How do we know if we are winning or losing in Iraq?

American Thinker ^ | January 19, 2007 | Greg Richards

[neverdem]

How do we know if we are winning or losing in Iraq? 

We know that the MSM has a very dangerous model - "if it bleeds, it leads."  The definition of "news" is biased toward the unpleasant and the bizarre.  That may be understandable for domestic news. We all live in the U.S. and thus can judge for ourselves the "default condition" of day-to-day life.  It is not necessary to report the cars that didn't crash or the babies that were born because in some sense we are aware of them.

But when we must rely on the MSM for our understanding of Iraq, knowledge of the default condition is absent.  In Iraq, the U.S. is engaged in a great project.  The real news is how we are faring in this project - are we succeeding or are we failing?  To understand that, we need to understand the default condition of life in Iraq and the trend of that default condition - is it improving for most people or is it deteriorating? 

Under the circumstance of our lack of context, while bad news is important, good news is even more important. We need to weigh both good and bad, not merely note the leading bleeding. The net amount of good news will determine the success of the venture.

But the MSM does not see it as its duty or role to report good news - the schools opened, the hospitals repaired, the water delivered.  They do not want to be pollyannas - if the default condition of Iraq is indeed characterized by bad news, then we want to know that; but is it?

Fortunately, this is 2007, not 1967.  We are no longer completely dependent on the MSM to assemble the mosaic of the default condition of the society for which we have gone to war.  With some effort, we can assemble the mosaic ourselves - yes, imperfectly, yes inevitably requiring judgment, but also with sources who have no ax to grind, or much less of one than we now know that MSM did in the 1960's or does now.

In that spirit, Michelle Malkin is back from her imbed in Baghdad, and is now starting to report on her experiences, along with her colleague Bryan Preston, who contributes an essay covering several issues on the Iraq War.  Not to be missed, Michelle's first report on Hot Air.

Iraq The Model reports  that the insurgents may already be skedaddling from Baghdad in anticipation of both the surge of American troops and the change in the rules of engagement.  Yes, we all appreciate that this is mixed news as it signals that the bad guys may try to avoid engagement now and wait us out.  But to the extent that it is true, it puts the lie to the criticism that the additional 20,000 troops is just a "drop in the bucket" and is a hopeless move that will only get more Americans killed.  They may think that in Washington; apparently they don't think that "on the other side of the mountain" in Baghdad.

Are we winning or losing in Iraq?  We are going to have to assemble the mosaic for ourselves.  To do this, we need a model.  It seems pretty clear that the Bush Administration had the wrong model for Iraq when we embarked on the war.  It seems likely that the Administration believed that Iraq was a functioning society onto which had been grafted a terror regime - remove the regime and, within reason, the normal processes of the society would reassert themselves and we could go home.  That turned out to be the wrong model.  Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston help with this analysis, suggesting that the decades of terror have had the effect of disintegrating the society, making it impossible for people to take responsibility for themselves and to plan for the future.  Which means rebuilding is really building.  A tough, long term job.

But if that is the case, then it means that there may never be a climax or a climactic battle to this war.  Perhaps what will happen is that various parts of Iraq - both geographically and then socially, politically and economically - will gradually come to life.  Yes, the forces of destruction will try to prevent this for various reasons - ideological in the case of al-Qaeda, power and sectarianism in the case of the confessional communities - and progress may be difficult to see. 

But it may be what is not bleeding is what should be leading - that the not bleeding will gradually exceed the bleeding and the normal processes of human nature assert themselves.  Ollie North  thinks we may be observing this in al-Anbar with the surge in volunteering for the Iraqi Police there.

And, here at AT, we have been calling attention to the remarkable surge in the value of the Iraqi dinar, now up 13% since early September and on increasing dollar volume in recent days  (scroll down to the bottom). 

There's something happening here. It may not be bleeding, but it may be leading us somewhere.

[lonestar67]

I think is trying to be helpful but still comes up short.

