Baghdad: A clean sweep, so far

The surge is on, and so far, not much.

The good news: U.S. forces sweeping Baghdad haven't encountered much resistance. The bad news: That's mostly because the sectarian fighters are lying low and waiting for us to leave. The sweep will only work if it is more than a sweep. It must be an actual occupation of ground, one that either flushes the insurgents out of hiding or forces them to remain there. Keep them lying low long enough, and actual security might be established.

So as long as we're planning to stay in the areas of Baghdad we've swept -- and that's the plan; follow the sweep with an occupation by Iraqi forces and the 82nd Airborne -- this doesn't bother me:

Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, warned that advance publicity on the security operation had given Shiite militias time to flee the city for bases elsewhere in the country.

"I have information that numerous of their leaders are now in Basra and other southern provinces in safe havens," he told Al-Arabiya television. "I believe that those who were behind the bloodshed and the chaos should be pursued and criminals must face justice."

Good. Let them flee. As long as we don't let them come back, we can slowly expand our militia-free zone across the country until they no longer have a place to flee to.

That's how occupation security works. And it's infuriating that it has taken more than three years for us to actually attempt it. But better late than never; if we can sustain this -- and the Iraqi government continues to be a serious partner -- Bush's "surge" will work.

Those are big ifs, especially because sustaining the surge will probably require more troops than we have committed. But for now, hope for the best.

surge, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Al-Sadr flees Iraq

In a story first reported by ABC News, American officials say they think Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi Army militia, has left Iraq, moving to Iran ahead of the expected "surge" in U.S. forces in Baghdad.

A lot of people are pointing to this as proof that the surge is the right strategy, that it's scaring our opponents because they know it will be effective.

I think that's simplistic. Yes, I'm sure he felt that he might be specifically targeted in the upcoming Baghdad campaign, so it was prudent to leave the area. But I think his departure is less a comment on the surge itself than it is on the growing fractures within the Mahdi Army and (more crucially) the withdrawal of Iraqi government protection. If the Iraqi government was still backing him he wouldn't fear an increased American presence, just like he hasn't feared it very much up until now. Forcing the Iraqi government to show it's serious about reining in its extremists was the second and must-win prong of the "surge" effort. So Sadr's disappearance is a positive comment on that aspect of the new strategy, not on the military surge itself.

Just to play devil's advocate, there's also a more pessimistic interpretation available: that al-Sadr is being sent out of the country with the Iraqi government's blessing just to get him out of the way while the heat is on. In other words, it's a way to protect him without appearing to protect him. The key thing to watch for is what happens to the Mahdi Army in al-Sadr's absence, and what happens to al-Sadr when (not if) he returns.

Speaking of the surge, the House today had a contentious debate on a resolution opposing the troop increase. All 435 members were given five minutes to speak, one reason the vote isn't scheduled until Friday. Democrats talked about sending soldiers to die refereeing a civil war; Republicans warned of undercutting the President, emboldening the enemy and darkly described the dire consequences of failure there.

It was a good, strong debate, though heavily marked by partisan posturing -- including an effort by some Republicans to shift the debate entirely away from the resolution and Iraq.

In a formal letter to GOP colleagues, Reps. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.) and John Shadegg (Ariz.) encouraged lawmakers to avoid discussing the resolution and focus instead on a wider war against Islamic radicals.

"This debate should not be about the surge or its details," they wrote. "This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."

Those two worthys notwithstanding, this is a debate that was long overdue. But in the end the resolution is expected to pass. And that's the important thing. Bush should get his surge -- and if the Iraqi government keeps playing ball, it might even work. But Congress needs to be on record stating its position on the war. If Bush succeeds, he can have his way with a chastised Congress; but if he fails, the resolution is an important first step toward eventually pulling the plug on the whole adventure.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Iran arming Iraqi insurgents?

It's a reasonable thing to suspect, and now the United States says it has evidence: captured Iranian munitions.

Never before displayed in public, the weapons included squat canisters designed to explode and spit out molten balls of copper that cut through armor. The canisters, called explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.’s, are perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here.

In a news briefing held under strict security, the officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories.

For it's part, Iran says "prove it."

The EFPs are pretty good evidence, and fairly alarming given the sophistication of the weaponry. The technology is 30 years old, but it still isn't the sort of thing people might cobble together in their garage. It requires fairly precise machining and design to create a shape that will deform into an aerodynamic projectile, as well as pack the explosives so that they will produce an explosion of the right amount and shape to do the deforming.

The mortar and RPGs are less compelling or surprising -- they're very common weapons, and could well have been introduced into Iraq long ago by Iran-supported groups fighting Saddam. Call them decent supporting evidence.

But merely having Iranian-produced weaponry doesn't prove Iranian complicity. To do that we have to show that the Iranian government is providing the munitions. That link appears to be shaky:

The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.

An "inference"? That's not the most actionable piece of data, especially when it involves something as momentous as accusing another country of arming your enemies.

Further, there's a logic problem: most of these weapons are being used by Sunni insurgents. Why would Shiite Iran supply sophisticated weaponry to the Sunnis, weapons that could just as easily be turned against Iraq's Shiite majority -- and probably will be if Iran achieves its presumed objective of forcing the United States to leave Iraq?

The article says many of these weapons have turned up in weapons caches in areas dominated by Iran-friendly militias. Okay, that makes sense. But as far as I know, such militias aren't generally setting up IEDs to attack U.S. forces. So what we may have here is two sets of EFPs: Weapons with clear Iranian provenance being supplied to Iranian-backed groups, but others of unknown provenance being supplied to Sunni insurgents.

