posted by Damozel | To start with, here are my current inferences from what follows:
- 1. The troop build-up really is helping with all the things you'd expect a troop build-up to help, at least in some parts of Iraq; and
- 2. The Iraqi government is unable so far to achieve "national reconciliation," a serious or (some---not all---say) insuperable obstacle to "sustainable stability."
THE EVIDENCE: CURRENT STATUS REPORTS:
First, of course, let's ponder for a moment Robert Gates' current discouragement (though he does point out the bright side, being---like everyone in this Administration---one of nature's cock-eyed optimists: the defense secretary concedes that U.S. officials "underestimated" the difficulty of reconciliation among Iraqi leaders (Josh White, Washington Post)---
EVEN THOUGH:
"I think the developments on the political side are somewhat discouraging at the national level," Gates said. "And clearly the withdrawal of the Sunnis from the government is discouraging (Josh White, Washington Post).---
YET:
"My hope is it can all be patched together. In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation, which, let's face it, is not some kind of secondary thing." (Josh White, Washington Post)
Yes, by all means, let's do face it. Though I'm not sure exactly who is comprehended in the "we" who underestimated the difficulty. I don't think anyone who was paying attention---e.g., my 79 year old mother---underestimated it.
The Washington Post provides some insight into the cause of the hold up in an article discussing the obstacles faced by Maliki and his party. Not to oversimplify---it's a really substantial, 3-page piece---but it does seem to boil down to problems of trust.
At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein -- covertly and concerned more about their community's survival than with building consensus among Iraq's warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats.
In recent weeks, those suspicions have deepened as U.S. military commanders have begun to work with Sunni insurgents, longtime foes of the Shiite-led government, who have agreed to battle the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
"The level of mutual trust is so low that you really have to not just rebuild trust, you have to build trust in the first place, and that is still very much a work in progress right now," said Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq. (Sudarsan Raghaven, Washington Post).
THIS IS APPARENTLY BECAUSE:
The mistrust has deep roots. For decades, the Dawa party, through a secretive, cell-based structure, waged an underground resistance to Hussein's government, including at least one assassination attempt. Hussein suppressed the movement, whose goal was to turn secular Iraq into an Islamic state ruled by its Shiite majority. Thousands were executed or chased into exile. Maliki, sentenced to death, fled to Syria in 1980. In the vacuum created by the U.S.-led invasion, the Dawa party reemerged as a potent force in the rivalry to forge a new Iraq.
But Dawa members and other Shiites remained suspicious of the motives of the United States and the Sunnis, partly because of the Shiites' history of being oppressed and betrayed, including what they viewed as an American failure to back a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. (Sudarsan Raghaven, Washington Post)
FURTHERMORE:
Maliki's critics say a key reason for Iraq's political woes is his reliance on Dawa party stalwarts selected more for loyalty than political experience. "The problem is none of them have any sense of governance and how a government should function and run," said a senior Iraqi official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he works closely with Maliki. "They are mixing running a political party and running the government. They don't see the whole government as their government, only the people who they task, the people who they deputize."(Sudarsan Raghaven, Washington Post)
AND:
The reliance on Dawa members has helped fuel accusations that Maliki favors Shiites at the expense of Iraq's minorities, particularly Sunnis. In recent months, Maliki has visited or given aid to Shiite victims of bombings, while Sunni areas have been largely neglected. U.S. military commanders, too, have expressed frustration at what they see as the sectarian nature of Maliki's office(Sudarsan Raghaven, Washington Post)
AND---UNFORTUNATELY---
The top Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, has largely withdrawn from the government over frustrations with Maliki's leadership. Last month the Shiite-dominated parliament voted to oust Sunni speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani because of his fiery behavior, prompting an initial pullout. The Sunnis were further enraged by an arrest warrant for the Sunni culture minister, who is accused of responsibility for an assassination attempt against another Sunni legislator. (Sudarsan Raghaven, Washington Post).
