"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.
We're starting to hear more warnings that an end to the US involvement in the Iraq War may be coming, chosen or not. Gareth Porter writes in Leave Or Be Forced Out by Gareth Porter TomPaine.com 10/17/06:
It is not that the civil war won't get worse in Iraq; it now seems very likely that it will. But the United States is not militarily capable of preventing the worse war yet to come, and trying to do so would only start a new war between the United States and the Shiites who want the U.S. to leave. Since we cannot prevent sectarian violence, the only question is whether we leave before the inevitable confrontation with Shiites—a battle U.S. troops would certainly lose.
... With the buildup of the Shiite sectarian militias - and particularly the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr - the U.S. occupation force no longer represents the predominant military power in Iraq. A study issued in August by Chatham House, the influential British strategic think tank, said the Mahdi army, which was believed to have fewer than 10,000 men under arms when the United States tried to destroy it August 2004, may now be “several hundred thousand strong.” In addition, the Badr Organization, which is affiliated with the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen.
Sadr is confident that, once the Shiite government has gotten everything it can out of the United States to strengthen Shiite forces, they can defeat the Sunnis by military force.
Andrew Bacevich in On the Offense American Conservative 12/23/06 issue (accessed 10/18/06) writes:
Step by bloody step the Iraq War moves toward its denouement. Having set this tragedy in motion, the United States today finds itself consigned to the role of bystander, the world’s only superpower having long since lost control of events. As things unravel, the president—the most powerful man in the world - is demonstrably powerless to affect the outcome. Meanwhile, American soldiers fight on, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that the Army only recently thought all but invincible will not win this war.
For the Bush White House, September 2006 will be remembered as the month when the roof caved in. Bad news came in successive waves: the Marine intelligence report declaring Iraq’s critical Anbar Province all but lost; the failure of an all-out effort to win “the Battle of Baghdad”; the warnings from senior military officers that the Army, its readiness in free-fall, is nearing the end of its rope; opinion polls showing that a large majority of Iraqis simply want the Americans out of their country; above all, the leak of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring, “the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terror leaders and operatives.” In response to all of this, the administration has had little to offer other than to repeat President Bush’s conviction that “the only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense.” (my emphasis)
In Iraqi Endgame Approaching, Bush Ready or Not Inter Press Service 10/17/06, Jim Lobe writes:
If Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki were inclined to bet his life on President George W. Bush's latest assurances that there will be no timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, he should probably give it a second thought.
While Bush, true to his self-image as an uncommonly firm leader in the mold of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, is undoubtedly sincere in his determination to press ahead, political circumstances -- not to mention the accelerating slide into an appalling civil war in Iraq -- are clearly conspiring against him.
Plus, longtime war boosters are now scrambling to find excuses and alibis. The obtuse Jonah Goldbert writes in Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake Los Angeles Times 10/19/06, "The Iraq war was a mistake," and acts like he's bravely speaking truth to power. When actually he's ducking for cover.
Then he says liberals are traitors:
In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
I know it's generally pointless to treat sleazy drivel like this as though it involved serious ideas. But I can't help but wonder why Goldberg would sneer at his imaginary oppenents who oppose wars that are in "ExxonMobil's interests". Does he seriously think it would be wrong to oppose a war fought only for the business interests of ExxonMobil?
Goldberg's argument isn't too coherent. (Not that his ever are that persuasive.) Republican warmongers are mostlyin the stage of throwing arguments up against the wall to see what sticks. For instance, this is about the oddest play on the "stab in the back" imagery that I've ever seen:
According to the goofy parameters of the current debate, I'm now supposed to call for withdrawing from Iraq. If it was a mistake to go in, we should get out, some argue. But this is unpersuasive. A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out. We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.
The war was a mistake that compares to stabbing someone in the chest that we were supposedly helping. But now the war is a good idea. Except people who had the good sense to oppose the war to begin with or who call for withdrawal now are traitors. Or something like that. And he ends up saying that if we keep fighting (for how many years or with what soldiers he doesn't say), "the war won't be remembered as a mistake"
So, I guess the short version of his column would be: The Iraq War was a mistake. But not really. And liberals are traitors.
Yes, on its merits it's a worthless argument. But out of mush like this will eventually come one or two narratives that will be broadly accepted by Republicans about why the loss in the Iraq War was all the fault of the Democrats. So we might as well keep an eye on the sloppy process by which Republicans whose ideas about war are bonkers come up with their excuses.
Goldberg's fellow neocon Max Boot, also writing in the Los Angeles Times, has his own take in Bring Iraqi Forces Up to Speed 10/18/06.
Cheerfully ignoring the fact that the official Iraqi armed forces are, to a significant extent, Shi'a militias with army uniforms, he boldly criticizes the Bush administration for not putting enough effort into training them. (Later he can say he "criticized the war" while it was still going on.) He wants the US to give the Iraqis better quarters, more ammunition and armored vehicles. And, expecially, assign more than the current 4,000 "advisers" who are training Iraqis.
He is righteously and indignantly criticizing the Cheney-Bush administrationfor not moving fast enough on training. That conservative fondness for sounding like they're speaking truth to power again. But if what he describes is true:
It's not only a matter of money. We have more than 140,000 troops in Iraq, but fewer than 4,000 of them act as advisors. There are barely enough to go around for higher-level Iraqi headquarters; there are no "embeds" available to consistently operate at the company and platoon level, where most of the action occurs. The Iraqi police forces are even more neglected.
