In Iraq- Too Little, Too Late?

That seems to me to be the big question surrounding our efforts in Iraq. I was waiting, I kept an as much of an open mind I think for the President's speech last night. I was not keen on the idea of a troop surge, but I was open to it if I heard a case for it's success- a military case. Instead, after listening last night, reading the proposal (see here), seeing the analysts speak, watching Peter Pace and Bob gates testify today...I come away thinking...what a shame. What a shame we lacked the courage to really see this through. What a difference-maker it could have been, and what a disaster our policy has been to this point. We suffered a failure of will, failure of planning, and a failure of leadership most of all.

The Bush administration knew if they leveled with the American people up front about what it would take, what it would cost, and how long a commitment this would be they could never have gotten the initial support to go into Iraq. So, they didn't. They told us it would pay for itself through oil revenues, that we would be greeted as liberators, that we could do the job with a smaller force, and that the weapons of mass destruction made it imperative that we do this and do it now. (You know this, you're sick of hearing it.) Instead, we tried to do it on the cheap, using just enough troops and resources to lose. The plans were already on the shelf, asking for 400-500 thousand troops. There was a Bush I plan, a Clinton plan, and an initial Bush II plan. All of the above asked for many more troops (see Cobra II, Fiasco, et cetera for more on this) for the occupation phase, not the invasion phase. The Clinton-era plan, I recall, called for over 120,000 troops in the Anbar province alone . Yet instead, thanks to Rumsfeld's hubris, Bush's ignorance, and a Republican party for the most part too willing to play politics with this rather than try to win, we went in with far too few troops to begin with.

Hence, we did not keep law and order. We never had a monopoly on the use of force. We did not restore services to pre-war levels fast enough (now, thanks to the ongoing civil war, these levels have fallen back to way below pre-war status). We allowed weapons caches to be looted, and these same taken explosives are used still every day against our troops. All the while, we heard that freedom is messy, that the insurgency was in it's last throes, and that our Mission was Accomplished. We had just enough troops to lose, just enough to make us targets without enough to really stomp out the insurgency. And here again, we suffered from a lack of political will among the politicians- this time within Iraq.

Despite what the President said last night: "When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation" this never happened. This sentence struck me as surely he knows they did not cast votes for a unified, democratic nation. They cast their votes overwhelmingly along sectarian lines- and a country so divided yields a government so divided that even the army and police cannot be trusted- we hear they have been "infiltrated" by insurgents. The government restricts which groups get cracked down on, and which are allowed to flourish. Malaki is beholden to Moktada al-Sadr to stay in power, and hence al-Sadr- whom, you may recall, we wanted to eliminate at one point- has now become a power broker, and for some (hear the man on the videotape of Saddam's hanging) an alternative. When we say we are going to do something, and fail to follow through, we strengthen our opponents. We have unfortunately done this, again and again, in Iraq.

Having said all this, we are where we are. Iraq is a mess. It is, in the President's finally-getting-closer-to-reality words last night, an "unacceptable" situation which requires us to "change our strategy." Failure would have dramatic consequences for Iraq, the entire region, and all of our foreign policy. Those which favor an immediate pull-out have many questions to answer- and I rarely hear them address, let alone answer, these difficult questions.

What if we "re-deploy" to the horizon and watch as full-scale civil war breaks out, sucking in factions from all across the Middle East. Do we sit idly by while the region engulfs itself in a giant proxy fight to determine which nation, which sect, will be the power center of the Middle East? Can even those governments nominally friendly to us really sit idly by and watch Iran's influence grow? Will we stand by and watch the slaughter of innocents by the millions, ignore a refugee crisis that could be as bad as the Cambodian killing fields?

But what if we stay? How long do we need? How many troops do we need? Can we raise them from our existing forces? The Joint Chiefs are already saying we're near the breaking point. What (and what a shame I still have to ask) constitutes victory? How do we know when we're done? What benchmarks do we have?

