Yet Another Nail

As we witness the continuing spectacle of Dick Cheney polluting the airways while being fawned over by the usual RWS™ and their enablers, it's well to remember how wrong he and the president he controlled were on everything Iraq. From the costs, the time requirements, the liberator-greetings, to the idea of installing Ahmed Chalabi, the failings of the US citizen-rulers, the resistance to holding elections and to the writing of a constitution (how quickly we forget), it's pretty damning. And now, there's this:

In an eye-opening article in Vanity Fair, the one remaining feather in a rotting headdress is taken away, leaving mere smoke. There's nothing those guys said or did that was right. The "working," as in "the surge is working," could have happened years before it did. It's generally understood by all but the most idiotic that the real reason the "surge" worked is that the Sunni tribal leaders agreed to put down their arms: the so-called Sunni awakening. What the article says is that they offered to do so years earlier, the officers on the ground supported it, and the Bush administration rejected it.

After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted.

What the history books should also record, revealed here for the first time, is that the Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders....

...For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.

The article includes this quote from a Jerry Jones, then special assistant to Rumsfeld:

“From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.”

This is pretty strong stuff. And yet, like some sort of undead wraith wailing from a grave he refuses to occupy, Cheney is still out there, criticizing everything Obama, defending everything he did: the indefensible. The demonstrably failed. Worse, he's still given a platform, still given credence. And in Congress, his defenders and apologists do everything they can to block the changes we need, and the people who intend to carry them out.

As difficult are the challenges we face, we shouldn't have to be wasting time arguing over the obvious.
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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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