I Cogitate

A surge of phony spin on Iraq
Bush's backers are peddling a sunny view of the president's strategy -- despite Iraq's political chaos and soaring death counts.
Juan Cole
www.salon.com

Aug. 7, 2007 | As Congress prepared to go on its August recess, Pentagon officials and White House backers were desperately spinning as a success this year's escalation of U.S. troop levels in Iraq. A recent poll shows that there has been a 10 percent uptick in the proportion of Americans who think the so-called surge, first announced by President George W. Bush in January, is having a beneficial effect. But how accurate are the sunny pronouncements coming out of Washington? What would constitute a success for the surge, and how likely is it to be achieved?

The troop escalation was intended to calm down Baghdad and to give the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breathing room to pursue a political reconciliation, especially with the Sunni Arab population. But the political goals of the surge are simply not being accomplished -- and indeed, the political situation has deteriorated substantially.

Maliki has lost even the few Sunni Arab allies he began with; the Sunni Arab coalition, called the Iraqi Accord Front, that had actually been in his government has now had its cabinet ministers tender their resignations. He has not held further reconciliation talks with dissident Sunni Arab groups. The Sunni Arab guerrilla groups are thinking of forming an opposition political party in hopes of extending their efforts to topple his government into the political sphere. His relations with Sunni Arab neighbors are so bad that Saudi Arabia declined his request to visit Riyadh.

Developments on other fronts are equally grim. The Maliki government has lost the confidence of three other political parties, the Islamic Virtue Party (15 seats in parliament), the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr (30 seats), and just on Monday, the Iraqi National List led by former appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. All have pulled their ministers from his government. The government of the major province of Basra, source of Iraq's petroleum exports and its major port, has collapsed. The governor, from the Islamic Virtue Party, failed a vote of no confidence by the provincial council, spearheaded by a rival Shiite faction, but he refuses to resign even though Maliki backed his removal. And if Basra collapses socially and with regard to security, it is unlikely that the Baghdad government can survive.

Administration supporters have been upbeat about the way in which some Sunni Arab populations, especially in al-Anbar Province, have turned against the foreign jihadi volunteers that were behind much mindless violence. These jihadis, styled "al-Qaida" by the Bush administration, however, were never the core of the insurgency. Politically speaking, the Sunni Arab Iraqi opposition to the foreign volunteers does not imply that the Sunnis are reconciled to the Maliki government. On the contrary, the Arab press reports substantial support in al-Anbar for the withdrawal by the Iraqi Accord Front from the Maliki government, on the grounds that the prime minister heads a narrow Shiite sectarian regime that holds thousands of innocent Sunnis in prison and has been implicated in Shiite ethnic cleansing of Sunnis.

A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq
Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers
August 03, 2007

WASHINGTON — Volney Warner thinks big. A retired Army four-star general who helped craft counterinsurgency doctrine during the Vietnam War, he's made a career out of thinking about how U.S. military strategy should advance America's global interests.

How does domestic politics shape military tactics? How and why did U.S. civilian and military leaders fail in Vietnam and Iraq? What has Iraq taught the U.S. military about unconventional war?

Warner is more than a detached student of America's current conflicts: Seven of his immediate family members have served in the military, five of them in Iraq or Afghanistan. They include his two sons, one a retired brigadier general and the other a retired colonel; a son-in-law who trained local troops in Iraq as a brigadier general; a granddaughter who's a captain in the Army Reserve; a grandson serving in Iraq and another grandson at West Point who'll be commissioned as an officer in June and probably ordered to a war zone immediately.

Also, Warner's 24-year-old granddaughter, Army 1st Lt. Laura Walker, who served in Iraq in 2004 and was killed by a homemade bomb a year later on her second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan. Her death makes Warner ponder, sometimes publicly, who was responsible for sending his granddaughter to two war zones without a sound strategy for victory.

A highly regarded expert on counterinsurgency who enjoys a reputation among his peers as a sharp thinker who pulls no punches, Warner asks why the U.S. military — with all its tradition, training, equipment and support — has failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam and apply them to Iraq. He gave his answers in a series of interviews with a McClatchy Newspapers reporter.

Iraq and Vietnam, he said, are both products of failed civilian and military leadership. Presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush began with flawed aims and assumptions, and in both cases they produced military strategies that were doomed to fail.

Steve Clemons
The Washington Note
Posted by steve at August 3, 2007

General Wesley Clark delivered a humdinger of a speech this morning in Chicago at YearlyKos.

There's much to it -- and he puts the target for the failure in Iraq not on the military, nor on the Congress, nor other participants in this mess other than President George W. Bush...

...But his commentary on engaging our foes and rivals was right on target. He called Bush out and demanded that the President stop trying to look like a leader by chewing up the lives of American men and women in combat. He told Bush to stop hiding behind General David Petraeus.

I want to remind readers and journalists that getting a Democratic presidential contender to state that we ought to be negotiating with Iran directly used to be difficult. It was not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Bill Richardson or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd who were in that space first.

Wesley Clark was. He made his first major statement that we should be talking directly to Iran in September 2005 at a conference titled "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose."

