What happens in Iraq is of less importance than the way the mess in Iraq is used by American politicians to manipulate domestic American political blocks.

Proposals for actions in Iraq are actually mostly ways of catering to American voting blocks. Those of us who do not speak Arabic will never understand what is going on in Iraq, and this is especially true for American reich-wingers. It is the response or set of responses here in the U.S. that really matter.

Does that mean that our politicians are killing Iraqis and related Arabs as a form of Kabuki theater that plays to American audiences?

Yep.

Kevin, you can comment on audience reaction to the Middle Eastern war-play with the best of us. don't hesitate.

When the steak is rotten, sell the sizzle.

Thanks for that round-up Kevin. I have a question about bullet-point #1. One argument that's always worked with me is that we can't just kill all the terrorists. And yet you imply that the Sunni sheiks will in good time "finish off" al qaeda in Anbar. If al qaeda could really be "finished off", wouldn't we have given that a go ourselves?

You have friends that suggest you're ignoring the "good news" coming out of Iraq? No wonder you're wishy-washy and lame so much of the time.

You apparently have friends who are koolaid drinking idiots.

says that although political progress in Iraq is nil (or even in reverse), at least we're finally making some tactical progress on the security front.

Yep the consensus is wrong but not for your reasons. USA Today reported significant political progress has just been reached in Iraq. I think we should give due credit to the Surge for this significant political event and the turning of the corner in Iraq.

Link

"Iraq's top Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday that they had reached consensus on measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation. The agreement by the five leaders was one of the most significant political developments in Iraq in months and was quickly welcomed by the United States."
"The five leaders agreed on draft legislation to ease curbs on former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party joining the civil service and military. Consensus also was reached on a law governing provincial powers; a draft oil law; and a mechanism to release some detainees held without charge, a key demand of Sunni Arabs."

Don't leave out the status of Moqtada al-Sadr! While his forces are still very much active, they have purposefully withdrawn from the visible spectrum of fighting for the period of the surge. This and similar phenomena has a large impact on the overall picture and their reemergence in full will drastically increase the bad column's stats.

The idea that that current situation represents "good news on the counterinsurgency front" is truly terrifying. Sure, it's good news in some sense that Baghdad hasn't turned into another full-fledged Killing Fields. But it's so far from safe that the good news would be meaningful only if we had another quarter or half-million troops available for the next five or ten years to vastly improve conditions in Baghda, make them stick, and extend the improvement to the rest of the country.

Proof-of-principle demonstrations are only useful if you have the resources and intention to put them into full production. And I don't see the $5-10 trillion spare bucks in the US economy, much less the boots on the ground.

That, and our coalition with the Sunni insurgents is not a mere matter of giving them a free hand--it means that we now have a policy of alliance where we will release their insurgents when caught in bad acts. This policy is not relegated to the Sunni "allies" though. Talk to soldiers at the door-kicker level--this is one of the things that pisses them off the most and is turning what remaining support there was for the mission among the lower ranks.

Rick B. I speak and read Arabic at a high level and can only say that you don't know what you're talking about. You trot out the usual cynical reductionist tropes a defunct idea is defended with.

"But I'm trying to be as honest as I can be here, and it looks to me like the balance of the evidence suggests that this is more hype than reality. As near as I can tell, we're not making much progress on either front."

Kevin, may I respectfully suggest that you may harbor a predisposition, judging from your past writings, to inflate negatives and deflate positive news coming out of Iraq?

Re: the situation in Anbar. In addition to the possiblity that groups now being assisted by the US Military will soon be turning their tuns on the US, there's the problem that these groups are in no way loyal to the central government.

I'm very unclear on exactly what Al Qaeda in Iraq is, and what it's agenda is. However, it's very clear that Sunnis are almost united in their opposition to any government controlled by the majority Shiites.

we're on an express elevator to hell, going down...

Our military efforts in Iraq are an "occupation", not "counterinsurgency". An insurgency assumes that there is a legitimate government that is being threatened (see General P's Army Manual). That clearly is not the situation in Iraq. The administration uses the term counterinsurgency to suggest that the puppet government residing in the Green Zone is legitimate. We can't let them muddy the water.

U.S. helicopters blasted rooftops in a Shiite neighborhood before dawn Friday

There is no progress being made in Iraq. Only the killing progresses.

Almost all the good news reports begin and end with the Anbar Sunnis turning against AQI. And that is indeed good news if it reduces the horrific attacks on civilians. But let's not blind ourselves. The breakup of the AQI-tribal alliance was due to a dispute over control, not because the tribes truly threw their lot in with US forces or, even more farfetched, with the central government. And what can be rent can also be repaired. Could the AQI-tribal alliance be restored? Sure it could. Maybe AQI now sees the inherent strength of the tribes and promises not to create an independent government in Anbar. Maybe the tribes will see AQI as a necessary weapon against a strengthening Iraqi state. So while I'm not saying it will happen tomorrow, we should be prepared for the Anbar tribes to flip their allegiances once again.

Kevin, may I respectfully suggest that you may harbor a predisposition, judging from your past writings, to inflate negatives and deflate positive news coming out of Iraq?

Five years in and people like you are still trying to read spread out chicken entrails as proof of something.

Frankly, you know shit with or without a background in Arabic. If you knew anything, literally anything at all, you would have figured out by now that the same -- exactly the same -- bullshit has been coming out from Baghdad for the last five years. Like clockwork.

And every, single, year, you losers say "See? THIS is the corner we've turned!" And every year we lose more Americans, more Iraqi civilians are killed and more terrorists are created without any appreciable movement.

