The Straight Dope On Iraq

The buzz from Iraq is about Sen. Levin and Warner's report after another Congressional "dog and pony show," where they suggest that there is tangible military progress but no political movement. Levin went so far as to say this:

"The Maliki government is non-functional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders."

Which is pretty much in line with a lot of things we've been hearing from non-propagandist politicians and so-called foreign policy experts.

But when you hear from the soldiers themselves, who aren't on the ground for an 8-day trip arranged by the military but a 15-month deployment, it carries a bit more weight.

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

I think the most dangerous part of the editorial is the one where the soldiers explain how the notion of an "enemy" is relative in today's Iraq.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

This revelation comes at at time when the military brass continues to try and spin that Iran is the sole bad actor in Iraq, despite little evidence, to the extent that military spokesmen say things like "Just because we're not finding (the Iranians) doesn't mean they're not there."

And it happens every day. And Shiites and Sunnis have more fealty to their militias than to the population, and our continued support for them in their communities simply arms both sides in a civil war.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

This is a great assessment of the country, because it sets the realities of the situation in a way that cannot charitably be seen as an element of "cut-and-run" defeatism. This is a truth that foreign policy experts know but refuse to say publicly. And so the lapdog media looks at words from people like Pollack and O'Hanlon instead of recognizing the truth.

UPDATE: Two provincial governors have been assassinated recently. That's 2 out of 18. The political turmoil is enormous.