Botched Surge-ry

Forget about the disinformation (to put it mildly), the poor planning, the disregard of the generals who knew. Ignore the stupidity of thinking god was guiding our plan, that by preëmptive invasion we could spread democracy, like bread on the waters, throughout the Middle East. Of all the travesties of the invasion of Iraq, the greatest -- because it foretold the failure from the outset -- was the complete misunderstanding of the religious/tribal dynamics of the place.

So now, after years of triumphalism, of hearing from Bush acolytes like John McPOW and everyone at Fox "news" that the surge worked, how brilliant they were and how shameful the nay-sayers, it's falling apart. (And those of us who said it was never about the "surge" but about the "Sunni Awakening," are proved right. Not a surprise, given the numbers. Facts.)

BAQUBA, Iraq — Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents.

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.

The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shiite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from Al Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq’s inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided Al Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters.

The Awakening members’ switch in loyalties poses a new threat to Iraq’s tenuous social and political balance during the country’s ongoing political crisis and as the United States military prepares to withdraw next year...

...“Many of those who called themselves the Awakening felt remorse,” said the man, who used the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Daeni. “They believed they were making a mistake by helping the occupiers and have now returned to Al Qaeda. I can say that the number is increasing every day.”

...Muthana al-Tamimi, head of the provincial council’s security committee, said Awakening members were clearly returning to the insurgency, but that Baghdad should share the blame.

“The Awakening needs government support,” he said. “They’re not getting it, so they’re an easy bite for terrorists.”

Thomas Ricks, among the most credible writers on Iraq and Afghanistan, has this to say:

It isn't surprising, but it is sad to see. I think it probably was inevitable, given the sectarian Shiite ascendancy and the ultimate victory of Iran in the war, as shown in this Guardian article. (... Maliki is visiting Tehran today. He supposedly also is going to Qom, temporary home of one Moqtada al-Sadr.)

More evidence, I would say, that the surge worked tactically (that is, improved security and so enabled Uncle Sam to edge toward the exits) but failed strategically (that is, didn't lead to a breakthrough in Iraqi politics).

I think the big question is how far the Sunni Awakening reversal will go. Is this the beginning of the next phase of the war? I dunno. And how much will U.S. troops be involved? Again, an open question. I am hearing through the grapevine that things are getting friskier.

It's not about "I told you so," although many people did. It's about the fact that, having made a huge mistake in going there, we now have to admit there's nothing more we can do. The RWS™ will be eager to blame Obama for the inevitable disintegration (although the word implies there was, as some point, integration.) They already are, of course.

But if there's any blame that accrues to him, it's in not standing up and saying exactly what needs to be said: whether you believe the invasion was a good idea or a bad one, it's time to recognize that we've given the Iraqis enough time, money, and blood to find a way to settle their internal differences. They want to, or they don't. They will or they won't. They can, or they can't. It's their time, and their country. If they need financial help, political advice -- if there are ways in which we can facilitate the process of reconciliation between Iraqi religious factions, or their growth as a nation, all they need to do is ask. But the military phase of our involvement at all levels must end. Their future, after thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, is -- and must be -- in their own hands.

Irony

Everywhere you look there are ironies, and it's hard to say which are the greater.

We're about to throw out of office the people who tried to fix the problems caused by those we're sending back in.

(For even more irony, read the "Mood ring" post by the author of the above cartoon [right below it], the inimitable Tom Toles.)

We've "liberated" (or whatever it's been) millions of Muslims; yet the people in armchairs who claim the action as their own, who puff up and scream that those who opposed it are unAmerican, would deny freedom at home to all of Islam. Thousands are dead, tens of thousands wounded, trillions spent in the name of planting democracy thence, only to uproot it hence.

We've asked our warriors to die for people over there that we (and by "we" I mean teabaggers and RWS™) don't want to live with here.

Over the seas, we hope -- we need -- that people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and Iran rise up against those who preach fear and hate and violence. At home, we rally at the feet of demagogues whose cynical manipulations of fear and hate (and undisguised calls for violence) are amplified in unprecedented synchrony by non-stop right-wing media who claim the mantle of country-love while disparaging and ignoring the most essential tenets of it. Like respect.

I'd call that ironic, all right.

