The Surge is One

[MonsterMark]

Whatever happened to all the Dems screaming for our retreat and defeat?/?/?

THE SURGE AT ONE

By Ralph Peters
New York Post

January 11, 2008 -- AS you read these lines, our troops are in the midst of Operation Phantom Phoenix, a "mini-surge" to squeeze al Qaeda and its fast-dwindling band of allies out of their few remaining safe havens in Iraq.

Iraqi troops fight beside us against a common enemy. Vast swaths of the country enjoy a newborn peace. Commerce thrives again. At the provincial and local levels, the political progress has been remarkable.

As for Operation Phantom Phoenix, our commanders expected terrorist dead-enders to put up a fight. Instead, they ran, leaving behind only booby traps and disgust among the Iraqis they tormented far too long.

Well, they can run, but they can't hide. We dropped 20 tons of bombs on 40 terrorist targets yesterday, including safe houses, weapons caches and IED factories. In a late-afternoon exchange with The Post, Gen. David Petraeus characterized our current ops as "executing aggressively, pursuing tenaciously."

The headlines at home? "Nine American Soldiers Killed." No mention of progress or a fleeing enemy on the front pages. Just dead soldiers.

Determined to elect a Democrat president, the "mainstream" media simply won't accept our success. "Impartial" journalists find a dark cloud in every silver lining in Iraq. And the would-be candidates themselves continue to insist that we should abandon Iraq immediately - as if time had stood still for the past year - while hoping desperately for a catastrophe in Baghdad before November.

These are the politicians who insisted that the surge didn't have a chance. And nobody calls 'em on it.

Meanwhile, "Happy Birthday, Surge!"

One year ago, "the surge" kicked off as a forlorn hope, our last chance to get it right.

The odds were against us. Terrorist violence was out of control. Baghdad was a toxic wreck. Militias ruled, with ethnic cleansing rampant. And Iraq's leaders couldn't even agree about which day of the week it was.

We had never applied a coherent military or political policy in Iraq. Dithering leaders, civilian and in uniform, squandered American and Iraqi lives. A unique opportunity to jumpstart change in the Middle East had collapsed amid ideological fantasies, a looting orgy for well-connected contractors and Washington's simple unwillingness to really fight.

The new US jefe maximo for Iraq, Petraeus, was a dark horse. He'd just signed off on a counterinsurgency manual suggesting that the key to defeating terrorists is to learn to pronounce Salaam aleikum (Peace be with you) properly.

And then it all went right. Confounding Dems who expected him to preside over a retreat, Petraeus took the fight to the enemy like a rat terrier on meth. Jettisoning all the p.c. dogma, he turned out to be the first true warrior we put in command in Iraq.

Turned our way, too - and luck matters in war. Al Qaeda had managed to alienate its erstwhile Sunni Arab allies in record time. Former insurgents decided that the Great Satan America made a better dancing partner than Osama & Co.

Although analysts have missed it completely, the execution of Saddam Hussein helped, too: It took away the rallying figure for Sunni hardliners and made it easier for former insurgents to switch allegiance. The shock of Saddam's hanging jarred Iraq's Sunni Arabs back to reality: Big Daddy with the mustache wasn't coming back.

Meanwhile, the rest of the population was just sick of the violence. The merchant class wanted to get back to business. Tribal sheiks felt betrayed by foreign terrorists. And mashallah! We had veteran commanders on the ground who recognized the shifts underway in Iraqi society and capitalized on them.

Petraeus manifested two stages of military genius: 1) He recognized exactly what had to be done. 2) He didn't imagine he could do it all himself.

Our new man in Baghdad had the wisdom to give subordinate commanders a long leash when they caught a good scent.

Without in any way detracting from Petraeus, the indispensable man, our success this past year rested heavily upon field commanders far from the flagpole having the savvy to realize that the local sheik just needed one last bit of encouragement to jump sides.

Oh, and the left turned out to be dead wrong, as usual. We hadn't created an unlimited supply of terrorists. In fact, the supply turned out to be very finite, to al Qaeda's chagrin. And killing them worked. (One of the great untold stories of 2007 was the number of al Qaeda corpses.)

