I'm really, really sceptical of reports that the surge is working, or the violence is down in Iraq. Obviously, those of us who supported the war have far too much incentive to want this to be true, and to overlook disconfirming evidence.
However, after reading this Michael Yon article, I went looking for some possible disconfirming sources. The Brookings index confirms that US military casualties are down. And the Iraq Body Count seems to indicate that civilian deaths have fallen dramatically; the usual Ramadan surge is entirely absent. (I know that IBC is not an accurate guage of the overall number of deaths, but right now I'm interested only in the direction, and the IBC seems like a good proxy for that.)
Caveats: Ramadan is earlier this year; the usual spike in attacks may not have been a function of the holiday, but of the weather, which steadily cools off throughout September and October. Even if the drop is real and sustained, it may not be attributable to the surge; the 2006 operational tempo may simply have been unsustainable. And if it is working now, that wouldn't erase the 100k+ who have died as a result of the invasion.
But if the falling body count doesn't vindicate past policy, it should guide policy going forward. If Iraq is calming down, to me that probably makes the case for a unilateral immediate withdrawal less compelling.
Megan,
We will be there for decades. You keep assuming that we are going to leave. This is not vietnam. A better analogy is South Korea. In the '50s we had 100 of thousands there. Now a little under 50K. Same profile with Iraq, except the luke-warm part of the war (since the end of the hot part in '03) will be going on while we build up Iraq. Just don't expect this work in progress to be done anytime soon. And Afghanistan will take even longer.
As you said. Patience.
An article I read claimed that Gen. Petraeus's strategy involved having more patrolling out of smaller bases with less staying back in the giant FOBs. I couldn't help but be reminded about your comments about New York's use of beat cops compared to Washington DC. (And the police boxes in Japan.)
It is, however, equally plausible to me that the operational tempo could not be sustained, and that also many of the people of Iraq grew tired of the violence (or at least found, like those in Afghanistan before them, that AQ-affiliated and radical Islamist groups in power are not so attractive). At the least, there was always a large question of whether and when the Sunni Arabs would accept a diminution of status and the new government. It always seemed obvious to me that they could not recapture their domination, but perhaps less obvious to them.
FYI, Ramadan is earlier every year. The Muslim calendar isn't solar-corrected the way the Jewish calendar is, so holidays don't jump back and forth.
Obviously, those of us who supported the war have far too much incentive to want this to be true, and to overlook disconfirming evidence.
You'd like to think that everyone would want it to be true. That said, I share your skepticism after too many rounds of lulls while the insurgents regrouped.
"Obviously, those of us who supported the war have far too much incentive to want this to be true, and to overlook disconfirming evidence."
I take the reports at face value because too many in the media want us to lose. If reporting of sucess comes through, it must be too obvious to ignore.
Then again, I also listen to some of the troops come home and can't even recognize what is being reported.
Trouble makers are never a random sample in any population.
George Bush Senior said it best with respect to crime. "The root cause of crime, criminals!"
Eventually, trouble makers get shot or arrested. You might even say a positive feed back loop has occured. The less trouble makers, the less likely for trouble makers to make trouble.
It's easy to forget that the surge was more then just an increase in bodies. It was a whole new strategy in community-based soldiering.
We will always be in a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum with regard to security and prosperity.
Without security, investment (whether gov or private) will always be lacking, so prosperity can not take root.
Without prosperity, and the jobs it generates, security will never be guaranteed. The unemployed have no incentive not to participate in violent acts for money.
Now, there are a combination of factors which are leading to the positive results we are seeing. The elements that John mentioned are all happening. I don't think we can say that things would be going better without all of those elements in place.
Of course, saying things are going better, doesn't mean that bad things aren't still happening in some places. But if you look at the trends, there are positive developments.
I try to avoid commenting about phenomena about which I am entirely ignorant, and that I have no opportunity to observe. No person who is not in Iraq, or does not regularly and closely communicate with people who are, has even the faintest notion about the character of developments there. Hell, even people who are there can't really get an accurate overview of the conflict, given it's complexity.
That was always the best argument against the invasion to begin with, that it was so extraordinarily difficult to calibrate military action closely enough to accomplish the very complex political goals, that one was better off just trying to manage the status quo. I favored invasion because my guess was that Baathist rule for several decades more would lead to a much worse result, but I had no illusions about the likelihood of outcomes that would seen as pleasant in anything approaching the short or medium term. What I find very disturbing is the possibility that the prevailing sentiment in the Bush Administration actually was that events would be easy, or at least not extraordinarily difficult, to manage.
There's a very simple measure as to whether the surge is working:
the pace of legislation on key issues for national reconciliation.