Well, perhaps these people traditionalists. After all, demagoguery and fomenting of hate for minorities has a long -- if largely, until now, unsuccessful -- history in this country. In a recent column, Nicholas Kristoff described it this way:

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

Perhaps the closest parallel to today’s hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about “the Catholic menace.” One book warned that Catholicism was “the primary source” of all of America’s misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope. Does that sound familiar? [Yes, it does.]

It may be a fine tradition -- perhaps even evolutionarily sound -- but it doesn't make me feel any better. Back then, it was the occasional pamphleteer. Now, it's pervasive and coordinated right-wing screaming.

And, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, the triumphalists are complaining that, in his low-point end-of-combat speech on Iraq, Obama didn't praise Bush enough; when, in fact, he gave them more than they deserved-- just as he did in not pursuing war crimes -- in pretending that everything was fine. So fast is history being rewritten that the ink is smearing. While, in a perfect circle of ironies, the screamers count on the shamefully short memories of Americans, we've already forgotten how the war began, was carried out, and descended into horrifying debacle. "The surge worked," we are being told, now as before, and for that we should haul George Bush upon our shoulders and march him into the history books, his greatness pristine as cleared brush.

The fact is, Obama effectively concluded "enough is enough." Couch it any way you want: it was time to end the endless horror to whatever extent possible, declare stalemate, and (sort of) leave. After all the blood, money, and time, with no actual endpoint, it's finally up to Iraqis to solve Iraq. Frank Rich, in one of his better columns, quoting Andrew Basevich, a West Point grad whose son died in Iraq, captures the irony far better than I:

“The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget....

“...common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.... the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.”

He's plenty hard on President Obama for abetting the whitewash. And the RWS™ have the temerity to complain that not enough praise was lavished.

Now there's irony, of the first order.

Words

"The last Marines are out of Vietnam," said Richard Nixon, square-facedly, as he touted his "Vietnamization" strategy. At the time, my base in Danang was crawling with Marines. I know; I was there.

The hedge? The guys I saw, and treated, were stationed in the Philippines, in Vietnam TDY. Temporary duty. Not really there, because their home base was a thousand miles away. (Wow. I just took a wild guess. But look!) Magic. Poof. No more Marines.

Makes me wonder, really, what's going on in Iraq, now that "all combat troops" have left. It's true the number is down by 100,000 from its peak, and that's good (except who knows how many "contractors" remain?) But I wonder what the definition of "combat troops" has become.

Turns out, I'm not the only one.

M-barrassment

I just heard the sun rises in the East, the sky is blue, and one plus one equals two:

The former MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller today delivered a withering assessment of the case for war against Iraq, saying it had significantly increased the terrorist threat to Britian.

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Manningham-Buller said the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion in 2003 was low.

But the toppling of Saddam allowed Osama bin Laden to gain a stronghold in Iraq and radicalised young Muslims in Britain, she said.

...She said the focus on Iraq had "reduced the focus on Afghanistan", and was damning in her assessment of every stage of the invasion, from the low threat posed by Iraq and the quality of intelligence provided to the reconstruction process after Saddam was toppled.

...She revealed that, during a visit to New York, she had tried to persuade Paul Wolfowitz, the then deputy secretary of defence, not to disband the Iraqi army. Asked whether she had any chance of succeeding, she said: "Not a hope." She said there was "plenty of evidence" that planning for the aftermath of the invasion was "not sufficiently done by the US".

I mean, golly, who could have seen that coming?

The Surge Is Working

On the list of outrageous statements we heard during the recent presidential campaign, the claim that "the surge is working" was pretty near the top for me. To the extent that violence was down, I believed -- along with many other more adept observers than I -- it was NOT due to the addition of a few thousand troops, but was, rather, a result of the so-called "Sunni Awakening" and the concomitant deals-with-the-devil made by our military leaders there. Ultimate success, it seemed obvious, would depend on the extent to which Iraqis might rise above eons of religious hatred between the Sunnis and Shia. And, given the history of such hatreds around the world (and most especially in Iraq), there was really not a lot to hope for. Far be it from me to claim that religious prejudice is the root of most evil; but anyone with more than two pyramidal neurons would rightly conclude that it's no more likely that those embittered Muslim factions would reconcile than it is that Texas will stop electing creationists to its legislature and that the creationists will stop trying to banish science from schools.