It's also possible that some of the weapons transfers are being done by Iranian intelligence, Hezbollah or Revolutionary Guard members without the knowledge or approval of the Iranian government.

Either way, more proof is needed. I'm entirely unsurprised that Iran might be arming groups it supports. but trying to blame Iran for Sunni IED attacks is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof.

Update: Gen. Peter Pace, when asked about the briefing, said he could not support the assertions of Iranian involvement from his own experience. "It is clear that Iranians are involved," he said. "And it's clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

Iran, Iraq, politics, midtopia

The end of an error

I don't always agree with the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman, but in his latest column he efficiently states something I've been saying for a while.

Pardon the extensive quote, but it's pretty good.

Pulling out, the argument goes, would destroy our credibility and embolden the terrorists. Neoconservative Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is among those confidently predicting a parade of horribles: ethnic slaughter, a regional war and a secure base for Al-Qaida to launch attacks on us and our allies.

If we withdraw, he wrote recently in the Washington Post, "the war in Iraq and in the region will not end but will only grow more dangerous." And there is the old argument that if we don't fight the terrorists in Iraq, we will have to fight them at home.

The first flaw in this line of reasoning is that lamenting the dangers of failure is not the same as finding a formula for success. Bush tells us that his new approach offers a path to victory, but that's what he said about the old strategy. Why should anyone believe that this time he knows what he's doing or is telling us the truth?

The forecasts of neoconservatives have generally been as reliable as your daily horoscope. In 2004, Robert Kagan derided those who thought the war was lost, declaring that the United States was about as likely to fail as Derek Jeter (a career .317 hitter) was to hit below .200.

Consider the other horribles that are envisioned. An emboldened Al-Qaida? It's not as though the terrorists are all sitting home playing checkers, having lost the desire to slaughter infidels. In fact, as they demonstrate daily in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're emboldened already. Lost credibility? Our credibility crumpled when we invaded on the cheap and proved unable to preserve basic order.

Ethnic and sectarian killing are occurring with us there and doubtless would continue with us gone. But MIT defense scholar Barry Posen notes that mass murder tends to occur when one group is unarmed, and "everyone in Iraq is armed." We could minimize bloodshed on our way out by offering protection to anyone who wants to relocate within Iraq, and by accepting refugees who have put their lives at risk helping us.

A secure base, Posen points out, is unlikely for the Sunni Al-Qaida in a country dominated by Shiites, and unlikely in a region where the group has few friends and many enemies -- unlike Afghanistan, where it has long gotten help from Pakistan.

There's also little basis to expect a regional war. Iran has no reason to intervene directly because its Shiite allies are already in the driver's seat. Saudi Arabia would be asking to get hammered by Iran if it invaded on behalf of the Sunnis. The Turkish army might cross the border to show the Kurds who's boss, but none of its neighbors would strenuously object, much less fight.

As for the claim that the terrorists would merely follow us back to our shores, history suggests the opposite. Texas A&M political scientist Michael Desch says that during Israel's 18-year occupation of Lebanon, some 1,200 Israelis were killed there. In the following six years (up to last summer's invasion), despite Israel's proximity, only 23 Israelis died in Hezbollah attacks launched from Lebanon. You're much more likely to get stung by bees if you poke their hive than if you keep your distance.

What amazes me is that after all this time people still pull out such hoary bromides as "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here", ignoring fundamentals like the fact that the Iraqi insurgency (which makes up 90 percent or more of our opposition in Iraq) didn't exist until we invaded Iraq. Or that the jihadists who do come to Iraq to shoot at us by and large aren't "terrorists", as that term was widely understood before the administration began using it to describe everyone who disagrees with them -- including, famously and hilariously, teachers.

Pulling out will cause us to lose face. It will lead to short-term damage to our credibility on things like threatened use of force. But those are temporary effects, and anyway, what credibility do we have on that score now? Overall, while a civil war in Iraq will be bad, the direct damage and threat to the United States will be less than that caused by our continuing presence there.

Iraq is an expensive disaster, national securitywise. The only reason to stay at this point is whatever responsibility we feel for creating the current mess. But given the central government's involvement in factional fighting and the refusal of the warring parties to even attempt to talk, that responsibility lessens by the day. If they refuse to help themselves, it's not our job to prop them up.

Give Bush his surge and give Iraq one last chance to show it's serious about national reconciliation. But after all the incompetence and hubris that has gone before, one last chance is all they deserve.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Iraq: It's not just us

I get a little tired, sometimes, being so down about Iraq. I occasionally wonder if maybe the problem is my perspective. Am I just not seeing things properly? Is the grass really greener on the pro-war side of the fence, where victory is just a step or two away and all we have to do is gut it out?

Sadly, no.

The Arab League sent Mokhtar Lamani to Iraq to persuade its bitterly divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to make peace. He failed, and has now resigned, disillusioned and nearly drained of hope.

He says his mission was doomed by feeble support from the Arab governments that hired him, U.S. policies and the refusal of Iraq's leaders to work together.

"I am no longer going to stand and watch Iraqis' bodies being taken to the cemetery," he told The Associated Press in Cairo, where he returned from Baghdad last week to deliver his resignation to the Arab League.

It's telling that not even othr Arabs can get the Iraqi factions to talk to each other. It means they're hellbent on confrontation, and there's no neutral "government" to defend against the bad guys; everyone is implicated.

Lamani's take:

In his Jan. 22 resignation letter, a copy of which he gave to AP, Lamani said of the Iraqi leaders: "My only problem was their own relations with each other, their strong feeling that each is a victim of the other."