That means Bush and the Republicans have been lying their behinds off when they keep telling us how well the training is going and how the Iraqis are "standing up" so our troops can "stand down".
The rest of his column is taken up by criticizing the Army for making training a less career-enhancing assignment for officers that field command and combat experience. I'm not assuming he's giving a fully reliable account of how that process works. But how can the Army not make field command and combat experience more important for promotion than training assignments? Since direct combat is their core mission and their most serious one, how can those not be priorities for promotion?
The last two paragraphs illustrate how spacy and essentially phony his "advice" (alibi) is at this stage of the war:
There is still a need for many more first-rate U.S. advisors to work with Iraqi army and police units down to the platoon level. T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, believes that 20,000 to 30,000 advisors are needed and that we should be sending officers who have successfully led American battalions and brigades. "We're at least an order of magnitude off," Hammes told me. "If our main effort is advisory, why aren't our best people going to become advisors?"
Perhaps because this would force a shake-up in the U.S. armed forces, with officers having to be pulled out of plum staff billets and field assignments. That's a tough change to make, but it may be necessary. A country of 26 million can't be controlled by 140,000 troops. If we're not going to send a lot more soldiers, it might make sense to draw down to about 40,000 to 50,000 troops so that we could free up officers and NCOs for advisor duty. Iraq may be too far down the road to civil war for this step to make any difference, but we need to try something different to salvage a situation spinningout of control.
Uh, what's going to happen when we pull 50,000 troops out of combat assignment right away? During the interim they are training more Shi'a militias (aka, the Iraqi army), what will happen to the 90,000 troops who are left to do what 140,000 have been unable to do?
This is just an alibi for disappointed warmongers. They wanted a conventional war with Iraq. They didn't expect or want a guerrilla war. And they didn't want a draft. And they don't want to retreat under fire, as a withdrawal would be in their minds. So now they're having to make up alibis and excuses for cheering to create what even Max Boot now has to call "a situation spinning out of [American] control".
Bush himself seemed to accept a comparison of theIraq War to the Vietnam War this week: Bush accepts Iraq, Vietnam comparison by Michael Rowland ABC News. Rowland reports:
US President George W Bush has conceded there could be similarities between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam war.
Mr Bush has been asked whether he agrees with a newspaper columnist [Tom Friedman] that the recent surge in violence in Iraq is similar to the Tet offensive in early 1968, widely acknowledged as a turning point in the Vietnam war.
"He could be right. There's certainly a stepped up level of violence," Mr Bush said.
But Mr Bush has once again vowed that America will stay the course in Iraq.
But this isn't the awakening that many people make take it to be. Juan Cole explains in this 10/19/06 post:
Many commentators are saying that he finally admitted that Iraq is a quagmire like Vietnam, but this is a complete misreading of what Bush is saying.
Bush's position is that things are going just great in Iraq, and that a few trouble-makers have managed to hijack the US media with a small number of limited bombings and other sabotage, and have made it look like the US isn't making progress. Bush believes that the media and Americans are falling for a get-up job. So he is is trying to say to the American public that just as the Tet offensive was a military defeat for the Viet Cong but a propaganda defeat for Washington, so the October offensive of the Sunni Arab guerrillas is so much smoke and mirrors, a mere propaganda stunt with no substantive importance for Iraq.
But in fact, the current guerrilla war against US troops and the new Iraqi government isn't at all like the Tet offensive. It is deadly serious. Because the US military is not defeating the guerrillas militarily any more. They have succeeded in provoking an unconventional, hot civil war, which was their "poison pill" strategy for getting the US out. The US has alienated the Sunni Arab population decisively. In summer of 2003, only 14 percent of them supported violent attacks on US troops. In a recent poll, 70 percent supported such attacks. And, the guerrilla movement is well-heeled, well-trained, and adaptive.
I don't fully accept the picture of the Tet Offensive that Cole goes on to describe as "a political show put on to weaken the will of the fickle American public". The North Vietnamese Army and the NLF ("Viet Cong") in 1968 actually expected more substantial immediate military and political gains from the Tet Offensive than they achieved. The reason it became a turning point in American public opinion was that it revealed the extent to which both civilian and military officials had been lying in their faces about how well the situation was going in Vietnam.
Cole seems to give too much credence to the preferred Republican stab-in-the-back narrative of the Vietnam War. Their version of Tet goes something like this: Our glorious military completely defeated the Godless Communists in the Tet Offensive and Final Victory was at hand. But those sneaky Vietnamese Commies had shrewdly calculated that a large portion of the American public was composed of civilian wimps, hippies and cowards, so they did the Tet Offensive just to break the Will of the American voting public.
After seeing how many Republicans still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq in 2003, it's not surprising that a version of the Vietnam War that has only a tenuous relation to actual history could win such widespread support among Republicans.
But Cole's characterization of Bush's comment is perceptive. In RepublicanSpeak, a comparison of the current situation to the Tet Offensive of 1968 (no matter how unrealistic the comparison may be) is a symbol of Victory for America. And that's what Bush is saying he sees going on here.
"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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