Iraq War "success" and The Surge

I've been very disappointed in general in the way that Obama's campaign has downplayed the Iraq War. Not only because it's a winning issue and a good way to distinguish himself clearly from McCain on foreign policy. But because this war is the greatest strategic disaster in the history of American foreign policy (so far, if McCain gets elected).

Patrick Cockburn in Iraq: Violence is down – but not because of America's 'surge' The Independent 09/14/08 reviews the reasons for the reduction in violence in Iraq since 2007. Stress should be on reduction, because conditions are still very violent there. The recent disturbances in Bolivia that threaten to set off a civil war there are like routine daily occurrences in Iraq. Cockburn says bluntly, "Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world." His reasons for what improvement there has been, an improvement that McCain attributes exclusively to The Surge, include:

• The Shi'a won the sectarian war in Baghdad. They didn't drive the Sunnis out of the city altogether. But the neighborhoods are more homogeneous religiously.

• A large number of Iraqis (4.7 million) are refugees, both in and out of the country, having left their homes to get away from the violence. Both that and the results of the sectarian war in Baghdad effectively means there are not as many people left to kill.

• Sunni insurgent leaders shifted their focus from fighting Americans to fighting Salafi extremists ("Al Qa'ida in Iraq", or AQI). This is one factor that the Americans did not initiate but did play a key role in encouraging. The US has been paying former Sunni insurgent groups to fight AQI instead of the US. This bribery worked in the short run, at the expense of strengthening local warlords and militias and thus making national unification even more difficult. Presumably, this is much of what Cockburn has in mind when he writes, "General Petraeus has had a measure of success in Iraq less because of his military skills than because he was one of the few American leaders to have some understanding of Iraqi politics."

• Iran backs the Shi'a government of Iraq under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Iran also persuaded nationalist Shi'a militant Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army (JAM) to stand down on fight Americans. For now. "It is very noticeable," Cockburn writes, that in recent weeks the US has largely ceased its criticism of Iran." A state of affairs he attributes in part to "an implicit recognition that US security in Iraq is highly dependant on Iranian actions". That's also an encouraging sign for US policy, and I hope it continues in that vein.

Cockburn notes the grim oddity of current discussion and reporting on the war in the United States:

In Mosul, Iraq's northern capital and third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, the government was trumpeting its success only a few months ago. It said it had succeeded in driving al-Qa'ida from the city, while the US said the number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July. But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. Two weeks ago, insurgents came close to killing Major-General Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, with a roadside bomb.

The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air. When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America's military adventure there is finally coming good. [my emphasis]

The implication of Cockburn's analysis is that if McCain becomes President and takes seriously his own rhetoric about the magic results of The Surge, that could not only lead him to actions that would inflame anti-American sentiment in Iraq but to adopt reckless policies in Afghanistan.

It's also important to note that part of the short-term reduction in violence has also been due to the effectiveness of death squads who have been assassinating resistance leaders, a program modeled on the infamous Phoenix program in the Vietnam War. Tom Hayden writes about the Iraqi death squads in Woodward book reveals extra-judicial killings in Iraq San Francisco Chronicle 09/15/08:

The silence so far toward Bob Woodward's reporting of secret extra-judicial killings by American forces in Iraq shows a worrisome collapse of public debate about the war.

During the Vietnam War, by contrast, revelations about torture, tiger cages and the Phoenix program were headline news that sent protesters into the streets and produced congressional hearings. William Colby, then leading pacification efforts in Vietnam, testified that the Phoenix program killed 20,587 Vietcong "suspects," while Sen. William Fulbright suggested it meant indiscriminate killings of anyone resisting the U.S. and Saigon governments. ...

Now the Woodward book reports a series of top secret special operations, launched in May 2006, to "locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups," a campaign that may have been the greatest factor in reducing the violence in Iraq. President Bush told Woodward that the secret program was "awesome." Derek Harvey, the top intelligence adviser to Petraeus on the secret operations, told Woodward that the "lightning quick" assaults gave him "orgasms.".

Orgasms? Is this what we've come to?

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, patrick cockburn, surge, tom hayden

Mission accomplished in Iraq at last?

Don't worry, be happy - and just what are you smoking in that pipe, dude?

Jo Fish at FireDogLake came up with a great euphemism, "Wire Service that Must Not Be Named" for the A********* P****. It was a kooky idea of them to try to stop people from even linked to their stories. But I'm beginning to wonder if they weren't just embarrassed to have some of their stuff highlighted for a wider audience.

For instance, here is a McCain campaign press release credulous article, As insurgency fades, fragile peace unfolds bylined to Robert Burns and Robert Reid 07/27/08, this version from the Orlando Sentinel.

Mission is finally accomplished in Iraq, according to this article. No kidding:

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point at which the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

It's not the end of fighting; it looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

The combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, curbing illicit weaponry from Iran, boosting links between Baghdad and local governments, integrating former insurgents into government jobs and rebuilding the economy. Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaeda holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance has all but ceased. (my emphasis)

First, I need to repeat my obligatory comment every time someone announces Glorious Victory in Iraq: Great news! Let's have the troops home by Christmas!

