Good Monday morning Fellow Seekers,
Well there’s not much waiting left. Petraeus makes his first presentation today, and the letter he wrote to the troops is a perfectly good preview of what he will say, plus Michael Gordon of the New York Times has the leak. And at this point, it isn’t much of a surprise. Things are improving, but not enough. There should be a small troop withdrawal in December (shades of John Warner and Norm Coleman) but decisions about further reduction will have to wait.
I had planned to write more in advance of his presentation, but I confess I’ve been distracted by other pieces that I hope to put up later this week. So I’ll just make a few observations here and declare an open thread to discuss the situation and the report.
There is tremendous tendency to engage in cherry-picking when trying to measure progress in Iraq. I’ve been hearing for months that sectarian killings were down. To me that’s like an admission that overall killings aren’t, and that’s what most of the reporting suggests.
Most of the troops of the surge were in Baghdad but most of the progress that has occurred has been in Anbar Province. The decline in violence in Anbar is very big. But it appears to have been caused mostly by a strategic decision made by the local sheikhs to oppose and evict Al Qaida in Iraq and other similar groups from using their province as a base. This decision was made before the surge started. The extra U.S. troops helped the tribes implement their decision. It is not easy to explain how this pattern can be extended to Baghdad or other regions.
Gen. David Petraeus strikes people as impressively credible. In his first interviews after he took over, I noticed his knack. In his letter to the troops, you’ll note how he plainly states that the surge has failed in one of its main goals, to create a climate in which political reconciliation would occur at the national level. That kind of admission builds credibility to an increasingly skeptical U.S. public.
But he is now at least for practical purposes a spokesman for the administration and after the past four years, his personal credibility (leaving aside his 2004 op-ed declaring that great progress was being made in getting the Iraqi troops ready to take over, which I take to be a blow to his personal credibility) cannot be divorced from the administration’s tattered credibility on all Iraq-related matters.
Enough from me. What do you think?
General Petraeus deserves our respect as a military commander; however, the Republicans seem determined to have all of us transfer that respect to the General’s position as a political representative of the administration. The military mission is over in Iraq — the strategy that Petraeus is invoking now is a police action in anticipation of a political solution. That solution is showing no signs of being forthcoming and as long as the Iraqi government has a $1 billion a week crutch to lean on, they have no incentive to make it happen. The American troops should move out to the borders and intercept the foreign fighters and then leave the internal security to the Iraqi powers that emerge. It may be a bloody power struggle, but how different will it be from what we have now?