Lamani said he ultimately blames Washington for Iraq's deterioration. "Its ways of dealing with the Iraqi problems, including the Iranian intervention, are not right. ... They need to change their policy in an urgent way," he said.

He has backed the Iraq Study Group's report in December that recommended Washington engage Iran as part of a regional approach to ending Iraq's violence....

Lamani also faults the 22 nations of the Arab League, saying they did not give Iraq "the necessary priority or seriousness." Arab governments were so detached from Iraq that it was "as if it were on the moon," he said.

This is a guy who spent eight months in Baghdad, living outside the Green Zone, driving an unarmored car with no bodyguards. Despite such risks and fervent work, he failed to accomplish his most basic aim: a conference of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss national reconciliation.

So let's recap: the Arab League representative, after eight months of trying, couldn't get Iraqi factions to agree even to talk to one another.

And we think a short-term "surge" will help?

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think so.

Lamani, Iraq, politics, midtopia

$245 billion more

That's what the administration wants for Iraq and Afghanistan in the next two years: $100 billion for the rest of 2007 (on top of $70 billion already approved) and $145 billion in 2008. Plans call for an appropriation of $50 billion in 2009, and none after that when the hope is we will have withdrawn.

Add that $295 billion to the $378 billion already appropriated for Iraq and at least $70 billion for Afghanistan, and it brings the total cost of the two wars to nearly $800 billion -- more expensive than Vietnam even on an inflation-adjusted basis. Never mind the indirect costs, or the long-term costs for things like health care for veterans, which added in would bring the total cost into the $2 trillion to $3 trillion range.

The Afghan expenditures I have no quarrel with. The Iraq expenses, which account for the bulk of the money, represent an incredible amount of forgone opportunities in order to pursue an unnecessary war.

Speaking of which, the latest NIE makes clear that prospects for success are daunting.

Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the next year to year and a half, a collaborative report by 16 U.S. spy agencies says, raising uncertainty about the prospect for withdrawing American troops that are shoring up the government.

Months in the making, the assessment says that growing and entrenched polarization between Shia and Sunni Muslims, inadequate Iraqi security forces, weak leaders, and the success of extremists' efforts to use violence to exacerbate the sectarian war all create a situation that will be difficult to improve.

One key point it makes is that Iraqi security forces are unlikely to be ready to take over responsibility for security in the next 12 to 18 months -- raising the question of what happens to the benchmarks we've told Iraq to meet, and how long we're willing to hold their hand.

And while it accuses Iran of meddling, it also says Iraq's neighbors are not "major drivers" of violence, nor are they likely to be -- largely because Iraqis are more than capable of generating plenty of violence on their own.

There is one hopeful section:

The estimate said some positive developments could — analysts stressed "could" — help reverse negative trends. They include broader acceptance of the Sunni minority of the central government and concessions on the part of Shiites and Kurds to make more room for Sunni participation.

This would be more hopeful if the first part of the report didn't assess the likelihood of any of that happening as very small.

NIE, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Double the surge! Or halve it

President Bush's surge has been advertised as involving 21,500 soldiers. I always assumed that was a total. But now the Congressional Budget Office says that only counts actual combat troops, and when you add in support troops the figure could be as high as 48,000.

The number comes in response to a request from Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., the chairman of the House Budget Committee, for an estimate on how much the surge will cost ($27 billion a year, as it turns out).

What are support troops? They're the folks who back up the soldiers doing the actual fighting. For every infantryman on the front line, there's a whole bunch of soldiers behind him, responsible for paying, feeding, equipping, informing and otherwise taking care of his needs. The ratio of combat to support troops in a military organization is known as the "teeth-to-tail" ratio, and that ratio is usually quite lopsided. When I was in the Army in the early 1990s, the Soviets had a ratio of about 3:1, meaning there were three support soldiers for every soldier actually fighting. The U.S. ratio was much higher: 8:1 or even 10:1, IIRC.

The lower the ratio, the more combat power you can deploy with a given number of troops. But the higher the ratio, the more durable your combat power is. So the Soviets could throw huge numbers of troops into the fray, but their logistical train was fragile so their combat power would decay rapidly. We could field fewer combat troops, but our robust tail meant we could sustain that level of combat power far better.

That assumes, of course, that the tail is actually functional, and doesn't simply represent bureaucratic dead weight.

Anyway, the reason I assumed the 21,500 figure included support troops is because such figures almost always include support troops. If you're sent to Iraq, it doesn't matter if you're a rifleman or a clerk-typist; you're in Iraq, and you count as part of the overall strength. So it's a bit surprising to find out that Bush was counting things up differently.

There are two reasons he might have done this, and which you choose probably depends on your view of Bush. On the one hand, it could have been politics: he might have played up the lower figure in order to minimize opposition to the move. On the other hand, it could have been that he simply didn't know yet how many support troops were being sent.

Me, I'm actually happy to find out he was undercounting. 48,000 troops still isn't a big enough increase to show we're serious, but it's a lot closer than 21,500.

On the other hand, maybe we only need half as many troops after all. In a frankly bizarre bit of testimony before Congress, Gen. George Casey -- the outgoing top general in Iraq who Bush has nominated to be the Army chief of staff -- said the surge was too big, and only half as many troops were needed.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey said he had asked for two additional Army brigades, based on recommendations of his subordinate commanders. Bush announced Jan. 10 that he would send five extra brigades as part of a buildup that would total 21,500 soldiers and Marines.

Asked by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., why he had not requested the full five extra brigades that Bush is sending, Casey said, "I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission."

Yeah, because things went so well under Casey's watch. Methinks his credibility on this issue is not so high.

