# Posted 12:41 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

LET THEM EAT CROW: Fred Kagan played a critical role in designing the surge and arguing for its importance. Now he has a simple message for all of his critics: I told you so.

I admit that I sympathize with his message. Yet after all the failures in Iraq before 2007, I'm still afraid of letting myself get too confident. All of the clear indications of progress seem too good to be true. Kagan lists some of them:

In the past five months, terrorist operations in and around Baghdad have dropped by 59 percent. Car bomb deaths are down by 81 percent. Casualties from enemy attacks dropped 77 percent. And violence during the just-completed season of Ramadan--traditionally a peak of terrorist attacks--was the lowest in three years.

It would be useful if the Standard provided links or footnotes. I have plenty of confidence in Kagan as analyst, but every statistic is a controversy in this war, so I'd like to go back to the sources and make sure the numbers are right.

Anyhow, Kagan is crystal clear about the fact that we have won the battle but not the war. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan. And Iran looms on the horizon, still working against us in Iraq. We've got a long way to go.

Labels: Iraq, surge

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# Posted 9:09 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE FACTS! Iraq Body Count (IBC) is a rather brazenly anti-American organization that has sought to discredit the occupation from Day 1 by counting civilian deaths in Iraq. Still, counting has its merits, even if OxBlog has shown how hard IBC works to skew its data in an anti-American direction.

Recently, IBC faced quite a dilemma. By early September, its data had begun to show a correlation between the surge of US forces and a visible reduction in the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. Remarkably, this development led IBC to worry that the anti-war left might consider it a shill for the Bush administration. In its defense, IBC explained that it:

...is aware that official reports are imminent concerning the progress of the US Government’s New Security Plan or ‘surge.’ However, IBC’s work is not linked to the political calendar, and the charts above are not intended to be directly comparable to data which may be supplied from official sources.

These charts sometimes indicate a modest improvement in the security situation for ordinary Iraqis post-surge, and this is not disputed. But these charts will tend to under-represent reported violence for the more recent periods, for the reasons stated above. The observed downward trend in these charts will likely become less marked as data still in the pipeline is added (see Recent Events for as yet unprocessed data).

You have to give IBC credit for hoping that enough Iraqis would die to discredit the surge. Sadly the terrorists and death squads failed to deliver. And the statistics from October aren't any better, even according to IBC. If you add up IBC's list of recent events, the total so far this month is around 600. Still horrific, but a far cry from the numbers of this spring or last fall.

Now, it's worth keeping in mind that accurate statistics about the civilian death toll are hard to come by. iCasualties, another site with no sympathies for the US war effort, list the current October toll at just over 400. For a look at the challenge of compiling such gruesome and tragic statistics, I highly recommend a recent column by Clark Hoyt, the NYT's public editor.

In closing, it is worth keeping mind a good point made by IBC, a point that has merit in spite of its authors' agenda:

It is important to place the events of 2007 in context. Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006. Only in comparison to that could the first half of 2007 be regarded as an improvement

We should never forget how much Iraqis have suffered because of our failures as an occupying power. The actual killers were Sunni terrorists and Shi'ite death squads, but a successful occupation could have saved thousands and thousands of lives.

Labels: Iraq, Iraq Body Count, surge

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# Posted 9:21 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

FIASCO REVISITED: Thomas Ricks' Fiasco is one of the most influential books about the war in Iraq. It was published just over a year ago, to considerable acclaim. It was only a few days ago, however, that I began to read the book.

One of the first things is noticed is a map that precedes the title page. The map is entitled "The Sunni 'Triangle': Heart of the Insurgency". That title speaks volumes about the dramatic changes in Iraq over the past six months.

A year ago, when Fiasco was published, it seemed delusional to hope that the US and its Iraqi allies could ever take back the Sunni provinces of Western Iraq. We understood the war in Iraq as essentially a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Since we had taken the side of the Shi'ites after the fall of Saddam, it seemed perfectly logical to assume that the most heavily Sunni parts of Iraq were the natural home of the insurgency.

Gen. Petraeus has up-ended that logic and shown that we can turn many of Iraq's Sunnis into our most effective allies -- more effective than most Shi'ites. This strategy has its perils, but those perils are almost infinitely preferable to the status quo of July 2006. Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor provided an overview of the dramatic changes in Anbar:

It's been six months since the so-called Anbar Awakening, when Sunni sheikhs joined US Marines in the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni extremists may still have a presence here, but US military officials say that with the help of the expanding Iraqi security forces, they've driven most of what remains of Al Qaeda from the urban areas.

Violence has stayed down, dropping from 2,000 attacks in March to about 450 last month – as the number of Iraqi security forces has increased, from around 24,000 this spring to nearly 40,000 today.

A 75% reducation in attacks in what was once the heartland of the insurgency. Is there any hope of extending that progress to the rest of Iraq? There are good reasons to say 'no'. Whereas Anbar is all-Sunni, Baghdad is a mixed metropolis with vicious Sunni-Shi'ite violence. How can any US strategy succeed on such dangerous terrain?

