Progress in Iraq, again

By now you'll have heard that Gen. David Petraeus, in typically disingenuous testimony to Congress, announced immediately that under his leadership the military objectives of the "surge" are being met and coalition forces "have achieved progress in the security arena". He then bolstered this nonsense with a series of outlandish lies.

It's worth reprising a point I made in June in a post that, I regret, did not attract much attention: "Progress in Iraq". In it I showed that the phrase "progress in Iraq" has been a constant rhetorical trope going all the way back to the very beginning of the Bush administration's excuse-mongering about the disastrous occupation. Bush & Co. did not turn to fictional "progress" after other excuses had failed to convince. "Progress" has been their constant companion, as they have tried to explain away or deny all the unpleasant facts that are in front of our eyes.

From the outset "progress" was most definitely an excuse, nothing more. For over two months after declaring victory in Iraq, as I showed, Bush avoided acknowledging in public the burgeoning Iraqi insurgency. In late June 2003 he finally was forced to discuss it—in a radio address that emphasized the "progress in Iraq" being made. It immediately became Bush & Co.'s favorite catch-phrase for the (failure of the) occupation. And it remains ever thus.

So Gen. Petraeus ignores the nearly two dozen American casualties today and instead invokes "progress". Gen. Petraeus ignores the vast majority of Iraqis who believe that security has worsened under the "surge", and instead invokes "progress". Gen. Petraeus ignores the crumbling of the Iraqi government, and instead invokes "progress".

For some measure of the rank dishonesty of this shameless mouthpiece for the administration, consider that Gen. Petraeus has the audacity to claim in his opening remarks today that the murders of civilians are down, that the ethno-sectarian violence is down, that the number of "security incidents" (?) is at its lowest level since June of 2006.

The facts don't concur.

If there has been a drop in certain kinds of violence during the last few weeks, that is only because of the stifling heat which each summer tends to depress, briefly, the level of violence. The attacks and deaths each month this summer are at the highest levels ever experienced in Iraq during those months. An very basic point. But you will look in vain in Petraeus' testimony for any mention of it.

You also will not find him discussing another basic point that I've made over and over again: The ethnic/sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has picked up pace and advanced so far, under Petraeus' nose during this "surge", that Sunnis have been driven out of large parts of the city. No wonder, then, with some 35,000 fleeing the city in the last few months alone, that sectarian murders and bombings in Baghdad have stabilized.

You may recall that in January, inserting himself once again into partisan politics, Gen. Petraeus stated that the Democrats' proposal for withdrawal from Iraq would bring disaster:

Petraeus warned of incalculable dangers of any rapid U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, as favored by many congressional Democrats, saying it would lead to intensified terrorist inroads, "ethnic cleansing" and a bloodbath in Baghdad.

Decidedly ironic, then, that his own command in Iraq has witnessed (many Iraqis would say abetted) the decisive stages of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.

Little wonder that Americans distrust Petraeus nearly as much as Iraqis.

Update: Here are two clear examples of Gen. Petraeus caught in outright lies today.

First, examine the third of the slides he presented to Congress (on page 4 of this PDF). It presents four maps of "ethno-sectarian violence" in the neighborhoods of Baghdad since December 2006. These maps pretend that the ethnic/sectarian mix of various neighborhoods has remained constant during this period. In fact, as I've commented here and elsewhere, the Sunnis have been driven headlong out of many neighborhoods since December 2006. Despite the map, there are no longer either majority Sunni or mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods east of the Tigris. And west of the Tigris, Sunni-dominated areas have shrunk considerably.

The maps falsify one of the most delicate of issues: The failure of the "surge" to stem ethnic/sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. If that information were brought to the fore, it would call into question the claims by Petraeus and other spokespeople for the Bush administration that the "surge" is responsible for an alleged drop in violence in Baghdad. If there is any such drop, it may be due in large part to the success of Shia attempts to drive Sunnis from their homes and into exile.

Secondly, Think Progress had the goods on another of Petraeus' lies. The General told Congress today that before the "surge" nobody could have predicted its success in transforming Anbar Province.

