Good News / Bad News

Thank God. A new Kenneth Pollack article! About Iraq! In The New Republic! Yes! It seems that the surge is working. Or, more precisely:

The bottom line in Iraq remains complicated. We should be heartened by recent progress, but we should not assume we have won yet, either: Failure is still at least as likely as success. But all is far from lost in Iraq, and the outlines of a successful strategy are finally appearing. Nevertheless, if the Bush administration is going to engineer lasting achievements from the accomplishments of the surge so far, it still has a lot to do and little margin for error.

There are a few flies in the ointment. For example: "the country's central government remains a highly counter-productive force." That's no problem, though. Rather than deal with the central government being a highly counter-productive force rather than a useful partner by leaving Iraq, we could just order up a new government: "by substituting one coalition for another within the current Council of Representatives (COR), but by advancing the date for elections (from late 2009 to late 2008 or early 2009) to get an entirely new COR." We can also help out by speeding the dismembering of the Iraqi state: "it may be necessary for Iraq to move to something closer to a cantonal system along Swiss lines."

At any rate, it's important to keep the stakes in mind:

As both of these examples illustrate, such campaigns require lots of time. In Iraq, several important factors, including the fortuitous and well-exploited "Anbar awakening," in which large numbers of Sunni tribes turned on their former allies in Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other Salafi extremist groups, has speeded progress. But there are three hurdles the United States must clear if it is to convert initial success into victory and leave Iraq as the next Northern Ireland, instead of the next Vietnam. This will still require considerable skill--and not a little luck.

To be honest, all you ought to need to say to make the case for withdrawal is "according to the proponents of staying, Northern Ireland is the best case scenario." I mean, that's crazy.

But to note a couple of analogistic points, they speak English in Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland is tiny, and the idea of just importing the Swiss political system to a foreign country with totally different traditions (and geography!) is silly.

Comments

Maybe Iraq should be reconfigured to resemble a Monopoly board. We must take care KBR, Blackwater and their ilk just don't continue passing "GO" several thousand times a day.

Posted by steve duncan | December 28, 2007 2:34 PM

On the other hand, if Iraq were to move to something closer to Monaco, they could rake billions from their high-class casinos. Forget the oil, they'd just give it away, why bother.

All problems solved!

Posted by abb1 | December 28, 2007 3:14 PM

"...along Swiss lines." - What a fraudster. We know a few people who spent quality time in Iraq and other countries in the region. All candidly admit that they have no idea what to expect or what to suggest.

Yet - Pollack, a man who does not speak the language and who never even visted the region, thinks he can pretend to be a sage - And he gets away with it. He is not laughed out of the room! He is not told to go away!

Posted by Comment | December 28, 2007 3:20 PM

I'd like to hear the plan for what happens next after we abandon our allies, our interests, and our honor in Iraq by simply leaving as Matt suggests. Are you guys ready to go on line with hydrogen fuel cells and snappy retorts for Al Jazeera when they report The Mother of All Propaganda Defeats? Pollack may get a little silly with the musical governments ideas, but he is a grownup who knows how important some reasonable facsimile of success in Iraq is.

Can we just decide to switch off the Greater Persian Gulf as an area of vital national interests? Seems to me it's worth "nation building" there at least as much as it was in South Korea. This is not something that can be done with satellites.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 28, 2007 3:30 PM

Robert Powell wrote:

Are you guys ready to go on line with hydrogen fuel cells and snappy retorts for Al Jazeera when they report The Mother of All Propaganda Defeats?

Sure. Since it's in America's interest to leave Iraq, normal people don't care that leaving Iraq will be spun as a propaganda defeat.

Whereas you, Robert Powell, know that it's in our interest to leave Iraq, but you want us to stay because you somehow think a propaganda defeat is worse than a real defeat (staying in Iraq forever).

I don't care what Al Jazeera says about America. It's more important to do what's right for America's interests. Maybe you don't think so.

Can we just decide to switch off the Greater Persian Gulf as an area of vital national interests?

The most "vital national interest" we have in Iraq is in getting out of there. You, on the other hand, are using "vital national interests" in the way that VSPs use it -- a meaningless term that justifes the defeat and humiliation of staying in Iraq.

Posted by M.A. | December 28, 2007 3:45 PM

The article is only available to subscribers and I've already completed my annual allotment of wingnut welfare. (I bought a new sewing machine)

Posted by Davebo | December 28, 2007 4:32 PM

For fuck's sake, Robert Powell. We're America. A very big and powerful country.