A year ago, we were asking the same question about Anbar.

Labels: Iraq, surge

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# Posted 7:49 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

CAN ANYONE "RATIONAL" BELIEVE THE SURGE IS GOING TO WORK? Mark Shields is pretty sure that the answer is 'no'. In his weekly spot on PBS NewsHour, he told Jim Lehrer that:

We don't have the troops to stay there, so we're going to withdraw...

This is a fight and a debate, and it's going to be for the next three months between the two parties, over who lost Iraq. That's what the debate is. And the predicate being laid down by the president and his supporters is, "We were just on the cusp of victory. We were just there."

And nobody I know in a rational condition believes the United States is going to have any kind of a military victory in Iraq. There's not going to be any surrender, capitulation by the other side saying, "You were right, we were wrong. You were strong, we were weak." That's not going to happen.

And so the idea is going to be, "We were on the cusp of victory and the rug was pulled out from under us by these willy-nilly, weak-kneed, nervous Nellies back home, namely Democrats, who let down our troops."

Shields is hacking away at strawmen. Insurgencies don't end with an official surrender on the deck of a battleship. They end with a whimper, when the government wins the allegiance of the population and the insurgents gradually fade into the background. Victory looks like what is happening right now in Al Anbar. The question is whether it can be extended to the rest of Iraq. Responding to Shields, Rich Lowry explained that:

...the surge has achieved military success on the ground, and I would also argue an important element of political success, because we haven't seen this turnaround in Anbar province that even Hillary Clinton and others are acknowledging because we killed all our enemies. A significant element of the insurgency came our way. That is a political development.

And you've seen in Anbar and other parts of Iraq the political and military elements interacting. It's not purely a military solution; it's not purely a political solution. It has to be both.
And why, when we're seeing progress -- I can understand a counsel of despair if we sent 30,000 more troops there for a new strategy and nothing happened. Well, the fact that we have seen progress, even the NIE says we've seen progress, and if we went to the Democrats' strategy of pulling down, all of that military progress would go away...

We're talking about these benchmarks that President Bush endorsed in January, legislation to be passed at the federal level on Iraq.

And why was that legislation so important? It was oil laws and other things. Because we care so much about the distribution of oil revenues in Iraq? No. Because the theory was, if you pass that kind of legislation, it would promote reconciliation between the sects, and you would pull the Sunnis away from the insurgency. That was the ultimate political effect you were hoping to have.

Against all expectations and predictions, you didn't pass legislation, but you've had the Sunnis pull away from the insurgency anyway. That is a major development and that Democrats are having to acknowledge it is a big change in this debate.

In contrast to Shields, Lowry is actually talking about facts on the ground. And Lowry's reference to Hillary Clinton suggests that Democratic candidates may not have Shield's luxury of hacking at strawmen. Strangely, one important test of the surge is whether its results are so obvious that even Democratic pols have to acknowledge them. But will they acknowledge that this success is political, or will they attempt to brand it as "just military"?

For the reasons that Lowry elaborated so well, I think that our progress is clearly political as well as military. To dissent slightly from Lowry's formulation, I would suggest that we can only bypass national reconciliation in the short run. But the short-run might last several years. If we discover local political solutions that provide security and stability, we can establish the foundation on which to build a national settlement.

No question, a lot of this is still a long shot. Just as we've turned things around in the past six months, so can Al Qaeda or the Shi'ite militias. But my blood pressure rises when I see Democrats working so hard to insist that we aren't making meaningful progress.

Labels: Iraq, surge

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# Posted 11:32 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

PLAN B IS A DELUSION: Stephen Biddle is one of the top military analysts in the country. He wrote in this morning's Post that:

Growing opposition to the surge has not yet translated into support for outright withdrawal -- few lawmakers are comfortable with abandoning Iraq or admitting defeat. The result has been a search for some kind of politically moderate "Plan B" that would split the difference between surge and withdrawal.

The problem is that these politics do not fit the military reality of Iraq. Many would like to reduce the U.S. commitment to something like half of today's troop presence there. But it is much harder to find a mission for the remaining 60,000 to 80,000 soldiers that makes any sense militarily.

I don't have the expertise necessary to agree or disagree, but the political implications of Biddle's argument are quite unusual. He's telling us that the respected centrists have a much less coherent, sensible position than either of the poles. Of course, neither the advocates of extending the surge nor those of immediate withdrawal want to acknowledge that the other has a reasonable argument. Yet Biddle says they both do.

Tom Friedman [behind the NYT firewall] agrees with Biddle's main point:

The minute we start to withdraw, all hell will break loose in the areas we leave, and there will be a no-holds-barred contest for power among Iraqi factions. Our staying there with, say, half as many troops, will not be sustainable.

And yet Friedman supports withdrawal, because it means no more dead Americans and gives us a longshot at making peace by scaring the Iraqis into a compromise. In contrast to just about everyone else who wants a withdrawal, Friedman is honest about the probable consequences:

Getting out...means more ethnic, religious and tribal killings all across Iraq. It will be one of the most morally ugly scenes you can imagine — no less than Darfur. You will see U.S. troops withdrawing and Iraqi civilians and soldiers who have supported us clinging to our tanks for protection as we rumble out the door.

