What are we to do when two liberals from the Brookings Institute say good things about the Iraq War on the pages of the NY Times?
We are doomed to victory. Anything but that.
“Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”
I’m confused…are they right about the Bush administration’s 5 year long mishandling of the Iraq war, or are they right that a little progress may finally have been made?
I am not familiar with their work in particular, but I am familiar with the Brookings Institute in general. I am guessing there is truth in a lot of their accounts. The success of the surge and Petraeus make it pretty obvious that we have made a lot of mistakes over the years.
Don’t worry Matt, there will be hit pieces out in no time to trash these guys and/or get them right thinking again.
Matt, you do need to come to grips with the fact that the process of setting you and other members of the out of Iraq, defeat now caucus has begun. The media is laying the groundwork to establish that we can’t leave because Iraq is just fundamentally important. It doesn’t matter who wins the election, just as it didn’t matter that Congress went Democratic this year. The Patriot Act, NSA data mining, Terrorist Surveillance Program and the war are all continuing regardless.
I read the article, and it is encouraging. I would point out that this is limited to the areas in which the surge has occurred.
Having said that, I recently listened to a sobering report on what happened to a particular “clear, secure, hold” (or whatever) operation. The US forces did all they were asked to do in one town: cleared the insurgents, built a police outpost, transferred control to the Iraqi police. Within one day of the transfer, an organized assault overran the outpost, killing as many as 60 police and destroying the outpost.
Unless we hold lots of places for a long time, I worry that that scenario will be repeated a lot.
**Unless we hold lots of places for a long time, I worry that that scenario will be repeated a lot. **
That is exactly right and the administration and generals on the ground know it. There are signs of success as long as we have 150,000 troops in place. The reports are already leaking that Petraeus is going to say we have to wait until next summer before we can adequately assess the value of the troop surge. When the initial idea came out, we were told we would have a good idea in a few months, then we were told to wait until mid-September and soon it will be until next year. This pattern will continue because the insurgents know not to fight in areas where the surge is. They lie low and wait until another day. The whack-a-mole theory is appropriate.
The Iraqi government is no closer to being unified now than when they were first elected, and probably much less so. They have failed to agree on anything and are now taking a month off. That can’t sit well with the administration. They have not been able to agree on anything and waiting another month will accomplish nothing.
I know the bar for “success” is dropping. The definition used to be “we will succeed when there is a stable unified goverment in Iraq and the Middle East” and now it’s “the deaths are down from a month ago” but the reality is, the government is unable to make a decision.
Reports out of Iraq (our great succeess notwithstanding) are that a full 1/3 (8 million) civilians do not have adequate necessities of life (food/shelter) and the standards for infant deaths, poverty etc., are far lower than when the war began. Those are the criteria we should be monitoring to see how “successful” we have been because those are the realities of life for the Iraqi people.
We are not winning anything, even if the deaths go down, until a government can get in there and actually do something for the people. The poverty and unrest amongst the young is a breeding ground for future terror.