Ret. General Barry McCaffery has been making the talk show rounds after his latest trip to Baghdad. He held interviews with Gen. Petraeus on down and wrote a highly critical assesment:
In summary, the US Armed Forces are in a position of strategic peril. A disaster in Iraq will in all likelihood result in a widened regional struggle which will endanger America’s strategic interests (oil) in the Mid-east for a generation. We will also produce another generation of soldiers who lack confidence in their American politicians, the media, and their own senior military leadership.
I just watched him on Hardball.
Chris: Is it deteriorating?
Gen. McCaffery: That’s an open question.
….
Chris: How many years are we going to be fighting in Iraq?
After the House passed the timeline laden emergency supplemental by only the slimmest of margins, President Bush was quick to respond with a threat to veto the bill. It all seemed like the usual heavy posturing, especially considering the tough opposition the bill was expected to face in the Senate.
Except when the debate began in the senate on Monday cracks began to appear in the Republican opposition. the Washington Post reports:
Unwilling to do the White House’s heavy lifting on Iraq, Senate Republicans are prepared to step aside to allow language requiring troop withdrawals to reach President Bush, forcing him to face down Democratic adversaries with his veto pen.
Why take the heat for stopping what is now becoming clear is an unavoidable confrontation between Democrats and the President? Veto he will, and the vote margins aren’t there to stop him, it seems…so again we are left with a tremendous amount of posturing to accomplish not so much.
Thomas Friedman(Times select) sees the pressure applied by the Democrats as fruitful even if it won’t affect policy. He writes:
The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the president and Gen. David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so? The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations — and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the “leverage” of telling the parties that if they don’t compromise, we will leave. (Deadlines matter. At some point, Iraqis have to figure this out themselves.)
And indeed despite the inevitable veto, it seems the anti-surge pressure is becoming consequential. Outgoing U.S. ambassador to Iraq Khalilzad is warning Iraqi leaders and military that patience is running thin. The Guardian reports:
At a final news conference in Baghdad, the Afghan-born diplomat warned of the growing pressure in the US to commit to a timetable for a withdrawal of troops.
“I know that we are an impatient people, and I constantly signal to the Iraqi leaders that our patience, or the patience of the American people, is running out,” said Mr Khalilzad, who has been nominated by Presdient Bush to succeed John Bolton as America’s envoy to the UN.
Sec. of State Rice started another Middle East trip this weekend. Fourth in four months. In Aswan Egypt, she’s been urging Arab leaders to rally diplomatic efforts for the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
While she’s in the neighborhood she might want to check out the other crisis brewing. Friday, 15 British sailors and marines were picked up by Iranian forces in disputed waters. They were brought to Tehran, and have been said to confess by the Iranian press. England wants them back “immediately.”
The fact that these guys were picked up the day before the U.N. was set to vote on new sanctions for Iran is a complete coincidence. No, really..and I have this bridge I want to sell you..
But why would Iran want to pick a fight with the British? Terrorism expert Walid Phares writes:
Teheran’s master planners intend to drag the “Coalition” into steps in engagement, at the timing of and in the field of control of Iran’s apparatus. Multiple options and scenarios are projected.
…
In a short conclusion the “War room” in Tehran has engaged itself in an alley of tactical moves it feels it can control. But the Iranian regime, with all its “political chess” expertise, may find itself in a precarious and risky situation. For while it feel that it can control the tactical battlefield in the region and fuel the propaganda pressure inside the West with its Petro-dollars, it may not be able to contain the internal forces in Iran, because of which it has decided to go on offense.
I’m no Robert E. Lee, but man that plan sounds dumb.
No surprises were in the resolution, which modestly strengthens largely financial sanctions adopted in December in a first, limited resolution. Senior American officials hailed the new resolution as a significant international rebuke to Iran, and they predicted that the new resolution’s prohibitions on dealings with 15 individuals and 13 organizations would leave Tehran more isolated.
Want to give yourself a headache?
Try to figure out where there will be peace first: Israel/Palestine or Iraq? And then try to figure out a scenario where either of those is possible within the context of a nuclear standoff between Iran and the West, not forgetting to factor in some British marines being held captive by Mullahs looking tough for the sake of intimidating dissenters the U.S. is actively and openly supporting…
Coverage of the war in Iraq by the MSM is called everything from biased, defeatist, heartless, impersonal, impotent talking heads demoralizing our troops to puppets of the powers that be, hegemonic powerbrokers, providing “militainment” to the jingoist xenophobic masses.
The past month we’ve had some really good examples of how much good work can be done by individuals from the monolithic illusion that is the MSM.
Bob Woodruff’s coverage on brain injuries being suffered by soldiers has been powerful, and as heartfelt and personal as any Ernie Pyle story. In many ways his reporting on injured veterans set the stage for the explosive impact of the Walter Reed scandal(another example of important reporting by the MSM).
Even some who frequently criticize the MSM aknowledged the selflessness of Woodruff’s concern for the issue and his admirable way of making the stories about the soldiers and not his own experience.
NBC news’ Richard Engel’s “War Zone Diary” which aired last night on MSNBC may be one of the best looks into the progression of the 4 year-old war the MSM has produced. It is certainly a powerful insight into the tremendous amount of sacrifice and dedication that it takes to cover(and fight/survive) a war.
He like Woodruff, Pyle and other great war correspondents tells the story form the perspective of the average U.S. soldier or Iraqi while drawing a broader context of the struggle.
The above was just part of the great fun had today in debating the funding bill for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The house appropriations committee passed the bill which would set a timeline of withdrawal from Iraq. The Washington Post reports:
Under the bill, the Iraqi government would have to meet strict benchmarks spelled out by Bush in January, including the quelling of sectarian violence, disarming sectarian militias, approving an oil-revenue sharing law, and setting in motion new local elections.
