Bad News for the Next Prez

Whatever you think about what is going on in Iraq I think that regardless of political leanings all would concur that Crocker/Petraeus combo has been our best by far. As fortune would have it, however, both Crocker and Petraeus will be gone by January of next year. Just in time for the next prez to find someone else to step into the mire.

What I always wondered was Amb. Crocker's relation to '80's neo-con bete noire Chester Crocker.

Surging Backlash

Two pieces do not a trend make but they make some salient points that should be addressed. Especially when you consider that John McCain seems to have built his entire candidacy around it. Michael Kinsley point blank says that the surge is a failure. It all boils down to one simple question for Kinsley:

Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? The answer is no.

Kinsley expands on his simple one word answer:

In fact, President Bush laid down the standard of success when he announced the surge more than a year ago: "If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home." At the time, there were about 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Bush proposed to add up to 20,000 more troops. Although Bush never made any official promises about a timetable, the surge was generally described as lasting six to eight months.

By last summer, the surge had actually added closer to 30,000 troops, making the total American troop count about 160,000. Today, there are still more than 150,000 American troops in Iraq. The official plan has been to get that number back down to 130,000 by July and then to keep going so that there would be about 100,000 American troops in Iraq by the time Bush leaves office. Lately, though, Gen. Petraeus has come up with another zenlike idea: He calls it a "pause." And the administration has signed on, meaning that the total number of American troops in Iraq will remain at 130,000 for an undetermined period.

So, the best that we can hope for, in terms of American troops risking their lives in Iraq, is that there will be just as many next July—and probably next January, when time runs out—as there were a year ago. The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started. Maybe the situation in Baghdad, or the whole country, will have improved. But apparently it won't have improved enough to risk an actual reduction in the American troop commitment.

Nir Rosen is even less impressed with the so called surge, placing the success on our efforts to bribe Sunni militants:

Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides -- and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq -- it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

At least 80,000 men across Iraq are now employed by the Americans as ISVs. Nearly all are Sunnis, with the exception of a few thousand Shiites. Operating as a contractor, Osama runs 300 of these new militiamen, former resistance fighters whom the U.S. now counts as allies because they are cashing our checks. The Americans pay Osama once a month; he in turn provides his men with uniforms and pays them ten dollars a day to man checkpoints in the Dora district -- a paltry sum even by Iraqi standards. A former contractor for KBR, Osama is now running an armed network on behalf of the United States government. "We use our own guns," he tells me, expressing regret that his units have not been able to obtain the heavy-caliber machine guns brandished by other Sunni militias.

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector -- more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

Bringing the Troops Home Now! Means 20 Months

This is for all those bumper sticker politicos who talk a good game but have no idea of what they are talking about. This is Max Boot in Commentary talking about how not to get out of Iraq:

In any case, there is no simple or safe way rapidly to remove 160,000 troops, 64,000 foreign contractors, 45,000 vehicles, and millions of tons of equipment from a war zone. Estimates from within the American military suggest that an orderly departure would take, at a minimum, 12 to 20 months to accomplish. (In Vietnam, our withdrawal was conducted over four years.) To leave faster than that would require a precipitous abandonment of allies and equipment. U.S. forces would have to fight their way out of the country along Route Tampa, the main supply line to the south, with insurgents determined at every inch of the way to inflict a final humiliation on the defeated superpower. The pell-mell scramble would likely produce traumatic images akin to those of the last helicopter lifting off from a Saigon rooftop in 1975.

In light of this grisly prospect, most advocates of withdrawal suggest a timeline that, they hope, would make our retreat somewhat more orderly. The leading legislation along these lines, co-sponsored by Carl Levin and Jack Reed in the Senate and Ike Skelton in the House, would begin troop withdrawals within 120 days of passage and complete the process by next April. This legislation passed the House in July but was blocked in the Senate by Republicans seeking to give the administration, and General David Petraeus, time to meet the September 15 deadline for an assessment of the surge’s progress.

Under the terms of the Levin-Reed bill, the President would still have the option, even after April 2008, to retain a “limited presence” of troops for various missions yet to be specified. In this, the legislation’s sponsors were following the work of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose December 2006 report has become a touchstone for many critics of the war. The ISG, too, called for a general pullout, to culminate if possible by next spring. But even after the withdrawal of “all combat brigades not necessary for force protection,” other U.S. forces, according to the ISG, could be deployed “in units embedded with Iraqi forces, in rapid-reaction and special-operations teams, and in training, equipping, advising, force protection, and search-and-rescue.”