Another Darfur and another Saigon. A moral failure and an epic humiliation. That is the cost of surrender. If America decides that is our best option, we should do so in full knowledge of its drawbacks. But I am not yet persuaded.

Labels: Iraq, surge, Withdrawal

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# Posted 11:08 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ANY HOPE FOR THE SURGE? David Brooks made the case for hope last Friday on the NewsHour:

If you take a look at what's actually happening in Iraq -- and I'm not someone who is super charged up about the surge -- nonetheless, we've had the oil law recently. We've had a real cleaning-out of the interior ministry. We've had some cooperation from Anbar. We've had quieting down in Sadr City, and now our troops can go into these areas.

It seems to me the events of the last couple weeks lead you to think let's give it a chance. And we'll know, as I say, in a few months whether it works or not.

Interestingly, there was no rebuttal from Mark Shields, who represents the liberal perspective on the NewsHour's Friday broadcasts. (And Taylor, what say you? Is Brooks looking at the right metrics for success?)

Bob Kagan made a similar case for the surge in his recent column in the WaPo:

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless, a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference...

The number of security tips about insurgents that Iraqi civilians provide has jumped sharply. Stores and marketplaces are reopening in Baghdad, increasing the sense of community. People dislocated by sectarian violence are returning to their homes. As a result, "many Baghdadis feel hopeful again about the future, and the fear of civil war is slowly being replaced by optimism that peace might one day return to this city," [Iraqi bloggers Omar and Muhammad Fadhil] report. "This change in mood is something huge by itself."

Unfortunately, some of the debate about Kagan's argument has been diverted toward the question of whether he should've disclosed that his brother and sister-in-law were involved in planning and promotion the surge. According to Andrew Sullivan,

The Washington Post should have disclosed that the plan Kagan is assessing was authored by by his brother and sister-in-law, Fred and Kimberly Kagan. If that isn't a conflict of interest that requires disclosure, what is?

I'm no lawyer, but I tend to think of conflicts of interest in financial terms. For example, it is a conflict of interest for a judge to preside over a lawsuit brought against a firm owned by his brother and sister-in-law. Perhaps some of you lawyers out there can elaborate on this point.

In contrast, no one expects op-ed columnists to be neutral judges of the political situation. Regardless, I think it would've been wiser for Kagan to mention his personal connection to the surge.

When it comes to the substance of Kagan's argument, Sullivan links to Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, who cites a very optimistic editorial from the Weekly Standard, circa March 2004, in order to demonstrate Kagan has record of premature optimism when it comes to Iraq:

A year has passed since the invasion of Iraq, and while no sensible person would claim that Iraqis are safely and irrevocably on a course to liberal democracy, the honest and rather remarkable truth is that they have made enormous strides in that direction...We may have turned a corner in terms of security.

What's more, there are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.

Clearly, that isn't how things have turned out. Yet as I've said in defense of my own flawed optimistm, sectarian violence has not prevailed because it is the natural state of affairs, but because the Sunni insurgents committed atrocity after atrocity in the explicit hope of provoking a civil war that would overwhelm American efforts to promote democracy and peace. We just weren't ready for that and weren't flexible enough to respond.

But just because the optimists (myself) included have been wrong before, it is serious mistake to conclude that such analysis is dishonest. For example, Greenwald's criticism of Kagan descends into a flurry of groundless ad hominem attacks:

No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion...

He is completely liberated from any obligation to tell the truth and is a highly destructive propagandist whose public record of commentary about Iraq ought to disqualify him from decent company, let alone some sort of pretense to expertise about this war.

Yet in his rather lengthy post, Greenwald provides no evidence of mendacity, only of errors. Thus, his writing amounts to a sad example of how vindictive partisanship results in reckless vilification and dangerous efforts to shut down rational debate. That is the kind of behavior that doesn't belong in decent company.

Now let me state for the record, as I have before, that I spent 12 months as Kagan's research assistant. Thus, I can report first hand that he demonstrated only courtesy and respect to those with whom he disagreed. In other words, he set the kind of example from which those like Mr. Greenwald have much to learn.

Labels: David Brooks, Iraq, Robert Kagan, surge

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# Posted 4:06 PM by Taylor Owen  

ASSESSING THE SURGE: What metrics should we be using to measure the success of the surge? Some are beginning to note a decrease in bombings in Baghdad, but given that it was widely believed that the insurgents (of some stripes anyways) would simply lay low until the surge was over, is this really a viable indicator? The first battle of Fallujah being a good lesson in this regard. Should we instead be looking for signs of political progress? Should the relative calm created by the troop presence, even if somewhat artificial and temporary, be seen as a window of political opportunity? If so, what conciliatory signs are we looking for? Further, what are the concequences of not seeing them?

Labels: Iraq, surge

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