In other words, there are solid grounds for Gates' temporary failure of optimism. There are also reasons---which have nothing to do with the much-overplayed August vacation---why the Iraqis aren't meeting our "benchmarks."
BUT!
But what about last week's joyful news (in The New York Times by the Brookings Institution's O'Hanlon and Pollack---"two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq "(O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT) Let's take another look at A War We Just Might Win.
THE JOYFUL NEWS!
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference. (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT)
MOREOVER:
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT)
IN ADDITION:
[F]or now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT)
BECAUSE:
In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.(O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT)
AND:
Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT).
ALSO:
Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments.(O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT).
OF COURSE, there are still problems (refer to article) and "the situation in Iraq remains grave." See O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT, esp. page 2).
THEREFORE.
There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008 (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT).
I was happy to read this because---unlike most of my fellow Democrats---I continue to feel that we've committed ourselves in Iraq, at least to the extent that we can perhaps do some good there. I continue to take as my "benchmark" the recent report of the Iraq Study Commission to Prime Minister Gordon Brown (see .pdf; see html version).
So I am definitely not one of the "Get the troops out YESTERDAY!" Democrats. Or rather, I would like for that to happen as soon as possible, but believe the UK's Iraq commission when they say there cannot be any easy paths out if the Coalition is to do the right thing by the Iraqis and that troop withdrawal deadlines are a bad idea.
HOWEVER!
So I was skeptical even though the authors of this bubbly report of potential success was news I personally was happy to hear, though it was a little dampening to be told in the second paragraph that when they said we could "win" the war, they didn't exactly mean "win" as in "victory": more that we could reach "a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with." (O'Hanlon & Pollack, NYT) But since sustainable stability is better than the alternative, I still felt relieved.
But I've learned from long experience that information presented in anything called an "op-ed" does have to be carefully filtered through an anti-filtering filter. In his column in The New Yorker George Packer wrote:
[W]hat do [O'Hanlon and Pollack] mean when they declare at the end, “There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008”? As of a few weeks ago, O’Hanlon advocated a partition of Iraq and Pollack was talking about containing the civil war within Iraq’s borders. Neither of them had much faith that the Administration’s strategy could succeed. Have they changed their minds? If so, what’s their political strategy for sustaining the surge into 2008?
O’Hanlon and Pollack have long been critics of the war. They are serious analysts and have nothing to gain by supporting the strategy of an Administration that they say has “lost essentially all credibility.” I don’t doubt that they believe what they saw and heard and wrote, and I’m certain that some of the gains they describe are real. I would like to know more about what they didn’t see and hear. At the heart of arguments over the war there has always been the question of what’s happening “on the ground.” It’s never been harder to find out than it is now, and in my experience, no news is generally bad news. Over the past four years, Iraq has humbled a lot of people. What’s missing from the Op-Ed is a necessary humility. (Packer, O’Hanlon and Pollack on the Surge)
So before breaking out the alcohol-free champagne to celebrate "sustainable stability" I checked out the views of some pundits who have been following the progress of the war much more closely than I have. I don't know that they're right, of course---in fact, the reason I tend to trust some of them (e.g., Sullivan and Klein) is that they've been humbled themselves. The other reason I tend to trust them is that they all seem at times to have annoyed both left and right---sometimes alternately, sometimes at the same time. When it comes to issues I don't understand, I am more comfortable with the opinions of pundits I don't always agree with.
The reactions I read definitely stripped the shiny off the O'Hanlon/Pollack report.
SOME REACTIONS BY COMMENTATORS:
GREGORY DJEREJIAN at The Belgravia Dispatch questions---though very civilly and after many disclaimers--- the reliability of the report of the Brookings Institution's O'Hanlon and Pollack (whom he calls "reasonably competent foreign policy analysts.") In the Socratically titled O'Hanlon & Pollack: Guilty of Rose Colored Glasses? Djerejian has written a very lengthy post challenging their analysis of the facts and countering the evidence they site with contradictory reports. It's well worth a look.
