In Or Out

Twelve more phony soldiers, former Captains who served in Iraq, write in The Washington Post that we have two viable options in Iraq, either "abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service" which will put us in a position where "we might be able to succeed in Iraq." Alternatively, and in the option they clearly favor, "our best option is to leave Iraq immediately."

Their point is that while plans to withdraw very, very slowly may help politicians who don't want to admit defeat, that such protracted phase-downs do nothing to actually help Iraq and a great deal to endanger the troops left behind. These are schemes that amount to asking soldiers to risk their lives not to achieve any strategic objectives of national importance, but for the vainglory of politicians whose egos are salved by anything that lets them avoid admitting error or the need for dramatic change.

Comments

Politicians have been getting soldiers killed for no good reason for thousands of years. Not going to change. Too bad about all the dead Americans. They volunteered. You go broke playing the slots. Coulda just not gone into the casino. Same thing.

Posted by steve duncan | October 16, 2007 9:45 AM

The op-ed was not included in the District home edition of the Washington Post and there is no indication on the Post's webpage of where it was printed.

Posted by dirk | October 16, 2007 10:04 AM

It's not in the VA printed edition of the WaPo either. I realize that the online WaPo isn't limited by an inches of column restraint, but jeeze, for those dinosaurs like me that still get newsprint on their fingers, couldn't they have dumped dumped Richard Cohen or Anne Applebaum (preferably for good, but at least for a day)? It's not as if anyone would have missed either one. Though, it's surprising enough that Hiatt allowed this to be posted online. (I wonder if the WaPo online editorial page has some independence from Hiatt?)

Posted by Bragan | October 16, 2007 10:34 AM

Why do you still subscribe to the American version of Pravda? Why do you give that totally compromised and discredited organization a single nickel?

Posted by sglover | October 16, 2007 10:44 AM

Actually, I don't subscribe. My wife does. She's the enabler of my addiction to newsprint.

I cancelled my subscription to the WaPo about 3 or 4 years ago after one of Hiatt's more contemptible attempts at defending his war drum beating.

Posted by Bragan | October 16, 2007 1:13 PM

Maybe the Post wanted to keep them out of the discourse and figured that any other credible paper would actually publish their column, you know, in the print version, and they didn't want that to happen, so they put them online where they hoped they would disappear down the memory hole.

Posted by bob | October 16, 2007 1:57 PM

Those 0-3s aren't "phony soldiers" as far as I know -- no one has alleged that they have lied about their service like Scott Beauchamp and other liberal favorites did. But it is worth noting that none of them has served in Iraq in 2007.

We all know that Iraq was a unmitigated disaster in '06; the question is, are things improving now with the surge, the Anbar Awakening, Petraeus's command, etc.? Judging from the good news about declining military and civilian casualties over the last couple of months, and the WaPo's article about Al Qaeda getting crushed, that seems to be the case. These captains are in no position to tell us though, since they weren't there when any of these positive changes happened.

Posted by Phony Commenter | October 16, 2007 5:11 PM

"Phony Commenter"

Appropriate handle for the post. Independent analysis by just about everybody except the right wing nuts is that none of what you list has made the slightest bit of difference in the Iraq situation.

The reality is that these Captains even now don't get it. You could put in the draft, raise another half million men, send them to Iraq - and at this point, the US would STILL lose.

It would just take longer - because you'd have to keep those half million men there for the next ten years at least. And you'd be losing some of them all the time - more every year.

Eventually one of two things would happen: the Iraqi insurgents would get exhausted (very unlikely) or the extra troops will have pissed off EVERY Iraqi in the country (instead of just 80%) and half a million Iraqis will attack our troops on a daily basis.

If you'd have sent a half million men to Iraq in 2003 (AND not decommissioned the Iraqi Army), it's just vaguely possible that it might have slowed the formation of the insurgency long enough to install some kind of government.

Then again, it might not have. With the incompetence of the US military forces, more likely more troops would have simply meant more dead civilians, more pissed off Iraqis, more insurgents, and a QUICKER ramp up of the insurgency.

You can easily argue either way.

The bottom line: there is NO way to "win" in Iraq now, no matter what the US does - unless you count nuking the entire country (except the oil fields) a "win."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 16, 2007 9:59 PM

The remaining Iraq hawks are waving Phony Commenter's argument around quite a lot today (even including Charles Bird from "Obsidian Wings" over among the comment threads at "Balloon Juice"). It is, I think, greatly weakened because the 12 Captains spent virtually their entire column talking about the disastrous lack of POLITICAL unity in Iraq -- which (as even Ryan Crocker admitted) has improved very little since the Surge began, and which is enough by itself to make any temporary decrease in casualties due to the current increase in US troops utterly useless.