Oil laws? Militia laws? Constitutional amendments?
nope, the surge isn't working.
Yeah, that's the measure, because popular opinion says their politicians should be able to accomplish in a year and 1/2 things that take our politicians decades to work out.
Hell, we can't get a energy policy passed in 3 decades, and nobody is seeking to kill members of our Congress on a daily basis.
The point of the surge was not simply to reduce the level of violence but to create a stable society, one operated by a unified government that was accepted by the large majority of the population. That hasn't happened.
Michael Yon says "Violence is plummeting. But much of Iraq is a complete mess, a horrible mess. Now is the time to put the foot on the gas."
Does that mean we should be sending in more troops? Too bad that we can't, because we've exhausted our military, both because 1)Afghanistan somehow isn't going quite the way the Administration said it would and 2) the Administration lacked the nerve to expand the military, fearing (probably correctly) that the political backlash would cripple them politically.
Note that "much of Iraq is a complete mess, a horrible mess" more than four years after the U.S., a nation of 300 million, invaded a country of 27 million. Oh, and things don't seem to be going too well in Turkey or Pakistan either. Well, a couple of trillion dollars down the road, we may be back to square one. Won't that be nice!
the Administration lacked the nerve to expand the military, fearing (probably correctly) that the political backlash would cripple them politically.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7039331.stm
US army expansion set to speed up
If Iraq is calming down, to me that probably makes the case for a unilateral immediate withdrawal less compelling.
I actually have almost the exact opposite reaction; as long as Iraq was on the brink of civil war, I thought that compelled us to stay; if the country is indeed stabilizing into a passably functional state, that seems to be a good argument in favor of a gradual withdrawal.
It is a good argument for a gradual withdrawal.
The real trick becomes making sure the withdrawal doesn't allow what security success we have achieved slide back into chaos.
And it looks like something the military has plans to do...
What is missing from this analysis is the cost of the war. You focused only on the benefit of the surge but the surge is not costless. This is not a mistake you make when you evaluate domestic policy issues.
Some people haven't been paying attention. The strategy was to use the surge to provide the physical security that is a necessary predicate to political cooperation. First physical security and then, after many months, political progress.
The surge wasn't fully staffed until June and the physical peace it has produced is just now being made manifest. It is too soon to expect the political process to move forward.
However, that doesn't keep some from declaring the surge a failure. Just like Senator Reid's declaration in April that the surge wasn't working (before the new strategy had even been implemented) and the war was lost, I'm hoping these new declarations of failure will be proved premature.
The pro-war argument on Iraq has really been honed down: If it's getting worse, we have to stay; if it's getting better, there's no reason to leave.
It's like that old joke about fixing a leaky roof: You can't fix it in the rain, and when it's not raining, it doesn't leak.
Which is fine by me. In fact, I'm hoping the warmongers keep at it, at least until November 2008.
When to leave? That's easy. When the Iraqi government asks us to do so.
That's funny; you'd think either the American people, who are providing the money for this war, or the Iraqi people, who are getting murdered by the hundred thousands in it, would get some say.
What was that Kevin Drum snark? 'The Iraqi and American people both want us to leave Iraq, but the American and Iraqi government both want us to stay. So we're staying. This is known as democracy promotion.'
Leaving aside all of the other issues around this war, when you say if its too violent, we should leave, but if its more peaceful we should stay, don't you get the completely backwards logic of that? We are talking about soldiers, not the Peace Corp after all. Regarding the reduction in violence, you need to read people like Michael Totten and Michael Yon (I know, you mentioned him), who are there and don't have a political ax to grind. The reduction in violence appears to me to be more because Iraqi's themselves finally became tired of al Qaeda's vicious tactics and have begun to work with American troops.
Concerning the Surge:
I wouldn't use short-term metrics to gauge the success or failure of a human community. When educated individuals -- individuals who could live well in many countries -- when these individuals choose to move to a city in Iraq, purchase a house, build a business, educate their children, and live out their lives in peace and prosperity -- then and only then will Iraq be a "success".
This is not an argument for or against U.S. intervention; it is simply a criterion for success or failure.
Even if we choose "short-term fluxuations in level of violence" as a criterion of military success, we can't evaluate the success of the Surge, because we can't predict the explosive yield of future weapons. Imagine, for example, if the Japanese had used this criterion for their military tactics in WWII. The war was going well up until, suddenly and out of the blue, their cities were fire-bombed and then nuked.
It's intriguing that no one has raised that when you switch tactics to more aerial bombings than were used in the last three years together, the number of US casualties might start to go down--though perhaps with some new long-term consequences.
They had a very good discussion about this topic on the blogger roundtable.
Well worth reading...
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