Clark then underscored his position in a " Real State of the Union" address he gave for the New America Foundation in January 2006 and then shortly after on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

Clark has an approach to national security and foreign policy that is very solutions-oriented. He has clear-headed views on how complex military, political, and economic systems need to be molded to achieve results. And he is open to the feedback of failure -- so that systems can learn.

U.S. officials: Militias main threat to Iraq
Mark Seibel and Leila Fadel
McClatchy Newspapers
August 01, 2007

BAGHDAD ­ Despite President Bush's recent insistence that al Qaida in Iraq is the principal cause of this country's violence, senior American military officers here say Shiite Muslim militias are a bigger problem, and one that will persist even if al Qaida is defeated.

"The longer-term threat to Iraq is potentially the Shiite militias," one senior military officer said, echoing concerns that other American officials raised in recent interviews with McClatchy Newspapers.

Military officers hail the fact that violence is down as evidence that their campaign against al Qaida in Iraq is succeeding. But there's no sign of reconciliation between Sunni Muslims and Shiites, the rationale the Bush administration cites for increasing the number of U.S. troops in the country.

The Shiite Mahdi Army militia continues to drive Sunni residents from neighborhoods in Baghdad, a development that one American officer called "disappointing." Shiite politicians show little sympathy for the expelled Sunnis or interest in stopping the expulsions. In interviews, they argued that the drive against Sunnis is a justified response to Sunni campaigns to drive Shiites from their neighborhoods, a position that American military officers reject.

American officials say they're hopeful about the recent decision by some Sunni insurgent groups to cooperate with U.S. troops to defeat al Qaida in Iraq. But some of America's new Sunni allies warn that once they've disposed of the religious extremists in their midst, they'll return to battling rival Shiites ­ and American occupiers.

Meanwhile, Sunni politicians are boycotting the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and threatening to withdraw permanently if 12 demands aren't met, including an end to Shiite militias' infiltration of Iraqi security forces.

More alarming, American officers say that battles for supremacy among armed Shiite groups will be the next challenge, and that U.S. forces are likely to be drawn into those disputes. Already, the U.S. is taking sides, sending attack aircraft to back Iraqi security forces against radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army.

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Dying in vain or for George W's daddy?
By Julian Delasantellis

...For many of those residing outside the United States, the continued US willingness to sustain the levels of casualties and expense it continues to suffer in Iraq is bewildering to the point of exasperation. All the previously stated justifications for the war - Saddam Hussein's threats, weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy in the Middle East, "we'll stand down when they [the Iraqi military and security forces] stand up", the "temporary" "surge" - have proved to be, at the very best, unintentional falsehoods; at worst, they've been proved to be bald-face lies.

Still, the war continues to have enough support that just under half of the US Congress continues to block all efforts to end it through a legislative initiative. A growing number of congressional representatives from the president's Republican Party now say they support a change in policy or a troop withdrawal, but when it comes to voting on measures that would place these declared desires into law, they prove themselves to be examples of the new political acronym called WINO - they're for Withdrawal In Name Only.

In the June 6 edition of Asia Times Online, my article Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time explained how, although it is perfectly clear that the current war is actually being fought in geographical Iraq, for many Americans, and perhaps for the American psyche as a whole, what actually is happening in Iraq is nothing but the last battle of the Vietnam War, as the US fights on for a victory in Iraq that would expunge the memory of its lone military defeat in Vietnam...

...On July 15, on the NBC (National Broadcasting Co) News program Meet the Press, a debate on the war was held between war supporter Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and a war opponent, newly elected Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia.

Graham was working the bar with abandon. "They [the troops] re-enlist in the highest numbers anywhere else in the military. They're speaking ... the soldiers are speaking, my friend. Let them win ... Let them win."

The fact that Graham had the gall to accuse Webb, a twice-decorated Vietnam veteran, Ronald Reagan-era secretary of the navy, and a man with a son currently serving as a marine officer in Iraq, of not supporting the troops demonstrates just how much power the support-the-troops canon currently has to temper and discipline the anti-war debate in the US. Whether true or not, Graham's argument that the war should be continued because the troops want to fight it reduces the war to something that sounds like a carnival attraction; let the children ride it as long as they want...

...Since all the stated rationales for the war have been proved false, I'll finish by entertaining you with mine. Gleaned from reading many of the books published about the Iraq war and Bush, but especially Bob Woodward's 2004 Plan of Attack and 2006 State of Denial, I see the war as representative of nothing but a fit of deep Oedipal rage, illustrating the terrible contradictions in the love/hate relationship between the current Bush and his father, former president George H W Bush. It was not at all uncommon for the mid-20th-century US patrician class to raise sons with a cold and distant parenting style, leaving the current President Bush filled with simultaneous unresolved towering admiration and seething resentment toward his father.

At first, he dealt with this problem with alcohol and substance abuse; now, as president, he tries to top his father, and in doing so quiet his inner demons, by doing what president George H W Bush could not, conquering Iraq. In doing so, he unconsciously hopes that, at last, his father might finally grant him the paternal love so long denied him.

If that's not a cause to die in vain for, I don't know what is.

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