by Teh Nutroots | Joe Conason thinks that the Bush Administration is winning at least one battle: the propaganda battle to reframe the "surge" as a success. (TruthDig) At The Washington Post, Andrew J. Bacevich agrees. Here's Bacevich:
In President Bush's pithy formulation, the United States is now "kicking ass" in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that "we are winning in Iraq." While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain's remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons. (WaPo)
f From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge "democracy's success in Iraq" has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn't be clearer: "We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it."(WaPo)
But before we conclude that "a' will be well...and a' manner of things will be well," we need to look a bit more closely at the reality. According to Bacevich, this doesn't match up particularly well with the success stories now being propagated by the Bush Administration.
As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction....
Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad. By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents -- an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops -- U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.
Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?" (WaPo; emphasis added; links in original)
Well, if you paint it like that, the success doesn't look as successful as we were all hoping. And Joe Conason has more bad news:
Worst of all, despite the undoubted courage and commitment of our troops, violence in Iraq has increased since the new year began. Killings of civilians by car bombs and snipers averaged more than 50 per day during the first two weeks of January, and U.S. military deaths are averaging slightly more than one per day, or nearly 50 percent higher than last month."(TruthDig).
Man, I really want to get those kids out of there, don't you? But how can we end things in Iraq as long as it's being presented as a "success"?
Conason alleges that the very same neocons who sold the war in the first instance are now hellbent on marketing its success to us in the second.
According to [William] Kristol, who once mocked concerns about religious strife in Iraq as “pop sociology,” the drop in violence last month marked the lowest overall number of deaths for both civilians and military forces since the war began in March 2003. Declining casualties for a month or two means progress, which, in turn, means that the war must continue, and that the president’s policy is correct.
But "success" of a kind can be achieved by moving the goalposts, which is what seems to have happened.. My co-blogger D Cupples the changing standard for success here. Here's Conason's take:
What has fallen far more sharply than the casualty statistics in Iraq is the standard for success there, as defined by neoconservatives like Mr. Kristol. In the original promotional literature produced by these individuals and their associates, and recited by the president, this war was supposed to remake the Middle East into a showcase for democracy, with ruinous consequences for our terrorist enemies and cheaper oil for us—and all for free because the Iraqi petroleum industry would cover all the costs.
When that happy future never arrived, to put it mildly, the war’s proponents scrambled to reduce expectations (TruthDig).
Clearly the Iraqi leaders don't seem optimistic about political reconciliation as realizable or realistic goal in the foreseeable future, i.e., the longest hypothetical period for which Americans could reasonably foresee continuing to commit resources and American lives to the Iraq war.
But as Kristol himself has demonstrated to us in the past, "success" depends on how you reframe it. And it also depends, as D Cupples constantly points out, on the quality of the data you're receiving and the trustworthiness of the analysis. So---speaking as one of the few Democrats who went on believing past all reason that "success" was something we owed, and therefore should provide, to the Iraqi people---color me cynical. Or, as Bacevich puts it, "Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. (WaPo)
MEMEORANDUM DISCUSSES THE ISSUE HERE.
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