Let's also recite the reality-based reasons for the reductions in violence. The goal of the surge was political reconciliation including a series of major compromise that have not been achieved. So, by the terms on which it was originally presented to the public, The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation, is a failure.

But there have been reductions in violence, from the more horrific to the less horrific. Yes, the increase in US troops had a role. I guess that's what the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named means by "a perilous peace". But so did other things. There was the Sunni Awakening, in which Sunni tribal leaders started fighting against the Al Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) group, whose connections to the Al Qa'ida that pulled the 9/11 attacks is pretty tenuous from what we've seen in the public record. Our Savior-General Petraeus decided to use a variation of the buy-off-the-local-warlords strategy that we've been using in Afghanistan, which has resulted in an exceptionally weak central government, the massive growth of narco-trafficking, and an escalating war in that country. In other words, the US military made an effective truce with and provided funds to many of the Sunni guerrilla ("terrorist") groups that oppose the heavily pro-Iranian Shi'a government in Baghdad which we support. This Awakening process began months before The Surge was even announced, and had very little to do with the increase in US troops. But strengthening these Sunni militias makes the long-term political reconciliation more challenging, not easier.

Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM (Mahdi Army) has observed a ceasefire for most of 2007 and 2008. There seems to be little evidence that it has lost power or influence. On the contrary, it's a more formidable political force than in was in 2004 when it clashed openly with the US occupation forces for the first time.

The level of killing has also been affected by five million refugees leaving places where they were more likely to be killed by sectarian and tribal enemies to place where they were less likely to be killed. About half of those are internal refugees, the other half external, mostly in Syria and Jordan. See Helena Cobban's Iraq: Provincial elections and displacement 07/23/08 for how the refugee problem affects the provincial elections, which were recently postponed until likely sometime in 2009.

Then there was the effective completion of "ethnic cleansing" in Baghdad itself. The A********* P**** has a euphemism that is a new one to me, "neighborhoods purged of minorities":

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006. That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital.

The Iraq War has gone on for so many years that there are some well-established traditions connected with it. Election-year optimism about how well things are going is one of them. Then there's the late-year predictions that huge drawdowns will occur the following year.

With both Obama and the Iraqi government demanding that the withdrawal of American troops should start in 2009, the latter may actually come true this time. If Obama gets elected and the antiwar movement succeeds in bringing enough pressure to bear on his administration.

Tom Hayden discusses the Iraqi withdrawal demand Maliki Endorses Obama Timeline in Huge Blow for McCain, Bush Huffington Post 07/19/08.

For a less happy-face view of the current state of affairs in Iraq than that of the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named, check out Bob Dreyfuss' Iraq: Poised to Explode The Nation Online 07/27/08:

Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. ...

There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, robert dreyfuss, surge

Nir Rosen on the Iraq War

Colonial war, Cheney-Bush style (the severed head is from an American ally)

Nir Rosen has a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone about a recent visit to Iraq and about the alleged "success" of the McCain escalation, The Myth of the Surge 03/06/08 issue; accessed 02/24/08). The photo by Danfung Denis featured above appears in the print edition, but not at this writing in the online collection. The caption says:

Violence in Iraq is on the rise again - and much of it is aimed at the Awakening, Sunni fighters who have abandoned Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans. At right, two U.S. soldiers pose with the severed head of an Awakening member - a U.S. ally - who was decapitated by Al Qaeda. (The soldiers were later reprimanded for their behavior.) The killing was intended to send a clear warning: Those who aid the Americans are marked for death. (my emphasis)

That image conveys better than any of the other photos in the print or online editions the sense that Rosen's article gives, of the American soldiers in a hopelessly hostile environment, with little hope of achieving anything like the Success and Victory that our Republican war fans tell us is withing grasp, someday, maybe 100 years from now, maybe 10,000.

It's particularly notable that these soldiers are mocking the dead, severed head of someone allied to the United States, killed for collaborating with them. It's hard to imagine that this level of distrust, contempt, and total lack of respect isn't conveyed to our Iraqi allies as well as enemies of the moment.

That photo, by the way, is the kind that makes our Republican war fans crazy. They don't want to see anything that shows the genuine ugliness of war, or that presents any member of the US forces as anything other than a comic-book heroic warrior.

Acceptable war imagery for Republicans: the sergeant is saying, "Keep movin', you lunkheads!! Nobody lives forever! So git the lead out and follow me! We got us a war to win!"

Despite the admiration it will no doubt inspire in some of our superpatriots, disrespecting the dead or using body parts as trophies is a violation of the laws of war. Although this is presumably more like to be done to the corpses of enemies rather than allies. H. Wayne Elliott writes in Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), "Dead and Wounded":

In 1967 a U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam posed for a photograph. The photograph, later published nationally, showed the sergeant holding the decapitated heads of two enemy corpses. The soldier was court-martialed and convicted of "conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline." There were other reports of U.S. soldiers cutting the ears and fingers off the enemy dead. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, denounced the mutilation of dead bodies as "subhuman" and "contrary to all policy and below the minimum standards of human decency." Not only is the mistreatment of dead bodies "contrary to all policy," it is also a violation of the laws of war.

