The Three Stooges speak

This little op-ed by McCain, Lieberman and Graham, the three BFFs of campaign 08, couldn't be a more transparent, self-serving attempt at political positioning, but you know what? I don't care.

Fine. The surge worked. They're vindicated. Great. Let's declare victory and get the hell out of Baghdad. Whatever it takes to bring our troops home.

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]

War is over (If you want it)

Shorter Insty: Yon called. We won the war. Everybody says so. And Obama and Biden are weenies for failing to acknowledge the great wisdom of teh mighty surge.

LAT: A sudden surge of attacks in Baghdad this week. 58 dead.

AP: 26 deadly bombings in the Baghdad this month, as of Wednesday, compared with 28 for all of October and 22 in September. At least 102 people were killed this month in the capital, compared with 95 for October and 96 in September, according to the AP count.

Military spokesman: "I think they're going into a political period in this country. With the power struggle ... there will be an increase in attacks."

Instaputz: This all sounds so familiar.

Me: Deep sigh.

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]

Behind the walls of Baghdad

By Libby

Crooks & Liars posts a video series that takes us to the streets in Baghdad where the elite media are unable to go for fear of being shot on sight. A Guardian journalist, who is also a native Iraqi, returns to his home and finds the 'success' of the surge is not what it's cracked up to be. Watch it in full. It's under 15 minutes long in total.



Part Two: The Killing Fields.

Part Three: The Lost Generation.

Horrifying. It looks more like a living hell than peace and normalcy to me.

Update: After watching the videos, this Petraeus subordinate sounds overly optimistic, don't you think?

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

Cementing the picture on Iraq

By Libby

Sully posts a letter from the dad of an army officer who notes that Baghdad is now a city of walled-in neighborhoods and the government is a joke from the clueless national ministers to the local warlords who are bleeding the reconstruction funds to line their own pockets and consolidate their tribal power. Picture your own city looking like this.

I later had the opportunity to discuss this with my son and he fleshed out the point about the neighborhoods being walled off. He told me that there are 17 feet high cement barriers at the end of every street separating manageable neighborhoods. There are checkpoints to control ingress and egress to each neighborhood. Citizens are not able to lead ordinary lives. The joke among officers over there is that in order to show further "progress" the troops will have to circle EVERY house.

Shamanic already covered this story at Newshoggers and comes up with a plan to solve the violence in Iraq permanently. Refugee camps on the moon. Brilliant, and it would fit right in with Bush's stated desire to ramp up the NASA lunar explorations.

On a different note, a commenter at Jim Henley's place is waiting for a "map of walled and fenced Baghdad in any major corp-media outlet." I'm wondering why some tech savvy blogger doesn't create one. I would think it would be fairly easy to do using the google satellite map widget and would surely be a picture worth the proverbial thousand words.

When you got money, you got lots of friends...

By Libby

I found this piece in the BBC rather cheering. It's good to read about peaceful days in Baghdad.

For the American soldiers patrolling Baghdad's southern suburb of Dora these are days of trial by tea. For in many houses they enter in this largely Sunni part of the city, hot sweet tea is offered and they know that refusal can offend.

It does not stop at tea either. As a goodwill gesture, the soldiers have taken to buying roast chicken, cheese, bread, and the Iraqi delicacy called samoun - bread dipped in sweet syrup - as they make their rounds of Dora. [...]

I have padded around this part of Dora for four days with Lt Carlisle and can report that this 25-year-old's job is now largely about dishing out money. This young officer from Wisconsin is supervising a $200,000 (£100,000) school project and numerous other contracts to get the local economy going again.

Nearby Dora market is thriving. Back in April when we visited, about 200 stall or shop owners were risking snipers and bombs to open for business. Now there are more than 1,000.

I can't help but think if we had been throwing money to the locals like this, instead of shooting bullets and dropping bombs, we could have avoided a whole lot of bloodshed over the last few years and by now a true and lasting peace might have taken hold in Iraq.

But I also can't help but hear another line in the song that inspired the title of this post, echo in my head. "When the money's gone and the good times and spending ends, they don't come round anymore." I wonder if we tried this too late, as we clearly can't sustain it much longer. No matter what our politicians say or pretend to do to direct policy, the troop levels will have to be reduced because we simply don't have enough soldiers. Will the peace hold when they're not there to drink tea and perhaps more importantly, was it worth it?

"None of this was worth the life of even one member of our platoon," Pt Mazzarella replied.