FOR EXAMPLE:
O'Hanlon and Pollack burbled excitedly about improved morale among U.S. troops. Djerejian points out that the report of the nominees for the chairman and vice chairman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Senate Armed Services Committee tells a somewhat different story. (Sisk) Evidently, the soldiers are discouraged by the same problem that is getting Defense Secretary Gates down: the failure of the Iraqi government to achieve national reconciliation---plus they are pissed off about the August vacation. Apparently those in charge think that unless the political issues get cleared up, """no amount of troops and no amount of time will make much of a difference."(Sisk)
It does seem likely that the people actually running the war are in a better position to know about troop morale than a couple of foreign policy analysts who spent two weeks in Iraq. Furthermore, there is this video by Sean Smith of the Guardian, which accurately describes it as a "harrowing documentary [of] the exhaustion and disillustionment of the soldiers."
Djerejian also suggests that some of their optimism about progress in restoring "political and economic arrangements" in civilian communities might be the result of overgeneralizing from progress they saw in the places they were shown. "[It]t appears Pollack and O’Hanlon were shepherded mostly around Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi and the Ghazaliya neighborhood of Baghdad (of which more below). This is quite a bit of ground, but it is not “everywhere.”"
Djerejian is skeptical about their conclusion that sectarianism among Iraqis is on the wane.
I am sure, when high profile visitors are being spirited through a barracks with U.S. forces obviously eager to have said personages leave with a good impression, the Sunni police company and Shia Army unit must have been behaving rather well so as to appear the very picture of “harmony”. But the fact that the police in Ramadi are all Sunni, rather than integrated, and the national army majority Shi’a, points to the festering danger of sectarian conflict rearing its head at any moment. These dorm-mates could turn on themselves quite violently indeed, certainly when (as is inevitable), U.S. forces in the area will have to begin to withdraw, and there is little we can do about this, alas, save agreeing to sign on for a decade plus long committment. Put differently, there exists no truly national Police, nor Army, and an excited Captain (one of course appreciates his pride in the progress he's trying to achieve) showing Pollack and O'Hanlon around a 'success story' in Ramadi doesn't change that undergirding dynamic, I'm afraid. (Djerejian)
And so on. As to why he's pouring cold water all over O'Hanlon's and Pollack's parade, Djerejian says,
I am not trying to parse and play gotcha, I am trying to force us, now more than four years on in a conflict that has killed almost 4,000 of our country-men, not to mention tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to contain our enthusiasms and retain some sobriety. (Djerejian)
ANDREW SULLIVAN, as I've already noted, said in The Daily Dish:
Sorry, but count me unconvinced. Pollack's only sources are American advisers and the "high command." ( Sullivan:)
Sullivan compares the NYT article---which to one published two days ago (also in the NYT), "General Training Iraqis Cites Problem of Sectarian Loyalty" which pretty much says...well, what the title of the article says it says. Which tends to contradict the perception of O'Hanlon and Pollack that the problem of sectarianism among Iraqi security forces is greatly improved.
So who's right? Pollack's "American advisers" or the general tackling the problem itself? I get the sense that Pollack has been snowed by a great Pentagon presentation. Or... is just a sucker for his old friend Petraeus....(Sullivan:)
Subsequently---in a note called Fisking Pollack/O'Hanlon---he tersely states, "Greg Djerejian does the most thorough, persuasive and unsettling job yet." (Sullivan) Sullivan's take:
And so Pollack and O'Hanlon want to extend the surge into 2008.If that means keeping some forces temporarily in place to help local government emerge in a way that can, at least, impede al Qaeda, then few will disagree. If it means another indefinite commitment of US troops to occupying Iraq in the absence of any viable central government, then the answer must be a firm no. The benchmarks for the surge remain what they always were: has it created the conditions for a national settlement? If it has, there's a reason to stay. If it hasn't, we need to start getting out, in a way that protects, as far as possible, whatever local achievements we have managed to accomplish.( Sullivan:)
In The L.A. Times, Matt Yglesias wrote "Be afraid when the same centrist consensus that has a lousy track record on the war lashes out at partisans."
