5 years and counting………….

Since Congress authorized the use of force in Iraq. 

I’ve been trying hard to fix in my mind the recent controversies over remarks made by LT. Gen Ricardo Sanchez, as well as the testimony of Gen Petreaus last month .  I’ve been very confused about how to encapsulate where the Iraq War is today and what the United States should do about Iraq in the years to come.

Now to some in the blogosphere there is only one thing that I should do-sit down and shut up. Accept that American forces are winning a great victory over Al Qaeda, Iraq is improving, and its all because the United States finally got the right strategy and the right commander. All those who were serving and trying to their best prior to that are some how tainted because they did not “succeed”. Furthermore asking that the civilian masters who started the country down this path should be made to pay for their malfeasance is considered disrespectful and somehow unpatriotic.

I cannot accept that line of thinking and neither should anyone else who actually can think for themselves. Instead of just joining the herd. The facts, when examined in considerable detail, suggest otherwise.

Because even now-with some encouraging signs as far as US casualties go-Iraq is still a mess.

However in one regard the President accomplished his mission that he set out to accomplish, when he anointed General Petraeaus as his saviour in Iraq. He was able to use the general’s words to so divide the opposition, that he will be assured of keeping the war going until the end of his administration.  And if some of the statistical trends continue, depending on who wins the 2008 election he will have the legacy of a US presence in Iraq for many years to come.

Whether that is in the long term national interest however, and whether the nation will really be willing to pay what it costs-that is an entirely different matter.

Several months ago I wrote:

You know it appears to me, that [the] Petraeus report will pre-scripted. The purpose will not to be to show progress in the way a reasonable person would define it. Nor will it play up the fact that whatever progress has been achieved will be in spite of the Iraqis, not because of them. They will still be as useless as they ever have been. No,  rather what they will want to do is to create enough quotes and sound bites that Bush and conservative politicians and bloggers can grab on to, such that it will enable Bush to continue to divide and conquer by discrediting his critics.

I believed that to be true then and I still think that’s the way it is now.

To start lets look again at what the surge really accomplished:

………the starkest fact to emerge from last week’s Petraeus/Crocker hearings: The U.S. will remain in Iraq, in some capacity, forever.

One of President Bush’s most under-appreciated maneuvers of 2007 was his recasting of the debate over the war into a debate over the surge. Commentators endlessly interpreted the surge as a “last chance” for the war to succeed — something the Bush administration, crucially, never promised. But as a result of this misperception, endless inquiry over the last several months has focused on whether the surge has succeeded on its own terms: whether it pacified Baghdad; whether it deserves credit for the Sunni tribal shift against al-Qaeda; whether it nurtured a glacial sectarian reconciliation. It’s a pattern of analysis that rests on a simple proposition: Since the surge is the last chance for the war to succeed, if it has failed, then the war must be brought to an end.

That proposition is false. Whatever the surge’s virtues, (is a reduction in sectarian violence in Baghdad the result of better U.S. strategy or the fruit of a victorious Shiite strategy to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis?) it has had a clear political benefit for the president, turning criticism of the war into criticism of a slice of the war. General Petraeus made it clear last week that the infusion of troops into Baghdad was what allowed him to emphasize a strategy of population protection that doesn’t apply in less-troop dense areas of Iraq, so when troop strength returns to 2006 levels, the strategy will accordingly shift. Those who criticize Petraeus because they want to stop the war will have gained little more ground than they occupied in December 2006.

What will the White House have gained? For one thing, an enduring presence in Iraq. In his speech, Bush said that “Iraqi leaders” — whom he meant, he left unstated — have “asked for an enduring relationship with America” extending “beyond my presidency.” What was once a commitment to remain in Iraq “as long as necessary, and not one day more” is now an admission that “we are ready to begin building that [enduring] relationship.”

“But what about the numbers that are being seen-the reduced violence, the reduced Iraqi and American casualties? That proves that that the surge was the right thing to do.”

Maybe. However as Herman Wouk once wrote victory has meaning only in its setting of the politics of the future. In this case the definition of success was that the Iraqi government would actually get its stuff together.