Things are going well? Then why is the administration sending strong signals that the Iraqi PM needs to be disposed? Why do people living in the Iraqi capital have less electricity than LAST year? Why do you each and every summer think "progess" is being made because killing is down without realizing that the same claim has been made each summer preceding? Why is Bush writing the 'progress report'? Why is Petraeus saying we need another decade? Why is John Warner getting squishy all of the sudden? Why is almost a quarter of the population of Iraq refugees?

See dave, this is the problem when you're fed tons of bullshit over five years, you tend to tire of it. And still, there's something pathological in those of you NOT tired of the lies, those who welcome official statements of 'progress' like holy writ while actual reporting and analysis of the war is treated as the suspect musings of terrorists.

And still, smugly and idiotically, you caution Kevin about his bias.

Daveinboca:
"Kevin, may I respectfully suggest that you may harbor a predisposition, judging from your past writings, to inflate negatives and deflate positive news coming out of Iraq?"

Over the years, the negative news has proven to be more reliable than the positive news in pointing to future developments -- so I'd say that Kevin's judgment in focusing more on the fundamental difficulties than the positive anecdotes has been valuable.

Al:
"USA Today reported significant political progress has just been reached in Iraq. I think we should give due credit to the Surge for this significant political event and the turning of the corner in Iraq."

I agree that this news sounds hopeful. I'd recommend a wait-and-see approach, though, given what we know about the fundamental difficulties of getting the disparate groups in Iraq together. We can assume that a lot of pressure has been applied to get the government to show something that can at least be spun as progress. In general you should be a bit abashed to proclaim that the corner has been turned--I almost thought your post was a parody when I saw that.

I speak and read Arabic at a high level and can only say that you don't know what you're talking about.

daveinboca uses the term "dhimmitude" and so proves that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Our military efforts in Iraq are an "occupation", not "counterinsurgency".

Actually, since we're the ones doing the "surging" aren't we by definition the "insurgents".....?

Rick B. I speak and read Arabic at a high level and can only say that you don't know what you're talking about.

You know who else speaks and reads Arabic at a high level? The Iraqis. How happy are they with what's going on in their country?

Kevin: You write that guilt is one motivating factor in your posts about the surge. Regrettably not the right guilt, though. It ought to be the guilt you feel for being one of the biggest cheerleaders IN FAVOR of invading Iraq a few years ago. That is an egregious error you seem consistently unwilling to confront on this site. Whenever someone brings it up, you delete the post and ban their IP. For longtime readers like me, that's why all of your comments on Iraq ring so hollow: You still refuse to own up to your multiple posts which helped make the invasion possible. As far as I'm concerend that kind of poor judgement puts you right up there with Miss Teen South Carolina as far as credible foreign policy commentators. On cat blogging, though, you are the king.

The American political class can't evaluate the course of the war because the main problem with the war is that there is no broad military objective beyond pacification. Bombings up or bombings down? Casualties up or down? Number of houses destroyed? Enemy retreats in Baghdad, advances in Basra...we have been down this road before. Pacification will not occur because there will be no acceptance of the invading force. The Iraqis will outlast the military and political will of the American invaders.

The real goal is political and emotional. If the US were just after the oil they could invade and hold the oil fields and not bother with making the government hand them a political stamp of approval. It is as if there needed to be a spiritual conversion brought about by force of arms. Pacification will never come because the goal of the Iraqi people is not to be Americanized. They simply want to be left alone.

From France he (Moshe Dayan)went to Britain in order to see Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of Alamein. Montgomery at that time was in the midst of writing his History of Warfare; Dayan, who had met him once before when he was studying at Camberley Staff College in 1951, noted how “relaxed and alert� the old man looked. Montgomery’s ideas concerning Vietnam were very clear-cut. The Americans’ most important problem in running the War was that they did not have an unambiguous objective. He himself had tried to get an answer on that subject from no less a person than former vice president Richard Nixon. In response he had been treated to a twenty-minute lecture; at the end of which he remained as much in the dark as he had been at the beginning.

Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did
Martin Van Creveld

"The revolt of the Sunni sheiks against al-Qaeda in Anbar and other Sunni strongholds is genuinely good news."
You seem to be under the impression al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia matters. Why is that?

"The Iraqi army is doing a little better, according to the Pentagon"
...and Franco-American says Spaghetti-O's are delicious. Why mention this?

daveinboca: "Kevin, may I respectfully suggest that you may harbor a predisposition, judging from your past writings, to inflate negatives and deflate positive news coming out of Iraq?"

This may be the absolute stupidest thing I've seen a troll post here.

save yourself time, just link to Juan Cole. He reads and speaks Arabic fluently and is one of the world's leading experts. He doesn't have to guess.

You can't say often enough that no level of military progress or improvement will bring about the political accord necessary to create a united Iraq. We can't do for the Iraqis what they won't do for themselves. All evidence indicates that the Shia are unwilling to share power with their former tormentors, the Sunni minority, and that the Sunni minority are unwilling to live under Shiite domination. The same was true of the Yugoslav state...the Balkan wars of the l990s began with the Serb war on the Croatian republic to prevent the Serb minority there from having to live under Croatian rule. The first Yugoslav state was wrecked by Croats who would not accept direct rule from Serbs.
No, we CAN'T all just get along, as it turns out, and the Bush admin was given ample warning about the sectarian and ethnic fault lines and ignored all of it. I have no idea how we will extricate ourselves from this without seeing a regional war break out.

Things look a whole lot worse if you read Kevin's bullet points in reverse order.