Now Pt Mazzarella has been there a long time and has seen too much death and violence in his short lifetime but "everybody in the platoon believes their success is fragile. It could all easily still go wrong." One can only hope, for all concerned, that this time we can beat the odds.

Success is just around the corner

By Libby

I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that the Bush administration has once again moved the goalposts on defining the sucess of the surge. Remember all those benchmarks the Iraqis had to reach or else we were leaving in six months? Well, forget those. We've got new ones. All they really have to do is promise not to kick us out before Bush leaves office so he can leave his godawful mess for the next president. Oh, and our new diplomatic mission is to 'help' the Iraqi government pass a budget. Which is pretty funny when you consider the GOP left office without passing one here.

Meanwhile, the success of the surge is becoming more difficult to sell. It didn't result in the promised political reconciliation. After causing an increase of violence with the escalation, they managed to reduce violence back to the levels it was when everyone was saying Iraq was lost. And even as Iraqi refugees are being forced to return home, the lull is already being broken with several major bombings in the last few days. As Thomas Ricks of the WaPo cautions, "Don't celebrate the turnaround in Iraq just yet.

Somehow it all reminds me of this.

Petraeus clueless

I'm working today, so I won't be posting much but I did finally briefly address the Petraeus report at Newshoggers this morning before I left. I actually don't have all that much more to say about it except that I think MoveOn is right. Petraeus has betrayed us.

I don't think it was so smart of them to blaze that as headline on a full page NYT ad, simply because it gives the wingnuts a straw man to knock down instead of having to confront the truth that Petraeus is effectively lying to us. Not that they would anyway, but let them create their own strawmen. MoveOn shouldn't be doing the work for them.

In any event, the notion that Saint Petraeus should be revered and unquestioned as some military savoir is ridiculous. He has proven by his actions that he is little more than a political hack willing to put his own troops into harm's way simply to cover for Bush's failure and to avoid having to admit the failure of his own strategy.

It's getting better all the time

by Capt Fogg

I'm no longer in that 18% who thinks Congress has enough good men in it to recommend that Yahweh not dispatch it to the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah. They did their best to make this all about how wonderful our troops are - it's not. They tried to make it about those nasty lefties making it a personal attack on the General - it's isn't. They tried to make it all about the left wing minority - it isn't and they're not a minority who think this "report" is not objective. They tried to make it all about standing up to an enemy and thereby keeping the respect of our allies - it isn't; the enemy is the people of a country who never attacked us and never sponsored "state terrorism." Our allies and our detractors haven't had any respect for us since we allowed the Commander Guy to call himself the President. In short they made it all about what they have been doing and saying day after day to those who question, who doubt and who are aware of the disparity between the official story and the story told by everyone else.

Petraeus says they want us there. Others say 70% want us out. Petraeus says the police and army are improving, others say they are totally ineffective and massively corrupt, some selling the weapons we provide on the black market. Petraeus says we can't get weapons to them fast enough. Others report that we have no idea who we gave them to and that they are turning up in the hands of insurgents in Turkey.

I'm past caring. America will do the stupid thing - we always do and when the piper presents his invoice we will spend generations rewriting history to protect the idiots - we always do. And then we'll do it again, using fake lessons from this debacle to justify another one. We always do.

Cross posted at Human Voices

Nothing to add

By Libby
Updated below

I have nothing to say on the Petraeus report today. John Cole has already written the ultimate post. Next lifetime I want to be able to do snark like this.

And by the way McQ, a lot of us wrote about this last week but everyone was on vacation so nobody read them. Or is the idea that no one is allowed an opinion if you've already expressed one to your own satisfaction?

Update: How do they find the posts so quickly?

Uh, no Libby ... you're welcome to express your opinion. It does help credibility though if it is an informed opinion. If you think John Cole's post is the ultimate word on the subject, that tells me just about all I need to know about how informed your opinion is.

I'm a little worried about McQ. He's seems unusually cranky today. I generally think of him as being more even-tempered.

Nowhere to run to...

By Libby

WaPo is running a series called Elusive Goals and this one on establishing security painted a bleak picture of life for the average Iraqi. This graf really set me off.

While statistics assessing the strife in Iraq are murky, one set -- unofficial Interior Ministry and morgue data provided to The Washington Post -- indicates that the number of Iraqis who died violently in August was less than half the number in January. The statistics echo the assertions of U.S. military officials that such deaths are down, although a Government Accountability Office report on Iraq released Tuesday said it was "not clear if sectarian violence has been reduced."