The caption to the Rolling Stone photograph above says the soldiers were "reprimanded", which is not the same as a court martial. Maybe our generals consider the "minimum standards of human decency" to have sunk since 1967?

Rosen's article is one that really needs to be read in full to appreciate the effect. He gives several accounts of his interactions with the Americans and the allied Sunnis ("Sons of Iraq" is the name that the US has suddenly started using, apparently just a week or two ago). What's impressive, and depressing, is how little understanding in either the linguistic or psychological sense the American soldiers have, or can really be expected to have under these situations. But saying that is not meant to let our infallible generals off the hook for their neglect of things like Arabic language skills.

Here's one account that gives some of the flavor (one of the Awakening members with whom Rosen talks is named Osama):

As [First Lt. Shawn] Spainhour talks to the sheik at the mosque, two bearded, middle-aged men in sweaters suddenly walk up to the Americans with a tip. Two men down the street, they insist, are members of the Mahdi Army. The soldiers quickly get back into the Strykers, as do Osama and his men, and they all race to Mahala 830. There they find a group of young men stringing electrical cables across the street. Some of the men manage to run off, but the eleven who remain are forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wear flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit take their pictures one by one. The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist - they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.

I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake — it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator - but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.

When you read accounts like this, you realize just how [Cheney]ed we are in Iraq. (my emphasis)

I know it's not news that Cheney and Bush are fools over this thing. But one of the many ways in which that's true is that after convincing our media clowns that The Surge has tamped down violence, if they had had any sense of responibility or even good sense at all, they would have taken the opportunity to declare Mission Accomplished once again and start large-scale and fairly rapid withdrawal of American troops.

But they didn't. Aside from their geopolitical and oil-industry ambitions, I really do think that they must have no clue at all how to extricate the US from this situation. Nor do they give any convincing impression of actually caring.

This article really gives a good picture of what the arming and training of the Awakening Councils/Sons of Iraq means. And how it bought short-term cosmetic gains at the price of making long-term peace a more distant goal:

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future." (my emphasis)

This is what happens when men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or John McCain are allowed to run the government.

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, nir rosen, surge

The Maverick and the Republican "conservatives"

The Maverick embraces his Dear Leader, 2004

That bold Maverick McCain addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference this afternoon. That's the gathering where last year Mad Annie Coulter fired up the faithful by calling John Edwards a "faggot". A number of prominent conservatives have complained that the Maverick isn't sufficiently loyal to the Party line, which incidentally (or maybe not so incidentally) plays right into the endless depiction of McCain as some kind of moderate by his adoring fans in the press corps.

Before I get into the rightwing grumbling over the Maverick, has anyone else noticed that Joe Lieberman has been showing up standing loyally beside McCain lately when he gives victory speeches? The Senate Democrats probably think they have little choice but to accept Lieberman as part of their voting majority in organizing the Senate. But, good grief, if the man is campaigning for a Republican Presidential candidate even during the primaries, it's silly to regard him as any kind of Democrat any more. Given their difficulty in getting any innovative, non-Cheney-approved legislation through the Senate anyway, I have to wonder whether accepting him as part of the majority even now makes sense. If the Dems pick up a couple more Senate seats in the fall - or even one more in the Mississippi special election to fill Trent Lott's vacated seat - there will be even less reason to allow Lieberman to pose as a Democrat. Because he obviously isn't. The Dems are at least not allowing HoJo to be a "super-delegate" at the party convention (Lieberman No Longer a Super Delegate Capitol Watch 02/06/08).

This suspicion of the right wing against their presumptive Presidential nominee Maverick McCain is very strange. I hate when Pat Buchanan agrees with me, but he's right in saying that the Maverick as President "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."

A couple of useful looks at this dustup within the Christian Republican Party are McCain seeks to assuage wary conservatives by Joe Garofoli San Francisco Chronicle 02/07/08, and Hating on McCain by Joe Conason Salon 02/07/08.

Garofoli hits what I think is the bottom line on this faction fight among the Reps:

Talk show host and conservative commentator Mike Gallagher wrote Wednesday in the TownHall.com blog that "a lot of my friends and colleagues are in a foul mood over John McCain's Super Tuesday success."

"But what should really fire them up is the possibility of a Democrat in the White House in 2009," he wrote. "And I would respectfully suggest to the 'I'll-never-vote-for-McCain' crowd that you are threatening to hand the November election over to the Democrats on a big, fat silver platter."

Why should prominent conservatives be harshing on McCain? In some cases, looking for reasons is probably useless. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, was off the wall even before he pickled his brain in OxyContin. Conason also predicts with good reason that most Republicans won't experience much trauma in getting behind the Maverick as their nominee:

Certainly there will be many elected officials, bureaucrats, officeholders and assorted pork-choppers who will fall into the McCain ranks without much protest, out of personal interest or partisan loyalty. If conservatives could persuade themselves to accept Romney's professions of the true faith despite his record of support for abortion rights and gay rights, then why not believe McCain when he promises supply-side tax cuts?

And, as Conason also explains, plain old fanaticism and wingnut paranoia are also likely at work to some extent.