Moreover his first few points about recent "success" are really irrelevant. AQI isn't going anywhere in Iraq anyway -- the Shi'ites will treat them even worse than the Sunnis, so sucess against it is pointless.

The important fact is there is zero political progress. Zero, as testified to by our trying to dump the head of the country. And there isn't going to be any political progress any time soon, whether we stay or whether we go. In fact, our staying is likely to retard it, not support it.

Let's get out now and at least save the lives of hundreds if not thousands of our soldiers and marines.

For the umpteenth time, we DON'T CARE about that fucking country.a

How's the surge doing? Iraqi anecdotes carry more weight than US ones, so, here's Leila Fadel, the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy(8/23/07):

Do you think it's safe for me to report in your neighborhood," I asked. His eyes widened and he shook his head.

"Every day is worse than the one before," he said of his southeast Baghdad home.

"Enaalso," he said in Iraqi slang. It's a new Iraqi word, a phrase used to explain being turned in by an informant to a militia and then being killed. Literally it means he was "chewed up."

And yes, Pat, there is something O'Hanlonesqe about these recent posts of Kevin's -- still hoping that there's a pony in Iraq, I guess. I've also thought it must be guilt about having supported the war.

Your grudging optimism is infuriating your readership - I guess even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. The most intelligent post Kevin ever wrote about Iraq noted that the very fact there is still a glimmer of hope despite the unfathomable level of incompetence the Bush gang has demonstrated validates our motives. Despite the steady round of dog and pony shows by the MSM trying to portray this effort as hopeless, a growing number of honest analysts are starting to see that every day we get to train a professional military and civil service we are winning and the caliphate is losing.I think by the end of Bush's term we will have a government with at least as much promise to provide a role model to the region as South Korea did in Asia five or six years after their war.

I would imagine that it's quite difficult to get accurate readings of what's taking place on the ground in Iraq, given that significant bucks are spent on information operations designed to present a positive picture (along the lines of what, e.g., the Rendon Group does, at our expense).

On a related note, for those who haven't read it yet, here's a good interview with Nir Rosen, somebody with significant on the ground experience:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1349252

"every day we get to train a professional military and civil service we are winning and the caliphate is losing"

You're joking, right? That Iraqi military and civil service that does stuff like assist in ambushes of our soldiers? Every day we get to train them will just help them attack their countrymen and us. Face it, our army is not suited to getting lions and lambs to sit down together, a process that even our generals think will take more than a decade, and which will take about the same time whether we're there or not. If the trolls here actually supported the troops they'd vote to bring them home so they won't suffer pointless death.

minion: "...every day we get to train a professional military and civil service we are winning and the caliphate is losing."

Perhaps you should have a look at the allegations that significant chunks of the Iraqi Army and police, guys that we are training, are sympathizers with the Mahdi Army, a group which is, presumably, on our bad-guy list.

Irony alert: not-at-all-ex-minion cites "honest analysts" and attributes the dog-and-pony shows to the so-called "MSM."

I think by the end of Bush's term we will have a government with at least as much promise to provide a role model to the region as South Korea did in Asia five or six years after their war.

A dictatorship. Swell.

The most intelligent post Kevin ever wrote about Iraq noted that the very fact there is still a glimmer of hope despite the unfathomable level of incompetence the Bush gang has demonstrated validates our motives.

A "glimmer of hope" "validates our motives"?

It's nice to see the Hail Mary approach in geopolitics. If it works 1 out of 100 times in pro football, it's good enough to risk the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis. Hell, in another six months you can always double down again because even 1 in a 1000, or hell, 1 in a million is still a chance! What does it matter to you who and how many suffer for your glimmer of hope -- they obviously don't have the resolve that the mighty armchair warriors of Blogistan do.

Meanwhile tell the nearly 25% of Iraqis have either moved from Iraq or are displaced within it how optimistic you are. I'm sure none of them are angry or hold a grudge or anything, they see the grave necessity of having had to invade them due to the massive stockpiles of weapons their dictator didn't have.

Jay B

If anyone is a "loser" on this thread, it is you. You are steadfastly hoping to lose, and discouraging anyone who thinks or hopes otherwise.

All the sound and fury here on our losing in Iraq, it signifies the wish being father to the thought.

There are dictators and there are dictators... I wish the war had been faught more intelligently, but if we get a dictator that wants to buy his wife another 3,000 pairs of shoes replacing one who shot little girls in airports I would put that down as progress.

A major criticism of the Bush administration conduct of this war is that we never had enough manpower to establish security.

So with the surge we are demonstrating that if you flood an area with the US military you can establish security. But we knew that all along. Why else where many of our military operations called whack-a-mole. But we can not sustain this level of manpower when we start rotating troops back out next year.

So all the surge is demonstrating is that the critics were right. We are losing because Bush refused to fund an expansion of the army and marine to a level sufficient to win the war.

I have a theory that he did not do this because it would have cost him his tax cuts. So we are losing because his tax cuts are more important to Bush than winning the war. I know not many people believe this, but I'm still waiting for any one to disprove this theory.

Excellent report. I like the summary of events on the ground. Please keep it up.

The fact that Kevin seems to have some access to a thorazine drip appears to infuriate some of the hopeless recidivists on this thread. Keep on thinking outside the cocoon, Kevin.

"if we get a dictator that wants to buy his wife another 3,000 pairs of shoes replacing one who shot little girls in airports I would put that down as progress"

Look. We don't get to make that choice. If we support a dictator, he'll turn out to be just as bad as he wants to be. And we've got no control over it.