To be fair, Casey may be talking about a narrower, more specific thing: the number of troops necessary to carry out the specific mission he was given. As we discovered in September, actually defeating the insurgency hadn't been our mission up to that point. So if Casey defines his mission narrowly enough, his numbers make sense. But then he's either being myopic or obliquely saying that the problem was the mission -- a subtle criticism of Bush, who defines the missions that the military then carries out.

I'm beginning to think, however, that Bush isn't solely at fault for the mess that has engulfed Iraq.

politics, midtopia

A Republican deadline in Iraq

Republican war supporters have given Bush their own deadline to show progress in Iraq -- six to nine months.

Several leading Senate Republicans who support President Bush's troop-boosting plan for Iraq say they will give the administration and the Iraqis about six months to show significant improvement.

“I don't think this war can be sustained for more than six months if in fact we don't see some progress,” Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said Wednesday. Until this month, he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Roberts' comments came two days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the new U.S. military push was the Iraqis' “last chance.”

“This needs to be successful over the next six to nine months,” McConnell said in an interview Monday with Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto. “And if not, we're going to have to go in a different direction.”

There you have it. As I've said before, Bush has one last chance to succeed in Iraq, because both Democrats and Republicans want it off the table for the 2008 elections.

These are war supporters, mind you, and their work is largely an attempt to derail the anti-surge resolutions making their way through Congress. But it's a sign of how far the debate has shifted that the hawkish alternative is a six-month deadline.

Speaking of resolutions, war opponents appear to have found bipartisan common ground.

Two senators, a Republican and a Democrat, leading separate efforts to put Congress on record against President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq joined forces Wednesday, agreeing on a nonbinding resolution that would oppose the plan and potentially embarrass the White House.

Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., had been sponsoring competing measures opposing Bush's strategy of sending 21,500 more U.S. troops to the war zone, with Warner's less harshly worded version attracting more Republican interest. The new resolution would vow to protect funding for troops while keeping Warner's original language expressing the Senate's opposition to the buildup.... It lacks Levin's language saying the troop increase is against the national interest, and it drops an earlier provision by Warner suggesting Senate support for some additional troops.

Works for me. The important thing is to get Congress on record opposing the plan. Though I hope Bush's "surge" works, I doubt it will, and Congress needs to get out front on the issue to avoid being accused of armchair quarterbacking with hindsight. The resolutions lay the groundwork for later, more robust action if such proves necessary. And it will give Bush a huge cudgel to use against Congress if he turns out to be successful.

Debate on the measure could begin Monday.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Congress finds its spine

Finally.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee began laying the constitutional groundwork today for an effort to block President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq and place new limits on the conduct of the war there, perhaps forcing a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

They were joined by Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who led the panel for the last two years, in asserting that Mr. Bush cannot simply ignore Congressional opposition to his plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

"I would respectfully suggest to the president that he is not the sole decider," Mr. Specter said. "The decider is a joint and shared responsibility."

Mr. Specter said he considered a clash over constitutional powers to be "imminent."

I don't particularly agree with Russell Feingold, who is calling for American troops to be withdrawn within six months. There may come a time for such a curtain drop, but it isn't now: Bush should be given one last chance to try to pull this out, to show that his "surge" will work. I'm skeptical, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

But I fully support Congress starting to exert its Constitutional authority and responsibilities. If they don't lose their nerve, we may end up with a historic delineation of the relative wartime powers of the executive and legislative branch.

First, let's quickly dispose of a tangential political canard.

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch repeatedly talked about the need to "support our troops," suggesting that a resolution opposing Bush's strategy would undermine them. He was handily cut apart by Feingold, who noted that the troops would not be hurt in any way. They would still be paid, supplied and trained as usual -- just not in Iraq. Richard Durbin delivered a second blow, noting that troops are being sent to Iraq without proper training or equipment. "Now who is standing behind the troops?" he said. Specter, citing a Military Times poll, added that since only 35 percent of service members support Bush's plan, questioning that plan would seem to be doing what the troops want.

Those responses neatly demolish the idea that "supporting the troops" requires supporting the president's use of them. That was a central tactic in war supporters' attempts to stifle debate on Iraq, and both the attempt and the faulty logic behind it always angered me. Sad as it is to see the tactic still being used on the floor of the Senate, it's good to see it quickly and robustly refuted.

But back to the constitutional debate. Congress's authority to cut off funding is undisputed. That's how Congress -- not the executive branch -- finally ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. And Congress has the sole authority to declare war as well. That bookends the debate: Congress can start and end wars. But what power does it have over the conduct of a war?

As a practical matter, it's usually better to have one commanding general than 536 of them. So let's stipulate that as long as the president and Congress agree on a course, the president should generally be left alone to command the troops.

But if push comes to shove, who wins?

It seems to me that if Congress has the power to start and end wars, it must also have the power to take lesser steps, such as establishing limits on a particular war or attaching strings to military funding. Congress' impeachment power supports this idea: If Congress really wanted to, it could impeach the president and then keep on impeaching his successors until they found one willing to fight the war to their liking.

The Founders, remember, had just gotten rid of one executive tyrant; they did not wish to empower another. Most important governmental powers rest in Congress, and the real biggies -- the power to tax and impeach, for example -- belong exclusively to the House, the people's representatives.

The president's commander-in-chief powers, then, are subservient to Congress: he fights the war on their behalf. At the Senate hearing, that was the testimony of Louis Fisher, a constitutional law specialist for the Library of Congress. As he put it, "The same duty commanders have to the president, the president has to the elected representatives."

