Iraq War: He does acknowledge the "good news", too

"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.

Simon Jenkins of the Times of London has long been a skeptic of the grand Anglo-American adventure in Mesopotamia.  He continues to be: Leave the field now - the Iraqi endgame is about to begin Sunday Times 01/01/06. Jenkins' contend that the Bush administration effectively accepted its inability to suppress the insurgency in 2004:

In reality the occupation cut and ran from Iraq in the course of 2004. This was when the Americans and their allies abandoned the policing of towns and cities and retreated bruised to more than 100 fortified bases. This is not like the Vietnam war, when American soldiers could move round Saigon at will. The bases are like crusader castles dotting a hostile Levant. Movement between them must be by air or heavily armoured convoy. Ferocious search-and-destroy sallies by the US Marines do not project power, only death and resentment.

The recent Anbar operation reportedly turned local support for Al-Qaeda from a trickle to a flood. Money is sprayed at sub-contractors (much of it stolen), but America exerts no executive power outside the capital. It imposes no law and order and cannot even protect infrastructure. This is not an occupation. It is a military squat.

I'm guessing that Jenkins is underestimating several factors here: the degree of self-delusion among American policymakers; the determination of the Bush administration, which has been aptly described as the energy industry invested with government power, to preserve American bases and a pro-American government in Iraq; and, the difficulty of getting the hardcore Republican base, especially the Christian Right, to accept a full withdrawal from Iraq.

Beyond those factors is the notion that I quote at the end of most of my Iraq War posts, including this one: it's much easier to get into a war than to get out of one. Apart from the fundamentally misguided nature of the invasion of Iraq to begin with, the implementation of the occupation has been disastrously bad.  If this administration handled getting into a war this badly, what kind of mess would they make of a withdrawal?

Jenkins does touch on the delusional nature of Tony Blair's assumptions:

On December 22 Tony Blair paid his Christmas call on British troops in Basra to tell them how much things were improving. This time he said security was “completely changed” from last year. What he meant was unclear. It was as if Gladstone had visited Gordon during the siege of Khartoum. Did it not seem strange to Blair that he could not move outside his walled fortress, could not drive anywhere or talk to any Iraqis? Did he wonder why British troops have withdrawn from two anarchic provinces? Was he really told that security is transformed for the better? If so he is horribly deceived.

Reliable reporting from Iraq is now so dangerous that the level of insecurity can be gleaned only from circumstantial evidence. Baghdad outside the American green zone is now all “red zone”, off limits to any but the most reckless foreigner. The death rate and the number of explosions are rising. While some rural areas are relatively safe there is no such thing as national security. Iraq’s borders are porous. Crime is uncontrolled. The concept of an “occupying power” is near meaningless.

And Jenkins, who recently visited Iraq himself, thinks that the end result is now largely out of the control of the Americans, no matter how many of our soldiers are withdrawn or left there:

The next stage in Iraq is no longer within the capacity of America or Britain to determine. All they can do is postpone it. The country is about to acquire its third government in as many years. Left to its own devices this government might just find enough authority to hold its country together. Imprisoned in its green zone castle as a puppet of the Pentagon, it will certainly not. That is whywithdrawal needs a date, and an early one.

I was told by a senior security official last month that the Iraq experience had been so ghastly that at least no British government would do anything like it “for a very long time indeed”. Funny, I thought. Why are 4,000 British troops leaving to fight the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, whence even the Americans have fled? Nobody can give me an answer. (my emphasis)

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05