...our experience in Iraq has repeatedly shown that projecting too far into the future is not just difficult, it can be misleading and even hazardous. The events of the past six months underscore that point. When I testified in January, for example, no one would have dared to forecast that Anbar Province would have been transformed the way it has in the past 6 months.

The trouble is that when Petraeus testified to the Senate in January, he stated that the transformation in Anbar was already underway:

You’ve seen it, I know, in Anbar province, where it has sort of gone back and forth. And right now there appears to be a trend in the positive direction where sheikhs are stepping up and they do want to be affiliated with and supported by the U.S. Marines and Army forces who are in Anbar province. That was not the case as little as perhaps six months ago, or certainly before that.

So in January, Petraeus used the evidence of the shift in Sunni alliances to call for Congress to support a "surge". In September, Petraeus uses that evidence to claim success for the "surge".

"Shameless" may have been too kind.

crossposted from unbossed

What Petraeus report?

You thought the Bush & Co. legerdemain had run its course when it was revealed last month that the White House rather than (saint) General Petraeus would write the much-anticipated report on Iraq to be given to Congress—though based, we were told, upon Petraeus' report to Bush. But you underestimated their duplicity once again, didn't you? Today we're told that Petraeus won't produce an actual report at all.

A senior military officer said there will be no written presentation to the president on security and stability in Iraq. "There is no report. It is an assessment provided by them by testimony," the officer said.

The only hard copy will be Gen. Petraeus' opening statement to Congress, scheduled for Monday, along with any charts he will use in explaining the results of the troop surge in Baghdad over the past several months.

Thereby the whole process of lying about "progress in Iraq" will be much facilitated.

“Information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals”

That remarkable statement finally made its way today onto the pages of the Washington Post, buried though the article was on page A 16. The statement comes from last December’s Iraq Study Group Report, and presented such a damning indictment of the administration that the ISG held it back until the final page of its report. The Associated Press’ military analyst Robert Burns wrote an article highlighting the ISG allegation that the Bush administration deliberately under-reports violence in Iraq. Yet few papers printed his story. Most large newspapers, like the Post, ignored it.

Nines months later, the allegation finally merits attention.

I won’t complain about today’s article by Karen DeYoung, Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq. Those doubts have been widely discussed here and elsewhere for months, of course, but DeYoung’s report brings together plenty of material and is well worth a read. However her treatment of the ISG information is somewhat lacking in critical detail and context.

Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

All well and good, except that the ISG was much more damning than DeYoung lets on. The ISG report provides a devastating example: On a certain day in July 2006, the Pentagon reported a total of 93 attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces. US Intelligence Agencies, however, had information about more than 1100 such reports on that day. In other words, the administration was attesting to only about 8% of the known attacks.

Why has the Post seen fit to report this decisive information only today? Isn’t the problem (proven, one supposes, beyond any reasonable doubt) that the Pentagon cannot be trusted about basic questions of fact, of some consequence to the national debate about what to do about the debacle in Iraq?

Incidentally, DeYoung has another article today on the Jones’ report to Congress, which I picked apart yesterday. Like some earlier articles on their findings, she paints it as uniformly bleak for the Bush administration’s point of view. No mention, regrettably, that the Jones report tries in its own way to please both the administration and its critics with a dash of squishy optimism.

Fictional Iraqi military branches are making "progress"

This would get filed in the Not laughing any longer folder, except my disk space has been exceeded.

A report to Congress by the Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq, obtained today by CNN, demonstrates how far backwards the supposedly serious people in Washington will bend to avoid declaring forthrightly that the occupation of Iraq, and now the escalation, is a disaster. When the ICSFI report is released publicly tomorrow, I think we'll see that it satisfies all Parties with that on-the-one-hand-but-then-on-the-other game.

How absurd are the results? The Commission (composed mainly of retired military officers and headed by Gen. James Jones) actually claims that two virtually non-existent branches of the Iraqi military are making significant progress towards fanciful goals.

From CNN's summary of the report (with quotations from the report):

• The "Iraqi air force's relatively late establishment hampers its ability to provide much-needed air support to ground operations" but "it is nonetheless progressing at a promising rate during this formative period."



