The Times front-pages this:
Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD — What’s going right? And can it last?
Violence in all of Iraq
is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and
Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest,
Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday,
Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which
has been controlled by Shiite militias. There is a sense that Prime
Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government has more political traction than any of its predecessors.
Consider the latest caricatures of Mr. Maliki put up on posters by the followers of Moktada al-Sadr,
the fiery cleric who commands deep loyalty among poor Shiites. They
show the prime minister’s face split in two — half his own, half Saddam Hussein’s.
The comparison is, of course, intended as a searing criticism. But only
three months ago the same Sadr City pamphleteers were lampooning Mr.
Maliki as half-man, half-parrot, merely echoing the words of his more
powerful Shiite and American backers. It is a notable swing from
mocking an opponent perceived to be weak to denouncing one feared to be
strong.
For Hatem al-Bachary, a Basra businessman, the turnabout has been “a miracle,” the first tentative signs of a normal life.
“I don’t think the militias have disappeared, and maybe there are
sleeper cells which will try to revive themselves again,” he said. “But
the first time they try to come back they will have to show themselves,
and the government, army and police are doing very well.”
While the increase in American troops and their support behind the
scenes in the recent operations has helped tamp down the violence,
there are signs that both the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi
government are making strides. There are simply more Iraqi troops for
the government to deploy, partly because fewer are needed to fight the
Sunni insurgents, who have defected to the Sunni Awakening movement.
They are paid to keep the peace.
Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust
with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation.
High oil prices are filling Iraqi government coffers. But even these
successes contain the seeds of vulnerability. The government victories
in Basra, Sadr City and Amara were essentially negotiated, so the
militias are lying low but undefeated and seething with resentment. Mr.
Maliki may be raising expectations among Sunnis that he cannot fulfill,
and the Sunni Awakening forces in many cases are loyal to their
American paymasters, not the Shiite government. Restive Iraqis want to
see the government spend money to improve services. Attacks like the
bombing that killed 63 people in Baghdad’s Huriya neighborhood on
Tuesday showed that opponents can continue to inflict carnage.
Reporter Stephen Farrell has a related story here.
MORE: Obama re-emphasized his commitment to defeat at the Philadelphia debate in April (transcript). Here is US News & World Report:
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama locked themselves into rigid positions on Iraq during a debate in Philadelphia Wednesday night.
Both said they would begin withdrawals of U.S. troops soon after taking
office and would move quickly to end the war. They didn't leave
themselves much room to change their minds even if the military
situation were altered or U.S. commanders gave a different
recommendation. This could make it more difficult for each of them to
be flexible during the general-election campaign and, more important,
as commander in chief.
SUNDAY UPDATE: In an odd mix of defensiveness and triumphalism Frank Rich defends Obama's positioning on Iraq:
Now That We’ve ‘Won,’ Let’s Come Home
By FRANK RICH
THE Iraq war’s defenders
like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good.
Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore.
When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.
The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news — it’s no
news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara
Logan appeared
as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing
television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest.
“Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,”
she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan
than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”
Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no
one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential
campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968.
But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis,
is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the
public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.
In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No
matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on
any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently
found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want
out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the
withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of
Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.
Hmm. I first read this in the Dead Tree edition - in the on-line version, Mr. Rich provides a link to the PollingReport.com and draws the same conclusion I came to when I went fishing there for evidence to refute and confound him - opinions aren't changing on the outlook in Iraq, even as the facts on the ground are changing.
As I said, Mr. Rich seems to have mixed feelings about having the support of the American people regardless of whether he has the support of the facts. After all, plenty of libs talk about public opinion polls showing Americans believed that Saddam was behind the 9/11 plot; those polls are not normally cited as evidence of the good judgment of the great unwashed, but rather as evidence of their susceptibility to media manipulation and comfortable narratives.
Mr. Rich presses on with his defense of Obama:
The G.O.P.’s badgering of Mr. Obama about the war is also backfiring.