And you think we need to continue spending a Big Dig's worth of money every two months, defending a "surge" that (let's pretend) succeeded by reducing Iraqi civilian casualties to a mere two 9/11s per month per capita, and sending our young men and women to die and be wounded there for no particular benefit to Iraq or the US...

... because you don't want to see propaganda on Al Jazeera?

Your egotistical preoccupation with your emotions is like a caricature of how a hippie views the world.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | December 28, 2007 4:35 PM

I'd like to hear the plan for what happens next after we abandon our allies, our interests, and our honor in Iraq by simply leaving as Matt suggests.

We have no allies involved, we abandoned our honor years ago to your own shreiking cheers, and our interests aren't as clear cut as you seem to think.

But the plan is simple. We'll put the 12 billion dollars a month and 25 to 30 casualties to use in a way that actually promotes our interests.

Posted by Davebo | December 28, 2007 4:39 PM

He has to say cantonal system "along Swiss lines" and not the more relevant "along Bosnian lines" because it would be too obvious how bad that good case scenario actually is if Bosnia was invoked.

Posted by P O'Neill | December 28, 2007 4:45 PM

I have a post up about this at the Liberal Avenger. I think it's short enough to reproduce here:

As far as I can tell, almost no one on either side of the political spectrum, no matter how batshit crazy, denies the following two pieces of analysis on the subject of Iraq.

1) In general, the factions that we, the United States government, back in Iraq tend over the long term to fare better than the factions we oppose and try to undermine and destroy.

2) If the previous point means that we should stay in Iraq, we should. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t.

The key to your position is how you feel about the second point.

From my perspective, the prospect that we might have some vague long-term effect on the relative prosperity of various factions in a failed oil state thousands of miles from the United States is not worth that much.

Hardcore foreign policy types have a different view, and maybe they’re right.

But I want to make clear from the VERY beginning - if anybody ever thinks they strapping a rifle onto my son behind some bullshit like this Iraq war, they better think again. The statistics on exactly whose sons are signed up to fight in this war suggest that most Americans feel the same way.

And that’s the state of the dispute.

Posted by Raul Groom | December 28, 2007 5:04 PM

-We're getting closer to winning.
-How will we know we've finally won?
-George Bush will tell us.

Staying in Iraq is the point of all that death and waste. That's what "winning" means.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 28, 2007 5:35 PM

A sensible plan to withdraw from Iraq should be called "The Churchill Option."

Churchill inherited an Iraq occupation and then spent the roaring 20s figuring out how to get British troops out of there.

So we should emulate him this time - but let's not repeat his mistaken use of chemical weapons.

Churchill's use of wmds in Iraq set a bad prescedent, but he did , alas, have the good sense to leave when he could.

Pollack has probably visited Iraq since the war - but we do recall him saying he never visited the region when his book was the byword of wisdom for pro war liberals.

Now he should embrace "The Churchill Option" and call for orderly withdrawl.

Posted by Comment | December 28, 2007 6:35 PM

The people who think we are winning have just evacuated the word of all meaning. Remember how, in 2002, vampiric neo-cons like Hitchens argued that Hussein was really an Islamofascist guy, secretly making deals with the Islamists? Today, of course, the U.S. is openly supporting the Islamists. And we have as a result brought about a beautiful, taliban like society. This story, for instance, yesterday - doesn't it make you feel we've fought for our honor and interests?

"Iraqi Hairdressers Forced Underground

By DIAA HADID – 2 days ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Umm Doha cuts hair and waxes eyebrows in secret from her living room because making women look pretty can get a person killed in her Sunni-dominated Baghdad neighborhood.

Hardline Muslim extremists who believe it is sinful for women to appear beautiful in public have forced many beauticians to move their trade underground.

Sunni and Shiite militants began blowing up salons roughly two years ago. They killed several stylists and bullied others into putting down their scissors and makeup brushes for good, all in an effort to stamp out what they view as the corrupting spread of Western culture.

Besides beauty salons, militants have also targeted liquor stores, barber shops and Christian churches.

In the past year, most beauty salons in the Shiite-dominated southern city of Basra went underground, as they did in the Sunni-controlled neighborhood of Dora in west Baghdad."
And there is this, so honorable, from liberated Basra:

"'Westernised' women being killed in Basra
By Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad
Published: 11 December 2007

Religious extremists have killed at least 40 women this year in Basra because of their "un-Islamic" dress, according to Iraqi police.