On that score the results are mixed at best. And, one should not cite data without examining all the data. One guy who did look at all the data was Michael Greenstone. His assessment? That at best the results of the surge are mixed-and on the key question of getting an Iraqi government that we can have confidence in the surge has failed.:

On at least one dimension, there is strong evidence of progress. The data clearly suggest that deaths of civilians in Baghdad have fallen, and there is no evidence that the crackdown in Baghdad has shifted violence to the rest of the country.

Coalition troop fatalities have been stable since the surge, which in some ways signifies progress since they were on a steady upward trend prior to the surge.
The surge does not seem to have helped in other dimensions such as the amount of oil produced or hours of electricity in Baghdad.

The most interesting part of Greenstone’s paper is his analysis of the pricing of Iraqi government debt. The Iraq government has issued bonds in the past. These entitle the owner of the bond to a stream of payments over a set period of time, but only if the government does not default on the loan. If Iraq completely implodes, it is highly unlikely that these bonds will be paid off. How much someone would pay for the rights to that stream of payments depends on their estimate of the probability that Iraq will implode.

The bond data, unlike the other sources he examines, tell a clear story: the financial markets say the surge is not working. Since the surge started, the market’s estimate of the likelihood of default by the Iraqi government has increased by 40 percent.

Plus, I think it is important to remember what the “reduced” casualty numbers are really saying: that for a two month period casualties are down from the 90 range to an average of 65. That’s happened before-in fact its happened several times over the past 5 years. AND IT STILL MEANS THAT BETWEEN NOW AND CHRISTMAS 240 AMERICANS WILL DIE IN IRAQ. That is hardly a “quiet nation” or an upturn. 

What does all that have to do with Gen Sanchez’s remarks? A lot if you ask me. Because if one looks carefully at his speech one can see that he acknowledges that he made mistakes in his working with and for the CPA and that he made mistakes in executing military strategy during that first critical year. Sanchez’s key point, however is that he and a lot of others were set up to fail from the start, by some very flawed decisions that were made higher up in the civil military chain of command. Now from my viewpoint he has a right to be upset. And a right to lash out.

Just because he made mistakes does not mean his analysis is wrong now. Much of it is right on the mark. And his key point is 100% correct-progress in Iraq does not equal victory or the advancement of American interests. If anything, Sanchez seems to be echoing the point made above-being in Iraq for years and years actually bogs the nation down. Staying in Iraq really is a never ending nightmare for the United States of America.

Notice how no one talks about benchmarks any more? Or the government of Al Maliki and how it still does not have a handle on things? No all we hear is that the surge is working and it has effectively defeated Al Qaeda. Great. Except if everything was due to Al Qaeda-why does this still go on?

It goes on because there is still a size-able conflict going on between sectarian elements in and out of Baghdad. It goes on because the government there is so incompetent. It goes on “because it’s certainly far from being a modern, self-sustaining country. Many roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are in deplorable condition. Fewer people have access to drinking water or sewage systems than before the war. And Baghdad is averaging less than eight hours of electricity a day. ”

I find it interesting that as soon as that article was posted, it was immediately branded as not relevant.  That is a prevailing theme when it comes to discussing Iraq after the September report.  One either gets on board and is a true believer or one is branded as a surrender monkey.

Fine, I can live with that moniker. What I cannot live with is a point of view that fails to put American interests ahead of a group of Arabs whose fate is only marginally supportive of long term advancement of US objectives in the middle east.  And if you doubt that premise, ask yourself why Putin is in Iran today. Its because he sees an advantage to exploit because the US is distracted in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s not right of course, but when one of the fundamental axioms of Iranian foreign policy is turned upside down-Iran is by definition Russia’s enemy-all bets are off as to where this little adventure ends.

So in summary I would submit that Americans need to hear Lt Gen Sanchez’s words every bit as much as they needed to hear Petreaus’. Because we need to remember how we got to where we are today and who is to blame.

We also need to ask ourselves if we really want to be in Iraq for the next 50 years?