Stagnation

Here's another one of the slides from the Crocker/Petraeus presentation. At first glance, it appears to show impressive progress starting in March 2007. Look more closely at the bars, though, and you'll see that the top segment of each bar is an essentially meaningless category -- "unit forming." The real meat is in those tiny green bars representing Iraqi units capable of operating independently of US forces. Here, we saw considerable progress between March 2006 and November 2006, followed by a steady decline running through June 2007, and now things have ticked up again a bit so that we're essentially back to where we were a year ago.

Not only is there no progress here, but the absolute numbers in question are tiny so even if things were to pick up, we'd still be years and years and years away from this policy succeeding.

Comments

reminds me of the flag of Ghana, gently waving in the breeze. ah Accra... good times.

Posted by cleek | September 11, 2007 12:53 PM

Yeah, but Congress is providing funding for a new US military base along the Iranian border, according to the WSJ. Moreover, it is deploying Georgian (as in Tbilisi) troops to man the border crossings.

Posted by Nur al-Cubicle | September 11, 2007 1:05 PM

Petraeus just said that we shouldn't get so fixated on that chart, since there are a number of units that have lost leaders and material, which still continue to operate independently. So apparently they operate independently, but he decided not to count them. Or he's counting them as fully operational and independent and they tecnically aren't. Would be really nice if the Senate hired a couple of lawyers to ask questions. There speeches are a waste of time and their inability to ask probing questions is breathtaking.

Posted by Keith | September 11, 2007 1:17 PM

Senator Casey just made exactly this point. Must have checked out this site during the break.

Posted by mq | September 11, 2007 1:41 PM

We shouldn't get fixated on the chart? That is hilarious!
One of the more obvious -but apparently not to the clueless Dems - tactics is that Petraeus is trying to hide behind his charts and their very purpose is to fixate Congress.
They are designed to bamboozle Congress!
His entire presentation has been designed to fixate and bamboozle Congress and prevent them from being able to focus on important issues.
The testimony is given BEFORE the written report is provided to Congress, so no one can actually question him about the actual report, which is what this whole deal is supposed to be about.
Which Democratic genius agreed to conduct these hearings before the written report was submitted? It is like confronting an expert witness at trial without benefit of reviewing the report he has generated or any documents he may have relied upon in order to come to his conclusions. And being handed a written copy of his opening remarks just as he was giving them - as happened yesterday in the House - does not qualify. One has to review the documents, scrutinize them and then prepare questions based on his report.
Mind-boggling!
Memo to Dems: You control the Congress at least to the extent that you control when matters are calendared for hearing. Try to calendar hearings when you will be able to adequately prepare for them. Like, after you receive the report that is supposedly the subject of the hearing.
Petraeus has clearly been well-prepped for his testimony. Most importantly, he has learned that bullying Dems is the best strategy possible. Either in his prep sessions, or based on his own experience, he has learned that the more he bullies Democratic Senators and congressmen, the better off he will be. He filibusters each Dem, using as much time as he can take with each question. He routinely talks over the Dems questioning him. He cuts them off in the middle of a question they may be formulating, and then he continues to talk when they try to interject with a question. He utterly refuses to respect their attempt to manage their measly 5 minutes of questioning time.
And most hilariously, he provides a series of indecipherable, unreadable charts and graphs that would each take a day of examination to make sense of. And he challenges the weak-kneed Dems to confront him on his shaky facts and figures.
Petraeus is smart, well-prepped and obviously much tougher than anyone on the other side of the table. The typical Repub/Dem dynamic at play.

Posted by frankie d | September 11, 2007 1:58 PM

You're missing the big lie, Matt.

The number of units capable of operating independently is zero, zip, zilch, nada.

That won't change until we trust them with air and artillery.

Posted by snoey | September 11, 2007 3:14 PM

Note that Yglesias actually UNDERSTATES his case. It isn't just the green sector of the graph bars ("Level 1: [Iraqi Army Unit] Fully Independent") that's been stagnant since Nov. 2006: it's also Levels 2 and 3 ("Iraqi Lead with Coalition Support" and "Fighting Side by Side") that have made no total progress whatsoever since Nov. 2006. Those two categories both actually deteriorated a bit through May 2007, and have only now clawed their way slightly back up to the same levels they were at last November!

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | September 11, 2007 3:20 PM

But you've got to admit that the chart looked damn impressive on C-SPAN!

Of course, I was listening to the General Petraeus Show on NPR. Not seeing the graph is probably the primary reason for my continued cynicism.