And our former enemies have been killing them for us.

Iraq still faces massive problems, of course. Thirty years of murderous tyranny under Saddam followed by four years of Coalition fumbling left the country a shambles. But Iraqis want it to get better.

The military situation is well on the way to being under control. Now the question is whether Iraq's leaders, especially those from the newly empowered Shia, can put their country above their personal and parochial interests (something that we don't expect of our own politicians these days).

On our side, the immediate problem is that we lack diplomats as visionary and capable as our soldiers. After almost a century, the Foggy Bottom fops still can't see beyond a world gerrymandered by their European idols at Versailles.

So here we are: The surge worked. It achieved all that we can expect of our military. 2008 will tell us whether the politicians and diplomats, US and Iraqi, can do their part.

And a final note: The Post had over a week's advance warning of Operation Phantom Phoenix, but didn't publish it. We don't share our nation's secrets with our enemies.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Wars Of Blood And Faith."

 

[TheDude]

Whatever happened to all the Dems screaming for our retreat and defeat?/?/?

You remind me of Michael Savage...

 

[shagdrum]

You remind me of Michael Savage...

How? By making sense?

 

[MonsterMark]

You remind me of Michael Savage...

Fred Thompson said it best. Things must be going great in Iraq because there is nothing being printed in the NYT about IRAQ.

I can't understand how lefties can call themselves Americans when they don't support the troops or their mission, bitch like crazy when things are going bad but don't say a word when things are going good.

Liberals Democrats Motto... What's bad for America is good for us.

 

[Calabrio]

...I'm still waiting for the explanation regarding Micheal Savage? Did he change his opinion mid-sentence or something? What he 100% right 60% of the time, and then flipping between wrong/right depending on his mood the rest of the time?

Sorry- but I'm not a HUGE Savage fan. Too inconsistent and too emotional for my taste.

 

[04SCTLS]

Surge to Nowhere

Surge to Nowhere
Don't buy the hawks' hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, January 20, 2008;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../01/18/AR2008011802873.html?hpid=opinionsbox1


As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working.

In President Bush's pithy formulation, the United States is now "kicking ass" in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that "we are winning in Iraq." While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain's remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons.

From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge "democracy's success in Iraq" has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn't be clearer: "We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it." In an essay entitled "Mission Accomplished" that is being touted by the AEI crowd, Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs us that "Iraq's biggest questions have been resolved." Violence there "has ceased being political." As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is "no longer nearly as important as it was." Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the "credibility of the prophets of doom" has reached "a low ebb."

Presumably Kagan and his comrades would have us believe that recent events vindicate the prophets who in 2002-03 were promoting preventive war as a key instrument of U.S. policy. By shifting the conversation to tactics, they seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not much.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day -- six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.

Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad. By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents -- an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops -- U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?"

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking ass" will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Such success comes at a cost. U.S. casualties in Iraq have recently declined. Yet since Petraeus famously testified before Congress last September, Iraqi insurgents have still managed to kill more than 100 Americans. Meanwhile, to fund the war, the Pentagon is burning through somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion per week. Given that further changes in U.S. policy are unlikely between now and the time that the next administration can take office and get its bearings, the lavish expenditure of American lives and treasure is almost certain to continue indefinitely.

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion -- with more to come -- actually gained the United States?

Bush had once counted on the U.S. invasion of Iraq to pay massive dividends. Iraq was central to his administration's game plan for eliminating jihadist terrorism. It would demonstrate how U.S. power and beneficence could transform the Muslim world. Just months after the fall of Baghdad, the president declared, "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." Democracy's triumph in Baghdad, he announced, "will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation." In short, the administration saw Baghdad not as a final destination but as a way station en route to even greater successes.

In reality, the war's effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the "stronger horse." In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor -- no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, "The Limits of Power," will be published later this year.