I hate how much we are dependent on the Iraqis in order to have any kind of success over there. Obviously, it's their country, so we need them, but I have no trust in a Maliki government which has been thus far unable or unwilling to make the hard choices and make political solutions that stick. Look at this list of tasks for the Iraqis taken from the White House fact sheet about "The New Way Forward":

Security:

* Publicly acknowledge all parties are responsible for quelling sectarian violence.
* Work with additional Coalition help to regain control of the capital and protect the Iraqi population.
* Deliver necessary Iraqi forces for Baghdad and protect those forces from political interference.
* Commit to intensify efforts to build balanced security forces throughout the nation that provide security even-handedly for all Iraqis.
* Plan and fund eventual demobilization program for militias.

Political:

* The Government of Iraq commits to:
o Reform its cabinet to provide even-handed service delivery.
o Act on promised reconciliation initiatives (oil law, de-Baathification law, Provincial elections).
o Give Coalition and ISF authority to pursue ALL extremists.
* All Iraqi leaders support reconciliation.
* Moderate coalition emerges as strong base of support for unity government.

It all sounds great, right? But are these things really attainable? What evidence is there besides the Administration's suggestions that we have the Iraqis' buy-in for these things? The Bush administration assures us that "this time is different" suggesting that Maliki has had a Come-to-Jesus (Come-to-Allah?) meeting and he knows it's now or never. Yet, is this enough to know that they are willing to do this right now and continue through the next few months in order to give our surge some efficacy. We need to all be working in concert on these various fronts or the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. The Administration and it's supporters frequently claim no political settlement is possible in the prevailing atmosphere of violence pervading Iraq. But without the political process, and at least a promise of better days to come, what is the incentive for insurgents to lay down their arms? There must be carrots as well as sticks, and the rewards are sorely lacking form the White House's proposal.

I wonder cynically if all this specific emphasis on the Iraqis contribution in designed to merely stick them with the blame in case of failure. I hear Bush sympathisers already saying things along of, as Charles Krauthammer put it back in November: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it." But we did not hand them a republic, we never "had" it to give to them in the first place. We broke the country, watched it divide along sectarian lines, watched violence increase, watched insurgents and terrorists gain strength, and were unable to stop it. What we "gave" them was a non-traditional civil war, one not even limited by the borders of their "country." (Fareed Zakaria, on the mark as usual, responds here along the same vein.) I sense a day coming up where Bush attempts to evade responsibility with the model of, "Well, they needed to do A,B, and C by X, Y, and Z and they failed so we're out of here." The mess they, and we, are in now was tragically foreseeable, and it has been made unconscionably worse by our own incompetence and ignorance.

However, having said all this, I am forced to reluctantly support this latest troop surge as a final attempt to succeed in Iraq. I'm filled with anger at this awful position our nation is in. As I watched Bush speak last week, I scribbled down "How did we get here? God, how did we get here." I wish we had a better president. I wish it was more troops; I wish it was not such a staggered deployment; I wish we were really going all out to win. As we say in sports, "Go Big or Go Home!" This is part of the doctrine that was once known for General Alexander Haig, then Colin Powell. When we must use our military: use overwhelming force, have clearly defined objectives, and have an exit strategy. In Iraq, we still (maddeningly, still!) have none of these. However we do have so much invested in blood, treasure, in thousands of American troops and their families physically and emotionally scarred. My hopes rest with this new direction to try and make some part of their sacrifice not a vain or empty one.

In all the reading I've done, Gen. David Petraeus (for more, see here or here), our new commander over there stands out as a man of courage and conviction. He is somewhat of a warrior-scholar, learned in the classroom, tested in the field. I'm hoping he can pull a rabbit out of his hat along with those brave thousands of men and women and their families who have paid such a price. I pray this mission can succeed, and our troops can come home and leave behind a free and stable Iraq. If this latest escalation fails, it is time to begin the redeployment out; to mourn our dead and wounded; and to learn these sad lessons of failed wars and failed leadership all over again.