In sync with Mr. McCain, the Republican National Committee unveiled an online clock — “Track How Long Since Obama Was in Iraq!” — only to have Mr. Obama call the bluff by announcing that he will go to both Afghanistan and Iraq before the election. Unless he takes along his own Lieberman-like Jiminy Cricket to whisper factual corrections into his ear, this trip is likely to enhance his stature as a potential commander in chief.
It might indeed increase his stature. It might present Obama with an opportunity to back-flip away from his commitment to withdraw. It might do a lot of things. Time (He boldly predicted) will tell.
The other whiny line of G.O.P.-McCain attack is to demand
incessantly that Mr. Obama stop refusing to recognize the decline in
violence in Iraq, stop calling for a hasty troop withdrawal and stop
ignoring commanders on the ground in assessing his exit strategy. Here,
too, Mr. Obama is calling their bluff, though not nearly as loudly as
he will, I suspect, in the debates.
The fact is that Mr. Obama frequently recognizes
“the reduction of violence in Iraq” (his words) and has said he is
“encouraged” by it. He has never said that he would refuse to consult
with commanders on the ground, and he has never called for a
precipitous withdrawal. His mantra on Iraq, to the point of tedium, has
always been that “we must be as careful getting out as we were careless
getting in.” His roughly 16-month timetable isn’t hasty and isn’t
“retreat.” As The Economist, a supporter of the war, recently put it,
a safer Iraq does not necessarily validate Mr. McCain’s “insistence on
America staying indefinitely” and might make Mr. Obama’s 16-month
framework “more feasible.”
As to the assertion that "He has never said that he would refuse to consult
with commanders on the ground", the quotes from the Philadelphia debate make clear that Obama has claimed that he will set the mission and will not be consulting with his generals as to whether a prompt withdrawal is appropriate. Where he is open to consultation is in achieving those withdrawals safely, but that is hardly the same thing (although Obama may try to respin it to appear to be).
Here is what the Obama website says about the Surge:
The Surge: The goal of the surge was to create space
for Iraq's political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq's civil
war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some
areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the
unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq's
political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political
differences at the heart of their civil war.
Time to update that a bit? Let's revisit the Times lead:
Violence in all of Iraq
is the lowest since March 2004.
And a bit further down:
Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust
with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation.
And the Obama website is still calling it a civil war. Sooo 2006. But where are we now?
OK, back to Frank Rich:
After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy
time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have
been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in January remains inoperative.
Mr. Obama’s timetable is at least an effort to use any remaining
American leverage to concentrate the Iraqi leaders’ thinking. Mr.
McCain offers only the status quo: a blank check holding America
hostage to fate and ceding the president’s civilian authority over war
policy to Gen. David Petraeus and his successors.
As the original Times article noted, one aspect of the surge was that it bought time for the training of Iraqi security forces. It may be that a few more years of a "blank check" will be the critical time that the Iraqis need for that training to be expanded and/or completed, and it certainly may be that our generals think so. What woukd Barack do then?
Should voters tune in, they’ll also discover that the McCain policy is
nonsensical on its face. If “we are winning” and the surge is a
“success,” then what is the rationale for keeping American forces
bogged down there while the Taliban regroups ominously
in Afghanistan? Why, if this is victory, does Mr. McCain keep
threatening that “chaos and genocide” will follow our departure? And
why should we take the word of a prophet who failed to anticipate the chaos and ethnic cleansing that would greet our occupation?
"Nonsensical"? Now Mr. Rich is just raving. Crime has dropped in New York City - should we disband the NYPD, or reduce it by two thirds? "We are winning" in Iraq doesn't mean we have won; my goodness, would General Rich have advised General Eisenhower that, having liberated Paris from the Nazis it was time to bring the troops home?
Mr. Rich appears comfortable having won the battle of the narratives, but I hope he is concerned that the battle of reality is not over.
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