plan or about what it is becoming more and more clear is an Obama administration attempt to ready for staying in Iraq past the SOFA's cut-off date by slight-of-hand and mission creep.

It's worth quoting Jeremy Scahill's snarky explanation of just what these groups are defending so hard again:

Ah, good thing the US quest for violent global domination was brought to a screeching halt with the November presidential election. Without Obama’s election, we’d still have an occupation of Iraq, mercenaries on the US payroll, torture of prisoners, an unending and worsening war that kills civilians in Afghanistan, regular airstrikes in Pakistan, killing civilians and an embassy the size of Vatican city in Baghdad, which was built in part on slave labor. Not to mention those crazy “Bush/Cheney” neocons running around trying to become the “CEOs” of foreign nations. Wow, glad that’s all over. Whew! And, it’s a really good thing Bush is no longer in power or else the US would come up with some crazy idea like building a colonial fortress in Pakistan to defend “US interests” in the region.

And now today we have Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett scathing about Obama's Iran policy in the New York Times. "Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough," the pair write. Yet there are elements within the Obama administration who see that as a feature, not a bug.

President Obama has made several policy and personnel decisions that have undermined the promise of his encouraging rhetoric about Iran. On the personnel front, the problem begins at the top, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Clinton ran well to the right of Mr. Obama on Iran, even saying she would “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Since becoming secretary of state, Clinton has told a number of allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf that she is skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will prove fruitful and testified to Congress that negotiations are primarily useful to garner support for “crippling” multilateral sanctions against Iran.

First of all, this posture is feckless, as Secretary Clinton does not have broad international support for sanctions that would come anywhere close to being crippling. More significantly, this posture is cynically counterproductive, for it eviscerates the credibility of any American diplomatic overtures in the eyes of Iranian leaders across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum.

Even more disturbing is President Obama’s willingness to have Dennis Ross become the point person for Iran policy at the State Department. Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

On all of this, groups such as CAP and MoveOn have either been silent or broadly supportive, excusing the obvious duplicity of Obama administration rhetoric.

Two weeks ago, former congressman Tom Andrews wrote that "Democrats in Washington can do much better; it's our job to make sure that they do." The trouble is, these pressure groups simply aren't doing that job.

I'll be straight up and unsubtle, as is my wont, and say why I think that's the case. I don't think MoveOn or CAP would have done anything essentially different if Clinton had been the Dem nominee. Their leaderships are wannabe Very Serious Persons and they see cheerleading as the path to Villager status or sinecures within the administration. There's more than a few other prominent Democrat voices who fit in that category too, having turned on a dime to support from Obama what they never would have from Bush. None are willing to bite the hand that feeds them, so they sacrifice their principles instead.