As for the question of whether the Anbar Awakening actually indicates any increased willingness on the part of Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites to cooperate -- well, take a look at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21164128/site/newsweek/

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=151780

At any rate, hopefully this will at least shut up, once and for all, any more attempts by the Fat Boy and his myrmidons to imply that there aren't large numbers of genuine, honest-to-God, patriotic, Yankee Doodle Dandy soldiers in Iraq who have soured on the war.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 1:30 AM

Incidentally, I just noticed that Phony Commenter is also waving around the standard conservative talking point that Scott Beauchamp lied to try and make Our Boys look bad. Oddly, none of them points out that Beauchamp's very first piece for the New Republic ( http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070205&s=diarist020507 ) recounted the tale of a kid who supposedly got his tongue cut out by vicious insurgents for befriending US troops but continued to befriend them anyway. Beauchamp's credibility has been called into some question in that piece as well ("his lower torso swallowed by one of Little Venice's excrement canals"?) -- but if he lied in that one, he did so in order to make US troops look MORE popular among Iraqis than they actually are. For some reason, the Right didn't try to pick that particular story of his apart. I wonder why?

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 1:37 AM

Correction: One of the hyperlinks I listed above ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21164128/site/newsweek ) has now been changed to http://www.newsweek.com/id/42453 .

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 1:48 AM

Speak of the Devil: I've just stumbled across Rod Nordland's blistering Sept. 14 attack on Petraeus as a long-time phony and liar ( http://www.newsweek.com/id/40417/output/print ). A little of what Nordland says is (at least at the moment out of date -- apparently since then casualties really have decreased, at least for now -- but his main point seems as relevant as ever:

"It is striking that at the moment, in Baghdad at least, the bad guys are largely holding their fire. But can that really be credited to the surge? Possibly... Or perhaps they hope to encourage the Americans to draw back down, knowing that once they do so, all the surge gains will evaporate as quickly as peace fled Mosul in Petraeus's wake. The whole point of the surge was to create a security environment in which the political players could peacefully settle their quarrels. But instead what has happened is a massive sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods and towns, continued and even accelerated refugee flight, and no significant progress on the political front in the last year, even during Baghdad's Pax Petraeus. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker put it, 'Abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts will bring failure, and the consequences of such a failure must be clearly understood by us all. An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering, well beyond what has already occurred.' The success of the surge, such as it is, hardly makes a good argument for withdrawing troops; just the opposite, it argues for even more. Petraeus's assertion, qualified as it is, that he sees an opportunity to reduce troops to presurge levels by next summer is motivated more by Washington politics, and the stress on the U.S. military, than the realities on the ground in Iraq. He dare not speak the truth, because to do so would include one of two words, both forbidden in the American political liturgy: defeat and draft."

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 2:05 AM

"Incidentally, I just noticed that Phony Commenter is also waving around the standard conservative talking point that Scott Beauchamp lied to try and make Our Boys look bad."

It's more than a talking point, Mr. Hate-America-First, it's what Beauchamp himself told the Army investigators when they asked him. And despite The New Republic's protestations and claims they would "investigate" the matter, their silence has spoken volumes:

"It's the Cover-up that Kills You":

"It’s been another week without word from the New Republic on the status of its "investigation" into the columns of TNR Baghdad Diarist Scott Thomas Beauchamp. "The editors" have not spoken on the matter since their August 10 update. At that time "the editors" spoke grandly of their "commitment to the truth" and their efforts to resolve the "legitimate concerns about journalistic accuracy" that had been raised by the critics of Beauchamp's TNR Baghdad Diarist columns. They also said they took those concerns "extremely seriously."

Nine weeks later, however, they have produced no new information and their promises seem empty. Indeed, TNR's August 10 statement and the silence that has followed become increasingly dishonest with each passing day. Then TNR said that the Army was "stonewalling" its investigation and that the Army had "rejected our requests to speak to Beauchamp." We now know that TNR editor Franklin Foer spoke with Scott Beauchamp on September 7. "

Posted by Phony Commenter | October 17, 2007 3:22 AM

"It is, I think, greatly weakened because the 12 Captains spent virtually their entire column talking about the disastrous lack of POLITICAL unity in Iraq"

And they have no special insight into political developments in Iraq today because, again, none of them has served in Iraq this year. As Ambassador Crocker himself noted, although national agreements on issues like sharing oil revenues haven't been ratified by Iraq's parliament, the Iraqi government is, nevertheless, sharing oil revenues with the provinces, including the Sunni ones. This is a concrete example of political accommodation.

Posted by Phony Commenter | October 17, 2007 3:28 AM

"It's more than a talking point, Mr. Hate-America-First..."

Oh, sorry; I thought I was talking to a sane person.

As for Beauchamp, it's kind of odd that Beauchamp (supposedly) said that he wrote his third piece to discredit our troops after he wrote that enthusiastically pro-US soldier piece that I just mentioned. Maybe he has an evil twin?

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 4:18 AM

"This is a concrete example of political accommodation."

What part of the news report - I think it was last week - that announced that the major Iraqi Shia and Sunni parties weren't even going to TRY "reconciliation" doesn't "Phoney Commentator" get?

Here it is:

Top Iraqis Pull Back From Key U.S. Goal
Reconciliation Seen Unattainable Amid Struggle for Power

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 8, 2007

Money quotes:

"I don't think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such," said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd. "To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power."

"Nearly half of the cabinet ministers have left their posts. The Shiite alliance in parliament, which once controlled 130 of the 275 seats, is disintegrating with the defection of two important parties.

