A seasonal tradition - with a new twist

The Iraq War has been going on for so long that it's developed its own seasonal traditions. I was beginning to wonder, though, why we weren't hearing the traditional Christmas-time predictions of signficant troops reductions. I mean, people need some happy news for those family get-togethers, right?

It was late this year. But tradition survives (U.S. to keep most troops in Baghdad by Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes Los Angeles Times 12/16/07):

The withdrawals are occurring over the next eight months as the military gradually reverses the troop buildup that was completed in June.

Plans call for reducing troops that reached a peak of about 170,000 to pre-buildup levels of about 135,000.

Some reduction will probably have to occur, because Cheney and Bush have largely run out of soldiers to send there. But the seasonal prediction is kind of low this year. Normally, war fans are predicting that we'll be down to 100,000 or fewer soldiers there by the end of [fill in following year].

But in other ways, this LA Times article is a surprising one. It essentially says that the latest shift in US strategy is to turn over most provinces to local warlords and concentrate on keeping the lid on conflict in Baghdad itself. It sounds like from this report that the generals have essentially accepted the fact that Iraq is now a failed state, with little hope of rebuilding a nation in any foreseeable future. In fact, they explicitly write, "Months ago, Bush administration officials and senior military leaders largely gave up hope of meaningful political reconciliation through the Iraqi government." (my emphasis) Gee, I don't remember Bush or Cheney telling us that in any of their speeches.

I don't want to put too much emphasis on one report. But I don't recall seeing one that comes as close as this one does to saying that that the US military has given up on Iraqi national security forces, which are largely partisan Shi'a militias, in any case. It's hard to read the following any other way:

Those turnovers should also accelerate the shift away from a purely counterinsurgency strategy. Military leaders in Washington have been pressing generals in Baghdad to move toward what they call "tactical overwatch." Under that strategy, Iraqi troops would take the lead in most operations, and U.S. troops would be called in only when problems occur.

A faster move toward an overwatch strategy has gained adherents as U.S. officials try to draw lessons from the experience of the British in Basra, the largest city in the south, which will become the first sector of the country outside the semiautonomous Kurdistan enclave in the north to be handed over to Iraqi government and security forces.

"You cannot set zero violence as your standard in Iraq. It is just not attainable," the senior military official in Washington said. "The standard rather is a level of violence that is containable by the Iraqi security forces. And that is largely what we have seen in Basra."

Haven't we been hearing for the last year about the brilliance of our Savior-General Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy? And now we're beginning to shut it down in favor of "tactical overwatch", whatever the heck that may mean.

What the British did in Basra was to recognize that the game was up. They weren't going to do any good there and were only increasing local tension while getting their own soldiers shot up.

Tags: iraq war