At the same time, the number of Iraqi corpses found dumped on street corners was higher in August than before the security offensive began and the number of Iraqis leaving their homes has increased significantly in recent months.

So in other words, they don't count the corpses as having died violent deaths because nobody saw them get killed? What? They just happened to die and their relatives left them on the street rather than bother with a funeral? Of all the things that bother me about this occupation, the failure to acknowledge the Iraqi war dead strikes me as one of the most egregious failings.

People speak of progress and success because the death toll drops from 1,500 to 1,000 a month as if the lower number isn't still a horrible atrocity. Worse yet, the dead may be the ones who have the best of it. At least they don't have to suffer the daily fear anymore or the indignity of being forced from their homes.

The military tells us the people are moving back into their neighborhoods as the surge establishes security. A local real estate agent calls out that lie.

"The security plan has failed in the neighborhoods. This is why they are moving," Thabit said. "I have not seen anyone moving back to their homes."

People are begging him for apartments in the few safer enclaves of Baghdad that are left after receiving death threats and worse. Yet Petreaus calls this signs of normal life. I'd call it anything but normal.

One Dem who gets it

By Libby

I've been waiting to see how the Democrats are going to respond to the PR blitz that has preceded the upcoming "Petraeus" report. This op-ed from Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland is encouraging.

Congress has the power to bring a responsible end to the Bush administration's failed policy. We should not approve another penny to continue that policy. Instead, we should use our constitutionally-mandated appropriations power to provide all the money necessary to fully fund the safe, timely and responsible redeployment of our troops and contractors from Iraq.

Last week, tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets in protests and vigils, calling on Congress to take a stand, and that is what we must do. The best way for us to do that is for members of Congress to commit to only providing funds for the safe, timely and responsible redeployment of our troops from Iraq.

Funny I didn't see any coverage of those protests in the "liberal" media, did you? It strikes me that this is the major difference between the protests of the Vietnam War era and now. The press used to cover it. They just ignore it now and instead fill the air with talking heads who have been defining failure as success and declare debacle as progress since the ill-fated invasion.

In any event, it's good to see at least one Dem with the guts to say the surge has failed. I hope we see a lot more of that.

The surge has failed - Dora Marketplace is a hoax

By Libby

Building on a post that I just put up at Newshoggers on how the surge has failed because, as we all agreed back in March, military gains are meaningless, let's look at this piece in the WaPo that expands on how illusionary even the military progress Petreaus and the White House PR team are touting really is, by analyzing the much ballyhooed resurgence of the market in Dora.

Even U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Petraeus's showcase remain skeptical. "Personally, I think it's a false representation," Campbell said, referring to the portrayal of the Dora market as an emblem of the surge's success. "But what can I say? I'm just doing my job and don't ask questions."

On the surface it might appear it's a small success. They met their goal of 300 shops reopened only a month later than the target date and by last count there are 349. Still shy of the goal of 500, and far short of the 850 shops that were there pre-invasion. But nonetheless, it's progress. Or is it?

Still, the Dora market is a Potemkin village of sorts. The U.S. military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses. The military has fixed windows and doors and even helped rebuild shops that had burned down, soldiers and others said.

Some shopkeepers said they would not do business in the market without U.S. support. "The Americans are giving money, so they're opening up stores," said Falah Hassan Fadhil, 27, who sells cosmetics.

1st Lt. Jose Molina, who is in charge of monitoring and disbursing the grant money, said the U.S. military includes barely operating stores in its tally. "Although they sell dust, they are open for business," said Molina, 35, from Dallas. "They intend to sell goods or they may just have a handful of goods. But they are still counted."

Okay, so we're building and financing the shops ourselves. In fact, "in the past month alone the military had approved 35 grants totaling more than $87,000." But the place is secure for the residents now that we established security, right? Right?

Security measures in the market are rigorous. Vehicles are not allowed inside for fear of car bombs. Customers are body-searched at checkpoints. Humvees constantly patrol the area, which is the sole focus of the 50 or so soldiers of Combat Outpost Gator.

...Before the invasion, many of its stores stayed open past midnight. Today, they are open for just a few hours, and by noon the market is mostly deserted. The shopkeepers, who are mostly Sunni, said they rarely see customers from outside Dora because it is too dangerous to travel here.

Okay so they still need help with security, but the other prong of the Petraeus surge strategy was training the Iraqis to take over. Surely they've met that metric.

