Juan Cole recommended a good column in the Sunday Washington Post:
Surge to Nowhere
Don't buy the hawks' hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.
By Andrew J. Bacevich - Sunday, January 20, 2008
As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working. ...
...In reality, the war's effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the "stronger horse." In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it. [emphasis added]This piece does plow through some conventional ground. For example, Bacevich belittles the Iraqi people as incapable of being a decent country without its U.S. daddy--"a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs." I don't buy this. No one can deny the pathologies at work in Iraq, but I don't believe keeping the U.S. boot on its throat is the best way to help the the country develop. This is something they can and would work out for themselves.
Where Bacevich strikes a refreshing note of reality into the usually "blinkered" U.S. discourse is in shredding the "success" of the surge. Violence may seem to be down, but, Bacevich writes, "Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war."
Given the period of civil war in 2006 and early 2007, look out for what that U.S. accommodation of (formerly enemy) Sunni tribal leaders could lead to up the road:
That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?"One year on, the surge overall is a failure, except for an amazing publicity success in taking the cameras off the quagmire for a while, due in no small part to a welcome reduction of casualties. But if Bacevich is right, that reduction will only be temporary.
Finally, Bacevich's evaluation of the strategic merit of the Iraq project from the U.S. point of view is that it is a disaster. The effect on U.S. stature and security is 180 degrees from that promoted by the president and Republican candidates. But it hardly seems to matter, as tossing around terms and phrases like "honor" and "freedom isn't free" are merely red state red meat. The surge has only increased the sinking of taxpayer treasure into the hole. We're dug in deeper, making the logic of withdrawal harder to fathom. Talk of actual withdrawal has all but disappeared. Maybe that was the point.
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