I realize that the image of Maverick McCain is one that has been repeated for years by our sad excuse for a press corps. Most of whom luuu-uuv that living saint, Staight-Talking McCain. Listen to the reporters on TV, blathering about St. McCain's "straight talk" and his "Maverick" nature.

The bold Maverick has one of the most conservative, pro-Bush voting records in the Senate. He panders to the Christianist right, including embracing their anti-science, anti-evolution pitch. He supports continuing the Cheney-Bush tax cuts (aka, tax subsidies) for the wealthiest citizens, because the heart and soul of the Republican Party is to make sure that the wealthiest people who materially benefit the most from what the United States has to offer should be free of the terrible burden of paying taxes to support their country.

McCain gave his adoring fans among the TV talking heads a chance to pimp his Maverick image by his anti-torture bill. But that was a joke from the start, though our pathetic press corps wouldn't think of reporting that. Torture was illegal when Cheney and Bush and Rummy started it in 2001. Why would anyone think that outlawing it again would make any difference to these scoundrels? Then when Bush signed the bill with a signing statement saying he had no dadgum intention of obeying it, the bold Maverick said he was just fine with that. And, of course, the Straight Talker happily voted to approve to retroactively indemnify many of the torturers. Although they can still be prosecuted under international law, if necessary. No McCain Presidency will prosecute those or any other torture cases unless their hand is forced somehow. And if the Congress can't force Bush's Attorney General to even investigate instances of torture in which the administration openly admits to using the drowning torture (waterboarding) that has been generally recognized as torture since at least the days of the Spanish Inquisition, it's unlikely they would be able to force McCain either.

The Maverick supports Cheney and Bush on telecomm amnesty for illegal spying, supports the illegal spying program generally, is fine with Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of (Republican) Presidential power, will do nothing to stop Republican voter-suppression maneuvers (a direct continuity between today's Republicans and "Old South" segregationists), is totally on board with Supreme Court Justices like Roberts and Alito (one McCain Supreme Court appointment and you can kiss Roe v. Wade goodbye), supports Republican administrations defying Congressional subpoenas and exercising a blatantly partisan and often plain dishonest political prosecution policy, and thinks preventive wars are just dandy.

McCain was the chief Congressional advocate of The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation, whose main function has been to strengthen the Sunni militias that are fighting against our allied Shi'a-dominated, pro-Iranian government in Baghdad's Green Zone. Just within the last few weeks, fighting between government (aka Shi'a partisan) forces and the supporters of some whacko apocalyptic cult produced fighting in 75% of Basra, in the south where the British have, uh, successfully pacified everything. That's a key port facility for oil exports and a key location on the exit route for American troops leaving Iraq.

And, of course, the point of The Surge - to produce political reconciliation - has gone nowhere, to put it mildly. Oh, yeah, now the Turks are regularly bombing northern Iraq and conducting cross-border raids. And the air war in Iraq and Afghanistan escalated dramatically in 2007. The Iraq War is almost exclusively urban combat. Gee, when you drop a 2,000-lb bomb on a building in the middle of a crowded city, think there might be some civilian causalities? Have you ever heard the bold Maverick McCain express the slightest reservations about fighting a guerrilla war this way?

And what's the Maverick's solution to this? Keep fighting forever. He said he was fine if the US stayed in Iraq for 100 years. When a reporter later challenged him on it, he said 1000 years or even a million years (!!!) would be fine with him.

Speaking of which, you wouldn't know it listening to the Chris Matthewses expounding their man-crushes for the Maverick. But listen to one of his speeches at some length sometimes. I heard a long excerpt of him campaigning in Florida, I think it was, and he sounded downright dingy. And that dull roar you hear in the background when he speaks? That's the sound of bombs falling on Teheran. And Damascus. And Lord only knows where else.

Tags: iraq war, joe lieberman, mccain, mccain escalation, surge

The secret of The Surge

Rosa Brooks summed it up pretty well last week in The walls around Bush's Iraq strategy Los Angeles Times 12/20/07.

Over the last year, sectarian cleansing has often occurred with reluctant American connivance. Our troops have watched helplessly as neighbors have driven out neighbors, and the walls that U.S. troops build help freeze the new sectarian boundaries in place. In Washington, the administration still speaks of a unified Iraqi central government and "national reconciliation," but in practice, we've gained a respite from violence in part because we've given up on reconciliation and accepted sectarian segregation as the new status quo.

In other words, for all the early rhetoric about benchmarks, "political progress" and reconciliation, the truth is that most Washington insiders accept that we're heading toward a different and much grimmer version of Iraq. As Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group comments: "Iraq is moving in the direction of a failed state, with competing centers of power run by warlords and militias. The central government has no political control whatsoever beyond Baghdad, maybe not even beyond the Green Zone."

We used to say we wanted freedom and democracy. But these days, we'll settle for more warlords, more segregation and fewer bodies. (my emphais)

Anthony Cordesman has out a new analysis of the status of the Iraq War, Progress in Iraq: The December Report on Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (Center for Security and International Studies) 12/20/07. He highlights the current Department of Defense (DOD) definition of success in the Iraq War: "The strategic goal of the United States in Iraq remains a unified, democratic and federal Iraq that can govern, defend and sustain itself and is an ally in the war on terror."