"If the Americans were not here, we would close earlier, maybe one or two hours," said shopkeeper Alaa Hussein Mahmoud, 32. "I'm always scared about the militias."

Two days earlier, a squad of Iraqi police entered the market. Shoppers left and shopkeepers scurried to shutter their businesses. The police are widely said to be infiltrated by Shiite militias. "We were scared of them. Everybody ran away," said Hussein Ali, 37, another shop owner.

Okay, so they're not quite ready yet but it's a hard job and the local security forces are really trying to get up to speed. Right?

Minutes before the delegation arrived, Bartran instructed 1st Lt. Ali Husham Salih, 27, the commander of the Iraqi army's 4th company, 1st Brigade, to have his soldiers put on their uniforms and combat gear.

Salih said later that his men could protect the market on their own but that they depended on the Americans for support and weapons. "If the American soldiers leave, you'll find the Iraqi army destroyed in one month," he said. "We still want and need the Americans to stay for a long time until we are strong."

Okay then. Americans are welcome as long as they're handing out cash and weapons and doing the Iraqis' job for them. But perhaps nothing describes the success story of the Dora market so well as this.

The head of the Chamber of Commerce for Rashid, the district where the Dora market is located, Mr. Shamary was invited by US military brass to visit the market.

Shamary agreed on the condition that the U.S. military escort him. The previous director of the chamber had been murdered. Shamary was not about to enter the Dora market alone.

Imagine for a moment that Baghdad was New York. The success of the Dora market would be the equivalent of erecting a concrete barrier around 14th Street and making it a zone where you could only enter on foot and are subject to rigorous body searches both on entering and while shopping. Unless you lived within, let's be generous and say 20 blocks in any direction, you wouldn't be able to shop there because it's too dangerous to get there. The mayor won't go there himself without an armed guard. Brooklyn might as well be in a foreign country.

There's no trash service so stinking piles of garbage line your route. There's no running water so there's no public bathrooms. People piss in alleys. You're limited by what you can carry because there's no electricity, thus no streetlights and the traffic is a mess. Forget about finding parking. Besides you can't afford the gas and you're afraid you might get killed at a vehicle checkpoint along the way.

Taken in that context, it's difficult to see how any reasonable observer can call even this small gain in Dora any sort of real success. I have to reiterate my disappointment here in all those moderates who promised me back in March, that they would join us in opposition to the occupation if it didn't meet metrics we all agreed upon at the time. Those that are now pretending that temporary military success was the only original goalpost all along, are quickly losing my respect and my trust in their judgment.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

It's Decisional

by Capt Fogg

I'm not even going to bother with the dictionary. If Decisional is a word, it shouldn't be, but a Decisional meeting is what Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called today's "surprise" get together at the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq's Anbar province; bringing together senior U.S. military leaders, top Iraqi political leadership, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and of course, the Decider in full Decisional mode.

"Nothing beats the opportunity to look David Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, 'What's the situation? What do you think?'"

said an unnamed "senior official as quoted by ABC News today. I don't agree. I think we'd be better off, decisionally speaking, having the opinion of someone whose career doesn't depend on selling vain hopes and sanguine dreams to delusional deciders.

Whether or not there has been a significant and stable gain in overall security in Iraq of late, and whether the administration is simply sprucing up the stage set or building a full scale Potemkin Village, one can be forgiven a bit of skepticism -- and particularly one old enough to remember General Westmoreland's hauntingly similar vision of a "light at the end of the tunnel" 10 weeks before the Tet Offensive.

cross posted at Human Voices

Send lawyers, guns and money...

By Libby

In his latest attempt to build support for continuing the occupation of Iraq, Bush has approved a new surge of payola to the Sunni insurgents who have decided to cash in on the "awakening," for the time being. Wiser minds than mine have explored the tactical and practical shortcomings of this approach, (read anything by Cernig or Fester), but I want to focus on a couple of the other points made in the article.

The money would come, the official said, by spending State Department funds through provincial reconstruction teams, which are finally being deployed in significant numbers. Some would come from American military commanders, who have emergency funds at their disposal, and some from a Department of Defense program to generate jobs by revitalizing state-owned industries — a reversal of the privatization effort begun by American forces four years ago.

I've always thought it was clear that a lot of what drove the invasion and the subsequent occupation was corporate interest in exploiting the new market the "cakewalk" in Iraq would provide. Months before the tanks rolled into Baghdad, certain US legal firms had already established a presence and were offering services towards setting up shops in the country. I take this reversal to mean that corporate interest is waning as it becomes apparent that Iraq will not have a viable business climate anytime in the near future. Certainly, not as long as we remain in occupation. Moving on...