We have met all goals in Iraq: removing saddam, impelementing three elections, passing a constittution, killing major terrorists such as Zarqawi.

Additional evidence has to do with indicators such as enlistment in the army and the police forces.

It only takes 5% of a population to create a relentless terror force. Nonetheless, this 5% cannot beat the much larger majority that wants them jailed or dead. Survey after survey shows the Iraqis sharing this sentiment.

The Bush reactionaries are now in a race against time-- get us out in time for some sort of civil war to spiral upwards.

That is not going to happen. Iraq has plenty of cash to fund its army and police. Iraq gets tons of tips every day on these 5% fools. Iraq continually trains and increases enlistment for its security forces.

The IRA made hell for a long time. The ETA is still making some hell in Spain.

So what? It takes a concerted effort by our media to make such terrorists into implicit heros fighting Bush. That is also not going to work.

The Iraqis will slowly crush this 5%. It will probably take 15 years before it looks approximate to American life standards.

[secretagent]

Summary: It will longer than we expected for "normal life" to resume in Iraq.

Some critics have said that Iraq can't resume what it never started, but they don't have enough patience and don't see the gradual improvements.

[ClearCase_guy]

If the Democrats are freaking out ans calling for us to withdraw, then we must be winning.
If the Democrats seem satisfied with the status quo and are not opposing Bush's policies, then we must be losing.

[ARE SOLE]

As long as the troopers support the effort, I'm down with them.


Regards

[PFC]

It seems pretty clear that the Bush Administration had the wrong model for Iraq when we embarked on the war.

I am still baffled and amazed at how they could have been so goddamn stupid in their assessment of what they were getting into. Anybody who knew anything about the history of the region should have known they had the wrong model for Iraq.

[mountainlyons]

When the demorats say we are losing then we must be doing quite well.

[mjp]

A constant stream of negative news will produce an emotion of discouragement which will cause one to give up which is what the commie secular humanists want.

Instead, we need information about increments of progress toward our goal, even if it is one small bit at a time. This will produce encouragement which is the emotion needed to help reach an outcome that is difficult and a long time coming.

[driftless2]

You'd better believe that in their black hearts the great majority of Dems want this effort to fail and fail badly. Simply for powers sake. The thought of a stable non-threatening Iraq, which is the FIRST !! (however faulty) virtually all Islamic democratic Arab country in the mideast, is irrelevant to them.

[MNJohnnie]

Nice you have feelings too bad your emotional based feelings are not facts.

The rabid Know Nothings are the ones racing against the clock. Desperate to sell their "Iraq is lost" dogma rather then admit they know nothing at all about the issue and merely are desperately afraid that victory in Iraq will mean the Hysteric Leftists, such as yourself, will end up having to admit they were wrong about Iraq from the start.

The Rabidly Ignorant Left would rather ANYTHING happen then having to admit their trailer trash level understanding of the world is pathetically incompetent and their intellectual pretensions an abusrd farce. They have a been absolutely wrong about Iraq from the start and know it.

Really sick how the Hysteric Leftists simply ignore ALL factual data coming out of Iraq to desperately cling to their emotion based ignorance on Iraq.

How about you quit mindlessly squealing your dogmas long enough to actually LEARN some real fact rather then simply tuning out all factual reality on Iraq since it obliterates your emotion based whimsy about Iraq?

Start with this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Iraqi_Army

[MNJohnnie]

You really are a total idiot who knows utterly NOTHING at all about Iraq!.

Instead of mindlessly squealing slogans, how about you actually try LEARNING something? BTW, your feelings are not facts. It is a habit of the intellectually inept to mistake believe their feelings if presented as statements of fact magically changes them into facts. They do not change no matter how strongly you feel them. Please try actually presenting some actual facts in future postings.

Mindlessly screaming your feelings over and over and over does not magically change them into facts. That habit of you Hysteric Leftists merely convinces most people you are utter arrogant morons too mindlessly convinced of your own infallibility to actually bother to discover even a single fact on a topic.