Moreover, it's not so simple. A Shi'ite dictator will victimize Sunnis just as Saddam victimized Shiites. And you can't know if a purported "dictator" (like, say, Allawi) will be just as big a failure as Maliki. Probably will. In fact, the things we don't like about Maliki -- that he supports the Shi'ites in all respects -- are only going to be worse with some guy who actually thinks we want him to be a dictator.

And anyway, wasn't this a war for democracy? And now we're installing a dictator? And for this we're paying the lives of 100 soldiers a month? It's revolting, and anyone who really supports the troops will bring them home.

I think by the end of Bush's term we will have a government with at least as much promise to provide a role model to the region as South Korea did in Asia five or six years after their war.

And I think pigs will fly.

By the way, the South Korean government six years after the war was a brutal and repressive military dictatorship under martial law. If that's the model we want to establish we could have just left Saddam in place and not have killed a million people doing it.

There are dictators and there are dictators... I wish the war had been faught more intelligently, but if we get a dictator that wants to buy his wife another 3,000 pairs of shoes replacing one who shot little girls in airports I would put that down as progress.

Man, all that "democracy whisky sex!" talk just went right out the window, didn't it? Nice to know that our boys and girls are doing to, at best, install a corrupt and repressive dictatorship.

Talk about defining deviancy down....

How does a government who supports Saddam in killing 100,000 Kurds and then overthrow him years later throwing the country into a perfect dystopia set a good example for other countries?
CrookedInc.Com

daveinboca: You are steadfastly hoping to lose, and discouraging anyone who thinks or hopes otherwise.

That statement pretty well encapsulates the blinkered thinking on the right.

Those of us on the left who opposed the war from the beginning, and those of us who supported the war initially but then saw the light, are steadfastly hoping that our leaders will eventually develop a strategic and tactical responses to deal with the authentic threats that we face from radical takfiri jihadists.

We are also steadfastly hoping that we've got any chance of doing that, now that we've blown so much on an ill-fated war of choice against a nation that didn't attack us.

Invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no "WMDs" - spending hundreds of billions in the process, resulting in the extermination of tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives, while simultaneously increasing the threats we face - is what's got us in such a darn tizzy.

Wake up and smell the coffee.

Don't we have to wait untill the surge is over to know if it worked.Calm now but if we send home all the extra troops that filled the surge and then we go back to square one with Car bombs and IED's then the surge will have done nothing but quelled the violence for the short haul.

You are steadfastly hoping to lose

From Bill Christison, at Counterpunch:

If the U.S. were to "win" these wars, whatever that means, more of the world's people than at present would be ruled by the U.S. Most of these people do not want to be ruled by the U.S. -- which makes the wars themselves anti-democratic. That fact alone is reason enough to conclude that our country should lose these wars.

resulting in the extermination of tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives,

It would be more accurate to say "the extermination of a million American and Iraqi lives."

"All the sound and fury here on our losing in Iraq, it signifies the wish being father to the thought."

ROFL... Oh, the irony, particularly coming from someone a) who is full of "sound and fury," and b) who has been unable to provide even a shread of information to back up his assertions.

Damn ... "shred," of course.

"One argument that's always worked with me is that we can't just kill all the terrorists. And yet you imply that the Sunni sheiks will in good time 'finish off' al qaeda in Anbar. If al qaeda could really be 'finished off', wouldn't we have given that a go ourselves?"

I assume that Kevin means that they would be reduced to little more than a nuisance rather than having any significant role to play in the ongoing conflict (although how much of a role they currently play is very much an open question).

Don't we have to wait untill the surge is over to know if it worked.

When will the surge be over? And what will be the measure(s) we use to determine if it was successful?

It would be more accurate to say "the extermination of a million American and Iraqi lives."

No doubt. Add to that the millions of externally and internally displaced Iraqis.

Anybody got any good ideas for how to rebuild Iraqi society when all those with the means to leave are pretty much doing so? Brain drain, anyone? Maybe Chalabi or Allawi can solve it, eh?

(Frankly, I still hold to the notion that some within the Bush Admin, or more specifically the OVP - guys like Wurmser - have been interested all along in fomenting chaos in Iraq.)

"Don't we have to wait untill the surge is over to know if it worked."

Not really. "The Surge" has been in action for six months or so, plenty of time to take a look at the metrics. Yes, yes, I know that we didn't have all of the troops there until a month or two ago, but we had the change in tactics from the very beginning and we've had extra troops piling in for months. Moreover, the political players in Iraq have known for months what needed to happen and there has been little to no progress on that score. The signs of it "working" should be there by now.

"Calm now"

Except that by all independently verifiable metrics, it isn't "calm" now.

"but if we send home all the extra troops that filled the surge"

We won't have a choice next year, unless you're prepared to break the back of the army.

"and then we go back to square one with Car bombs and IED's then the surge will have done nothing but quelled the violence for the short haul."

You're missing Kevin's point -- the available data indicate that we haven't left square one, much less "quelled the violence."

The un-deBaathification agreement is kinda nice. What it means is that after four years, half a trillion dollars and half a million or so excess deaths we might be (politically) inching toward where we should have been at this time in 2003.

No doubt by 2016 or so things will be just dandy, assuming nothing else bad happens anywhere in the world to distract our leaders' attention from fixing what we broke in Iraq. Whee.

To any one who says the surge is working should also admit that Bush went about the Iraq war the wrong way, to few men,On that note alone he should resign.He had too many Generals telling him 300,000 to 400,000 soldiers where needed to do the job.Bush and Bush alone is responsable for almost all of the deaths in Iraq.If the man just wasn't so pig headed.

"You are steadfastly hoping to lose"

Nice ad hominem attack; got any real data?