• "The Iraqi navy is small and its current fleet is insufficient to execute its mission. However, it is making substantive progress in this early stage of development."

Let's compare those assessments to the facts. As even the Pentagon acknowledged in its latest quarterly report on "progress" in Iraq, the combined manpower of the Iraqi navy and air force is about 2,000 men (pp. 42-43). The phrases "late establishment" and "small" barely begin to describe the problems faced by these two nominal branches of the Iraqi military.

Even if they had many times their current force, in any case, they'd be nearly irrelevant. The report pretends, tongue in cheek, that the Iraqi navy possesses a "current fleet". That hasn't been true since the first Gulf War. As the Pentagon quarterly report reveals, Iraqi naval and marine personnel have to get their sea legs on oil platforms. There are, it's alleged, plans to buy a small fleet of small boats, and if all goes swimmingly, they'll be on hand no earlier than late 2008. But for now, the "current" fleet has only a handful of boats and is capable only of shoreline patrols against smuggling.

But the air force, that must be impressive? According to the Pentagon report, it has a handful of (no doubt fearsome) Cessnas (and such) with which it does some ground surveillance. The air force also has 10 helicopters for evacuating casualties, and all of 3 1960s vintage turboprop transport planes. Yep, that's it for the Iraqi air force. But perhaps it's churlish to focus on the lack of aircraft per se, when as the ICSFI report assures us, it is merely the late start that "hampers" the air force from doing whatever Cessnas normally would do in warfare.

So, according to the pleasant ICSFI report, the virtually non-existent Iraqi navy and air force are "making substantive progress" and "progressing at a promising rate". In other words, CNN has gotten a hold of one of the hardest hitting reports yet on the debacle in Iraq.

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Given that the new, dissembling report concludes that Iraqi armed forces won't be ready to operate independently for at least the next year and a half; that the Iraqi Interior Ministry is a ministry in name only; and that sectarian infiltration has rendered the Iraqi national police so ineffective and unreliable that they ought to be disbanded and recreated from scratch—one has to wonder just how bad are things? In the world of facts, I mean, the one surveyed recently by the GAO.

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And while we're toying with imponderables, what does it say about the culture of Washington that such a squishy report is treated in the federal capital as if it were a "harsh indictment" of progress in Iraq? There's surely a reason why Bush administration officials were briefed on the Independent Commission's report last week, whereas Congress will not hear from General Jones until this Thursday.

According to several administration officials, the Jones commission also reached largely positive conclusions about the Iraqi Army’s performance since the start of the new security strategy in Iraq — a sign, several officials said, that a determined American effort to remake Iraqi institutions holds some promise of success.

The officials who agreed to discuss the commission recommendations did so in some cases because they believed that disclosing them publicly would help diffuse their impact and focus attention on the Petraeus-Crocker report.

If Washington's serious people would care to get a truly harsh indictment of Progress in Iraq, perhaps they could arrange a sit-down with me some afternoon.

Crossposted from Unbossed

"Progress in Iraq"

Almost exactly four years ago, in June 2003, the White House began to make excuses for the occupation of Iraq. On June 21st, 2003 we first heard Bush defensively use the rhetorical phrase "progress in Iraq" to deflect criticism of his failure to end the insurgency. These were the first echoes of the rhetoric of quagmire, which haunt us still.

I'm not speaking, incidentally, of Bush & Co.'s defensiveness regarding the grounds for invading Iraq. Embarrassment over that began growing even before Bush had declared victory in Iraq, as the administration pretended over and over again to have found WMD, only to backtrack. But that topic pretty well has disappeared from WH rhetoric, since it refuses to explain its pre-war lies.

No, I mean the false reassurances that Bush & Co. have been giving us about the internal situation in Iraq. Although the occupation was recognizably a debacle at least by the beginning of May 2003, never the less for several months after the invasion the administration concentrated on crowing about their "success" in overthrowing Hussein and spreading freedom. It is stunning now to re-read the news reports about Iraq from May and June 2003, and contrast them to the utter silence of the White House regarding the unfolding disaster.