Your pretension of intellectual ability have so far NOT been backed up by any evidence of actual intellectual ability. How about you quit screaming your slogans and trite childish sound bite ignorance long enough to actually learn something about Iraq?

Why Iraq

One of the really infuriating things in modern politics is the level of disinformation, misinformation, demagoguery and out right lying going on about the mission in Iraq. Democrats have spent the last 3+ years lying about Iraq out of a political calculation. The assumption is that the natural isolationist mindset of the average American voter, linked to the inherent Anti Americanism (what is misnamed the "Anti War movement") of the more feverish Democrat activists (especially those running the US's National "News" media) would restore them to national political dominance. The truth is the Democrat Party Leadership has simply lacked the courage to speak truth to whiners.

The truth is that even if Al Gore won the 2000 election and 09-11 still happened we would be doing the EXACT same things in Iraq we are doing now. Based on the political situation in the region left over from the 1991 Gulf War plus the domestic political consensus built up in BOTH parties since 1991 as well as fundamental military strategic laws, there was NO viable strategic choice for the US but to take out Iraq after finishing the initial operations in Afghanistan.

To start with Saddam's Iraq was our most immediate threat. We could NOT commit significant military forces to another battle with Saddam hovering undefeated on our flank nor could we leave significant forces watching Saddam. The political containment of Iraq was breaking down. That what Oil for Food was all about.

Oil for Food was an attempt by Iraq to break out of it's diplomatic isolation and slip the shackles the UN Sanctions put on it's military. There there was the US Strategic position to consider.

The War on Islamic Fascism is different sort of war. in facing this Asymmetrical threat, we have a hidden foe, spread out across a geographically diverse area, with covert sources of supply. Since we cannot go everywhere they hide out, in fact often cannot even locate them until the engage us, we need to draw them out of hiding into a kill zone. Iraq is that kill zone.

That is the true brilliance of the Iraq strategy. We draw the terrorists out of their world wide hiding places onto a battlefield they have to fight on for political reasons (The "Holy" soil of the Arabian peninsula) where they have to pit their weakest ability (Conventional Military combat power) against our greatest strength (ability to call down unbelievable amounts of firepower) where they will primarily have to fight other forces (the Iraqi Security forces) in a battlefield that is mostly neutral in terms of guerrilla warfare. (Iraqi-mostly open terrain as opposed to guerrilla friendly areas like the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of SE Asia).

Did any of the critics of liberating Iraq ever look at a map? Iraq, for which we had the political, legal and moral justifications to attack, is the strategic high ground of the Middle East. A Geographic barrier that severs ground communication between Iran and Syria apart as well as providing another front of attack in either state or into Saudi Arabia if needed.

There were other reasons to do Iraq but here is the strategic military reason we are in Iraq. We have taken, an maintain the initiative from the Terrorists. They are playing OUR game on ground of OUR choosing.

Problem is Counter Insurgency (aka Counter Terrorism) is SLOW and painful. Often a case of 3 steps forward, two steps back. One has to wonder if the American people have either the emotional maturity, nor the intellect" to understand. It's so much easier to spew made for TV slogans like "No Blood for Oil" or "We support the Troops, bring them home" or dumbest of all "We are creating terrorists" then to actually THINK.

Westerners in general, and the US citizens in particular seem to have trouble grasping the fundamental fact of this foe. These Islamic Fascists have NO desire to co-exist with them. The extremists see all this PC posturing by the Hysteric Left as a sign that we are weak. Since they want us dead, weakness encourages them.

There is simply no way to coexist with people who completely believe their "god" will reward them for killing us. So we can covert to Islam, die or kill them. Iraq is about killing enough of them to make the rest of the Jihadists realize we are serious. They same way killing enough Germans, Italians and Japanese eliminated the ideologies of Nazism, Fascism and Bushido. Americans need to understand how Bin Laden and his ilk view us.

