On another forum, a poster wrote (regarding the Iraqi parliament):
“Today, many of those parliamentarians simply don’t show up to work. There are rarely enough to reach a quorum to debate any of the key issues facing the country. They squabble over who the speaker should be, and debate how much they should get paid, while 74 members currently boycott the sessions entirely.”
This individual was, I believe, attempting to make the point that we should immediately “beat feet” and effect a total, unequivocal pullout of troops from Iraq, on the basis that the central political establishment in Iraq still has it’s collective head up it’s fourth-point-of-contact, and is unable to accomplish anything other than to engage in petty internal partisan bickering.
Strangely, his quote from ABC News also quite accurately describes “business as usual” in the United States Congress – a Congress, I believe, who will be themselves joining the Iraqi parliament in taking off the month of August, in spite of a host of pending legislative matters of “imperative national significance” still facing it, and troops in harms way actively waging a shooting war against a clear and declared enemy of the United States.
And not that the early US Congresses were all that unified or productive either, from 1776 onward. It took us quite some time to get our collective “stuff” together, and we didn’t have a neighboring Islamist state deliberately stirring things up.
Just a few redcoats – and the French.
In the mad political rush to declare defeat in Iraq and to engineer some way to weasel our way out while making it appear that the resulting chaos and increased jihadic threat will in fact be the fault of George Bush and every Republican ever to serve, overlooked is the inconvenient reality (for some) that the troop “surge” is actually WORKING, and is achieving it’s intended goals.
The worst thing that even critics of the Iraq operation can say, is that things are presently a “mixed bag” of positive and disappointing results.
A “mixed bag” is NOT a “defeat”.
What advocates of “a change in course” consistently neglect to map out is just what direction THIER course will take us in terms of achieving our strategic goals of combating global Islamist jihadism (aka “terrorism”).
Will it take us forward? Sideways? Up? Down? And just HOW exactly? Or is the only acceptable direction a BACKWARDS course, as in surrender, defeat, and retreat?
If the advocates of the “change in strategy” strategy put only half as much effort, creativity, and resolve into defeating the jihadists as they have put into defeating their own president, we would be years if not decades closer to convincing the jihadists that their path is ultimately counter-productive, and that “tolerant co-existence” is a far better definition of “peace” than combative jihad.
What is remarkable, largely unrecognized, and under-reported about Iraq today, is that even as the central political structures struggle to deal with the pressures of meeting arbitrary external timetables while simultaneously engaging in the messy democratic process of clashing political egos and posturing for power and prestige, is that the “grass-roots” process of reconciliation is quietly making great strides in the background.
Evidence of this is found in the dramatic turnaround of al-Anbar with the Anbar Awakening movement, where local Sunni tribal leaders are now turning against the al-Qaeda insurgents, and in the process, seeking the assistance and cooperation of both US and Iraqi security forces and Iraqi government, against whom they had themselves been fighting only a year ago.
The difference just a few months makes.
Elements of this success are rapidly spreading to other provinces, as local leaders are contacting Iraqi officials and US liason officers asking how they might create their own local “Awakening” movement.
Tensions and mis-trust between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds still run high. What is happening, according to Frederick Kagan, a former West Point professor of military history now with the American Enterprise Institute http://aei.org , is that while Sunni, Shia, and Kurds still dis-trust each other, they increasingly trust the United States.
US forces and diplomats in Iraq, Kagan says, are acting as an important “bridge” for local reconciliation and cooperation between the factions, even as they now simultaneously serve as an effective deterrent to keep the sides apart.
Kagan says that it is no accident that recent Shiite response to ongoing al-Qaeda provocations has been much milder than it was a year ago after the first bombing of the Golden Mosque in Sammara. To get at each other, each side must now go through the much larger, better trained, and more determined combined US and Iraqi security forces.
The result of this increased security, continues Kagan, is that both sides are now able to feel more “comfortable” making concessions – an important precondition to lasting reconciliation.
In short, Kagan’s message is that while national leaders continue their much-publicized posturing, local leaders are slowly venturing out across that “bridge”, making their way slowly toward cooperative arrangements of real, grass-roots (rather than imposed from the top-down) local and regional reconciliation.
Speaking at a recent symposium sponsored by the AEI, retired general Jack Keane pointed out that the objective of the troop “surge” was a significant change in strategy from the pre-2007 strategy.
The pre-2007 strategy, says Keane, is the strategy currently being promoted by many Democrats as a future “alternative” to a primary combat role for US troops. From 2003 to 2006, the role of the US military was primarily to train the Iraqi security forces as quickly as possible to take over the security needs of the provinces. Very little if any effort was actually given to “clear and hold” counter-insurgency operations.
The result was that the violence increased faster than the newly-trained and inexperienced forces could learn to deal with it.
The 2007 “surge” strategy on the other hand, says Keane, is to continue the task of training a competent and combat-ready Iraqi security force, including police, while at the same time “tamping down” and disrupting the insurgent activities to the point where Iraqi forces can take over, and stay ahead of the curve.
While both acknowledging the practical challenges of sustaining current force levels for periods much longer than the currently-planned “surge” end of April ‘08, Keane and Kagan agree that abrupt dramatic force reductions that are seen as the US “abandoning” Iraq, rather than a gradual handing off of responsibility to a capable and successful Iraqi force, will have catastrophic results, both for Iraq, and for other US alliances and strategic interests.
While spectacular suicide attacks appear to be up slightly, mostly in the “softer” areas outside the surge operations area, Kagan points out that genuine intersectarian violence (other than that carried out by al-Qaeda or certain other extremist groups in an effort to incite reprisals) is down significantly.
The suicide attacks, Kagan says, are a distinct hallmark of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, says Kagan, is dominated by foreign fighters from outside Iraq.
This, combined with their extreme fanatacism, brutality, and extreme fundamentalist ideology, is a big part of what is turning an increasing number of Iraqi’s against them. Iraqi’s are in many cases now coming around to the view that al-Qaeda and similar extremist groups are an even greater threat to them than the so-called “infidel occupiers”, who really don’t threaten them at all.
So yes – in spite of the great wailing and gnashing of teeth up on the Hill, and in spite of all the efforts to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, things are not nearly as grim or as hopeless as many are being led to believe.
So go all weak-kneed and wobbly if that’s the best you can muster – but it’s not the time to be.
Ups and downs for sure – but getting better, every day.