Legislation to manage the oil sector, the country's most valuable natural resource, and to bring former Baath Party members back into the government have not made it through the divided parliament. The U.S. military's latest hope for grass-roots reconciliation, the recruitment of Sunni tribesmen into the Iraqi police force, was denounced last week in stark terms by Iraq's leading coalition of Shiite lawmakers.

"There has been no significant progress for months," said Tariq al-Hashimi, one of Iraq's two vice presidents and the most influential Sunni politician in the country. "There is a shortage of goodwill from those parties who are now in the driver's seat of the country."

Iraqi leaders say there are few signs that Maliki's government is any more willing to share power now than 15 months ago, when he unveiled a 28-point national reconciliation plan. A key proposal then was an amnesty for insurgents -- an "olive branch," Maliki said at the time -- to bring members of the resistance into the political fold.

But over the summer and fall of 2006, sectarian violence rose to its highest levels, driving thousands of people out of mixed neighborhoods and pushing Sunni and Shiite politicians further apart. The amnesty never materialized, nor has the reconciliation."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 17, 2007 5:20 AM

I'd like to know much more about the EXTENT to which iraq's central government is supposedly sharing oil revenues equitably with the Sunni areas -- particular given the fact that the NY Times rumbled the story on the utter collapse of the latest attempt to establish an official revenue-sharing arrangement the day after Petraeus and Crocker had completed their testimony. Granted that that collapse was apparently due to the Kurds bailing out (with the encouragement of a major American oil company, which the White House didn't seem willing or able to prevent), and so it's still possible that the Shiite-controlled central government is sharing revenue with the Sunni provinces. But it seems hard to locate any actual data on the extent to which this is occurring.

And to that dismal Wash. Post article that Mr. Hack refers to above, we can add Greg Djerejian's equally dismal but far more detailed Oct. 3 appraisal ( http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/2007/10/what_a_month_a_depressing_sept.html ). Perhaps his two key paragraphs:

"...[E]xcuse the colloquialism, but Crocker basically put lipstick on the proverbial pig by dressing up the thin gruel that is virtually non-extant relations between the secretive, conspiratorial minded Shi’a Dawa government sitting in Baghdad and provinces like Anbar. How many times did we hear that the Central Government was going to increase the budget for Anbar Province by $70MM for ’07, or that $50MM had been pledged for compensation for losses in Anbar suffered as a result of battles with al-Qaeda (an intrepid reporter should circle around and see if there is real follow through here?).

"At one point Crocker stated: '[N]o longer is all-powerful Baghdad seen as the panacea to Iraq’s problems', saying that 'those living in places like Anbar and Salahuddin are beginning to realize how localities having more of a say in decision-making will empower their communities.' Sounds great, yet as Crocker admits: '[O]ne of the key challenges for Iraqis now is to link these positive developments in the provinces to the central government in Baghdad. Unlike our states, Iraqi provinces have little ability to generate funds through taxation, making them dependent on the central government for resources.' And there’s the rub. Despite all the talk of ‘bottom-up’ reconciliation, you still need a real central Government if you want to avoid an increasingly failed state, one that is cooperating well with the provinces. To this end, and despite the admirable exertions of Crocker’s Embassy, the bridging of the divide between the center and provinces like Anbar has proven rather pitiable...

"There were many other issues with [Petraeus' and Crocker's] testimony. We heard on multiple occasions that while immunity hadn’t been granted to most former Sunni insurgents (per the benchmark requirement), de facto 'conditional immunity' had occurred with the 1,700 former Sunni insurgents in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad reportedly accepted into the police force by Shi’a dominated authorities. (Speaking of police forces, why did neither Crocker nor Petreaus deign to mention that the police was meant to be a national force, but that, even despite possible salary payments emitting from the central government, the ‘concerned citizens’ committees’ sprouting up were anything but ‘national’ in spirit?) Or that progress on oil revenue sharing was afoot, when in reality the first U.S. oil contract with Iraq runs at cross-purposes with our strategy, given its Kurdish-centric approach? Why did Crocker make such a big deal of the August 26th communiqué among Iraq’s 'five most prominent national leaders', when it was painfully apparent this was mostly eyewash these Iraq actors had reluctantly offered Crocker just in time for his testimony, and that no real movement buttressed this Potemkin exercise? Why did no one deign to mention that ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad might arguably have lessened, not least, because massive ethnic cleansing had already taken place, some Sunni neighborhoods were walled off, and so on? Why was the existence of some 2 million internally displaced and another 2 million refugees worth nary a mention (and that such displacements were continuing post-Surge?) Or that Mahdi militia controlled large swaths of Baghdad still? And, most important perhaps, why didn't anyone mention the prospect that our rapprochement with Iraqi Sunnis will likely lead to greater tension with the majority Shi'a, including even a renewed conflagration?"

(If you intend to try and establish that Djerejian said all this because he "hates America" and wants us to fail in Iraq, by the way, you have your work cut out for you. He started as an enthusiastic booster of the war, and in 2004 -- although his enthusiasm was already waning -- he ended up supporting Bush over Kerry. As with so many other such figures, he doesn't anymore.)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 17, 2007 5:52 AM