The fact is that in invading Iraq we unleashed a fury. Expecting a sustainable government to be formed which includes Shia and Sunni working together is like expecting Rush Limbaugh to start praising Barack Obama. They are oil and water. Bug and windshield. Pediatrician and surgeon.

And so it is that this article is unsurprising, if deeply worrisome. Its author, Thomas Ricks, has been mostly right about mostly everything over there. In the milder parts of the article, he says:

"...the Maliki government is putting the screws to the Awakening movement (for those who just arrived, that's a mainly Sunni group of about 100,000 people, many of them former insurgents, who in late 2006 and 2007 arrived at ceasefires with the U.S. military presence in Iraq). The American plan was to integrate about 20,000 members of Awakening groups into Iraqi security forces, and help the rest find other work...

Maliki's guys are:

• Arresting some leaders of the "Sons of Iraq" (the American term for Awakening forces)
• Attacking others
• Bringing only 5,000 of the ex-insurgents into the Iraqi security forces
• And stiffing others on pay, with some complaining they haven't been paid in weeks or even months

I think Maliki's gambit is to crack down on the Sunnis while American forces are still available in sufficient numbers to back him up. This is a turning into a test of strength, Sunni vs. Shiite..."

[Ricks has a follow-up article today. Same message, or worse.]

For no good reason, and with no thought aforethought, George Bush lit a fuse that we can't extinguish. At some point we'll have to admit the horror of it and let it play out as it will. If after all these years and lives and efforts and trillions we haven't been able to make the impossible happen, what other actions can be tried that will?

By "horror," I mean "HORROR." We have caused people to die for no good reason, and we will cause countless more to do the same. Facing reality, we'll have to walk away at some point, knowing full well that in doing so we'll be removing the tourniquets and letting the blood flow. Even if we decided to stay indefinitely -- a political and economic impossibility -- the end result can't be avoided, only deferred. The same deaths will happen, more slowly delivered, over a longer time, leading, sooner or later, to the resumption of civil war, with or without our troops in the middle.

It's an unavoidable catastrophe, and it will inevitably fall upon Barack Obama to let it unfold. It's only a matter of whether he can make it understood. Not acceptable; just understood. The analogy that haunts me is this:

Hiking in the wilderness, you come upon a horrible scene: a man is lying on his belly at the edge of a cliff, holding the hand of a young woman who is dangling and thrashing, fear in her eyes. The man yells for help, he's losing his grip. "It's my fault," he cries. "I told her it would be okay. I made her come with me..." Laying next to the man, grabbing onto some weeds for stability, you manage to catch the woman's other hand, just as the man lets go. I'll go for help, he says, and disappears. And now you are holding on, one hand in one hand, looking straight into the woman's face, she dangling, you grasping at more weeds trying not to get pulled over yourself. Time passes, the hands are sweating, your muscles are burning, you don't have the strength to pull her to safety, and your purchase on the ground is loosening. At some point, even as she looks you in the eye, pleading, you realize you'll have to let go, and watch her drop to her death. And then you do.

There was no choice. But how do you live with that?
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Crash Test Dummies

If you're a passenger in my car, and if I'm drunk and speeding, hands off the wheel, and if I've removed the seat belts and disabled the air bags, as long as we haven't crashed yet is it credible for me to argue that I've kept you safe?

The one theme that seems to prevail in the face of George Bush's astronomically huge failures is that he's "kept us safe." Well, okay, in the above sense. But I think a couple of things need to be kept in mind. First, those efforts that actually may be playing a role in preventing another attack are ones that any president would be doing, without question: namely, gathering intelligence. (The difference being, of course, that most would have done it legally.) I absolutely understand the need to keep an eye on certain people. Wiretaps don't bother me. But (even though it's clearly open to abuse no matter what) I don't see a reason why the law can't be followed, or updated where necessary. And I'm not at all persuaded that torture (not to mention renditions, suspending American law, Guantanamo) has been or is a useful tool. The only people who support it besides Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, are knee-jerk (and non-militarily-experienced) pundits of the Limbaugh/Kristol variety, who think 24 is a documentary. There seems nearly unanimous agreement among actual intelligence operatives that torture produces unreliable information. False information. Not to mention the degradation of our image around the world. It's part of the tough-guy swagger that right-wingers, nearly all of whom found ways to avoid signing up for the military, like to imagine for themselves.