"and discouraging anyone who thinks or hopes otherwise."

What we're doing, moron, is actually looking at the independently verifiable facts, the very opposite of "hoping." The "hoping" here is all coming from those who support the war and are steadfastly refusing to actually look at the facts.

Nice post, Kevin. However, I can sum it up in seven words:

THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ IS A CLUSTERFUCK!

Shame that Sen. Larry Craig, (R) ID, could not be sent to rule over Iraq - Self proclaimed highly intelligent family values guy - But, his "surge" in the men's room at the Minneapolis Airport last June, seems to have backfired - Geez, pleading guilty without benefit of counsel to lewd behavior. Guess Larry was just not smart enough to know his rights, or was this simply an embarrassment plea?

The Repugs just keep coming out and shooting themselves in their collective feet.

daveinboca,

You are steadfastly hoping to lose, and discouraging anyone who thinks or hopes otherwise.

All my plans, laid bare! Seriously, that's even too stupid for you.

Look, it's not my fault that after FIVE LONG YEARS our soldiers are stuck in Iraq without any idea of what it is they're supposed to 'win'. It's not my fault that their leadership has been telling the world that 'progress is being made' every month or so for five years, when the obvious, objective reality is at best a status quo. And that they are dying for a reason that may be best described as "arming both sides" for an inevitable Civil War.

It's funny, though, watching butch armchair generals like yourself talk about resolve and "hope" as a more effective tool than planning, execution, vision and every other goddamn thing no one in the Bush Administration has sought to assert. There's no Clapping Harder. There's only reality and unreality.

After five years of listening to you and your other warbangers non-stop litany of lies, stupidity and/or bloodlust (for, at best, an endless occupation) -- I think the evidence is overwhelming.

Just tell me this hero, how many of other peoples' lives are you willing to waste before you admit you're wrong?

No sense of "things improving" legitimizes or justifies this war or the cruel occupation.

"And anyway, wasn't this a war for democracy?"

No, I believe that was rationalization number 2 or 3 after no WMDs were found...

So with the surge we are demonstrating that if you flood an area with the US military you can establish security.

Sorry spencer - the one region showing real improvement in security is the one where US troop levels have been drawn down, beginning before the Surge. And there's no real way to foresee whether the Sunni tribes we've given weapons and treasure to, to convince them to go after AQI will NOT, after either marginalizing or coming to an arrangement with AQI, return to their previous pass-time of targeting American troops and Shia.

We're not "losing" because GWB refused to trade his tax cuts for a force large enough to be victorious. Between dishonest publicly stated goals, imperialistic unstated goals, and a lack of reasonably achievable proposed military goals, we've never had a real criterion for "winning".
Nor any real discussion of what we'd be getting into, what the repercussions would be, and if it was anything that so much as resembled a good or rational idea.
It was a bad idea, from start, and will remain so until finish.
It would be akin to Fred Thompson treating his lymphoma by amputating his fingers and toes a couple at a time. Not that I might not vote for that, but I wouldn't be under any illusions that it would keep his cancer in remission.

Brojo. Openly rooting for the U.S. to lose. Jackass. No wonder Dad was banging every woman in the congregation. Anything to get out of the house and away from you.

Pat, you ought to be more careful about broadcasting your difficulties understanding what people write.
Otherwise, based on available evidence, some of us may be forced to conclude that you are functionally illiterate.

This political compromise is nothing we haven't seen before, and as mentioned by earlier commenters, can be explained by recent anti-Maliki sentiments expressed by US political figures. Factor in Allawi's recent activities and it looks very likely that it's an attempt to fend off a coup of sorts.

If you want to talk about something potentially very substantive, by which I mean jaw-dropping, let's talk about the summit in Egypt(I think) between representatives of the chief Sunni Imam, Al-Sistani's chief of staff, and Saddam Hussein's former Imam, among others.
If they do in fact come to an agreement, and issue fatwas(Sunni and Shi'ite) against sectarian violence, we'll actually have some genuine progress to discuss.
That said, it will be awhile before we know whether US and coalition troops will bear the brunt of the violence no longer directed at Iraqis, by Iraqis.
If sectarian violence in Iraq comes grinding to a halt and the US loses 20,000+ troops and hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment while the Iraqis develop a consensus government in the process of ejecting foreign occupiers, can we in the US call that a victory?

The surge is really working when stories like this are available:

Anwar Abbas Lafta, a CBS translator and a friend, was killed by gunmen who stole him from his home. His body was found in the morgue last night among so many others.

Earlier this year he guided Jenan and I through his neighborhood. He laughed at my hesitancy to speak English in the street.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "This is my neighborhood. I did a piece for CBS on the safest neighborhood in Baghdad right here."

I was shocked when he told me he didn’t hide his job from his friends and his neighbors. Iraqis who work with foreign journalists are often accused of being spies.

Thank you for telling the story of your nation, for your honesty and courage. All I can say to Anwar is I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it cost you your life.

By Leila Fadel, McClatchy's Baghdad bureau chief.

One quick point:

According to AP, the rate of civilian deaths in Iraq is running at Double the rate of last year, even though violence is down from its peak in Baghdad.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/26/iraq-body-count-may-double-2006-numbers/

Daveinboca,

Rick B. I speak and read Arabic at a high level and can only say that you don't know what you're talking about. You trot out the usual cynical reductionist tropes a defunct idea is defended with.

The result is that any and every prediction of what is going to happen to Iraq is a fantasy. The fantasies are designed for American consumption and are intended to keep American politicians in power.

