Right Wing Nut House

You’ve probably seen that headline a half dozen other places. Everyone and their mother feels a compulsion to tell us what the addition of 30,000 US troops and a modest change in strategy (along with, perhaps, a more competent commanding general?) means for the immediate and long term future of Iraq.

Have you noticed that no one seems to be able to agree on anything? Are US troop fatalities down, up, or relatively unchanged? Take your pick. How about Iraqi civilian casualties? Ditto. “I hear you can walk through the streets of Ramadi without body armor.” Yeah, but don’t lose your military escort. The Brits bug out of Basra thus securing one third of the country for the militias and their patrones in Iran. “Yeah, but Basra isn’t part of the surge, ya know?” Perhaps. Praytell, how do we intend to recapture that rather large slice of Iraq from al-Sadr and the Badr Organization not to mention keep Iran’s grubby mitts out of Iraqi politics??

I don’t know if American casualties are down. I surely hope they are. I don’t know if civilian casualties have dropped significantly. Looking at the big picture, it hardly matters. Iraqis are still being found in the streets of Baghdad with holes drilled through their heads or worse, no heads at all. And Iraqi families are still hearing knocks on the door in the middle of the night telling them they have 15 minutes to pack up and leave as the de facto partition of the country into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish enclaves continues apace - surge or no surge.

No one is denying al-Qaeda is on the run although they seem quite able to set off mass casualty car and truck bombs whenever they want to garner headlines and goose the left in this country into another round of “I told you the surge wasn’t working” Bush bashing. It is one thing to be duped into falling into the enemy’s propaganda trap. But it is quite another to use al-Qaeda’s PR strategy and knowingly incorporate it into your domestic political critiques of your opponent. That is just one of the amazingly ignorant and dangerously naive components of the left’s strategy to counter any and all good news coming out of Iraq.

And then we have the hilariously ironic spectacle of the left using body counts to justify withdrawal. It was an article of faith for the left during the Viet Nam War that body counts didn’t mean anything, that they were used by the military to justify continuing the war. My how times have changed, no? Today, it is an article of faith on the left that we should leave Iraq because of the body counts.

Of course, this kind of deliciously corrupt irony is totally lost on the left. In order to appreciate irony, one must be capable of introspection. And as we all know, the left don’t do introspection. Such things as self examination may lead to an emotional and intellectual crisis as the riot of conceits that make up modern American liberalism with all of its contradictions and hypocrisy could very well cause a short circuit somewhere between their brains and their mouths - if there hasn’t been such a breakdown already.

Fred Kagan believes that not only is the surge working but that Bush’s visit to Anbar yesterday was a “Gettysburg” moment - a hinge of history, so to speak, a turning point. While I will grant that the article makes some cogent and encouraging points about the Sunni “awakening,” as is Kagan’s wont, he glosses over some of the more troubling aspects of the strategy of arming Sunnis who just a few months ago were trying to kill us in order to fight al-Qaeda.

For instance, Kagan’s thesis is that this “bottom up” reconciliation will work because it is in the self interest of all parties involved that it happen. Ditto the reason Sunnis won’t suddenly turn on their new found American friends and blast them with the weapons with which we have recently armed them.

But that “self interest” argument can be a trap as well. Who’s to say that in the near future, the Sunnis wouldn’t believe it in their own interest to start killing Americans again? There could be an “incident” that sets them off or perhaps the realization that we are facilitating a permanent division of Iraq into 3 slices - something that may become a reality with or without our blessing. Or the Democrats could win the argument in Congress and yank the troops just as they are starting to do some good, something that might be seen as a betrayal by the Sheiks who have laid their lives on the line by almost certainly going against the wishes of many younger men in their tribes and making common cause with the Americans against al-Qaeda.

There are a half dozen reasons why the Sunnis would find it in their “self interest” to begin taking pot shots at Americans again. Kagan dismisses this with a wave of his magic wand and the bland assurance that this is a permanent change in Sunni behavior. I certainly hope he’s right. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, once again, Kagan is proven to be wrong.

So that part of the surge’s success may be ephemeral. And I think that the idea of a “bottom up” reconciliation is also a mirage. It doesn’t hurt, mind you. But only a strong central government can save Iraq from its own stupidities and hate. Kagan points eagerly to the 2009 parliamentary elections and believes that it will be at that point that the unreasonable Sunni and Shia politicians in Baghdad will go down to ignominious defeat to be replaced by level headed democrats. Don’t count on it.

The Shia religious parties have the power and will fight to keep it. There may be more Sunni representation after the next election but probably not enough to form a coalition with secularists and take control of the legislature. The Kurds have already cast their lot with the Shias, seeing in them the quickest way to independence - perhaps cynically believing that the Shias will so alienate the Sunnis that the partition of Iraq will become a foregone conclusion. At any rate, it is unlikely that the Kurds would ally themselves with their former oppressors.

None of this has anything much to do with answering the question of whether the surge is “working” or not. Petreaus has cleverly kept the goals of the surge limited. The Congress and White House have added all the bells and whistles having to do with political benchmarks and the like. This probably means that Petreaus can go before Congress and show that the surge is working but that the political questions involving reconciliation have a long way to go.

Petreaus deserves every day of funding that Congress can give him to continue what he is doing in the Sunni provinces. As for the rest - Baghdad and the south - there really isn’t much to be done. The entrenched nature of the sectarian conflict in Baghdad is probably beyond our military to deal with - even with the additional troops. This would seem to indicate that the Iraqis themselves will have to sort out the situation. And given the sectarian nature of the Iraqi government, I would not be very encouraged if I were a Sunni living in Baghdad.

The political argument over whether the surge is “working” or not has degenerated into a food fight of facts and figures, each side using whatever charts and graphs showing progress or lack thereof as if by inundating us with numbers and arrows and decimal points, some magic truth will emerge and one side or the other will “win” the argument. This is so much bullsh*t. My 5 year old nephew can make facts and figures say pretty much whatever he wants them to say. The ultimate question, as always, is do we stay or do we go?

Given the alternatives, it seems that the Iraq tar baby has us firmly in its grasp. And there isn’t a big enough briar patch in all the Middle East to save us.