Officials were cautious about discussing Friday’s Pentagon meeting. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were said to have used it to hear a variety of viewpoints, officials said, including lengthy descriptions from the Joint Chiefs about how the increase in forces is unsustainable beyond spring without extending the tours of forces already in Iraq. Several aides to Mr. Bush have said in recent weeks that such extensions are so politically unpalatable that they are not under consideration unless an emergency breaks out requiring the use of American forces elsewhere in the world.

For instance a massive conflict with Iran? Wouldn't that kill two birds with one stone? Cheney would get his forever war and Bush would have a good excuse to further exhaust the troops for this newly created crisis. And there's no mistaking the troops are exhausted and will have to drawn down in the spring. Some counsel that withdrawal be started earlier.

By beginning a drawdown slightly earlier, the officials say, Mr. Bush would both maximize his flexibility and avoid having to stick to a strict timeline for withdrawal, which the president has said in the past would signal to enemy forces exactly when and how quickly American forces would begin to leave.

That's assuming he would ever admit defeat and leave voluntarily, which I doubt, but this has always seemed to me to one of the silliest arguments against a date certain for withdrawal. It's not like the troops can just back their bags and hop the next plane out of Baghdad. It will takes years to move everything out, just as it took years to move it all in there. I have a feeling "the enemy," however you define them, are going to notice -- whether we announce it or not.

I had a dream

By Libby

No really. I had the most bizarre dream last night. I dreamt that Karl Rove and I were lovers. Otherwise, I've been on this secrecy kick today, which I expanded upon further while pondering the rewriting of history and how disrespectful I find the scheduling of Petreaus's "report" for 9/11. It's so crass and then Bush still has the hubris to accuse the Democrats of politicizing the surge? It's disgusting.

As is the administration's record on transparency. Coincidentally I ran across this item at Forbes.com today.

WASHINGTON - Government secrecy by almost any measure is expanding and little is being done to stop it, according to a coalition of 67 organizations favoring greater openness.

There's a whole laundry list at the link but these were two of my favorites.
In 2000, 45 percent of contract dollars were awarded under full and open competition; by 2006, only 34 percent followed such procedures, said the report. Since 2000, over 25 percent of federal contracts were awarded without competition, a total of $559.9 billion.

In the intelligence realm, classified "black" acquisition programs about which nothing is revealed in the budget account for 18 percent of Pentagon contracting or $31.5 billion, more than double the level from 12 years ago, the group said.

Black acquisition could pretty well describe the current Pentagon PR blitz, which I expound upon to the delight of at least three people in Detroit with The surge has failed - don't be fooled again edition, even if these fools say they saw the headlights of success in the rocket's red flares.

Delusions of Anbar

By Libby

Cernig is on this story so I'll just send you there for his excellent analysis on how the alleged success of Anbar is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, a point made clear by this interview in the UK's Times.

Read his whole post but here's a couple of key points.

Taken in concert with reports that other Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigade, that have turned opportunist US ally for now are carving out lucrative protection rackets in their territories, extorting money from everyone who wants to do business there, and it's clear that the Anbar Awakening is anything but the happy pony that the Right wants everyone to buy.

Especially since the US military has been given these once-and-future-insurgents training and money to but more guns. The truth is that, in their eagerness to acclaim anything at all as "surge success" the panto kiddies on the Right haven't yet figured out that the next panto call is always "look behind you!"

And in the comment section, Carl points us to some historical context. This is a repeat of the same empty rhetoric and false promises of progress the White House made in Fallujah. The pact we made with insurgents there was supposed to turn that corner to victory over three years ago now.

Might be time to trot out the definition of insanity again.

Schakowsky sees through the spin

By Libby

Rep. Jan Schakowsky just returned from a Pentagon sponsored PR trip to Baghdad to sell the surge to Congressional members. As part of bi-partisan delegation, she sat through numerous power point presentations. She took the whirlwind tour of the city, but didn't see much from the helicopter or the convoy rides where her view was blocked by armed soldiers hanging out of the windows. She noted the irony of having to wear body armor to a meeting of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss their progress in working together. She wasn't impressed.

"I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy -- just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place," Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, "acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that's what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we'd have to be there nine or 10 years."

She summed her impressions in her notes. "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time." Unfortunately, she seems to be alone in her clear eyed view of the propaganda.

