John McCain repeatedly returned to the theme on Iraq: "the surge is working. We are winning."
Really? What are we winning? And, is the surge really working?
General Petraeus-- who McCain must have referred to a million times-- acknowledges that the progress in Iraq is very fragile. If any will take the time to read Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War", you will begin to understand exactly what "fragile" looks like: it is a piece of green intestine hanging from a tree, or a pair of feet in their boots disconnected from its body, or the severed heads of suicide bombers in the gutter still wearing a look of surprise. Or, war orphans brutalized by surviving adults who may or may not be family.
If the surge is working, it still looks like this.
Fragile, scarcely describes how Iraq is shattered. When McCain says "we are winning"; what are we winning?
Obama should insist on an answer: what exactly are we winning because our misadventure there does not incorporate any victory except in the sense that we have learned to play tribal politics and used bribes to buy the peace in certain sections of the country. But in other places, ethnic cleansing is the rule of order.
To the extent the surge is working, it is because American soldiers have turned into neighborhood cops: is this a sustainable mission for the US military?
Perhaps Obama doesn't want to say, "we are making enemies faster than we can kill them", because it sounds too flip. But it is true.
There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded. There were no Syrian and Saudi and Sudanese jihadists in Iraq, until we invaded. Violence may have decreased but it is still unacceptably high; and, just like in Vietnam, we increasingly rely on statistics that are impossible to verify or ground-truth because it is too dangerous for reporters to venture into many, many parts of the country.
Obama should help the public reflect on the last time we said that we were winning "the hearts and minds" of a nation we had invaded. In Vietnam, too, Americans deluded themselves into thinking victory was in our grasp, when the real motivation for staying in Vietnam was politicians who would not acknowledge their mistakes had cost this nation irreplaceable treasure.
John McCain says he knows what it is like to lose a war, but when he was fighting that war, our nation told voters we were winning.
11 comments:
Are we not also bribing people in Iraq to help us look good:
"It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime’s lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the "surge" is working.
Launched last year, the "surge" was the extra 20,000-30,000 US troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.
This claim never made any sense. The extra troops didn’t raise the total number of US soldiers to more than one-third the number every expert has said is necessary in order to successfully occupy Iraq.
The real purpose of the "surge" was to hide another deception. The Bush regime is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack US forces. That’s right, 80,000 members of an "Awakening group," the "Sons of Iraq," a newly formed "US-allied security force" consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack US troops. Allegedly, the Sons of Iraq are now at work fighting al Qaeda."
Also this is going on:
"... as Iraqis and American officials assess the effects of this year’s American troop increase, there is a growing sense that, even as security has improved, Iraq has slipped to new depths of lawlessness."
the first quote was from:
Paul Craig Roberts who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Gimlet-we are curious, have you been to Iraq? Have you seen first hand what is going on over there? Or are you just taking what you read and see in the liberal media?
My cousin is stationed in Iraq, what do you wnt to know reader?
I didn't think so....
This is right from Dexter Filkins mouth---
"Well, this is something I actually do feel strongly about. I wasn’t sure that the surge
would work, but I thought it was worth a try. I felt we owed to the Iraqis. We toppled
Saddam, after all, and we made so many mistakes in the aftermath that helped send the
country into its tailspin. By late 2006, the country was headed toward the abyss. So I
thought we owed to the Iraqis to stick it out and get it right. And it’s worked–at least for
the time being. The violence is down dramatically. I’m in Iraq right now and the changes
are just extraordinary. I can barely recognize the place."
Gimleteye writes:
Like most Americans, I gather information on Iraq from a wide variety of sources. I have read, as I mentioned in my earlier post on Dexter Filkins' excellent new book-- The Forever War. I urge every reader of this blog to go out and get a copy. Other fine books: The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind; The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer; Fiasco, The American Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks and Cobra II by Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor. I count among friends, journalists and contractors who either have worked or who are working in Iraq now. In addition to reading widely, I draw my experience from our involvement in Vietnam and its record; not the least of which was organized anger against the "liberal" media. Its a felonious charge leveled by people who are too fearful or angry to face facts. History may not always repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Independent.co.uk
Iraq: Violence is down – but not because of America's 'surge'
If fewer US troops and Iraqis are being killed, it is only because the Shia community and Iran now dominate
By Patrick Cockburn
Sunday, 14 September 2008
As he leaves Iraq this week, the outgoing US commander, General David Petraeus, is sounding far less optimistic than the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, about the American situation in Iraq. General Petraeus says that it remains "fragile", recent security gains are "not irreversible" and "this is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not a war with a simple slogan."
Compare this with Sarah Palin's belief that "victory in Iraq is wholly in sight" and her criticism of Barack Obama for not using the word "victory". The Republican contenders have made these claims of success for the "surge" – the American reinforcements sent last year – although they are demonstrably contradicted by the fact that the US has to keep more troops, some 138,000, in Iraq today than beforehand. Another barometer of the true state of security in Iraq is the inability of the 4.7 million refugees, one in six of the population, who fled for their lives inside and outside Iraq, to return to their homes.
Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world. On Friday a car bomb exploded in the Shia market town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, killing 32 people and wounding 43 others. "The smoke filled my house and the shrapnel broke some of the windows," said Hussein al-Dujaili. "I went outside the house and saw two dead bodies at the gate which had been thrown there by the explosion. Some people were in panic and others were crying."