Beyond those things that we'd all have done, there's nothing one can point to as a positive for safety in Bush's policies. Clearly creating more potential terrorists than it has eliminated, Iraq has been a debacle, no matter how it finally turns out. With George Bush seeing himself as Samson, no Delilah was needed. Having shifted power to Iran, having ignored Afganistan/Pakistan and the real al Queda, there's no argument but that we are at increased risk. Likewise, the bankrupting of our country and depleting of our military has left us nearly paralyzed.

Approaching eight years after 9/11 we're teetering on the brink of collapse in ways for which Osama bin Laden couldn't have hoped in his wildest prayers. (If he did, he's the most brilliant villain in history.) What has brought us to this point? Three airplanes, or the presidential policies since then?

I'll give Bush credit for taking certain obvious steps in response to 9/11, ones that had he not taken he'd have been guilty of presidential malpractice. But to see the Iraq misadventure and its offshoot illegalities as anything but a disastrous over-reach (to put it kindly) and to claim that it in any way deserves credit for the lack of further attacks on our soil (ignoring, of course, the fact that it's led the the death and disabling of tens of thousands more Americans than occurred on 9/11) is, at best, to claim something plainly unprovable, and, at worst, willfully to look away from the direction to which the facts point.
And answer me this: if Bush is to be credited with the lack of attacks since September Eleven, why is he not to be blamed for the attack itself, nine months into his presidency, when he'd been told explicitly by the out-going administration that al Queda was a grave threat, and ignoring it? How does that work? All credit for the one thing, no blame for the other? Or this, to those who absolve Bush of any responsibility for 9/11: how far into the Obama administration's tenure would an attack be marked on Bush's side of the ledger?

[An interesting datum in regard to the above, according to Ron Suskind whom I recently saw on TV: He says it's known by Bush and Cheney, based on gathered intelligence, that al Queda has "called off" attacks on the U.S. for now, until they're able to deliver a greater blow (presumably with some form of WMD) than was 9/11. So in claiming to have kept us safe, George Bush is saying something he knows to be untrue (surprise). Rather than having been deterred, al Queda is simply waiting, preparing for something bigger than before. Great. One can only wonder how much less vulnerable we'd be, had we not pissed away opportunity in Iraq.]

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Rewrite!

I wonder if George Bush and Karl Rove will get away with their attempts to rewrite history, even while the bodies are still warm. Given the complicity -- by virtue, mostly, of laziness, I think -- of the press, it's entirely possible. The truth, as they say, is out there; but future journalists will have to expend a little energy to find it. It's not as if they're famous for doing so.

Among the many facts so easily revised, so ignored, is the Iraq WMD issue. In the past couple of days, we hear Bush regrets the failure of intelligence. And Rove says (in a statement Bush himself isn't so damn sure about) that if they'd known there were no WMD they'd not have invaded.

Bullshit. They knew it. There's no way they didn't.

Everyone who tries to justify the "failure" likes to say how many others believed there were WMD: Europeans, Bill Clinton, Congress. Well, yeah, for a while they did. But they didn't invade. And there were serious questions raised, and ignored. But most important of all: before Bush invaded Iraq, there were inspectors there. THERE WERE INSPECTORS THERE!! Finding nothing. Given the reservations, and the fact that THERE WERE INSPECTORS THERE FINDING NOTHING, there was no reason to invade -- assuming WMD was really the reason. It's simply a lie to say otherwise. Rantings notwithstanding, I'm not particularly quick to call people -- even George Bush -- liars. But in this it's impossible to think otherwise. Because -- stop me if you've heard this -- there were inspectors there, finding nothing. And then Bush pulled them out! How easy it seems to be to ignore that fact, to forget it entirely.

George Bush has a right to say whatever he wants, and to try as hard as he can to rewrite his own history. I hope to hell that he doesn't get away with it.

Thank God for the internet.

[Update: it's even worse than I thought!]