Joe Conason: The Illusion of Progress in Iraq

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/15/3859/

The Illusion of Progress in Iraq
by Joe Conason


Following two days of carefully staged theatrics on Capitol Hill and cable television, the essential facts about Iraq remain unchanged. Despite the big charts and the blustering fanfare highlighted by Fox News, neither Gen. David H. Petraeus nor Ambassador Ryan Crocker could convincingly claim that the American military escalation in Iraq is achieving its original goals.

Having assured us last spring that we would learn by September whether the so-called “surge” is a success according to those benchmarks, the general and the diplomat now ask us to disregard the original measures, look elsewhere for wisps of hope, and give the Bush plan still another six months.

By then, of course, there will not be enough troops available to continue the escalation. While Petraeus sought to portray the eventual withdrawal of several brigades as the result of “success,” the truth is that the Army, Marines and National Guard will soon reach the breaking point.

Meanwhile, our soldiers and Marines remain mired in a slow-moving civil war whose casualties can be measured not only in the dead and wounded but in the dispossessed, by the hundreds of thousands. Where the Pentagon claims that measurable violence has diminished, especially in Baghdad, the underlying reason is often that either Shia or Sunni families have been forced to flee by death squads or militias.

Rather than confront the dismal facts on the ground, both Petraeus and Crocker predictably emphasized a more uplifting assessment from recent developments in Anbar Province. The ambassador had no choice but to confess his deep “frustration” over the Iraqi government’s daily failures, yet professed to find hope in the Anbar experience and the Iraqi government’s response.

snip//

“I frankly do not expect that we are going to see rapid progress through these benchmarks,” admitted the ambassador. “It is important to remind ourselves that the benchmarks are not an end to themselves; they are a means to national reconciliation. And I think it is very important that we maintain a sense of tactical flexibility and encourage the Iraqis to do the same, to seize opportunities to advance national reconciliation when they arise, as we have seen in Anbar and as we have seen in the government’s response to Anbar, through distributing additional budget resources to this province and bringing in its young men into security forces. So while I would certainly share disappointment that progress has been slow on legislative benchmarks, that, to my mind, does not mean there has been no progress toward reconciliation. There has been.”

In other words, we must forget about all the agreed benchmarks, gaze instead upon a contrived tableau of reconciliation in a single province, and pretend to see progress.

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. Iraq is the biggest debacle of my lifetime. BUMP!

[Igel]

2. Neither " could convincingly claim that the (surge) is achieving its original goals."

Back in June and July I thought this was a problem.

But in late August I changed my mind. Pardon the excursus on a similar but different matter.

It's been claimed that Arab countries could not make peace with Israel until 1974--Egypt, in particular--because to do so would have involved accepting the humiliation of only having lost. As an Irmanji column put it, when you're losing and humiliated you can't make peace, and when you're winning and proud there's no reason to make peace. This makes little sense in Enlightenment terms; but it makes sense if your culture is based on honor (and not the 20th century Western idea of 'honor', at that).

Now, one problem in Iraq is that the Kurds have honor. They held off Saddam. They resolved their internal controversies in the '90s.

The Shi'a have honor. They're in charge. They've kicked the Sunnis out of government, out of the army, and damned near out of Baghdad. The humiliated the Sunnis defender and standard bearer. There are factions among the Shi'a to be dealt with, to be sure, each struggling for ultimate power, with slightly different ideas about how to finally restore Shi'ite honor and defend it. The longer the problem goes on, the stronger the factions seem to grow.

But the Sunnis are still, probably, the crucial problem. They're humiliated. They have no honor as it stands, and deeply resent the loss of honor they had: Many believe themselves a majority, to aggravate their dishonor. They choose to believe that non-Sunnis are at the heart of their problems, that Saddam was a good man (if only because he was a Sunni).

Perhaps the Sunnis are like the Egyptians. They need a victory of some sort to elevate them in what they believe to be others' estimation, but which is also certainly their own. By having them 'stand up' in Anbar and Diyala and other places, they may be able to gain the 'honor' necessary to allow them to strike a deal, and to give them some respect even among the Shi'ite.