He looks at what it would take to achieve that goal. One thing is something that is hard to see as anything other than an open-ended US troop commitment, in practice:

The US needs to maintain a strategic relationship with Iraq that provides stable support for Iraqi security, accommodation, economic development, and the creation of effective governance over a period of at least three to five more years. This does not mean maintaining current US force and aid levels, or not making US support conditional on a realistic level of Iraqi progress. It does mean understanding that 2008 cannot be a decisive year in building stable accommodation, only a beginning.

So, great. After six years of war (March 2003 will be at the sixth anniversary0, we will finally reach the beginning - if we're lucky.

I have to give Cordesman credit. Given his grim prognostications, it takes some real vision to keep optimism about achieving some kind of victory, as he is. Or at least this optimistic: "There are ... strong indicators that the glass has gone from one that was mostly empty [at the end of 2006] to one that is at least half full."

He also points to the need for Iraqi political reconciliation. Due to the developments that Brooks' column highlights, that possibility at the national level faces even greater obstacles now than before The Surge. Juan Cole writes at his Informed Comment blog in Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007 12/26/07:

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has for the moment lost the support of the Sunni Arabs in parliament. The Sunnis in his cabinet have resigned. Even some Shiite parties have abandoned the government. Sunni Arabs, who are aware that under his government Sunnis have largely been ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, see al-Maliki as a sectarian politician uninterested in the welfare of Sunnis.

Then there's the issue of basic governmental services. Cordesman writes:

Iraq governance remains weak at every level and ineffective at many. There is no agreement on a political structure that can lead to the creation of effective local and provincial governments, define Kurdish autonomy and the form federalism will take, or shape the tangible political structure of accommodation and differences in governance by major sect and ethnic group and in mixed areas. This process will take at least several years to develop and reach some level of stability. (my emphasis)

Remember that business of developing the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) about which we used to hear promises all the time? Cordesman sees that as vital, and writes:

It is unclear that real progress can be made in these areas before far more progress is made in accommodation, and it may well be three to five more years before a reasonably stable mix of police, courts, and a heavily "federalized" rule of law can emerge. (my emphasis)

In other words, another five years to get there. If everything goes well.

He also points to the need for economic development, which is going terribly slowly because of all the other problems.

Cordesman points out in a restrained but unmistakable way the secret of The Surge which the Rosa Brooks column addresses when he writes that "the unplanned Sunni uprising against Al Qa'ida that has been the real key to the successes of the last several months."

Here, "Al Qa'ida" refers to the radical Salafist groups that call themselves "Al Qa'ida in Iraq" (AQI), whose affiliation with Osama bin Laden's central Al Qa'ida group is fairly tenuous.

The "unplanned Sunni uprising" refers to anti-American Sunni militias with whom the Americans started actively collaborating in attacking AQI. While doing so, the Sunni militias have not been focusing on killing Americans and have focused less on civil war against the Shi'a. But there is little reason to think that the Sunni militias have given up their intention to fight the American occupation and the Shi'a.

Pursuing this course of allying with the Sunni militias against AQI would make more sense as part of an immediate exit strategy. But as part of an indefinite commitment to American troop presence, it reinforces the power of local Sunni militias who will later turn to fight the Americans and the Shi'a, and makes the establishment of a functioning national government more difficult. As Joost Hiltermann says in the quotation above, it pushes Iraq more in the direction of being a failed state for a protracted period.

Another way to put it is that the short-term "success" of The Surge was achieved by accepting in practice for 2007 that Iraq is a failed state and that the US military had to work with what it had. Again, that would mean one thing as part of an exit strategy. But as part of an effort that requires American combat troops to fight for 5-10 years more, it makes the political problems in Iraq more intractable.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq war, juan cole, mccain escalation, rosa brooks, surge

Both sides equally to blame?

Our Savior-General David Petraeus

Charles Peters, the founder of Washington Monthly magazine, gives us a pristine example of fake "fairness" in The Case For Facing Facts Newsweek 12/03/07 issue.

In a world where the Republican Party is trashing science in the name of "creationism", anti-abortion obsessions, and industry propaganda minimizing the effects of global climate change, Peters writes:

The problem is one that I have seen cripple our political life again and again and that seems to grow steadily worse. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty. Neither side wants to face facts that don't fit its case. (my emphasis)

"Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Heaven forbid that a columnist in Newsweek accuse conservatives or Republicans of denial of reality without "balancing" it. "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Brilliant.

As an example of Peters' own reality-testing in this column, let's start with this:

Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam. Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong; in fact, a significant number of them did not want to live under the communist North. The Nixon administration could not admit that South Vietnamese leaders were too inept to prevail. This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit. In our chaotic departure, we abandoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who could only escape across the South China Sea in boats so rickety that many did not survive. Many of those who could not flee languished for years in North Vietnamese prisons and "reeducation camps." (my emphasis)

What.A.Load.Of.Crap. It's hard to believe an adult would write something like that for other adults to read.