 

[04SCTLS]

And From the Hawks

Making Iraq Safe for Politics


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../01/18/AR2008011802939.html?hpid=opinionsbox1


By Frederick W. Kagan, Jack Keane and Michael O'Hanlon
Sunday, January 20, 2008; Page B07

Iraq's parliament this month passed a new de-Baathification bill, which awaits only expected approval by the five-member presidency council before becoming law. Much remains to be done, but this is an important step toward political reconciliation -- and it further strengthens the case for America to remain committed to its crucial mission in Iraq in the months and years ahead.

During Saddam Hussein's day, if you wanted a professional job in Iraq you basically had to join the Baath Party. For most of the 1 million-plus who did so, this hardly implied direct involvement or even complicity in crimes of the state. Hussein was so paranoid that only his very inner circles were entrusted with information on the dictator's plans and policies.

Appropriately, the new legislation will punish only former Baathists who were in the three highest circles of the former regime's power structure. That probably amounts to a few thousand people. Others will generally be allowed to rejoin Iraqi society, regain their access to jobs and federal pensions where available, and avoid prosecution for previous crimes of the state. Under earlier rules, dating to edicts issued by Paul Bremer during his early weeks as Iraq's administrator in 2003, the four highest circles had been effectively ostracized. This meant tens of thousands of individuals were directly affected -- and hundreds of thousands indirectly, including family members. That precluded many of Iraq's most talented professionals and politicians from helping rebuild their nation -- and it created widespread bitterness among Sunnis, who constituted the bulk of Baathist Party members, that the current Shiite-led government would never accord them fair rights in the new Iraq.

The legislation is imperfect, of course. Most notably, the law could keep all former Baathists out of Iraq's security and legal institutions. While understandable as a way to alleviate Shiite worries about a possible Baathist-Sunni resurgence, this goes too far. Taken literally, it would interfere with efforts to bring Sunni volunteers into Iraq's security forces (unless waivers are issued). This possible problem will have to be cleared up. But if that happens, a major step will have been taken toward building sectarian trust.

The reformed de-Baathification legislation is one of half a dozen key political issues codified into American law last year by President Bush and Congress as "benchmarks" we expected Iraqi leaders to address. Other matters so identified are hydrocarbon legislation; a provincial powers act (clarifying the roles of Iraq's 18 provinces vis-a-vis the central government); a provincial election law to facilitate the next round of local elections; a process for holding a referendum on the political future of Kirkuk, the disputed northern oil city (and for compensating individual property holders and sectarian groups who lose out in such a vote); and a more transparent and trustworthy process for purging sectarian extremists from positions of government authority.

These benchmarks are reasonable goals. It is regrettable that insufficient progress has been made on the others (with the exception of the long, slow progress of purging extremists from official positions). What really matters, however, is that Iraqis come to view themselves as a single people working together to build a new nation, and address their inevitable differences legislatively rather than violently. As such, to the extent that benchmarks are employed, we would advocate using a longer list -- and include Baghdad's sharing of oil revenue with the provinces, the hiring of Sunni volunteers into the security forces and into the civilian arms of government, improvements in the legal and penal systems, and, over time, reform of the electoral system to weaken the role of the sectarian parties. In all but the last of these considerable progress has been made in the past year.

This political progress resulted from a year's worth of substantial effort to reduce violence in Iraq. Proponents of the surge always said that getting violence under control was an essential prerequisite to reconciliation, not the other way around. The full surge has been in place and operating for just over six months, and already violence has fallen dramatically across the country. The achievement in such a short time of significant legislation that requires all sides to accept risk and compromise with people they had been fighting only a few months ago is remarkable. It would have been unattainable without the change in strategy and addition of American forces that helped bring the violence down.

The progress of the past year also required American political pressure. The ongoing engagement of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Gen. David Petraeus and others in cajoling and compelling Iraqi political leaders into making compromises across sectarian lines has been crucial -- not only in passing the reformed de-Baathification law but in purging Shiite extremists from government and persuading Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to gradually, if begrudgingly, hire Sunni volunteers into the security forces. American politicians of both parties have sometimes applied useful pressure too -- when they have made clear that they are focused on Iraq, that they are determined to insist that Iraqi leaders behave responsibly, and that the United States will not underwrite sectarian violence or oppression. But they have acted harmfully when threatening to withdraw U.S. forces rapidly, without regard to conditions, without regard to whether Iraqi leaders are trying to make compromises across sectarian lines.