But as another witness -- Robert Turner, a professor at the University of Virginia -- noted, such power comes with a price: blame. He said Congress was responsible for the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia because they wouldn't let Nixon fight inside Cambodia. That's a stretch, but it also demonstrates why Congress has generally been only too happy to let the president make such decisions in all but the most extreme cases.

Besides moving toward a confrontation on Iraq, Congress also issued another pre-emptive warning on Iran.

"What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what's taking place," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told John Negroponte, who is in line to become the nation's No. 2 diplomat as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

And for today's political humor, here's Negroponte's response to a question from Chuck Hagel.

Negroponte repeated President Bush's oft-stated preference for diplomacy, although he later added, "We don't rule out other possibilities."

"Preference for diplomacy"? Surely he jests. Bush, after all, has flatly rejected talks with Syria or Iran over Iraq. And he has let the Europeans take the lead on talks over Iran's nuclear program, contenting himself with rattling sabers in the background.

Some of that is reasonable, even justified. I'm doubtful diplomacy will succeed in persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But to claim Bush has a preference for diplomacy is a bit removed from reality.

constitution, Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia

Maybe -- maybe -- real change

I'm oddly heartened by the extended and bloody fighting currently taking place along Haifa Street in Baghdad.

Attack helicopters pumped rockets at gunmen holed up in office towers and apartment blocks yesterday, as US and Iraqi forces swept through a notorious Sunni-insurgent enclave in the heart of Baghdad.

The US military said the fighting around Haifa Street was part of a new offensive launched before dawn to disrupt illegal militias and bring the volatile area at the heart of Baghdad under the control of Iraqi security forces.

At first glance, there's not much to be heartened by. This is the third or fourth time we've "retaken" the area since the invasion. And it's a Sunni stronghold, so it could be viewed as just another battle between the Shiite government (supported by U.S. troops) and the Sunni minority.

But one reason Haifa Street is restive again is that Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army has been less active, thanks to an apparently real withdrawal of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's protection. Doubts over whether Maliki was willing or even able to bring al-Sadr to heel drove a lot of skepticism over Bush's "surge" plan, which could only work if the Iraqi government finally got serious about getting its house in order. Not only does Maliki appear to be making a genuine effort, but al-Sadr himself seems to have realized that a confrontation with the government is not in his interest.

There remain, as always, serious signs of concern. For instance, A Sunni general respected by his American advisers was replaced midfight by a Shiite general, on Maliki's orders. And an American vow to fight gunmen in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods alike remains untested. I don't doubt the Americans are willing to be evenhanded, but are the Iraqis? Maliki says yes, but he's been, uh, less than truthful on that score before.

This is but a small first sign -- not even a step. And there still remains the hard tasks, like cracking down on death squads, eliminating corruption and "ghost soldiers" in the Iraqi army, reforming the Iraqi police.... the list goes on.

But for now, Maliki has shown more willingness to do what is necessary than I would have believed even two weeks ago.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Iraq war resolution gains momentum

There are now two versions of an anti-surge resolution circulating in the Senate, but unlike many such instances one is not an attempt to derail the other; sponsors on both sides expect to reconcile them into a single text that will draw bipartisan support.

One is mostly Democratic, but with key Republican co-sponsors: Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe. The other is mostly Republican, but with a key Democratic co-sponsor: Ben Nelson. You can find the text of the Democratic version on thomas.gov by searching for "S Con Res 2". The GOP version is still being drafted; I can't find a copy of the actual text.

If the resolution actually comes to a vote -- opponents have threatened a filibuster, though it will be interesting to see if they follow through and can sustain it -- I'm dying to see what the final vote total will be. If it's lopsided enough, it will speak volumes about the future of our Iraq adventure.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Not serious about war, Part II

A month or so ago, I wrote about how the Future Tactical Truck (FTT) program shows that the Pentagon is not taking the war in Iraq seriously.

Now, we've got yet more evidence.

After nearly four years of war in Iraq, the Pentagon's effort to protect its troops against roadside bombs is in disarray, with soldiers and Marines having to swap access to scarce armored vehicles and the military unsure whether it has the money or industrial capacity to produce the safe vehicles it says the troops need....

Even if the Pentagon can find millions of dollars not currently budgeted, and even if it can find factories to produce the armored vehicles, most U.S. troops in Iraq will not have access to the best equipment available, as President Bush has often promised.

The Army acknowledged last week, for example, that it is still 22 percent short of the armored Humvees it needs in Iraq despite heated criticism in 2004 and 2005 over the lack of armored vehicles.

Army officials said it will be another eight months before that gap can be filled.

Wait, it gets better. Unable to actually protect the troops, the Army is putting a Band-aid on a gaping wound:

The Army is shipping 71,000 sets of fire-resistant uniforms to Iraq so that soldiers will have a better chance of surviving the fires that often consume Humvees that hit roadside bombs.

It's not just armored Humvees. The military plans to largely replace Humvees with V-shaped vehicles call MPVs -- a class of armored car that has been produced and used for years by other countries that are very good at surviving explosions. We're not talking about having to develop a new vehicle from scratch; we're talking about buying or modifying an existing design.

Even so, the first MPVs aren't expected to reach Iraq until March 2008.

The Pentagon says it is doing all it can. Apparently "all it can" means that even four years into this fight we haven't ramped up development, production or purchasing of vehicles everyone knows we need. Just like with the FTT, we're still on a peacetime development cycle.

As I said a month ago, if this mentality had prevailed in World War II, we would have fought the whole thing with Grant tanks and 37mm antitank guns -- and lost.

military, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Unpleasant math

What can $1.2 trillion buy?

