It seems to me the point of the article is that policy of "Iraqization" is not working because Iraqi troops and police who should be doing the job are either incompetent or treacherous. This is a serious allegation which should be dealt with here with more than just screams about drive-by media bias.
The casualty numbers are real and not concocted by the media. That a police unit had to be disbanded for treachery is a fact. It is true "In March, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that Iraqi forces — not U.S. troops — would deal with a civil war in Iraq "to the extent one were to occur." Without arguing whether or not we are now in the midst of a civil war or even whether these recent Baghdad operations which produced the spike in casualties constitute a civil war, the facts on the ground are contrary to Rumsfeld's prediction, it is US forces -- not Iraqi troops -- who are dealing with the strife. More, the article asserts that commanders calls for 3000 Iraqi forces have yielded only a few hundred. This even though we have trained up 300,000 Iraqi forces.
Moving from what we know to be absolute fact, that is what is well sourced in the article, to allegations in the article which are unattributed, we find this very chilling observation:
Pentagon officials say aggressive military operations in the Iraqi capital are at best a short-term and partial solution, buying time for political compromise, which they call the only way to arrest Iraq's disintegration.
The anonymous Pentagon officials (note plural) represent a terrible challenge to anyone who thinks we are on course to "victory" in Iraq. Unless you think the reporter is flat lying, officials in the Pentagon believe that Iraq is disintegrating. But the only way to stop the disintegration is by "aggressive military operations." And, inferring from the rest of the article, those aggressive operations must be conducted only by an American troops. Finally, even with American troops aggressively fighting and sustaining near record casualties, our sacrifice can only hope to temporarily delay Iraq's disintegration. That is just what it says by a plain reading.
Now, one does not need to be anti-Bush, a leftist, a hater of America, or even a steenkin' rat to ask, do we have a policy upon which we should have some confidence that we will achieve our war aims in Iraq ? I see nothing that gives me that assurance. The whole policy seems to be to substitute Iranians for Americans in the field, and that approach by all the evidence before us, is simply not working.
This brings us to the question, what are or should be our war aims in Iraq? Are they realistic? Do we have a national consensus to sacrifice the blood and treasure necessary to achieve those war aims? Our original war aims were multiple in nature but it is fair to say that the administration chose to concentrate on an aim which was to deprive Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction which later evolved into an aim of establishing a democracy in Iraq. It seems to me the first was directly connected to America's national interest, but the second, although desirable, is not essential to our national interests. It seems to me that our national interests in Iraq are to prevent it being a petri dish for terrorists and to prevent those terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction with their petrodollars.
Can we have an Iraq which is not controlled by terrorists building bombs but which is something short of a democracy? Given the current deranged state of mind of most of the Muslim world, I am not confident that such a result can be obtained short of a democracy. But, given that same state of mind in the Muslim world, it will probably be even harder to establish a democracy. And, considering our own national mood, I am confident that we do not have a national consensus to spend enough blood and treasure to fashion a Willsonian democracy in Iraq.
We had in Iraq something that we will now be lucky to wind up with, a secular strongman who can prevent Iraq from slipping under the thrall of the fundamentalists and aligning itself along a Shi'ite axis with Iran.
Before the war, I posted a list of reasons, that is to say, war aims, which prompted me to support the war. They included the reasons stated above, although democracy was low on the list, and some added reasons such as controlling the flow of petrodollars away from weapons of mass destruction, the establishment of bases from which to bring security to the region and intimidate Iran away from the bomb. In other words, I saw the map of the Muslim world as a checkerboard where of one could take strategic squares and the rest would come under control. It is now clear that this strategy has backfired. The war on terrorism is not a war for turf. In the end it will be a war, if we are to survive it with our cities intact and our democracy whole, of sane Muslim against crazed, fundamentalist Muslim.
I think the experience in Iraq and the experience of the Israelis in Lebanon demonstrates that we have no strategy if our only strategy is to wage asymmetrical wars of attrition to our disadvantage. We are failing to encourage our allies and intimidate our enemies. Domestically our citizens are beginning to recognize that we need a new approach. George Bush is losing his consensus and, God help us, we're liable to lose the House or the Senate or both within a month and with that loss, our choice of options in Iraq will be lost.
But far worse than all this is the looming threat of Iran. Iraq is a festering sore but it is not immediately life-threatening to the Republic. If Iran gets the bomb we will be in mortal peril. It must be the utter imperative of American foreign policy to prevent Iran getting the bomb.
A short while ago I posted this one in which I try to describe the horns of our dilemma:
"Ultimately, it must be Muslims themselves who exterminate the terrorists in their midst. In this regard, a defeat in Iraq would so distort the the perception of the balances of power that we would be very unlikely to enlists rational Muslims in our crusade against the crazies.
A thousand times more important than the war in Iraq is the struggle to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. If you want the Saudis to stop funding schools for terrorists, if you want the precarious government of Pakistan to root out Al Qaeda in the mountains, if you want the Syrians to cease arming and supporting Hezbollah, you had better not let the Iranians get the bomb.
So we are in a terrible dilemma. We cannot afford to fail in Iraq for that makes us even weaker in the eyes of the Muslim world and makes it virtually impossible to prevent Iran from obtaining the bomb. But the more we fight in Iraq the more attenuated and weakened our ground forces become. We have reached the point now where generals are telling Congress that our matériel and manpower are approaching the breaking point. It is difficult to intimidate Iran when the whole world knows we lack the military muscle, the will, and the support of our allies and world opinion to force a regime change in Iran.
Instead of tipping the balance of power in the Middle East in our favor, Iraq has succeeded in insulating Iran from American power while making us vulnerable to attrition by Iran's proxies "