The police said women were being apprehended by men patrolling on motorbikes or in cars with tinted windows before being murdered and dumped in piles of rubbish with notes saying they were killed for "un-Islamic behaviour". He said men had been victims of similar attacks.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the rise of Iraq's Shia-dominated government, armed men have forced women to cover their heads or face punishment. In parts of the predominantly Shia south, even Christian women have been forced to wear headscarves. In some areas of Basra, graffiti warns women that forgoing the headscarf and wearing make-up "will bring you death".

In September, the headless bodies of a woman and her six-year-old son were among those found. A total of 40 deaths have been reported this year but police believe many go unreported for fear of reprisals."

The U.S. overthrew a murderous tyranny and replaced it with hives of murderous theocrats, and a central government corrupt enough to want to sell off Iraq's oil in a fool's deal to American oil companies, but not powerful enough to make the deal.

Posted by roger | December 28, 2007 8:04 PM

[a cantonal system along Swiss lines]

I bet those people who wrote their "stupidest article of 2007" posts and then went away for the Christmas holidays are feeling *pretty fucking angry* right now.

Posted by dsquared | December 28, 2007 8:57 PM

Roger's sumar: "The U.S. overthrew a murderous tyranny and replaced it with hives of murderous theocrats, and a central government corrupt enough to want to sell off Iraq's oil in a fool's deal to American oil companies, but not powerful enough to make the deal." is excellent.

Now tack on the costs of that "success" - 4,000 US troops dead, probably 20,000 or more crippled, another 100,000 in PTSD, a million dead Iraqis, four million displaced (nearly twenty percent of the population if you add in the dead), and a cost to the US taxpayer of one to two trillion dollars.

And the whole thing was allegedly over WMDs that didn't exist.

How anybody like Powell can say that this can be turned into a "success" is just amazingly brain dead. It requires a hallucinatory world view that even mescaline or ketamine couldn't provide.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 28, 2007 9:46 PM

"...Iraq is the house of sedition and famines, is daily retrogressing and suffers greatly from oppression and heavy taxes. It's fruits are few, its vices many and the burdens on the people are many...Baghdad was once a magnificent city but is now fast falling to ruin and decay and has lost all its splendour." Muqaddasi, "A Description of the Muslim Empire" (published 985 AD)

In spite of the assurances in comments above, I've seen no evidence of a ready substitute for petroleum as a pre-requisite for a world economy; no sense that handing an enormous propaganda victory to jihidis would not in fact be a huge problem; no reference at all to the crucial nature of Iraq in our ongoing relationship with its neighbors (with particular emphasis on Iran and Saudi Arabia); and no sign of concern from the "peace at any price" faction for the millions of Iraqis who have in fact stuck their necks out to work with us in a stabilization effort that's approved by the UN, and of major importance to the civilized world.

What I do see is major propaganda distortions of the sort that multiply the most reliable figures on Iraqi casualties since 2003 by a factor of ten; total disregard for the actual record of the Ba'athist regime's murder of millions, and the substantial evidence that failing regime change we would be in for more of the same and quite likely worse; an utter lack of awareness of the probable effect on our military of being defeated by domestic politics in a war we have practically won; no concern about the UN, either in terms of its pre-invasion Resolutions, or the fate of the current stabilization mission supported around the globe.

People like Pollack represent the only argument available the Democrats aren't hopelessly naieve about national security.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 29, 2007 5:24 AM

Powell, nice of you to line them up:
1. sensible oil policy would include negotiating detente with Iran, leaving Iraq to follow the traditional Middle Eastern pattern of creating an overarching state oil company to oversee petroleum extraction. Iraq did just fine back in the seventies and eighties doing that.
2. distortion of casualties: no, the reliable data is from the Lancet survey. The idea that Ba'athists killed millions combines a war and an estimate of internal mass murder that, of course, depends on the same kind of survey methods used by the group that published in the Lancet.
3. Jihadist propaganda has already triumphed. Osama bin Laden made a legendary escape. The U.S., run by feebs and cretins, failed to mop up the Taliban fighters in the spring of 2002, started drawing down soldiers in Afghanistan to embark on a wholly criminal and unnecessary war in Iraq, and has produced a situation in which, at best, the Afghani government will have to negotiate with the Taliban.
4. We have practically won the war is a joke. We have practically surrendered to Anbar militias. We have practically presided over the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. We have practically placed a good two million refugees in Syria, Iran and Jordan. We have practically seen Southern Iraq become a mini-islamicist state. We have practically backed the islamicist central government. People who think this is a practical victory are needed, now, in the financial world to buy some really profitable CDOs that are backed by grade A sub-prime mortgages.
So, basically, the pro-war position is stuff and nonsense, rhetorically disguising the systematic failure of the Bush administration to actually fight not the global war on terror, which is and was always nonsense, but the actual small war on terrorists who attack the U.S., while engaging in a horrendous and asinine sideshow that led, predictably, to disaster. Luckily, we can get out of the disaster quite easily. After Vanity Boy is gone, we can withdraw, we can make peace with Iran, and we can do what we can to make sure that negotiations in Afghanistan don't allow for a complete Taliban takeover. Probably at some point we will have to bite the bullet and negotiate with Al qaeda itself, due to the malevolent and idiotic actions of the Bush administration in 2001 and 2002. That depends on how bad things get in Pakistan.