Less than half of that would let us double cancer research funding, treat every American who has diabetes or heart disease and immunize every child on the planet against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio and diptheria -- all for a decade.

$350 billion would provide a decade of universal pre-school.

$100 billion over a decade would be enough to fully implement the 9/11 Commissions recommendations and provide more aid to Afghanistan.

Or you could choose, as we have, to blow it all on Iraq. And that's a relatively conservative estimate.

The sheer scale of waste and forgone opportunities boggles the mind.

Iraq, budget, money, politics, midtopia

Thanks for the liberation

You may recall that at the time of our invasion, administration officials estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed 300,000 people during his 24 years in power -- not counting combat-related deaths from the Iran-Iraq war or other military operations.

That works out to about 12,500 a year. Not a bad clip. But since we toppled him, we've demonstrated that he was a rank amateur.

Nearly 35,000 civilians were killed last year in Iraq, the United Nations said Tuesday, a sharp increase from the numbers reported previously by the Iraqi government.

Gianni Magazzeni, the chief of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said 34,452 civilians were killed and 36,685 were wounded last year.

The Iraqi government disputes the U.N. figures, claiming the true death toll was 12,357 -- a number that itself is still comfortably close to Saddam's efforts. But there are plenty of reasons to be doubtful of the Iraqi figure, prime among them that the Baghdad morgue alone reported 16,000 unidentified bodies last year, most of which were victims of violence. A Health Ministry official told the Washington Post that the true number of casualties was 23,000. All in all, the U.N. figure seems the most unbiased and reasonable.

We should be careful not to morally equate deliberate executions and massacres under Saddam with the casualties of a multifaceted civil war. And theoretically, the current death rates will hold for only a short period of time, as opposed to ongoing killings under Saddam.

But viewed from the perspective of Iraqis, they have little reason to celebrate our arrival. They're now being killed at two or three times the rate they were before, and the pace has been steadily accelerating, not slowing down.

politics, midtopia

Iraq plan DOA?

Probably not, but the ranks of Republican opponents is growing in a sort of negative bipartisanship. Several senators took on Condoleeza Rice on the topic today on Capitol Hill.

Some were longtime war opponents, like Chuck Hagel:

President Bush’s decision to deploy 21,500 additional troops to Iraq drew fierce opposition Thursday from congressional Democrats and some Republicans — among them Sen. Chuck Hagel, who called it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."...

In a heated exchange with Hagel, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, Rice disputed his characterization of Bush’s buildup as an "escalation."

"Putting in 22,000 more troops is not an escalation?" Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and longtime critic of Bush’s Iraq policy, asked. "Would you call it a decrease?"

"I would call it, senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad," she said.

Hagel told Rice, "Madame secretary, Iraqis are killing Iraqis. We are in a civil war. This is sectarian violence out of control."

She disputed that Iraq was in the throes of a civil war. To that, Hagel said, "To sit there and say that, that’s just not true."

More interesting to me, though, is Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who withdrew his support while complaining that the Bush administration had lied to him and the American people. Or George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who did not come out and say he was withdrawing support, but said Bush had not made a convincing case for his plan.

Separately, an Associated Press poll found strong opposition to the president's plan, with 70 percent opposing sending more troops. Polls should be taken with a grain of salt. This one, for instance, largely reflects overwhelming (87 percent) opposition from Democrats and lukewarm (52 percent) support from Republicans. But that's still a solid majority opposed to the idea.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Same old, same old

A steady stream of leaks means there were few surprises in Bush's speech on Iraq, but let's go through it anyway.

First, two reference links: The speech, and the fact sheet.

Bush starts out by acknowledging the obvious: 2006 was a disaster. He says any mistakes are his, and that it's clear a change is needed. All good words, but it's disheartening that Bush was months behind the rest of the country in recognizing the downward spiral in Iraq.

He then asserts that "failure in Iraq would be a disaster." In the fact sheet, the phrasing is even starker: "The war on terror cannot be won if we fail in Iraq." Those are scare words, and simply not true. Iraq is hurting our cause, not helping it. But let's address Bush's specific arguments.

Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits and oil revenue from a "safe haven" in Iraq. Nope. Our presence in Iraq has itself greatly increased extremist recruiting and helped inflame an entire region; I doubt our leaving could boost it much more. Plus, Iraq would not become a "safe haven" for terrorists. The Shiite majority has no use for the Sunni fundamentalists in Al-Qaeda. Nor do the Kurds. Nor do most of the Sunni clans, who resent foreign interference as well as the attempts to provoke a sectarian war against the numerically superior Shiites. If we leave, the insurgency loses most of its momentum and al-Qaeda loses most of its support.

Iran would be emboldened to pursue nuclear weapons. Perhaps. But they're pretty darned emboldened now, and one reason is because we have our hands full in Iraq. Leaving Iraq would give us a lot more options for dealing with Iran.

That's it; that's what he says to support the "cannot be won if we fail in Iraq" claim.

Next he turns to solutions. First, secure Baghdad. He correctly notes that most of the sectarian violence occurs in the ethnically mixed areas in and around the capital. He also correctly notes that all previous attempts to secure Baghdad failed because we didn't have enough troops.

Again, totally unsurprising -- and totally disheartening that Bush has only now come to that conclusion, three years (and at least three "retake Baghdad" attempts) after invading.

He claims the new pacification plan will work. Here it is. Iraqi army and police units will spread out across Baghdad and do most of the heavy lifting. American troops -- five brigades worth -- will back them up. This, supposedly, will finally give us enough troops to clear and hold neighborhoods.

