July 06, 2007
Trying To Get Beyond The Politics Of War
The reaction to yet another Republican defection from President Bush on Iraq says a couple of things about where we are on the war right now.
One: Politically, it is no longer possible to be openly optimistic about the war's outcome and be taken seriously. There may be pockets around the country where this does not hold but for the most part it seems true. The Democrats chanting for an exit out of Iraq no longer temper their remarks with the "I hope I'm wrong" caveat. The new conventional wisdom is that the war is no longer winnable.
That leaves Republican lawmakers who back the war but really want to be re-elected next year with one choice: stop backing the war. That isn't to say that changes of heart on the GOP side are all the result of cold, political calculation. Sens. John Warner, Richard Lugar and George Voinovich were skeptical about Bush's war strategy before it was politically popular to be.
Unfortunately for New Mexico's Pete Domenici, he wasn't.
Democrats in his state are calling the six-term senator's "U-turn" too little, too late. Sort of an odd welcome to the fold, considering war critics still don't have enough votes in Congress to affect the course of the war. Ownership over resistance to Bush on the war is also an issue within the Democratic Party, as illustrated by tensions between the WH 2008 front-runners over who first said they were against it and who apologized over their vote to authorize it.
Democrats have long railed against the Bush administration for putting civilians with little military experience -- i.e., Donald Rumsfeld -- in charge of the war. But the same is true for many top critics of the war, and in part explains why the Democratic-controlled Congress is nearly as unpopular as the commander in chief. More than two-thirds of Americans want a realistic exit strategy. So far, the only one on offer is the much-maligned "surge."
That brings us to the second point about the war: Like it or not, it is almost completely in the hands of American and Iraqi commanders on the ground. Having felt they were misled after the fall of Baghdad, Americans may distrust what Pentagon officials now say about the situation there. But something else is at play, too, which is that what commanders on the ground are saying is not what the public wants to hear.
For some time, military experts have quietly warned that U.S. troops will need to stay in Baghdad well beyond 2008. Quite a few Republicans are holding steady in their support of the war until at least September, when the top U.S. commander on the ground, Army Gen. David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, deliver a report on the war's progress to Congress. But Petraeus is expected to say that the new strategy, Operation Phantom Thunder, really only got started in June, and that he needs more time.
Last month, the New York Times reported that the administration has ordered additional reports on the situation that could give political cover for withdrawal. That does smack of calculation, and runs counter to the pleas of Petraeus and other top commanders to let them do their jobs.
U.S. commanders may have reason to hope. An assessment written by a key counterinsurgency adviser to Petraeus is making ripples in the Beltway. Pundits are seizing on it as an I-told-you-so rebuttal of withdrawal advocates, which is why it's worth the time to read it yourself.
The writer is David Kilcullen, an Australian military expert who is now serving as the senior counterinsurgency advisor to Multi-National Force-Iraq. In a post to Small Wars Journal, a blog founded by ex-Marines and one of the go-to guides for a strategic view of Iraq, Kilcullen lays out in plain English the wherefores of ongoing operations there.
Many Americans have written off the "surge" strategy, but they have also been living with the idea of it since January, when it was first announced. "On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces," Kilcullen writes. "As General [Raymond] Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual 'surge of operations.' I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing."
(Odierno, the U.S. ground forces commander, announced late last month that the build-up to the full, anti-insurgency operation was complete. Unfortunately for him, the news cycle was all about Paris Hilton.)
While Bush continues to say that the point of current operations is to defeat "the enemy" so that they don't follow U.S. troops home, what that actually translates to is cutting al-Qaida in Iraq off at the knees to give Sunnis and Shiites space to work out a collaborative government. Terrorists can't survive in a vacuum, and Kilcullen argues that creating zones of stability in Iraq is not only feasible, but will give Iraqis time to develop the ability to fight off terrorists on their own.
"Because [the terrorist] needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people," Kilcullen writes. "And he can't just 'go quiet' to avoid that threat. He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base."
Kilcullen purposely declines to say whether he thinks the strategy is working or not. But if he can't make that assessment just yet, there's little to indicate anyone here in the U.S. could do better.
"It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way," he warns. "But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing."
(DOD photo by Sgt. Tierney Nowland, U.S. Army.)
Posted at 3:44 PM
Posted to:
Al-Qaida, Bush Administration, Campaigns, Congress, David Petraeus, Democrats, Iraq, Middle East, Military, President Bush, Terrorism, WH 2008
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