Posted by roger | December 29, 2007 12:18 PM

roger--
1. okay

2. no way. The Lancet study from Johns Hopkins has been throughly refuted by peer review. Bad methodology, blatant political bias by the admission of the principals.

3. Not so. They agreed that Iraq was The Central Front, and they're getting they're asses kicked.

4. Watch.

There is no "pro-war position". Most of us would prefer no war but, if dragged in to one, we prefer victory to playing for a tie, or self-defeat.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 29, 2007 2:23 PM

2. Talk about no evidence, yours is a blank position, backed by all of the science ravings of Michelle Malkin. For the definitive refutation of your position, though, I'd recommend the Deltoid thread featuring the only person who even tried to make a scientific criticism of the Lancet survey, David Kane. Kane was calmly handed his head. Now, show me the scientific survey that gives us a certain number of the victims of Saddam Hussein. Give me the methodology used, and how the level of certainty was arrived at.
3. Way. They - who are they? This shows the usual Bushite ignorance of terrorism - Osama bin Laden, you might notice, didn't have himself flown to Iraq for a reason. What happened in Iraq was pretty simple - a convergence of interests of Saudi elites and jihadists. Thus, money and weapons were found, bunches of Saudi men went to Iraq, and the U.S. closed its eyes to what was happening and pretended that it was all Iran's fault. Asses kicked is funny - the same people whose 'asses' were kicked in Fallujah in 2004 are now being armed by the U.S., which has quietly dropped the demand that there be no amnesty for any Iraqi who killed an American soldier. Funny, dat.
4. We have no other choice, since we are held captive to D.C. morons. But the U.S. can't continue to break its army indefinitely, so you watch - withdrawal is inevitable. The only question is how it is going to happen - disastrously, as we try to hold out well past the point at which the American public and the Iraqis can continue to be patient, or rationally, with an agreement with Iran that essentially demolishes one parameter of a now obsolete Persian Gulf policy. As for the macro-factor ending the war, it will be the coming recession - people's minds are wonderfully concentrated when their government is burning 200 billion per year on nothing, and mass layoffs are afoot in the land.

Posted by roger | December 29, 2007 5:07 PM

I agree with you about Iran, and about the difficulty of getting good numbers on Saddam's depredations. I accept UNICEF's study showing about a million dead attributable to sanctions, and the general consensus that the Iran/Iraq War killed about a million more. I've seen figures in the hundreds of thousands for each of the massacres carried out against the Kurds, the Shi'ia, and the Kuwaitis that seem reasonable based on mass grave excavation and census data, and the destruction of the Marsh Arabs along with the ecosystem that had supported them for millenia is also pretty well documented by the British.

I think the analysis of the Lancet study done by the anti-war "Iraq Body Count" website, among others including the Iraqi Ministry of Health, is solid. I am also inclined to doubt any study that's based entirely on questionable interviews in a war zone, is ten times higher than the consensus of the rest of them, and whose authors flatly stated that they timed the release in hopes of influencing the '04 election.

I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that the Army is "breaking". According to Ron Paul we have over 700 military bases around the world, and I can't imagine that most of them aren't less important than Iraq. We still have over 20,000 combat troops in South Korea whose only job is to be a "tripwire". We've certainly wasted a lot of money in Iraq, but then total defense spending is still around 4.5% of GDP, which compares favorably with about 9% for Vietnam and 14% for Korea. We spent 38% of GDP in WWII.

Posted by robert powell | December 30, 2007 4:53 AM

...total defense spending is still around 4.5% of GDP...

The US GDP is mostly service-related these days, more so, in fact, than any other industrial country; 78% services, according to this. So, to increase the GDP you may want to get more haircuts while giving your hairdresser massages.

Posted by abb1 | December 30, 2007 6:10 AM