Except that these are the same Iraqi troops that didn't do much in previous efforts, and the same Iraqi police that are riven with sectarian divisions, as well as being underequipped and ill-trained to engage in urban combat. And again, "clear and hold" has been the policy for a long time. Bush is admitting that for months he has been pursuing a strategy that was doomed to fail because there weren't enough troops to make it work. If there weren't enough troops, why was he pursuing such a strategy?

On Sunday, George Will made the point that, Bush's blithe assertions aside, even with the additional troops we still won't have enough forces. He quotes Wayne White, a long-time State Department official, who calls Baghdad "a Shiite-Sunni Stalingrad."

Based on experience in the Balkans, an assumption among experts is that to maintain order in a context of sectarian strife requires one competent soldier or police officer for every 50 people. For the Baghdad metropolitan area (population: 6.5 million), that means 130,000 security personnel. There are 120,000 now, but 66,000 of them are Iraqi police, many — perhaps most — of whom are worse than incompetent.

Because their allegiances are to sectarian factions, they are not responsive to legitimate central authority. They are part of the problem. Therefore even a substantial surge of, say, 30,000 U.S. forces would leave Baghdad that many short, and could be a recipe for protracting failure.

Bush claims that political interference -- read, opposition from the U.S.-supported central government -- hamstrung previous pacification efforts, but this time the Iraqis have pledged to be cooperative. Good as far as it goes -- but the fact that such a pledge is needed speaks volumes about the likelihood of success this time around.

Bush also told Prime Minister Maliki that the American committment is not open-ended, and mentioned the benchmarks he has established for the Iraqi government to show it can become self-reliant. He said Iraq will take over all security responsibilities by November, reform the oil-revenue laws, hold provincial elections, allow Baathists back into government and spend $10 billion on reconstruction.

All good, but mostly surface. The benchmarks are not particularly demanding. "Security responsibilities" is a paper handoff; U.S. troops will still be heavily involved. Elections mean little as far as security. The revenue sharing and deBaathification are solid, addressing two major Sunni grievances.

The $10 billion is kind of remarkable, considering that Iraq's entire federal budget is only $65 billion. The link, by the way, also raises another question about Iraq's ability to achieve self-reliance, because that federal budget is larger than its GDP ($47 billion), and includes a $16 billion annual deficit.

Bush didn't mention a reported pledge of $1 billion in U.S. money. Which is just as well; $1 billion would sound more impressive if his 2007 budget hadn't cut Iraq reconstruction aid from about $10 billion a year to zero.

Let's see, what else: increased training of Iraqi forces? Good, as long as we're not just training and arming militia members. Better coordination of reconstruction efforts? Good, but minor. Increase forces in Anbar province by 4,000 troops? Good, I guess, but probably too few to make a serious difference, and since those troops will simply be reshuffled from elsewhere in Iraq it means the game of whack-a-mole continues.

Intriguingly, he then refers to "interrupting the flow of support from Iran and Syria" -- but gives no details. I'm curious what he means by that. He can't mean diplomacy, because he has ruled out talks with those two. And we don't have enough troops to seal the border. Does he mean cross-border strikes? Aggressive interdiction? That should be a focus of questioning from the press.

He then closes with stirring rhetoric.

The fact sheet fleshes out some details -- a demobilization program for militias, increasing the size of Iraqi security forces, reforming the Interior Ministry -- but little else.

So what's new? Not much. I have to agree with several other observers, including the WaPo's Don Froomkin and conservative blogger AllahPundit: His grand new strategy is just more of the same. Another conservative blogger, Jay Reding, provides some more analysis, but even he was underwhelmed.

We are in trouble.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

The lessons of Somalia

The recent U.S. airstrikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants in Somalia raises some questions and reinforces some points that often get lost in the debate over Iraq.

Reports out of Somalia are, as always, conflicting on that score. Somali officials are reporting that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a key planner of the 1998 embassy bombings, was killed, but U.S. officials caution against believing that and say they aren't even sure he was in the country.

Assuming the strike is not a precursor to something foolish -- like the introduction of U.S. ground troops -- it signals a return to the sort of thing we should be doing in battling terrorism: identifying top terrorists and killing them, as we have with missile-armed drones in Yemen and other such places. It's a pinpoint approach that goes after actual terrorists, rather than the big hammer approach of invasion that inflames whole populations and consumes lives and resources while creating enemies rather than eliminating them.

It's not always the easiest path. It takes elite troops and excellent equipment. It requires that the intelligence be good and the strike accurate. And above all it takes patience -- both political and tactical.

So far, the Somali strike appears to fit the bill. Let's hope we see more of this sort of operation as we begin to extricate ourselves from the mess in Iraq.

Somalia also shows the value of using regional proxies -- Ethiopia, in this case -- to do whatever conventional fighting is required. By avoiding the introduction of U.S. troops, it not only makes such interventions easier politically but also avoids a very practical problem -- the inflammatory nature of a U.S. troop presence. Astute selection of such countries helps develop and strengthen allies in key regions and sends a message to the world: if you fight terrorists, you can expect our help; if you harbor them, you can expect us to help your enemies.

It's not quite that simple, of course: care must be taken not to back allies of momentary convenience, or get drawn into taking sides in a local conflict because of spurious or insignificant terrorist connections. But it worked in Afghanistan, it's working in Somalia and it can work elsewhere, too.

Somalia, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Senate second thoughts

In a stark sign of how far the political winds surrounding Iraq have shifted -- and a sign of how difficult it will be for Bush to get Iraq initiatives through Congress -- a majority of senators who voted 77-23 to give Bush authorization to invade Iraq now say they regret the vote and would vote differently if the vote were held today.

