Iraq Strategy: No Sudden Movements

As the House begins the first step toward funding what seems to be endless war, it's time once again to take a look at the facts on the ground in Iraq. And they're pretty much the same as they've been. We know that any security successes, fragile though they may be, are largely attributable to the ethnic cleansing that the surge was designed to create. With the sects almost entirely separated, by neighborhood as well as by blast walls like the cities are medieval fortresses, sectarian strife has gone down because of the homogeneity of the populations.

But whether or not you want to characterize walling off Baghdad into a series of separated, segregated neighborhoods while the government remains dominated by a sectarian clique and unable to actually govern in vast swathes of the country (areas where rival cliques rule through force) as "success" this is the new reality.

The question is what, if anything, follows from that. Iraq might go back to falling apart at the seams if we leave. On the other hand, it might go back to falling apart at the seams even if we stay. The extent of our impact on the situation isn't clear. What is clear is that the political causes of the conflict are still in place, which is why the violence continues to persist, albeit at a lower level.

We've reached this uneasy stasis where the only solution that we know won't crack everything to hell is if we stay right where we are and make no sudden movements. The political will for such fear of chaos masquerading as strategy is very low and will only get lower. There is no plan to pacify areas by anything other than physical structures, when what is needed is an emotional and political pacification.

We aren't even entirely sure what stability actually looks like in the areas that have been handed over to Iraqi control.

As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, marking the end of 4½ years of control in southern Iraq, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. "They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world," he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.

Khalaf painted a very different picture from that of British officials who, while acknowledging problems in southern Iraq, said yesterday's handover at Basra airbase was timely and appropriate.

But it's not like the UK has some better option out there. Their presence was fueling the insurgency and drawing nothing but gunfire. As much as we'd like to tout successes in places like Fallujah, they are coming at the cost of personal freedoms and economic prosperity. You can't wall off an entire country and expect it to survive.

al-Fadhily says Fallujah is under "siege," Totten says nonsense, there's actually just a "hard perimeter around the city manned by Iraqi Police who prevent non-residents from bringing their cars in." I agree that's not a siege: in fact, it's a pretty normal situation -- for walled cities of the Middle Ages.

The rest of it's pretty much like that. al-Fadhily says "seventy percent of the city was destroyed during Operation Phantom Fury." Totten counters: "I saw much more destruction in nearby Ramadi than I saw in Fallujah." If you're beginning to wonder if Totten is a liberal plant, he eventually does stick in the sort of good-news nuggets his audience goes for: the old standard Marines-distributing-food-and-schoolbooks, of course, as well as more fashionable, cutting-edge leading indicators, e.g. "Solar-powered street lights" and "Low-interest microloans."

We've reached the point with this war where what ordinary people would regard with horror and revulsion is perceived by its fans as great news.

I think that we have to start looking at Iraq in terms of sustainability. As I noted, it's not sustainable just to keep a lid on a cauldron until Bush leaves office. Even his own advisors understand that, particularly with the other forgotten war slipping into catastrophe.

With violence on the decline in Iraq but on the upswing in Afghanistan, President Bush is facing new pressure from the U.S. military to accelerate a troop drawdown in Iraq and bulk up force levels in Afghanistan, according to senior U.S. officials.

Administration officials said the White House could start to debate the future of the American military commitment in both Iraq and Afghanistan as early as next month. Some Pentagon officials are urging a further drawdown of forces in Iraq beyond that envisioned by the White House, which is set to reduce the number of combat brigades from 20 to 15 by the end of next summer. At the same time, commanders in Afghanistan are looking for several additional battalions, helicopters and other resources to confront a resurgent Taliban movement.

But the President can't do that because he knows that a sudden movement like a rapid drawdown in troops might provoke the mess that he's essentially pre-planned through empowering opposing forces. In the end, Afghanistan may be able to be saved, but Iraq is an unsustainable conflict in the long term, and our presence or absence really doesn't have much input in the final outcome.