O'Hanlon and Pollack are both Democrats, so their endorsement of current policy and "sustaining the effort" in Iraq indefinitely are examples of the sort of razor-sharp thinking we can expect from Washington if we all just stop and submit ourselves to soothing bipartisanship.
Of course, those of us who read Pollack's celebrated 2002 book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," and became convinced as a result that the United States needed to, well, invade Iraq in order to dismantle Saddam Hussein's advanced nuclear weapons program (the one he didn't actually have) might feel a little too bitter to once again defer to our betters.
...O'Hanlon and Pollack want us to stay put. And...the optimism of O'Hanlon and Pollack is at odds with the conclusions of Brookings' own Iraq Index project. It reported July 23 that "violence nationwide has failed to improve measurably over the past two-plus months," and that -- contrary to their enthusiasm about the provision of electricity and other essentials -- "the average person in Baghdad can count on only one or two hours of electricity per day," far less than they had under Hussein. More ironically still, the person in charge of the Iraq Index is none other than Michael O'Hanlon. (Yglesias)
At Swampland, Joe Klein cites the Yglesias article commenting---with considerable hardihood, some might say---"The foreign policy priesthood has certainly wobbled from wrong to incoherent on the war." (Klein)
Klein's initial main criticism of O'Hanlon and Pollack's article was that they failed to take into account the political situation and the fact that it appears to be slip-sliding away despite the best efforts of the troops and General Petraeus. " [Y]ou really can't write a piece about the war in Iraq and devote only two sentences to the political situation, which is disastrous and, as Petraeus has said, will determine the success or failure of the overall effort." (Klein)
Yes, progress has been made in the fight against the most extreme jihadis (AQI), but that should not be extrapolated into anything resembling optimism....And if we manage to put a major hurt on AQI--which is Bush's (current) rationale for us being there--what rationale remains for us staying there if the Iraqis themselves are intent on slaughtering each other? (Klein)
He further notes that O'Hanlon and Pollack seem to have visited only Sunni areas. "And that's where the progress, such as it is, has been made, with the tribes moving against the jihadis and toward us. But Iraq is primarily a Shi'ite country--and we're not doing so well with those guys, especially the most prominent of them, Muqtada al-Sadr." (Klein)
I should also note that their optimism about the Iraqi Army might look a bit different if they went to mixed areas like Diyala province, where a corrupt Shi'ite-dominated Army is going to have to deal with a police force that is being recruited from former Sunni insurgents. There certainly are a few excellent, mixed units in the Iraqi Security Forces, but the majority of units are local, sect-specific and awful.(Klein)
In short,
In at least some parts of Iraq---how much is unclear---the troop build-up has helped with all the things you'd expect; but sectarianism in Iraq is a serious obstacle to progress.
What is to be done?
I obviously am not qualified to say, but I'm inclined to think that immediate troop withdrawal is a pretty self-centered "solution."
Perhaps we should follow the UK panel's lead: Launch "diplomatic offensive" to help Iraq with the difficult job of national reconciliation? Involve the UN? Do what is necessary to support the government while recognizing that troop presence may be contributing to destabilization? Take steps to get the Iraqi army in a position to do the work our troops are doing now and leave when we've done what we can (i.e., not immediately)?
It's hard to see how this is going to work long-term, but I still say we owe it to the Iraqis to try, no matter how sick people are of this war and even if it means, as the Brits say, that more [Coalition] blood has to be spilled. Rightly or wrongly, we invaded. It seems wrong to me for us to say now "oh but the price is higher than advertised" if there is any way we can put them on the path to....well, to something better than they'd have otherwise.
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