September 07, 2007

Bush Says We're 'Kicking Ass' In Iraq. Discuss.

That the commander in chief and military leaders must keep an upbeat tone about a war in which thousands of Americans have died is understandable. But this particular commander in chief certainly has a way of sticking his foot in it.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, when asked by Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile how the president's recent trip to Iraq went, Bush responded, "We're kicking ass."

Bush, of course, is in Australia for the APEC summit, far from the eyes and ears of Beltway reporters gearing up for next week's Iraq report from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Whether the U.S. actually is "kicking ass" in Iraq is clearly debatable: Next week, Petraeus and Crocker are expected to validate Bush's "surge" strategy on the heels of two independent reports that find little payoff from efforts to transition Iraq into an independently functional democracy.

Pentagon officials told the New York Times that Petraeus has indicated he would be willing to withdraw about 4,000 troops early next year. The largely symbolic gesture is a nod to growing pressure in Congress for the White House to get results or get out of Iraq.

Petraeus has said all along that political progress is the missing key to the Iraq puzzle. The ultimate goal of the surge was to dampen violence long enough for Iraq's leaders to come to some kind of working arrangement. In a letter to his troops [PDF] obtained by the Washington Post, Petraeus concedes that in that sense, the surge "has not worked out as we had hoped."

Not only has political progress proved frustratingly elusive, it's looking more impossible by the day. The warring Shiite and Sunni factions are in the fight of their lives. So long as the iron curtain that divides them in Parliament remains, there will be no centralized government.

In May, an adviser to Petraeus laid out a bleak assessment of sectarian violence in Iraq. Foreign policy experts Brian Katulis and Ilan Goldenberg yesterday described similar trending toward a civil war.

Both contended that the numbers the Pentagon uses in its claim that overall violence is decreasing are faulty, because DOD doesn't include Sunni-on-Sunni or Shiite-on-Shiite violence. In addition, "When defining sectarian and ethnosectarian violence, they don't count people who get shot from the front. This is selective cherry-picking," Goldenberg said.

The lawlessness in Iraq was in some ways the doing of the U.S. military, he added: "In an ironic twist, we've armed all sides. We've created a situation where genocide is not likely because everyone has a gun."

Where U.S. troops appear to be actually "kicking ass," of course, is in Anbar province, which everyone is fully aware of because the White House has been trumpeting it for so long. But the Sunni tribes basically picked the U.S. over al-Qaida, which wanted to enforce no-smoking, no-drinking Sharia law on them. There are hardly any Shiites in Anbar to inflame further tensions.

It took Bush three years to admit that his "Bring 'em on" invitation to Iraqi insurgents was probably a mistake. His latest declaration of success in Iraq is sure to invite more snickering, but for the sake of Iraqis and U.S. troops, there is probably more hope that he's right.

PDFs of the report by the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq can be found here, here, here and here.

(White House photo by Eric Draper)

Posted at 5:00 PM
Posted to: Bush Administration, David Petraeus, Iraq, Middle East, Military, President Bush
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