War and the Presidential election

Monday's Democratic Presidential debate provided a Clinton/Obama squabble that gave the Establishment press a good "horse race" story. But, as Juan Cole points out in Iraq Dominates Testy Dem Debate Informed Comment blog 01/22/08, the Iraq War was very much on the candidates' minds and agendas, because it's very much on the minds and agendas of the Democratic base and the public at large. Even though the lords of the press corps keep repeating that nobody cares about it any more, that it's disappeared as an issue.

But The Surge, aka the McCain escalation, hasn't worked those miracles that the war fans fantasize that they see. Andrew Bacevich has some pointed comments on the topic in the Washington Post 01/20/08 in Surge to Nowhere:

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working. ...

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina.

Patrick Cockburn reports on some very recent violence in Iraq toll mounts as forces fight cult The Independent 01/21/08:

Some 276 people were killed, wounded or captured by government forces fighting a millenarian Shia cult in southern Iraq over the past three days, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence said in Baghdad yesterday.

The heavy losses in gun battles between the 'Supporters of the Mahdi' group and the police and army in Basra and Nasiriya underlines how swiftly violence can explode in Iraq where everybody is heavily armed. In Nasiriya three senior officers were among the dead.

The movement, led by Ahmad al-Hassani, also known as Ahmad al-Yamani, believes in the imminent return of the Messiah but exactly why its members should have taken to the streets in several cities remains unclear. In Basra they reportedly first killed several traffic policemen and commandeered six empty vehicles and two police cars. They later captured an oil facilities building and a hospital. At one point there was fighting in 75 per cent of Basra, a city of two million people, according to the police chief Abdul Jalil Khalaf.

It is a measure of the lack of information on what is happening outside central Baghdad that casualty figures vary widely with one source claiming that 97 died and 217 were wounded in Basra alone. In Baghdad the National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie was trapped in a Shia mosque in the Sh'la district in west Baghdad but it is not clear if his attackers were also from the 'Supporters of the Mahdi' movement, that appears to have supporters in every Shia city. (my emphasis)

Basra is a key port city that is on the route US troops would need to use in a large-scale withdrawal from Iraq. That 75% of the city could be engulfed in what sounds like serious fighting can't be comforting news to US commanders.

But what about the idea of Petraeus '12 (The American Prospect Online 01/22/08)? Spencer Ackerman thinks he sees a glimmer of a Presidential campaign in four years by the Savior-General himself!

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, patrick cockburn, petraeus