If you speak and read Arabic at a high level, then you are head and shoulders above the capabilities of all but about five or six people sitting in a basement at the CIA who are being ignored. Which really doesn't matter much, since Dick Cheney doesn't want to confront reality. He wants more of the paraniod NeoCon fantasy - again a creation here in the U.S. with little or no connection to Iraq.

If you want to say I don't know what I am talking about concerning events and processes in Iraq, we agree. But I do know what I am talking about when I observe the information collection that has been going on and how it is translated into America political actions and then into policy.

The actual source data has been replaced by American politicians with an American-centric set of fantasies. Those fantasies guide our policies, not the unknown reality on the ground in Iraq.

Is there good data illustrating that violence in Iraq is indeed "seasonal"?

tim -- just Google Iraq casualties and you'll get the reports, broken down by months. You'll see that every year the casualty rates in the summer are substantially less than earlier in the year. This stands to reason -- it is a bad season there, very hot. Anyway, it's deceptive to compare July or August with January or March; really apples and oranges. And if you compare year-to-year, June to June, July to July, you'll see this summer is far more deadly than any earlier one. That's no sign of progress.

And in response to the apparent trollish support for saying the hell with democracy and making Allawi dictator or some such half-baked scheme, take this:

Then there's the fact that Allawi already had a shot at the position -- and he was terrible. He was appointed interim prime minister in May 2004, keeping the position until he was replaced in April 2005 by Ibrahim Jaafari (following the January '05 elections). If that sounds like the time when the insurgency really started to heat up, well . . . it was. Allawi's tenure was marked by corruption, a feckless approach to basic services, and a widespread perception of thuggishness. In one particularly intense episode, he's said to have personally (and summarily) executed six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station. Perhaps most importantly, his support for the devastating military incursions into Fallujah and Najaf in 2004 earned him the hatred of both Shia and Sunni Iraqis. As a postscript to this illustrious record, after the latest elections, he basically disappeared to London and Jordan -- when Ambassador Crocker was asked about Allawi recently, according to NYTimes, he "said he only spoke to people who actually came to Iraq."

Via Americablog

Nice troll, Daveinboca,

If anyone is a "loser" on this thread, it is you. You are steadfastly hoping to lose, and discouraging anyone who thinks or hopes otherwise.

All the sound and fury here on our losing in Iraq, it signifies the wish being father to the thought.It is impossible to win in Iraq until someone presents an achievable goal.

Everything suggested so far depends on the existence of a government which those governed consider legitimate and which has a monopoly of force with which to enforce its decrees.

But the 'government' is a structure we created and which is filled with members of warring tribes who use their government positions to further their war aims. The Ministry of Health, for example, belongs to the militia of al Sadr rather than to the Green Zone government. The towns that have ethnically cleansed those they don't like are now relatively peaceful, but they aren't going to give up their militias and start obeying the Shiite government in the Green Zone.

Bush's invasion created a failed state where there was none before. The egg has been scrambled and cannot be returned to the shell.

The surge is a military tactic designed to move the various militias and insurgent groups to different locations, but unless there is a legitimate and effective government the levels of violence from specific locations are meaningless.

Under those circumstances, what would you say should be the goal for American forces? Other than, as they are doing, die in place?

Once you present that goal, a strategy requires a specific set of plans and a possible allocation of resources to accomplish that goal.

Right now the only goal on the table is to return to the relatively low level of violence that existed under Saddam. But that is impossible because the idiot Jerry Bremer disbanded the Iraqi military and police forces, and we can't reassemble them.

In Vietnam when we pulled out Uncle Ho moved in an took over, to the great relief of all except those who we had promised we would never abandon them. That was the same result that would have occurred with much less bloodshed had Eisenhower permitted the UN plebecite that was scheduled for 1956 (U.S> Presidential election year) to occur, but Ike couldn't do that because of domestic American politics. The American right-wingers were already screaming "Who lost China?" and gunning for Ike because he was too moderate, so Ike kept on supporting the corrupt Catholic-dominated government of South Vietnam and passed the hot potato off to Kennedy. JFK was going to pull out in 1965 after his reelection. Instead LBJ had to trade Westmoreland's troop expansion to half-a-million so Westy could fight his war of attrition so that the right-wingers wouldn't kill Medicare. We fought Vietnam for U.S. domestic reasons. The Domino Theory was garbage from the get-go.

Bush invaded Iraq to appear like he was strong leader after he had downgraded the war against terrorism when he took office in 2001. Cheny never believed that terrorism that wasn't state-support was going to be significant, not matter what the Clinton peole warned them. (They also didn't beleive anything Clinton did could be correct.) Sept 11 was really their wake-up call and they had to do something to appear like they were on top of things after the level of failure demonstrated by the 19 hijackers. So they bought the PNAC crap (equivalent to the Domino Theory) and invaded Iraq. They have stayed so as to not be shown to have failed there also, but we are in Iraq even today for domestic American political reasons.

we are left with no achievable goal in Iraq. Other than removing Saddam and creating a conservative free enterprise democracy (both of which are unacheivable) Bush's only goal, and that of the Republican Party, is to avoid the cries of "Who lost Iraq?" We have been fighting this Republican Party (not American)war in Iraq since the insurgency was created to remove the occupiers purely for the domestic American political reason that the Republicans refuse to admit their failure.

That is the definition of "Have we lost Iraq?" The Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) directly responsible for the invasion refuse to admit they have screwed up.

But when we do lose, at least America won't have lost the war. This is a war that belongs entirely to The Republican Party. They started it, they have lost it.