Schakowsky acknowledged that the military's presentation may have been effective. "If you took the briefings at their face value, without context, without bringing anything to it -- clearly they were trying to present that positive spin, and that's what [other lawmakers] took away from it."

It's hard to believe that grown men and women, whose job it is to monitor the situation in order to make decisions on how to address it on behalf of the American people could swallow such a shallow and blatantly self-serving presentation and come away convinced. The stated purpose of the surge was to allow the Iraq government to reconcile and we were assured there would be political progress in six months.

Maybe the idiot politicians have forgotten that they promised to take meaningful action to end the occupation if that didn't happen. We haven't, and we will remember their politically convenient memory lapse in 08.

A Positive Position On Iraq

The poll results are out and Americans are now officially more optimistic about the "surge".

According to a new CBS News poll, Americans have become somewhat more optimistic about the impact of the troop surge in Iraq. The poll, released Monday, shows that 29 percent of respondents now believe that the surge is having a positive impact, an increase of 10 percentage points from last month.

Wow, twenty-nine percent, isn't that the same number that still thinks Bush is doing a good job? I personally have always thought that enough American troops could make Iraq a safer place. Hell, if our civilian leaders could have found a clue four years ago, our troops could be home now.

The problem is not our troops, the problem is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice and a cast of hundreds if not thousands of incompetent fools. If Colin Powell, that over-rated remfing general and Secretary of State could have requisitioned some courage then maybe this whole thing could have been stopped before it started. Enough of that.

If comes down to the same old thing though; it doesn't matter what our troops do or how safe Iraq becomes. The truth is that group of corrupt thieves that call themselves the Iraqi government is never going to create a truly stable country. There is too much hatred, fear, jealously and raw unadorned stupidity to make the whole thing work.

You want to know why there's not enough electricity or why there is sewage in the streets? It's because all of the Europeans who made it run are gone. All of the Russians, French and Germans got the hell out of there years ago. The average Iraqi couldn't build or maintain anything. All they're good at is shooting and killing when they're not sitting around doing nothing. We've all seen it, they shoot when they're mad and when they're real happy they just shoot up into the air. Either way, people die.

The truth is, the surge is doing some good, but the only way to create a government is to leave. When the killing ends, however long a time that may be, then the nation building begins.

Am I more positive about the surge? Oh yeah, I'm positive that in the end it won't make any difference one way or the other.

Jim Martin

No Way To Win

Does the escalating fighting in Basra after the British pullout work as a model for the rest of Iraq after the U.S. withdraws? It would certainly seem that way. Instead of what once was thought of as a model for the way things should be done

It has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.

It comes down to the same thing it always has; stable Iraqi leadership and a populace eager for peace. Unfortunately, there is neither in Iraq.

There are too many factions to keep straight, both tribal and religious. They don't want peace, they want power and the ability to deliver payback to their rivals and enemies.

American forces today are winning the battle against the insurgency, but where is the Iraqi government? There isn't one. There hasn't been one since Saddam was overthrown and there won't be one until the sectarian wars play themselves out after the U.S. withdraws. That could happen next year or it might take ten years, but when we leave, it will happen.

For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.

There will be no clean victory for us in Iraq. Eventually we will leave. Not this year or next year and probably not until most of our national treasure has poured into this sandy cesspool.

The idea of democracy in Iraq is the nonsensical raving of an idiot.

Jim Martin

Thanks to The Blog Report for the link.

Surge strategy belies promise

By Libby

Via Jeb Koogler at TMV, Jeb at Foreign Policy Watch explains why the surge has failed already. No matter what the White House tells you about optimistic signs, Jeb is right. He has the quotes where they sold this plan in the beginning as a strategy that depended on political reconciliation and just as many of us predicted a Friedman ago, it didn't work. Even Defense Secretary Gates admitted that much today. He said that Bush administration might have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation between Iraq's sectarian factions.

Well they're the only ones who did. Maybe they should stop reading the rosy reports and fantastic predictions from their handmaidens at the neo-con think tanks and start reading some real time news. They might have noticed the occupation is going badly.

The surge gained some military ground but it can't be held without a strong government and it made things worse on the political side. Maliki's government teeters on the brink of dissolution. What will horrible carnage will happen next is anybody's guess but I predict with certainty that Bush and Petraeus will say they need just one more Friedman or two to make it better and the remaining occupation supporters will claim the Democrats hate America and just want us to fail if they don't give it to them.

Neither statement will be true.