First of all, it was the Ford administration that was in power at the time of Saigon's fall in 1975. Ford's chief of staff was a guy named Don Rumsfeld, and his main assistant was Dick Cheney. Gee, they didn't plan ahead? They believed their own propaganda? Gosh, who would have guessed.

Peters' pseudo-balanced argument is, "This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit." What does this even mean? He is particularly referring to plans for evacuating supporters from Vietnam, so it's not very clear how anyone outside the incumbent Republicans administrations could have done much concrete planning for such a thing. But the broader implication that war critics had given no thought to the implications of the US exit is plainly not the case, as a couple of hours in Internet archives or with hardcopies of contemporary publications could have shown.

Peters doesn't indicate what he thinks would have been an appropriate policy for handling the problem he addresses. The idea was that the South Vietnamese government could fight and survive on its own. Just how would the US have offered a policy in 1975 of facilitating massive emigration by government officials and ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldiers without prompting a massive flight that would have undermined the tottering Thieu regime even more quickly?

"Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." In what alternative universe was that? Peters is sensible enough not to attach any names to that little fantasy. But the statement is batty on the face of it. As an example, Radical America for Jan-Apr 1974, a New Left journal, which meant it's producers considered themselves leftists and not liberals, was devoted to a long paper, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam", a study of Vietcong organizing in the Mekong Delta. And, amazingly enough, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the archiving activities of Brown University, the whole darn thing is available online. If you read the first two paragraphs of the Introduction, you'll see that the editorial position expressed there was explicitly sympathetic to the National Liberation Front (NLF/Vietcong), which was not the position that liberal opponents of the war took.

And yet, even in the second paragraph, the editors explain to their readers that the view that the NLF "consisted of resistance fighters of super-human proportions, enjoying the unwavering support of the people" - for the maybe two dozen people in the US who actually thought that - was not so, because even "some of them defected from the NLF along the way".

The point of this somewhat obscure example being that no one over the age of 13 thought that "every South Vietnamese" was "a closet Viet Cong"! And yet there it is in a respectable column by a respectable writer in respectable Newsweek, "Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." I repeat: What.A.Load.Of.Crap.

Yes, our Establishment press is that broken.

Here are a couple of present-day examples from his column illustrating his case that "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." One is on abortion, where he writes, "Too many pro-lifers and pro-choicers seem determined to ignore the other fellows' [sic] points as they cling to their own rigid positions."

I don't normally nitpick over gender neutrality or lack thereof in common phrases. But in this case, it's probably indicative of the shallowness of Peters (or maybe his Newsweek editor) on this particular point that he refers to the abortion debate as one between the "fellows".

The point he's making is a vapid one. Abortion and women's right to choose have been actively debated for decades. Abortion was a national issue during the Presidential campaign of 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade ruling. It's not an issue of sporadic visibility. It's one on which people have well-established positions, and the public attitudes on abortion have actually been stable for a long time. Both sides are familiar with the arguments of "the other fellows" on the abortion issue. This is an issue on which people differ on a matter of basic policy. It's a real difference, not a matter of insufficient manners or attentiveness on both sides.

Theoretically, there could be some actual common ground on which pro-choice and anti-abortion groups could unite, such as sex education and measures to care for women and girls in difficult circumstances who prefer to carry their babies to term. I'm not familiar with the specific instances, but I understand that feminist groups have proposed such joint action on occasion. But regardless of who proposed what to whom, the fact is that the anti-abortion movement is mainly composed of politicized white Christian fundamentalists, aka, Christianists, who also generally oppose sex education in the public schools, except for the proven-ineffective and often plain dishonest "abstinence-only" version. A lot of them are opposed even to the idea of parents provide sex education for their own children. (Do they think the kids will learn it from reading the Bible? Do they think that stories about sex in the Bible fit the fundamentalist model?)

The anti-abortionists are also generally opposed to any kind of family planning services for adults that include even information about abortion, unless it's the exaggerated and dishonest fundi brand of propaganda against abortion. The Cheney-Bush administration, in line with the desires of the Christianists, has consistently voted in the UN and other international forums with the Vatican and conservative Islamic governments against practical family planning programs and against measures to bolster women's' rights.

So where's the common ground? Peters doesn't tell us. It's just that, "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty."

And, hey, if you can't find a vaguely plausible-sounding parallel, just compare two different things, because liberals and conservatives must be equally guilty of whatever. Peters writes:

I have yet to find a conservative who acknowledges that our lowest unemployment rates since World War II have come in years when we had the highest income-tax rates, but it is a fact. And I have yet to hear a liberal express regret that it was not one of our own who had the courage and imagination to challenge Soviet leaders "to tear down this wall."

Say what? What a goofy comparison. Peters maybe should have explained why John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech doesn't count in that latter point.

Ostensibly, there is a policy point in Peters' essay. He is saying that the US should plan to make provision to get people out of Iraq who would be subject to retaliation for having worked with the Americans.

But the real purpose seems to be to use the phony "balancing" to trash liberals, even though conservatives in his balancing formula are theoretically equally bad in everything. Because his first three paragraphs aren't concerned with his pseudo-balancing act at all:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared.