By ABC News' count, if the Senators knew then what they know now, only 43 — at most — would still vote to approve the use of force and the measure would be defeated. And at least 57 senators would vote against going to war, a number that combines those who already voted against the war resolution with those who told ABC News they would vote against going to war, or said that the pre-war intelligence has been proven so wrong the measure would lose or it would never even come to a vote.

For any Senate vote to switch from 77-23 in favor to essentially 57-43 against is quite remarkable, and far more so for a decision as significant as the one to go to war.

This isn't a comparison of that Congress to this Congress; it's asking those who cast a vote on the resolution -- be they current or former senators -- how they would vote today.

There's a small hole in ABC's methodology, in that they didn't ask those who voted against the resolution whether they now supported it. But that's a tiny thing, because it's highly unlikely that the answer would be "yes."

Hindsight is great, of course. But it demonstrates how impossible it is anymore to paint war opponents as far-left extremists or naive hippies or Al-Qaeda sympathizers.

And there's this observation:

The president, not up for re-election, can try to move forward on his plans for Iraq regardless of public sentiment, Ornstein added.

"But if Lyndon Johnson were alive today, he'd tell the president you can't keep prosecuting a war when the public — and many of your congressional supporters — abandon you," he said. "It makes it much, much harder to sustain it."

Among those who stood by their vote to authorize war were Republicans Dick Lugar, Sam Brownback, Pete Domenici, Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, and Democrats Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.

There's actually a lot more nuance to the answers than you might expect, so if you want the full taste, read the link.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Let the spin begin

The White House is putting out its version of the Iraq strategy review, courtesy of the New York Times.

The major news here is that General George Casey, the top military commander in Iraq, may be moved out of the post by March -- several months earlier than planned.

As well, there's this frank assessment of what happened to the administration's strategy:

In interviews in Washington and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan.

This left the president and his advisers constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground.

“We could not clear and hold,” Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, acknowledged in a recent interview, in a frank admission of how American strategy had crumbled. “Iraqi forces were not able to hold neighborhoods, and the effort to build did not show up. The sectarian violence continued to mount, so we did not make the progress on security we had hoped. We did not bring the moderate Sunnis off the fence, as we had hoped. The Shia lost patience, and began to see the militias as their protectors.”

Hmmm. Pretty much what everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has been saying for quite some time.

Other than that, however, the article is mostly devoted to giving the administration's version of the Iraq debate. If you believe them, the current strategy was Casey's, and Bush has had doubts for a year or more. Finally those doubts grew strong enough that he ordered a complete strategy review in September -- on his own initiative, not because of political pressure.

Note the subtext: Bush saw things clearly; his only failing was (understandably) placing too much faith in his general. Bush was not forced to review his Iraq strategy; he moved with clear-eyed deliberateness. End result: Bush gets let off the hook for what has happened in Iraq, and Casey is the fall guy, along with Donald Rumsfeld.

But given Bush's own statements and policy decisions, this seems to be a clear case of attempted hagiography. He constantly insisted that the war was being won. Every time a spasm of violence ended, he cited it as progress -- until the next, even worse spasm occurred. He steadfastly resisted calls to either send more troops or increase the size of the military or even define how what he was doing was achieving anything other than bloody stasis amid a widening sectarian war. He insisted on "victory", but repeatedly resisted providing the resources and strategic route that might have achieved it.

Does Casey bear some responsibility? It's reasonable to assume so, but we'll only know for sure when the Bush administration records are made public 25 years from now. His plan seems reasonable, had it been adopted quickly and with adequate resources. But it also seems that his reports to Bush suffered from both the traditional military "can do!" attitude -- which led to overly sunny analyses -- and a cognizance of military limitations that Bush himself had not yet (and perhaps has not yet) fully embraced.

But to suggest that the problem was Casey's ignores both Bush's own actions and his ultimate role as commander in chief. At some point an observer must conclude that Bush is either the problem directly, or alarmingly dependent on advisers who he is hideously bad at choosing.

Either way, his credibility is shot.

Iraq, Bush, politics, midtopia

Islamists in retreat in Somalia

The internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia, with the backing of Ethiopian troops, has taken control of Mogadishu and put the Union of Islamic Courts into full flight.

When the UIC first rose to power, I counseled patience. Somalis had endured 15 years of violent anarchy between clans and rival warlords; if the UIC could bring peace, they deserved a chance to try. Various sources tried to paint them as an African division of Al-Qaeda, but that was never particularly convincing; what mattered is how they governed the place. And they were almost certainly better than the warlords they replaced.

But they instituted a particularly harsh brand of sharia, with one cleric famously threatening to shoot anyone who didn't pray five times a day. Then they began to attack the transitional government, closing schools to send students to the front. They had not brought peace; they had brought continued war, fought with child soldiers.

But they miscalculated. Not only did they overreach and provoke an Ethiopian counterattack; the heavy casualties suffered in that fighting has caused the UIC to splinter, as clans withdrew their forces in an effort to preserve them.

The question now is whether the transitional government can establish firm control over the country. Already looting and factional fighting has engulfed Mogadishu, and no one is quite sure what hard-core UIC fighters will do: fade into the civilian population? Unleash a guerrilla war?

The Somali government has an opportunity to put an end both to the UIC and the warlords, if they act quickly and firmly and retain the support of the Ethiopian military. If they don't, then Somalia could fade again into anarchy -- and the Somali people's suffering will continue.

Ethiopia, Somalia, politics, midtopia