1115.org

From the beginning of the Iraq war, we’ve seen very few things done well and many things done very poorly. This Newsweek piece contains some elusive good news:

…since August, without much public notice, the Baghdad highway has been largely secured. In April 2005, when control of the route was primarily American, there were 37 casualties. By October 2005—when Iraqi Special Police checkpoints were in the forefront—there was only one person wounded. The number of attacks plummeted, too, from 27 to eight.
[…]
The new approach is the result of long negotiations between Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces. Their overall strategy: on the military side, “clear, hold and build” while training up Iraqi forces; on the political side, wean Sunni leaders from their support of the insurgency, buying them off with incentives tribe by tribe and village by village; and on the U.S. domestic front, appease rising outcries for withdrawal by reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq to under 100,000 troops—hopefully by midterm Election Day 2006.

Though it should be completely unnecessary, I still feel the need to mention that the reduction in casualties and the new military strategy is welcome news. But the circumstances and timing raise truly troubling questions:

To secure the country with so few troops, Khalilzad and Casey have had to swallow their pride. They are making compromises with Sunni supporters of the insurgency that would have been unthinkable a year ago. President Bush is also doing what he has been loath to do: asking neighboring countries for help, even the rabid anti-American Islamists in Tehran. Khalilzad revealed to Newsweek that he has received explicit permission from Bush to begin a diplomatic dialogue with Iran, which has meddled politically in Iraq. ‘I’ve been authorized by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly,’ says Khalilzad.

Why now, after two-and-a-half years of failure are we suddenly making changes that should have been made in 2003? What the hell does “swallowing pride” mean in the context of a war? Why are we now making “unthinkable” compromises with anyone? Why was the President “loath” to ask anyone for help? Why did the White House release the hounds on Congressman John Murtha when he called for withdrawal even as the administration was planning withdrawal? And why, after four-plus years of accusing anyone who suggested anything less than war without end of being weak and traitorous, are we now “appeas[ing] rising outcries” for withdrawal?

The President’s pride, and by extension the ugly jingoism he has engendered on his half of the aisle, has been the main stumbling block to the successful prosecution of the Iraq war. The chaotic rush to war, during which most of our allies counseled patience only to be vilified as Saddam-lovers, was as embarrassing as it was misguided, and contributed to the pathetic coalition responsible for rebuilding Iraq. The overly simplistic and laughably naïve “with us or against us” not only served us poorly with regards to our erstwhile allies, but also with factions within Iraq.

The ethnic strife unfolding there now wasn’t hard to predict; it’s been there since Iraq was created without regard to cultural considerations decades ago. The “Sunni triangle” area has been a violent mess since Baghdad fell. The insurgency has been carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi troops, civilians, and most troublingly, Iraqi police officers with regularity. The Sunni insurgents, disgruntled by their meager influence over the constitutional process, have been taking out their hostility in violence. Their political leaders have done little or nothing to stop this behavior until - it seems - we started bribing them to fly right.

After a two-year string of bad decisions, a change in strategy and tactics is long overdue. But this isn’t academic. While the President has consistently displayed no flexibility and gone out of his way to belittle and marginalize those who called for it, American soldiers died preventable deaths and American citizens spent good money after bad to the tune of $250 billion so far. Training Iraqi soldiers is time consuming, and if after multiple stumbles, including the wholesale disbanding of the Iraqi army in 2003, we’re finally on the right track, then that is cause for optimism going forward. On the other hand, the other new policies should have been implemented before things got totally out of control. There were many junctures at which the administration could have done an honest assessment of the warning signs and made changes. But at every opportunity the President (and Rice, Rumsfeld, and especially Cheney) have repeated the same speech insisting that we “stay the course” / “not waver” / “avoid appeasement” etc. Now it is known that we are doing all of that and more.

Only this administration has the combination of balls and incompetence to go two-and-a-half years down the wrong road and then change course to what their critics had been suggesting the whole time, all the while questioning the resolve of those same critics and tagging them as flip-floppers. It’d be Monty Python if not for the body count and big budget. No one may have expected the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone expected the Iraqi insurgency. The administration’s failure to plan and adapt is not neutralized by the new tactics Newsweek says are in place now.