Giving Gen. David Petraeus his due does not mean we have to start saying it was a great idea to invade Iraq. It remains the terrible idea it always was. And the occupation that followed has been until recently a continuing disaster, causing the death or maiming of far too many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Still, the fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (my emphasis)

The premise, of course, is factually false. Congressional war critics like Jack Murtha and Jim Webb have been in the news recently stating that The Surge has had short-term military benefits in reducing violence. But both they and other war critics have also reminded the Cheney-Bush administration that the whole point of the military surge was to create time and space for political reconciliation. And that political reconciliation is plainly not happening. Why does Charles Peters not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (To borrow his wording.)

Even those like Juan Cole who have pointed out the exaggerations and distortions in the claims of reduced violence have also noticed that the overall level of violence has receded to something like 2005 levels, which seemed pretty bad at the time. They've also pointed to the role that ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and other places has played in reducing the immediate level of violence. But I haven't come across anyone denying that The Surge had any effect.

Still, anyone of any ideological persuasion looking at the situation and having the persistence to get past the lazy "press corps" conventional wisdom of the day can see that The Surge has scarcely brought the Iraq War closer to a peaceful resolution, much less created a situation where Cheney and Bush are willing to declare victory and get our forces out of Iraq, the way even the British are doing. (Actually, the Brits, having had plenty of experience losing colonies, aren't so fixated on claiming that an obvious disaster is a Great Victory.) The American alliance with local Sunni warlords, which war fans celebrate as "reconciliation at the local level", is especially problematic in that regard.

The editors of The American Prospect summarize some of the key concerns well in a single-paragraph item, Up Front: Who Did What? Dec 2007 issue (behind subscription at this writing but they make it publicly available later).

In an editorial in the Nov. 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, [neocon hack] Fred Kagan celebrated the success of the surge, a plan he helped devise, in routing al-Qaeda from safe havens throughout Iraq. Since the surge bore no relation to the tribal revolt that has resulted in al-Qaeda's recent defeats, this is a bit like Captain Ahab claiming victory as Moby Dick lies dying of lung cancer. Truth be told, the revolt was unforeseen by any of the surge's proponents, and had begun to weaken al-Qaeda before the surge forces themselves were even in place. Then there's the conundrum that empowering Sunni militias against al-Qaeda has also undercut the U.S.' strategic goal of a unified, centrally governed Iraq. Still, allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it! (my emphasis)

Why does Charles Peters not want to face these facts, let alone ponder their implications? He concludes his essay by chanting the Republican Party line about our Savior-General Petraeus. Peters tells us that the Savior-General "has taught us how to deal effectively with insurgencies." Mission accomplished, dude!

And the American Prospect editors are plainly recognizing the (limited) success of The Surge in that passage: "allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it!"

But you won't get that from Peters' essay. It serves to mainly tell readers, look how vested those Democrats are in a narrative of retreat and defeat. Which just happens to be the Republican prowar polemic of the moment. But look! Even the liberal Charles Peters says it!

As Bob Somerby so often puts it, if we didn't have a press corps like the one we have, you couldn't invent them.

Tags: abortion, authoritarianism, charles peters, establishment press, iraq war, mainstream media, mainstream press, mccain escalation, surge, vietnam war

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Juan Cole writes (Informed Comment blog 08/31/07):

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn't actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.

The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn't paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

I saw on CNN this smarmy Bush administration official come and and say that US troop deaths had fallen because of the surge, which is why we should support it. ... US troop deaths haven't fallen. They are way up. Besides, they would be zero if the US were not occupying Iraq militarily, so if we should support a policy that leads to fewer troop deaths, that is the better policy.

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, surge

Evaluating The Surge

All of us I know are biting our nails in anticipation of Gen. Petraeus' September report on progress in The Surge. Sure, the White House is actually writing the report and Petraeus himself is already talking about how successful The Surge (aka, the McCain escalation) has been and how we need to keep troops in Iraq until God-knows-when. But what, what, what will his September report say? I know the suspense is overwhelming me.

Meanwhile, I highly recommend while waiting for the Petraeus Report, The surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 08/07/07. Cockburn, author of The Occupation (2006), has consistently done some of the best reporting on the Iraq War. He speaks Arabic himself, which even some of the best-known reporters on the war do not. And he's still out there doing on-the-scene coverage at no small risk to himself. You have to be a bit of a cowboy to be a good war correspondent. And to still be out there as a Western reporter covering this war in the field you have to have a streak of high-wire acrobat or something similar, as well.

His review of The Surge is long but worth reading in its entirety. It certainly challenges the happy-face view of the war presented by the Cheney-Bush administration even as they agitate more actively to attack Iran in order to redeem the situation in Iraq, which is supposedly going just fine. In light of the current escalation of war propaganda against Iran, this paragraph is particularly notable:

A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents. (my emphasis)

I would hope our friends who are now raring to go with war against Iran would take note of such things.

The rest of us had sure better take note of it. One of the key justifications for war against Iran is that they are supplying weapons that kill Americans to insurgents in Iraq.

