Damnit!
Posted on 08/06/2007 11:29:11 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.
In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year.
It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.
No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory.
Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.
It's been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and—more importantly at this juncture—able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement—evenhandedness and reliability—that is furthest from being fulfilled.
There is no magic formula for success.
And magic is what it may take to turn military gains into the strategy's ultimate goal: a political process that moves Iraq's rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from the brink of civil war to the threshold of peace—and to get there on a timetable that takes account of growing war fatigue in the United States.
Efforts at Iraqi reconciliation saw another blow Monday: Five Cabinet ministers loyal to Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein leader decided to boycott government meetings, further deepening a crisis that threatens Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The boycott would leave the Shiite-led government with no Sunni participants, at least temporarily.
Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.
Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.
U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying—to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security.
The idea, after all, is not to kill or capture every terrorist and insurgent. That can't be done. The idea is to create a security environment more favorable to political action by the government, to provide breathing space for leaders of rival factions to work out a peaceful way to share power.
The U.S. military, partnering in many instances with Iraqi forces, is now creating that security cushion—not everywhere, but in much of the north, the west and most importantly in key areas of Baghdad.
Sectarian killings continue and extremist groups remain a threat, yet they are being squeezed harder. The U.S. military has caught some momentum, thanks to the extra 30,000 troops—for a total of 159,000 on the ground—that Bush agreed to send as part of the new counterinsurgency strategy announced in January. The troops are interacting more with the local people and are protecting them more effectively.
At this stage, however, there is precious little evidence that Iraqi leaders are inclined to take advantage of that.
Even so, U.S. officers seem convinced that it is too soon to stop, that by tamping down the sectarian violence, at least in Baghdad, they are giving the Iraqis a chance to come together. They insist it is unrealistic to expect the Iraqis to resolve their problems in a matter of months. And they argue that withdrawing would only lead to bigger problems, for the U.S. and for Iraq.
That is likely to be the message that Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. officials in Iraq, convey to Congress and to Bush in September. They are in no position to predict how long it might take the Iraqi government to achieve reconciliation, but they are likely to concede, if asked, that if the Iraqis do not take key steps in the months ahead the entire U.S. approach may unravel.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose views on how to proceed in Iraq also will figure prominently in Bush's decisions, says the administration, in hoping for movement toward political reconciliation this year, underestimated the depth of mistrust between rival sects.
The culture of fear in Baghdad is ingrained.
The Shiites, now in power after decades of being dominated by the minority Sunnis during Saddam Hussein's rule, remain fearful of a Sunni revival. The Sunnis see their own survival at stake.
Kurds have enjoyed more than a decade of semi-autonomy in the north, where control over oil wealth is in play.
Which gets to two matters that underlie much of the conviction in Congress that it is time to get out of Iraq.
First: Do the potential benefits of sticking with the war strategy outweigh the cost, in American blood and treasure? Total U.S. war deaths now exceed 3,665 and are climbing by more than two per day, on average.
And second: Would Iraqi political leaders be more likely to settle their sectarian differences if they knew that America's patience was ending and that its troops were leaving—at least the combat forces?
There is clearly a consensus among senior U.S. commanders in Iraq that the answer to the first question is yes. They feel that so much has been sacrificed already that it makes no sense to quit now. Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in charge of training and equipping Iraqi forces, said the counterinsurgency strategy, not fully implemented until June, has finally wrested the initiative from the insurgents.
"It was fought over and died for, and there's no reason to give it back right now," Dubik told AP.
On compelling Iraq's political leaders to move toward reconciliation, few American officers appear to believe that an early pullout would do the trick. They think it would propel the country further into chaos.
Crocker is explicit on that point.
"A massive human catastrophe (could follow), with the bloodshed among the Iraqi civilians on a scale we have not seen and may find hard to imagine," he told AP.
Nonetheless, leaving—in at least a limited way—appears likely to begin in 2008. Petraeus might be inclined to send home, perhaps as early as January, one of the extra five Army brigades that Bush sent to Baghdad. Some of the roughly 4,000 extra Marines in Anbar province might head out by then, too.
If that happens, and if Bush overcomes congressional pressure to get out faster in a presidential election year, Petraeus probably would stretch out the troop drawdown over many months. He might also switch some units from one part of the country to another, reflecting an uneven pace of security progress, while leaving the bulk of the force in place at least until 2009, when a new president will be in the White House.
The AP reporter missed all the talk about the SURGE?
Probably too busy reading DU.
Dems are going to get spanked in September. Karma can be brutal when you own defeat.
This is different from the lulls we've seen in the past. This is a sea-change of sorts.
During the Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson boasted, “They can’t bomb an outhouse without my approval.”
The U.S. military, in the absence of political interference, is capable of adapting to any environment and defeating any enemy.
Does anyone get the feeling that Bush is saving his best comeback
for the last act of his presidency?
If Petreaus and Co demonstrate material gains come Sept, the
polls that have been tending toward more tolerance toward the
war will go even further in that direction, condemning the
libber-als to looking like surrendermonkies...yet again.
And then they’ll have to flip-flop...yet again. Which will make
it that much easier to take back the Senate and hold onto the Oral,
er a Oval Office in 08.
Do you believe that these evnets are scripted maybe well in adavnce?
Inquiring minds want to know!
MV
Absolutely not.
I think August is going to be a bloody month. Everyone (including Al-Qaeda) knows about the September date. The Democrats and their media cannot allow any sort of success. The surrender bills are already drawn up. Couple that with lots of violent scenes of Iraq... Despite any reality on the ground, it’s going to be a tough sell that there was ANY success in Iraq. With an election coming? Team BUSH SHOULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THIS. We’ll see if they did because it’s going to take more than some General testifying in Congress that things are better when the TV God says differently.
I suspect Bush granted far more deference to military commanders in the field, the problem is, or the question is, why this took so long? The “surge” seems to have had a fault line effect in the US, apart from its impact on Iraq. If it was not much heralded here, yet it coincides with increased optimism and support for the effort, what was the mechanism? It was spoken of, usually with derision, in the MSM. Is a significant percentage of us getting news from elsewhere? Finally?
Agreed and that's always been our greatest strength. But it takes time, and mistakes can be costly. With the 24-hour news cycle, it can be oh so hard to adapt and learn when you are constantly fending of litigation.
“Dems are going to get spanked in September. Karma can be brutal when you own defeat.”
Come on now! You know the Drive-by media will come to their rescue. I can hear it now...the demos forced the surge that worked.
“Team BUSH SHOULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THIS.”
Very true, but Team Bush has the most abysmal communications department in US history. Terrible. They communicate NOTHING about our successes in Iraq and really its too late for them. I wouldn’t hire them to hand out fliers announcing the neighborhood BBQ.
Hopefully we've learned our lesson and we'll elect someone who CAN communicate better. The thing I hate the most about Bush is that "deer in the headlights" look. Every time he does it, I find myself doing it too.
Logically, one would expect AlQaeda to mount some kind of offensive in the next few weeks, a "Tet offensive" of sorts, to bloody Coaliton forces and provide grist for the 'rat surrender-mill.
They may not be able to, and if they don't, I suggest it would be confirmation of the most optimistic reports recently of "the surge's" effectiveness.
“I wouldn’t hire them to hand out fliers announcing the neighborhood BBQ.”
lol well said.
Good observation. Keep your fingers crossed and your powder dry. Still the media will make even the smallest disaster monumental with 24 hour coverage and weeping victims.
Am I right? if so, can they do it?
I’m not a Don Rumsfeld basher, but I wonder if he resisted a “Patraeus” approach.
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