Playing down such killings, the Iraqi government and the US have launched a largely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that "things are better" in Iraq and that life is returning to normal. One Iraqi journalist recorded his fury at watching newspapers around the world pick up a story that the world's largest Ferris wheel was to be built in Baghdad, a city where there is usually only two hours of electricity a day.
Life in Baghdad certainly is better than it was 18 months ago, when some 60 to 100 bodies were being found beside the roads every morning, the victims of Sunni-Shia sectarian slaughter. The main reason this ended was that the battle for Baghdad in 2006-07 was won by the Shia, who now control three-quarters of the capital. These demographic changes appear permanent; Sunni who try to get their houses back face assassination.
In Mosul, Iraq's northern capital and third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, the government was trumpeting its success only a few months ago. It said it had succeeded in driving al-Qa'ida from the city, while the US said the number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July. But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. Two weeks ago, insurgents came close to killing Major-General Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, with a roadside bomb.
The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air. When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America's military adventure there is finally coming good.
An important reason for this optimism is the fall in the number of American soldiers killed. (The 30,000 US soldiers wounded in Iraq are seldom mentioned.) This has happened because the war that was being waged against the American occupation by the Sunni community, the 20 per cent of Iraqis who were in control under Saddam Hussein, has largely ended. It did so because the Sunni were being defeated, not so much by the US army as by the Shia government and the Shia militias.
Sunni insurgent leaders who were nationalists or Baathists realised that they had too many enemies. Not only was al-Qa'ida trying to take over from traditional tribal leaders, it was also killing Sunni who took minor jobs with the government. The Awakening, or al-Sahwa, movement of Sunni fighters was first formed in Anbar province at the end of 2006, but it was allied to the US, not the Iraqi government. This is why, despite pressure from General Petraeus, the government is so determined not to give the 99,000 al-Sahwa members significant jobs in the security forces when it takes control of – and supposedly begins to pay – these Sunni militiamen from 1 October. The Shia government may be prepared to accommodate the Sunni, but not at the cost of diluting Shia dominance.
If McCain wins the presidential election in November, his lack of understanding of what is happening in Iraq could ignite a fresh conflict. In so far as the surge has achieved military success, it is because it implicitly recognises America's political defeat in Iraq. Whatever the reason for President George Bush's decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, it was not to place the Shia Islamic parties in power and increase the influence of Iran in the country; yet that is exactly what has happened.
The surge only achieved the degree of success it did because Iran, which played a central role in getting Nouri al-Maliki appointed Prime Minister in 2006, decided to back his government fully. It negotiated a ceasefire between the Iraqi government and the powerful movement of Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra, persuading the cleric to call his militiamen off the streets there, in March and again two months later in the Sadrist stronghold of Sadr City. It is very noticeable that in recent weeks the US has largely ceased its criticism of Iran. This is partly because of American preoccupation with Russia since the fighting began in Georgia in August, but it is also an implicit recognition that US security in Iraq is highly dependant on Iranian actions.
General Petraeus has had a measure of success in Iraq less because of his military skills than because he was one of the few American leaders to have some understanding of Iraqi politics. In January 2004, when he was commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, I asked him what was the most important piece of advice he could give to his successor. He said it was "not to align too closely with one ethnic group, political party, tribe, religious group or social element". But today the US has no alternative but to support Mr Maliki and his Shia government, and to wink at the role of Iran in Iraq. If McCain supposes the US has won a military victory, and as president acts as if this were true, then he is laying the groundwork for a new war.
Gimleteye, you are so not like most Americans. Don't sell the other's so high. Most Americans have no clue what is happening. This blog has been all over the county housing and mortgage schemes for a long time and you get four or five comments. If only more Americans would take an active interest in something besides what they can get at somebody's expense.
Maybe that is what the election is all about anyway. We have an experienced American Senator who this week was featured in an advertisement by Howard Dean's brother considering his mortality due to melanoma, this is what the election means. Of course the amateur cable network called MSNBC pulled it after running it for two days.
Now do you think anyone is going to talk about Donald Young, Larry Sinclair, Beau Biden or Barack Obama in an advertisement anywhere? Go to CUIL.com or google and search those three names with the ONE, maybe you will learn more about Obama as you have with Iraq.
Last anonymous, with McCain we get a rightwing, creationist, know nothing who will be a heartbeat away from the presidency. I would rather have Obama any day. McCain killed his chances with anyone with a brain.
I'm crazy curious why Obama is holding back from hitting McCain hard. Frankly, the debate left me feeling worse about the whole damn election. McCain seemed practically senile and Obama sounded like a recording of all his speeches and ads spun all together. Does anyone have any freaking balls in DC anymore? We are looking at repeating the Great Depression and it's politics as usual.Obama should be miles ahead of McCain on the economic situation alone, yet he's not. He'd better amp it up, new politics or not, he has got to show some muscle here soon or we're going to be looking at the liarest of liars and his idiot VP for the next 4 years.
miaexile:
I too thought Obama was softer than he should have been during the debate but he must know something we all don't. He seems to be running a campaign that is working -- his poll numbers are up. Maybe by laying low, not being too agressive and not dissing too many people -- playing it safe -- is the better way to go. It worked against Hillary and it is working against McCain. He treats the Palin woman as if she is a non entity. He is doing what Democrats on the street don't want him to do and it is working (so much for listening to Democrats).
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