As Crocker said last spring, "The longer and louder the debate gets, the more danger there is that Iraqis will conclude that we are going," leading to "a hardening of attitudes" among sectarian factions." Iraq's institutions are too weak, and its sectarian wounds still too raw, for us to expect the gains of the past year to endure in the face of a quick and nearly complete American withdrawal.

The number of American forces in Iraq matters. Although the change of U.S. strategy announced last January and the change in attitude among Sunni Arabs were critical to the successes achieved in 2007, the addition of five Army combat brigades and three Marine battalions was also critical. Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno know the strains the surge has placed on the military and believe that we can reduce our forces to pre-surge levels by this summer without compromising our gains. Considering the big steps taken by Iraqi security forces over the past year, as well as the tremendous damage our forces and Iraqi forces, together with the Iraqi people, have done to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Baathist insurgency, Iranian-backed special groups and the fighting elements of the Jaish al-Mahdi, this belief is probably justified. But we cannot be sure.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is working hard to regroup, and our soldiers are fighting hard to prevent that. Activities of Iranian-backed special groups continue to be worrisome. And much remains to be done politically at the local and national levels to secure the gains we have made.

Some in Washington are already calling for a commitment to additional reductions, resulting in force levels below pre-surge levels, even before we have finished the current drawdown. Such calls are unwise. America has made this mistake in Iraq before -- withdrawing too soon, attempting to hand security responsibilities over to Iraqi forces unable to accept them, and assuming that the best-case scenarios will play out. We must not make that mistake again. It is inappropriate to try to evaluate the possibility of reductions beyond pre-surge levels before we have had time to examine the situation after the completion of that drawdown. Therefore, Congress, the president and the American people should not expect Petraeus to report in March on the feasibility of still further reductions but, rather, on the sustainability of the reductions already in progress.

The strain on the U.S. military is great, and we are all concerned. But sustaining 15 brigades in Iraq for six more months or another year will not break the force. Reducing forces in Iraq too rapidly, however, even by one or two brigades, might seriously jeopardize the tenuous success we are seeing. We should not take that risk.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Retired Gen. Jack Keane was vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army from 1999 to 2003. Michael O'Hanlon is a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution.


______________________________________________

I agree more with the former con opinion rather than the pro latter one here but for better or worse we're stuck in Iraq for a long time to come.

A new administration Republican or Democrat will inherit this war and what they will do remains to be seen.

 

[shagdrum]

...I'm still waiting for the explanation regarding Micheal Savage? Did he change his opinion mid-sentence or something? What he 100% right 60% of the time, and then flipping between wrong/right depending on his mood the rest of the time?

Sorry- but I'm not a HUGE Savage fan. Too inconsistent and too emotional for my taste.

Yeah, but he is entertaining, at least for a conservative! Not much substance, but fun to listen to. Kinda like a drunk redneck friend who says stuff you agree with and makes sense, but makes you embarassed by who you are agreeing with.

 

[MonsterMark]

Kinda like a drunk redneck friend who says stuff you agree with and makes sense, but makes you embarassed by who you are agreeing with.

You must mean the Democratic Presidential hopefuls debating last night. They all had to agree that the Surge worked but yet they still had their heads up their asses when it came to pulling out the troops.

No wonder Democrat women are so pissy and snarly. Democrat men can never stay in and finish the job. Always pulling out early. I guess it explains why so many Democrat women are lesbians.

 

[Calabrio]

Yeah, but he is entertaining, at least for a conservative! Not much substance, but fun to listen to. Kinda like a drunk redneck friend who says stuff you agree with and makes sense, but makes you embarassed by who you are agreeing with.

He's very emotion based, that why I think he changes his mind so often on details. I listen some nights, but I'd rather listen to Hugh Hewitt if the signal is coming in clear. But his outrage is usually right, I just wish it weren't a little more thoughtful. He's not persuasive, he's a voice for preaching to the choir.