Kaplan on Petraeus and His Report

Kaplan is obviously a fan of Gen. Petraeus. All this Petraeus talk makes me want to re-read Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers, which I confess to not liking the first time around. First Kaplan says that the General is the right man for the right time:

In previous wars, presidents have reached down into the bureaucracy to find the most competent generals. Lincoln was famous for discarding generals until he got the right one, Ulysses S. Grant. John Pershing was promoted above other officers to command troops in World War I. George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower were also plucked from the ranks to command troops in World War II. But George W. Bush and his secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, settled for a barely competent general, Ricardo Sanchez, for the absolutely crucial job of getting the military occupation of Iraq off to a good start. When Sanchez failed, they then settled for a merely ordinary man, George Casey, under whom the situation continued to deteriorate. If you are whom you appoint, Sanchez and Casey speak volumes about the Bush administration. It took nearly four years of war for the Bush administration to choose the kind of general that previous presidents would have been hunting for—and demanding—from the very beginning: David Petraeus.

Kaplan dismisses the notion that either Petraeus or Amb. Crocker could be percieved as Bush men.

The idea that General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are front men for the administration is ludicrous. Until he took the job as overall ground commander in Iraq, Petraeus was a favorite of liberal journalists: the Princeton man who enjoyed the company of the media and intellectuals, so much so that he was vaguely distrusted by other general officers who envied the good ink he received. As for Crocker, he is a hard-core Arabist, a professional species that I once wrote a book about: He is the least likely creature on earth to buy into neoconservative ideas about the Middle East. Neither of these men are identified with the decision to go to war. If I had to bet, I’d say that Crocker especially would have been against it, like his other Arabist colleagues. Thus, these men have no personal stake in proving the president right. They and their staffs are much more likely to provide a balanced analysis of the reality in Iraq than senators and congressmen looking over their shoulders at opinion polls and future elections. As Petraeus said, “I wrote this testimony myself,” meaning, the White House had nothing to do with it. Watching them brief Congress Monday, I came away convinced that they made a better impression on the public than anyone else in the room.

Kaplan ultimately believes things are getting better, but we are still going to be stuck...

Probably the two most interesting statements in Petraeus’s report will get little coverage. First, that the data analysis he used to brief Congress was found by two intelligence agencies to be the best available on the Iraq war, and that reenlistment rates of troops in Iraq are above average: 130 percent among younger enlistees and 115 percent among those in mid-career. Those statistics constitute telling evidence that the troops themselves continue to find great meaning in their work, suggesting that they certainly don’t believe the cause is lost.

Of course, there is a basic contradiction in the analyses of Petraeus and Crocker. If Iraq has made all the progress they show in their charts and yet would fall apart if we left, then how relevant is that progress in the first place? The editorial writers at The New York Times remind us that military progress is meaningless without political progress. By that logic, since there has been no tangible national reconciliation at the top levels of government in Baghdad, there has been no meaningful progress at all. But that may be too neat an equation. If the surge has helped fortify political progress on the ground at the tribal level in Anbar and other regions of the country—by solidifying the Sunni alliance against al-Qaeda—then perhaps we should not rush toward the exit gates. Just because we can’t engineer change at the top does not mean that we can’t engineer change at the bottom in a way that will gradually and organically affect the top. As Crocker said, “The current course is hard; the alternatives are far worse.” Indeed, as Petraeus indicated, a rapid withdrawal would unleash centrifugal forces in Iraq that would tear the country further apart, whereas a slow and gradual withdrawal over time will improve the situation.

Alas, a series of dictators, culminating in Saddam Hussein, built a state out of a multiconfessional and multiethnic hodgepodge. Because that hodgepodge was so unwieldy—a Frankenstein monster of a polity—the force required to control it was, by necessity, tyrannical in the extreme. With that extreme tyranny now dismantled, rebuilding the Iraqi state must begin from scratch. It may be no accident that the progress we have seen is at the bottom, since that might be the only place where such progress can even begin to take hold.

Bottom line: I suspect we will be stuck in Iraq with tens of thousands of troops for years to come. The results we obtain may be meager, but they’ll still be better than if we suddenly withdrew.