Oh, and remember when Uncle Ho moved in and took over South Vietnam? I do. This time our Republicans have handed the southern Shiite parts of Iraq over to Iranian de facto control. Does that give Iran-Iraq control of the largest known pool of oil in the world? If not, it certainly rivals Saudi Arabia.

This is all going to happen, daveinboca. There is not a damned thing we can do now to stop it. Bush and the Republicans set this into motion and it is irrevocable. All we can do is try to find out how to accommodate the changes. Oh, wait. Republicans don't DO diplomacy or soft power, do they?

Reference bullet #5 - so how long have we kept forces in Germany post WWII? 62 years and counting - oh and now we're adding more troops to Europe for missile defense and not necessarily for terrorists but b/c Vladdy and crew are going to be trouble for some time in Russia - has the cold war really ended or now being fought by terrorist proxy? Korea - 53 years and counting. So why shouldn't we expect to have a large contingent in Iraq for several decades?

One of the links to "data" above lead to the following statistics.

Iraqi Police Military Killed: UP23%.

Putting aside that this is to be expected given the spectacular growth in the ISF and the fact that they are more and more in the lead, ISF deaths are now at the lowest level since record keeping began in 05.

http://icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

The linked "data" also claimed....

US forces killed: Up 80%

But, US combat deaths are at the lowest level in a year.

http://icasualties.org/oif/hnh.aspx

This is despite the fact that US troop levels and their operational tempo is at the highest level since the end of major combat operations.

The "data" claims that....

Size of the Insurgency: Up 250%

The size of the insurgency guesstimated by the Brookings institute is very unreliable and given that much of the "insurgency" is switching to the coalition side claims of a 250% increase seem very hard to believe.

This paragraph from the story is also suspect:

"With the exception of the telephone network, the infrastructure news is almost uniformly bad. Oil exports are down, fuel availability is lower, electricity generation is spottier, and attacks on pipelines are up."

Infact, hours per day of electricity in much of Iraq are better than pre-liberation. Total power generation is up slightly but demand is way up, evidence of increased economic activity in the country, leading to less power in Baghdad.

http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/c22988.htm

I suspect that cherry picking of data by Mr Drum lead to his gloomy outlook.

Tell me what happens when we bail out of Iraq before we accomplish the goals of security and stability? While I agree the aftermath of removing that piece of shit Saddam was handled incompetently, removing his sorry ass was still the right thing to do.

Republicans AND Democrats voted to support the use of force even if now they whine that "Bush misled us". What? The so called dumbass Chimpie McBush misled you? Then how can you be competent enough to lead the country and the free world if such an unintelligent man misled you? Please...

Colin Powell was right, and Rummy was wrong. Ok, that is obvious. Rummy arrogantly ignored the Powell Doctrine of Overwhelming Force as well as The Pottery Barn Rule, "You break it, you bought it". Well, Rummy is gone and none too soon. We changed course, even if Dingy Harry Reid refuses to admit it. Do we give up now just because we royally screwed up at first with a flawed strategy?

Whether you agreed with invading Iraq to remove Saddam or not, the fact remains we did it and are morally obligated to not bail out on the Iraqi's and leave them to suffer and die, especially those who risked all to help us. They will be slaughtered and Iran will pick up the pieces and the world will point to us in blame, and rightfully so. Not a pleasant prospect.

Winning this thing by accomplishing our goals of security and political progress (both are slowly happening now) is the only acceptable outcome. Losing should not be an option on the table.

had Eisenhower permitted the UN plebecite (sic)that was scheduled for 1956 (U.S> Presidential election year) to occur, but Ike couldn't do that because of domestic American politics.

Rick B, no, that's not so. First the Geneva Agreement was a treaty between France and North Viet-Nam (DRV), the US and South Viet-Nam (GVN) were not signatories to the agreement. Eisenhower did not interfere in the July 1956 (planned-for) elections.
See the Pentagon Papers:
As the deadline for consultations approached (20 July 1955), Diem was increasingly explicit that he did not consider free elections possible in North Vietnam, and had no intention of consulting with the DRV concerning them. The U.S. did not--as is often alleged--connive with Diem to ignore the elections. U.S. State Department records indicate that Diem's refusal to be bound by the Geneva Accords and his opposition to pre-election consultations were at his own initiative.

President Eisenhower is widely quoted to the effect that in 1954 as many as 80% of the Vietnamese people would have voted for Ho Chi Minh, as the popular hero of their liberation, in an election against Bao Dai.

...the date set for elections in July 1956, passed without international action. The DRV repeatedly tried to engage the Geneva machinery, forwarding messages to the Government of South Vietnam in July 1955, May and June 1956, March 1958, July 1959, and July 1960, proposing consultations to negotiate "free general elections by secret ballot," and to liberalize North-South relations in general. Each time the GVN replied with disdain, or with silence.

Why do so many posters love talking about things that happened forty, fifty or sixty years ago. It's all totally irrelevant. Can't we make empirical judgements on the evidence we have before us. The military are claiming progress but produce no actual numbers. AP say that the death toll this year is running at twice last years despite the surge. We do know that US casualties are at highest summer rate for the entire war. We also know that there has been zero progress on the political front. The army are also claiming Iraqi support in a couple of provinces but this seems to be based on buying off some Sunni militias with arms and cash. The fact that these guys are antagonists of the Shiite dominated central govt doesn't seem to be causing the military any sleepless nights. In other words it's still FUBAR. Turning to domestic politics the mystery to me is why the Republican party is continuing to sign on for this electoral death ride. I know why Bush is doing it. He just wants to run out the clock and then blame whoever has to clean up his mess. Probably Hillary. Why the GOP is buying into this plan to hand a veto proof majority in the senate and another 25 seats in the house eludes me.