Posted by Philippe Duhart | September 11, 2007 3:58 PM

I just don't understand how there cannot be more progress on this front. I find it mind-boggling. On December 7, 1941, the American armed forces contained less than a million active service personnel. Three years later, a military consistiing of 11.5 million had gone halfway around the world and defeated two vicious enemies. So how come, three years after recruiting began in earnest, the Iraqi army is still such a basket case? Lets be honest here - there are just 10K soliders in the Iraqi military that are assigned to units that can fight alone? For godsake - that is one re-inforced combat division. Three years to develop a single division? At this rate, the Iraqi's will never have the capactity to secure Switzerland let alone Baghdad.

Posted by Don | September 11, 2007 5:22 PM

The Iraqi Security Forces are being formed out of nothing. There are no giant secure military training areas to receive, train, and ship out new recruits to their first units. There was no NCO corp to train incoming recruits. Most recruits are the primary breadwinners for their families and, lacking electronic banking or mail, need to travel home often to deliver their wages to their families who literally live day to day. Those who join must often keep their service a secret to avoid being killed as they return home to deliver their wages. The Iraqi Army was never all that impressive in the maintenance, supply, and professional leadership departments and is lacking even more so considering that the Army was destroyed and then looted in 2003. A tactic of the insurgency has long been to infiltrate the ISF, identify members, and kill them on their way to their units and terrorize their families.

In spite of these challenges, tens of thousands serve, patrol, fight, and die. Their losses outpace ours, often by 100% or more. They do not endure 15 month tours; the length of their tours is equal to however long this conflict lasts, however long that turns out to be. People have the gall to criticize the ISF for short work weeks and frequent truancy rates. The most common reason for truancy is due to death threats against their families after insurgents discover their ISF affiliation. The ISF are enduring hardships and peril that armchair Generals in this country cannot even imagine, yet they seem to be the most maligned people on this planet, aside from the President.

Iraqi Soldiers did not choose this war any more than anti-war groups in the US did. Many wish that the war never happened. But they find themselves immersed in an environment of ethno-sectarian conflict, insurgency, and terrorism and they're doing the best that they can in the worst possible circumstances. Many Iraqis have fled the country. Others sit in their houses, hunkering down in hopes of surviving until this conflict ends, if ever. At least the Iraqi Security Forces are trying in the face of overwhelming odds of being maimed or killed or having their families slaughtered as retribution for their service. Give them a fricken break.

Posted by TJM | September 11, 2007 9:39 PM

Why should I give them a "frickin' break"?

They're demonstrating that they're just as stupid and desperate as the morons in OUR army. They're putting themselves in harms way against the will of most of their own countrymen on the orders of men they don't respect for purposes they don't understand except vaguely (the "defense of Iraq"? To "fight terrorism"?) in operations under the control of foreign invaders.

How stupid can you get?

At BEST they don't understand how Iraq's violence can never be controlled by the Iraq Army as long as it is infiltrated by the rival factions and as long as those factions are NOT going to reconcile, i.e., until exhaustion sets in.

Anybody who joins the insurgencies gets cashy money, gets to kill the foreign invaders, gets to fight for his tribe or his religious faction, for reasons he understands, and doesn't stand a really great chance of dying unless he goes up against a bigger faction. And in most cases, they have no choice in that regard if they want to stay in country - either join a faction or get killed by the OTHER faction!

So it's a smart move given the unemployment rate. If you can't find a way to make money off the war, or leave the country, better join a faction.

But anybody joining the Iraqi army is a complete idiot and arguably a traitor to the country - except of course there is no more "Iraq" to be called a country, as Nir Rosen aptly pointed out.

Iraq doesn't exist any more. Therefore, anybody in the "Iraqi Army" is by definition an idiot.

So why are we surprised that in reality, there IS NO "Iraqi Army"?

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 12, 2007 12:26 AM

Come on, Hack. Any member of the Iraqi military who actually does want to see a peaceful ecumenical Iraq has my absolute sympathy -- and there are a small number of Iraqis who do want that; we know that from the voting patterns in the elections. Unfortunately, there are ONLY a small number of them -- which is why the Iraqi Army makes ARVN look like the Wehrmacht.

As for "maligning Bush": it's hard to malign a malignancy. (Not that -- in all his recent interviews and accounts by his friends -- he seems at all depressed by the criticism he's taking. For that, after all, you need a conscience.)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | September 12, 2007 1:17 AM