Given the nature of the black market for weapons - hell, even for the legitimate market - the country of origin of weapons is hardly evidence of the intent of the government of that country to kill the people against whom they are being used. I'm sure there are some John Birch Society zealots who could explain to you how Islamunist conspirators in the Republican government of the US are consciously conspiring to kill American soldiers with American weapons.

But as the war drumbeat against Iran from our neocons strategists gets louder, it is worth remembering that according to this study to which Cockburn refers, the most effective weapons used by Iraqi guerrillas to kill American soldiers are American weapons originaing with the American government.

Also in Cockburn's report, he describes the selling of The Surge:

There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator's assertions. When Vice-President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America. (my emphasis)

This was also an informative observation:

The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish government to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.

The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget, but by the CIA. Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realises. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that this bloodiest of wars goes on, with no end in sight.

Read Cockburn's entire report. And remember it when the official Petraeus Report comes out. With its now-completely-unknown conclusions, of course.

Tags: iraq war, mccain, mccain escalation, patrick cockburn, petraeus, surge

Low-posting notice and Iraq War news

I'm going to be on low-posting mode for the next three weeks due to some traveling. No, those rumors are not true that say I'm going to be hanging out at nightclubs around Los Angeles hoping to catch one of Britney's surprise "comeback" appearances. Although, come to think of it...

My blogging partners at The Blue Voice crew will be posting, though. And I'll be making posts here and there over that time. I have one on polling that I'm going to post later today.

Meanwhile, how's the McCain escalation going in Iraq? Via Juan Cole at his Informed Comment blog, Philip Gailey in Iraq's fate awaits Bush exit St. Petersburg Times 05/06/07 says Bush has a secret deadline for ending the Iraq War:

Contrary to what his critics say, President Bush does have a timetable for ending the war. He plans to hand the disaster over to his successor at high noon on Jan. 20, 2009.

This assumes that the military situation doesn't hopelessly deteriorate by then.

Cole also gives us a glimpse from the Arabic-language press on events in the Shi'a holy city of Najaf:

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that calm returned to the Shiite holy city of Najaf Saturday after clashes on Friday between the Mahdi Army and local security forces. The clashes, this reports says, led to the "collapse of the local government and demonstrated the effective presence of al-Sadr's militia" in the city. During the clashes, "the security forces withdrew from all the centers and checkpoints and individuals from the Mahdi Army took thier place . . ." Only when Muqtada al-Sadr's office issued orders that the Mahdi Army stand down did police return to their stations. A joint committee has been set up between al-Sadr's office and the local administration that will work to calm things back down and ensure that the security forces deploy throughout the city again.

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, surge

Just curious...

How do these two things match up?

From Waiting for GODOT in Iraq by F. J. Bing West Military Review (US Army professional journal) Jan/Feb 2007. (In HTML at US Army Professional Writing, but their 3rd quarter 2006 date for the article is incorrect.)

The U.S. Military strategy must also change. Over the next year, most of the battle space will be handed over to the Iraqi Army, with U.S. Combat units pulling back to be used more as quick reaction and raiding forces against al-Qaeda in Iraq and death squads. American units are not going to continue to occupy Sunni cities and try to win the support of the Sunni population or protect them from the insurgents that were hiding in plain sight among them. Counterinsurgency is no longer central. The primary task has shifted to training Iraqi security forces.

...We are training Iraqi troops to be the cement holding Iraq together in place of Americans. (my emphasis)

From Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy by Nancy Youssef,
McClatchy Newspapers 04/19/07:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

Presumably West's article went to print before the "surge" was announced. But still, are our generals effectively just throwing in the towel on training the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)?

Tags: iraq, iraq war, f j bing west, mccain escalation, nancy youssef, surge

Bacevich on the McCain escalation

All my posts today are dedicated to the memory of Molly Ivins.

Our Blue Voice partner Dave should like this one - even if it does come from The American Conservative! - be because it describes a situation in which both parties are responsible.

It's from one of my current favorites writers and military/political analysts Andrew Bacevich. He publishes in lots of other places, too, including the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal and even the British New Left Review.

The article is Going for Broke The American Conservative 01/29/07 issue, where he writes:

Nothing so clearly reveals the impoverished state of American political discourse as the ongoing debate over finding “a way forward” in Iraq. Broadly speaking, that debate pits a resurgent foreign-policy establishment, led by James Baker, against embattled neoconservatives, with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute their improbable champion. On the surface, Baker and Kagan represent irreconcilable views. Beneath the surface, they are engaged in a common enterprise: deflecting attention from the contradictions that beset U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Baker, the trusted Bush family factotum, resurfaced most recently as co-chair, along with former Congressman Lee Hamilton, of the Iraq Study Group. Almost without fail, media references to the Baker-Hamilton commission emphasize its bipartisan composition as if that alone were enough to win a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Yet to imagine that bipartisanship signifies wisdom or reflects a concern for the common good is to misunderstand the reality of present-day politics. The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo.

Bacevich takes a dim view of the prospects for the McCain escalation Bush is now implementing: "Marketed as the product of careful analysis, the surge should be seen for what it is: a naked gamble."

And he has some good comments on Reagan's foreign policies and the ambiguous legacy of the Gulf War of 1991.

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, mccain escalation, surge