"Tell me what happens when we bail out of Iraq before we accomplish the goals of security and stability?"

We'll most likely have a low-level civil war and a lot of chaos, similar to pre-Taliban Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other various examples of this type. Since that's essentially what we have now, I don't think you have much of a point, particularly since the goals you cite are almost certainly beyond our power to effect.

"While I agree the aftermath of removing that piece of shit Saddam was handled incompetently, removing his sorry ass was still the right thing to do."

Nope, sorry. The cost was too high.

[Mindless partisan drivel deleted.]

"We changed course, even if Dingy Harry Reid refuses to admit it."

Not really. We're doing exactly the same thing that we've been doing all along -- "stand down as they stand up," and "clear and hold" are still the orders of the day.

"Do we give up now just because we royally screwed up at first with a flawed strategy?"

No, we give up now because we lack the capability to do what Bush forced us into Iraq to do.

[Deleted logical fallacy: appeal to emotion]

"Winning this thing by accomplishing our goals of security and political progress (both are slowly happening now)"

No, in fact, they aren't. And that is the problem.

"is the only acceptable outcome. Losing should not be an option on the table."

That is the only option available to us. This war is already lost. We can either accept it now or we can accept it later; the outcome will be the same.

PaulB says that losing is the only option available to us and the war is already lost. Wow. With that attitude Columbus would never have sailed, the Wright Brothers would never have gone to Kitty Hawk, the Brits would have given up before El-Alamein, and Ike would never have attempted D-Day.

And as far as an appeal to emotion...it's emotionless people like you who allow things like the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Darfur to happen. It's emotionless people who walk by a rape happening and say, "oh, the cost is just too high" to intervene.... Whatever happened to honor and dignity?

The outcome is a low level civil war similar to pre-Taliban Afghanistan? The same Afghanistan that became a terrorist haven and eventually harbored those who planned 9/11? Oh,that's a great option. That's the same attitude that brought us the killing fields in Cambodia. And let's let Mookie al-Sadr and his puppeteers in Iran control even more of the worlds oil supply to be able to buy more weapons to use against us and commit economic blackmail... (Waiting for you bumper sticker No War for Oil reply on this one)

The cost is too high to betray those who fought and died in Iraq. I refuse to agree to let them fight and die for nothing just so pathetic whiners can and hand wringers can say, "See, I was right.", and so a political party can gain more seats in an upcoming election.

People told Washington the war was lost at Valley Forge, but he ignored them. I'm glad he he did.

Why do so many posters love talking about things that happened forty, fifty or sixty years ago. It's all totally irrelevant. Can't we make empirical judgements on the evidence we have before us.

One of the main reasons Cheney and the Neocons wanted the preemptive invasion of Iraq so badly was that they were trying to prove to the rest of the Middle Eastern nations that America was not only the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but also to prove that the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" was dead. We had the military and we would use it. Cheney and Rumsfeld have both been trying to prove they were corrent in how to handle Vietnam four decades ago, and we are in a world of shit because of that history.

That history (of which you either are or wish to be ignorant) lives and breathes in the fantasies driving today's conservatives and especially the NeoCons. They have built their excuses for past failures into their ideology, and make decisions today based on ideology rather than today's facts on the ground. Then when the current facts on the ground contradict their great conservative ideology, they try to bury or spin the current facts so that they conform to the ideology.

That's the difference between a theory and an ideology. A theory gets modified when contradictory facts appear. When holders of an ideology confront contradictory facts, they ignore or bury those contradictory facts so as to maintain the ideology unsullied.

Rick B writes: "One of the main reasons Cheney and the Neocons wanted the preemptive invasion of Iraq so badly was that they were trying to prove to the rest of the Middle Eastern nations that America was not only the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but also to prove that the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" was dead."

Objection your honor! Counsel is engaging in conjecture. (talk about theory...) Please ask counsel to demonstrate to the court that his ESP and Truthsayer power is fully functional first....by telling us what Osama's next move is or where he is hiding.

From the Washington Post The irony is that for three decades, American interventionists like those surrounding Rumsfeld have been laboring to overcome the Vietnam syndrome and its reluctance to get involved in overseas wars.

From Norman Soloman: The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula," President George H. W. Bush said of the Gulf War victory in early 1991. He told a gathering of state legislators, "It's a proud day for America – and, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."

From William R. Hawkins at NRO: Curing the Vietnam Syndrome

As war looms ever closer in Iraq, more references are being made by critics that this new conflict risks "another Vietnam." The first Gulf War of 1991 was widely hailed at the time as having put the "Vietnam Syndrome" behind us, but it didn't. It was reported that "Desert Storm" was a decisive victory because, unlike Vietnam, the military was given carte blanche to develop a winning strategy without the confining rules of engagement that allegedly cost America victory in Southeast Asia.

From PNAC Info on Pat Buchanan: to the extent that there is a “Vietnam Syndrome�– a distaste and impatience for foreign wars of dubious purpose — future U.S. leaders would do well to factor that into their war planning.

David Lindorf in Counterpunch: Vietnam Syndrome -- This term came into vogue among Republicans and neo-con Democrats directly after the U.S. defeat in Indochina. The idea was that the loss in Vietnam had soured American policy makers and the public on foreign military actions of any kind. The Bush administration's war-mongering in Afghanistan and Iraq was supposed to drive a stake through that syndrome, by offering an example of successful use of military force in promoting American foreign policy.

There's lot's more. Google is your friend. Use it.