In the Arab world the USA is considered a big wimp. We have run away so many times. Lebanon, the Kurds, the Iraqis in 1991, the Iranians, Somalia, Clinton all thru the 1990s etc etc etc. The Jihadists think we will run again. In fact they are counting on it. That way they can run around screaming "We beat the American just like the Russians, come join us in Jihad" and recruit the next round of "holy warriors". Iraq is also a show place where we show the Muslim world that there are a lines they cannot cross. On 9-11-01 they crossed that line and we can, and will, destroy them for it

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I admit that Reply #2 isn't as clearly written as its author probably hoped, but IMHO if you reread it a time or two you will conclude that you actually agree with its author.

[upsdriver]

Yes, we are winning in Iraq. We have always been winning in Iraq. As long as we never quit on ourselves the victory is ours. At some point in the future the naysayers are going to be exposed as the traiters they are. Iraq is going to be only the first of our successes in the middle east.

[Billthedrill]

The real reason the headline can even be written is that there aren't any benchmarks for building a nation from smoking ruins, and that as soon as somebody proposes some the Democrats raise the bar and the MSM let them get away with it.

How will we know when we've won? We won't. There are far too many ideologies and reputations at stake for any clear-cut consensus on it. Were the Iraqi government to continue successfully in its current state a hundred years from now the critics will still find a way either to state that it would have happened anyway - an open lie - or that they know a better way to effect it. So let me propose one sign that will help us to know we've won - when we start to hear sour grapes from the Left. And it's already happening.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

the MSM has a very dangerous model - "if it bleeds, it leads." The definition of "news" is biased toward the unpleasant and the bizarre. That may be understandable for domestic news. We all live in the U.S. and thus can judge for ourselves the "default condition" of day-to-day life. It is not necessary to report the cars that didn't crash or the babies that were born because in some sense we are aware of them.

But when we must rely on the MSM for our understanding of Iraq, knowledge of the default condition is absent.

. . . the MSM does not see it as its duty or role to report good news - the schools opened, the hospitals repaired, the water delivered. They do not want to be pollyannas - if the default condition of Iraq is indeed characterized by bad news, then we want to know that; but is it?

I long ago figured out that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a definition of what is important which places the business concern of the journalist above the national interest. In fact, conservatism might be defined as:

"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore Roosevelt

. . . and Big Journalism is an establishment which exists only as the critic and yet is committed to the idea that journalism is more important than any other endeavor - bar none.

Viewed in that light, it is only to be expected that journalism is anti conservative; conservatives value what journalism exists to denigrate.

[Gritty]

[SuzyQue]

You make some good points.

[edsheppa]

But to the extent that [insurgents may already be skedaddling from Baghdad], it puts the lie to the criticism that the additional 20,000 troops is just a "drop in the bucket"

Not necessarily. We can't take and hold all of Iraq with 20K additional troops. We didn't take and hold South Vietnam even with over half a million soldiers. I don't see how we can take and hold Iraq with fewer. Supposing they are leaving Baghdad, they'll simply cause mayhem elsewhere.

It'd be better if they weren't leaving, if we could somehow draw more in.

[arthurus]

How will we know if we are winning or losing in Iraq?

We are not winning or losing in Iraq, not the war, anyway. Iraq is a campaign in the Islamic War or The Long War. It will be won in Iran if we attend to it soon. If we do not then we will have to defeat a much larger array of the enemy as the saracen governments across Africa and Asia perceive that Iran and Islam might just really conquer.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping.

The 1st battles (Afghanistan & Iraq) in a long war, have been tremendously successful. We (coalition forces) have won decisively. As Afghanis and Iraqis take responsibility and control of their countries the building of great nations will accelerate. Afghanistan's and Iraq's most wanted will be reduced to a 1 hour television show. We will continue to bring to justice foreign and domestic enemies and mock the propagandists into their graves.