If Bush could not certify any progress toward such goals by July 1, troops would begin leaving Iraq and would be gone before the end of this year. If the president did certify progress, the Iraqi government would have until Oct. 1 to meet all of the benchmarks, or troops would begin withdrawing then.
Understanding the political suicide of de-funding the troops, their latest brainstorm would have the United States instead spend money on a whole host of critically important things such as peanut storage, additional salaries for the House of Representatives, live fish transport across the Canadian border, an FDA Office of Women’s Health, and compensation (bail out for ecoli scare) to spinach growers, along with the old stand-by favorites NO ONE would dare say no to…Children, Katrina victims, and Veterans.
Meanwhile in the Senate a similar bill was defeated by the Republicans just minutes ago. After a victory earlier in the week to get to the actual debate the Democrats had hoped to push the measure though today.
Seeing as how Bush would have vetoed it anyway…
And a really great cloumn by David Brooks. His take:
The Democratic leaders don’t want to be for immediate withdrawal because it might alienate the centrists, and they don’t want to see out the surge because that would alienate the base. What they want to do is be against Bush without accepting responsibility for any real policy, so they have concocted a vaporous policy of distant withdrawal that is divorced from realities on the ground.
Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the surge, he supports it, even if it’s going to be unpopular. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such guts.
As a result, nobody loves them. Liberals recognize the cynicism of it all. Republicans know the difference between principled opposition and unprincipled posturing. Independents see just another group of politicians behaving like politicians.
What we get is foreign policy narcissism. The Democrats call it an Iraq policy, but it’s really all about us.
So, I ask again, is the troop surge working? Well, I guess that’s relative. Look at these two articles today by the Washington Post.
The first is being repeated throughout the MSM and recounts a press conference with U.S. and Iraqi military leaders.
BAGHDAD, March 14 — U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday that the month-old Baghdad security plan has reduced the level of violence in the capital, but they cautioned that the security situation in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq remains unstable.
The top U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said sectarian killings had decreased since the operation began in mid-February but noted a record number of bombings in Baghdad last month.
“By the indicators that the government of Iraq has, it has been extremely positive,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said. “But I would again caution everybody about patience, about diligence. This is going to take many months, not weeks.”
The Pentagon yesterday released its bleakest assessment of Iraq yet, reporting record levels of violence and hardening sectarian divisions in the last quarter of 2006 as rival Sunni and Shiite militias waged campaigns of “sectarian cleansing” that forced as many as 9,000 civilians to flee the country each month.
Weekly attacks in Iraq rose to more than 1,000 during the period and average daily casualties increased to more than 140, with Iraqi civilians bearing the brunt of the violence — nearly 100 killed or wounded a day, according to statistics in the Pentagon’s latest congressionally required quarterly report on security in Iraq.
For me the problem is trying to wrap my head around these numbers of dead, bombings, and attacks. What’s the trend? Is it significant? And can we even believe the numbers being put out their by these generals?
Context, context, context..here’s a little history to put it all into perspective.
Edit: Here is another take on the difficulty of assessing progress by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax on the BBC.
The Washington Post ran an interesting story today on whether the Feb. 2006 bombing of the golden domed Askariya mosque was the tipping point when the situation in Iraq got out of control.
But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq — particularly in Baghdad — overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam — the Golden Mosque of Samarra — in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.
That speech and others since have often painted the pre 2/22/06 situation in Iraq as moving on a positive path toward democracy. That it wasn’t incompetency in the post-invasion management that led to growing sectarian violence, rather, this one event triggered an unstoppable tidal wave of violence.
A cursory look at casualty numbers from before and after reveal that, yes, since 2/06 there have been higher monthly totals, however, not by much..
Experts say the attack{the shrine bombing} did not begin a civil war but rather confirmed the ongoing deterioration and violence in Iraq — conditions the White House and the generals had resisted recognizing. In that sense, the bombing destroyed much more than the shrine: It also demolished the positive view of progress in Iraq, leading military and administration officials to a more pessimistic perspective, and eventually to a new U.S. strategy.
Others think the Post story is missing the point entirely. Counterterrorism Blog says:
Until late 2005, the majority of provocative terror attacks targeting Shiites in Iraq were executed by Al-Qaida and its local Sunni supporters. Other mainstream Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups didn’t really jump on that bandwagon until the winter of 2006 — when Shiite militiamen themselves went haywire in response to the bombing in Samarra.
In other words, the shrine bombing didn’t start the violence, it just changed the face of it..I wouldn’t dispute that…I just agree with the Post’s implication, that some are blaming one event for a dire situation whose roots date way back to the March 2003(or Nov. 2000, if you want).
I was turned on to this optimisitc opinion piece by Robert Kagan by the liberal website Think Progress. I bring it to our attention mostly because it mirrors so closely my own blogging, particularly the sourcing of Iraq the Model.
“If I were the president, I’d probably seize on every encouraging sign,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “As an analyst, that isn’t what we do.”
The NYTimes looked past all encouraging signs in its Friday editorial.
“Anyone who wanted to believe that all Mr. Bush was seeking was a short-term security push — as part of a larger strategy to extricate American troops from this unwinnable war — now needs to face up to a far less palatable reality. What is under way is a significant and long-term escalation. The Army cannot sustain these levels for more than another few months. And as long as Iraq’s leaders refuse to make significant political changes, the civil war will continue to spin out of control.”
Although they too noted, as did ITm, Kagan, and I, that the fractioning of the Shiite Bloc is a positive development.
What’s becoming clear is that earlier optimism about a short impactful surge, is being tempered by the generals on the ground. This is going to go on for a while.. so let’s just hope for the best, right?
