"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Bush this week gave a new address on the Iraq War, this one to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): President Discusses War on Terror and Rebuilding Iraq.
It didn't add much to the discussion. Over at The Blue Voice, I gave the "shorter version" of the speech as follows: The bad people in Iraq are "terrorists and Saddamists". We're beating the terrorists and Saddamists, we've been beating the terrorists and Saddamists all along, and we'll keep on beating the terrorists and Saddamists. For years and years. And anyone who criticizes my war policies is a wimp and is aiding the terrorists and Saddamists.
Bush's great problem right now politically on the Iraq War is that his credibility - and that of his whole administration including the ever-optimistic generals and official Pentagon spokespeople - is shot. This is one of the practical consequences of using "dodgy" intelligence claims to justify the war initially, regardless of how urgent or just the cause may be.
As I discussed in a previous post, the current Bush domestic PR offensive on the Iraq War is based on a view of public opinion that says the people will rally to a war whose prospects of success look good.
Ruy Teixeira of the Donkey Rising blog also believes that assumption is flawed. See Will Predicting Victory in Iraq Rally the Public Behind Bush? 12/07/05 and Moving Toward Isolationism or Back to Normal? 11/30/05.
A few things in Bush's CFR speech caught my attention in particular. He used the cities of Najaf and Mosul as examples of cities which had been pacified (though he doesn't use that term) and are being handled by Iraqi security forces (ISF). If it had come much earlier, it would seem refreshing to see that Bush acknowledges on-going problems in both cities. On Najaf, he said:
Our troops liberated Najaf in 2003 -- yet about a year later, the city fell under the sway of a radical and violent militia. Fighting in the streets damaged homes and businesses, and the local economy collapsed as visitors and pilgrims stopped coming to the shrine out of fear for their lives.
That would be the thuggish Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, which has joined with other Shi'a parties in contesting the December elections. But is that the good news or the bad news? There is no reason to believe that his perspective or his goals have changed since the recent days when his fighters were shooting it out with the Americans in the holy city of Najaf. And the obvious question is, if this enemy militia can be assimilated to the current government (for better or worse!), isn't this some indication that negotiations with other insurgent groups might offer some hope of reducing the violence?
He also said of Najaf:
A U.S. Army sergeant explains our role this way: "We go down there if they call us. And that doesn't happen very often. Usually, we just stay out of their way."
Does this sound like the ISF are able to handle things on their own there?
I was also struck by his comments relating to electric power:
Like most of Iraq, the reconstruction in Najaf has proceeded with fits and starts since liberation - it's been uneven. Sustaining electric power remains a major challenge -- and construction has begun on three new substations to help boost capacity. Because there is a shortage of clean water, new water treatment and sewage units are being installed. ...
Mosul still faces real challenges. ... The city is still not receiving enough electricity, so Iraqis have a major new project underway to expand the Mosul power substation. ...
Like our approach to training Iraqi security forces, our approach to helping Iraqis rebuild has changed and improved. When we started the reconstruction progress in the spring of 2003, our focus was on repairing and building large-scale infrastructure -- such as electrical plants and large water treatment facilities. We moved forward with some of those large projects, yet we found our approach was not meeting the priorities of the Iraqi people. In many places, especially those targeted by the terrorists and Saddamists, the most urgent needs were smaller, localized projects, such as sewer lines and city roads. Delivering visible progress to the Iraqi people required us to focus on projects that could be completed rapidly.
Even with Bush's optimistic, it's hard not to see this message: In other words, over 2 1/2 years after the end of the initial, conventional phase of the war, the Iraqi government and US resources have not yet been able to adequately restore basic municipal services like electricity, water and sewage service. The fact that it's in significant part the result of sabotage by "terrorists and Saddamists" (which Bush avoids saying exactly) doesn't make it much more of any kind of "good news" for the Iraqi government and their American allies.
In his recent book Night Draws Near (2005), Anthony Shadid reports on his findings in Baghdad during the conventional war phase and the occupation. One of the very common things people complained about was that, even after the highly destructive bombing of the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam's regime was able to restore the power within a relatively short time. Even a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, people were complaining heavily about the Americans not being able to get the power back on nearly as quickly as the former regime did.
Imagine what people are thinking after 2 1/2 years.
That last paragraph I quoted from Bush is also, in its way, a fairly remarkable statement from the man who never admits an error. Not that he's intending to do so there.
But the remarkable thing is that he is describing major problems in the recent past with providing basic services and security in Iraq. Yet while those (past) problems were occurring, the official Party line, broadcast over FOX News and out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh into the well-funded Republican Noise Machine and their echo chamber, was that things were going great with the reconstruction. And when journalists or bloggers or anyone else brought up those problems that Bush not mentions in retrospect, they were accused of giving insufficient attention to the "good news".
When it comes to "standing up" the ISF to replace the American troops, Shadid also mentions something in his book that is a discouraging precedent. He describes the coordinated series of attacks on the first day of Ramadan 2003, October 27, that struck the International Red Cross headquarters, among other targets. At least 35 people were killed in the attacks that day, and over 230 injured. Shadid reports this immediately turned the mood in Baghdad to a distinctly darker tone. And he writes:
The U.S. administration, usually remarkably slow in gauging popular sentiment., acknowledged the shift in mood. [US proconsul] L. Paul Bremer called the events "a tough week here in Iraq." (Two months earlier, after the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, Bremer had admitted the situation was "grim" but declared that "beneath the surf was a swelling tide of good news.") At a news conference, Bremer declared that security remained the occupation's first priority and announced steps that U.S. officials would take to accelerate the transfer of responsibility and authority to newly trained Iraq1i forces. It was a theme U.S. officials would return to often, with limited success.
We're still waiting for that "swelling tide of good news" to manifest itself. And for those ISF forces.
But, as Bush told us Wednesday, Joe Lieberman was just over there in Iraq and he says everything is going fine. And that Bush's war policies are just dandy.
Joe Lieberman has developed a credibility gap of his own.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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