In early June, 2003 in a speech to troops in Qatar came the first slight hints from George Bush that all was not skittles and beer:

Our forces are taking aggressive steps to increase order throughout the country. We are moving those Baathist officials that are trying to hang on to power. There are still pockets of criminality. Remember, the former leader of Iraq emptied the jail cells of common criminals right before the action took place. And they haven't changed their habits and their ways. They like to rob and like to loot. We'll find them. (Applause.)

"Right before the action..." refers obliquely to two massacres of demonstrators in Falluja in late April, which greatly inflamed the Iraqi resistance. Bush's accounts of the violence in Iraq have always been vague in the extreme, right from the very start. The other characteristic we see in that speech are the soaring predictions for a better, happier Iraq...at the end of the rainbow.

Criminal courts are now reopening. Day by day, the United States and our coalition partners are making the streets safer for the Iraqi citizens. We also understand that a more just political system will develop when people have food in their stomachs, and their lights work, and they can turn on a faucet and they can find some clean water -- things that Saddam did not do for them.

Sad to say, we're as far now from achieving those things as ever. Anyhow, this speech in Qatar was the barest acknowledgment that the burgeoning chaos in Iraq actually needed to be addressed.

It wasn't until June 21st that Bush finally saw fit to address the issue back home.

To get a sense of how late the (tacit) admission came that something had gone wrong, compare these articles that both were published the very same day. They describe the daily grind of the guerilla war in terms reminiscent of Vietnam. In late June we were also seeing news reports showing that the window of opportunity to shut down the Iraqi resistance was already closed, or nearly so.

In the midst of this, on June 21 Bush finally acknowledged in his weekly radio address that American troops were still fighting a dangerous enemy.

Making Iraq secure is vitally important for both Iraqi citizens and our own forces. The men and women of our military face a continuing risk of danger and sacrifice in Iraq. Dangerous pockets of the old regime remain loyal to it and they, along with their terrorist allies, are behind deadly attacks designed to kill and intimidate coalition forces and innocent Iraqis.

American troops had in fact been dying at a rate of more than one per day during May and June, unacknowledged by the President.

For the first time in over a decade, Iraq will soon be open to the world. And the influence of progress in Iraq will be felt throughout the Middle East. Over time, a free government in Iraq will demonstrate that liberty can flourish in that region.

American service-members continue to risk their lives to ensure the liberation of Iraq. I'm grateful for their service, and so are the Iraqi people. Many Iraqis are experiencing the jobs and responsibilities of freedom for the first time in their lives. And they are unafraid.

Progress in Iraq. Although almost unknown until that June day, the phrase has been used hundreds of times since then by the Bush administration. By mid July, 2003 it had already become the preferred catch-phrase for the administration's rosy scenarios:

Q Scott, earlier today, you said you saw steady progress in Iraq. It's been a very bad day. An American soldier killed, a pro-American mayor killed in Iraq, a little kid killed. Where's the progress?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are making some important progress in Iraq. There are obviously -- there are still some difficulties, there are some are there are loyalists to Saddam Hussein and his former regime, Baathists and others from outside the country that are trying to disrupt these successes. They oftentimes will target the success that we are making, so that's why you have seen some of these attacks.

And here we see the rhetorical twin to "progress in Iraq"—the notion that attacks by the Iraqi resistance prove that success is being achieved, rather than the opposite. The greater the violence, Bush & Co. began telling us that June, the surer the sign that the attackers are "desperate" to undermine the administration's successes.

Q Ari, why should Americans take at face value what Paul Bremer and others in the administration have said that the attacks against U.S. forces that we've seen seeing repeatedly over these past few weeks are basically the last desperate cries and acts of violence from a dying regime? Why shouldn't they believe that, in fact, it's evidence of a guerrilla insurgency movement that is really testing and challenging whether or not the United States was prepared enough for this phase of the conflict?

MR. FLEISCHER: Because I think that if you look at the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly pleased with the fact the United States has helped them to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime. That was clear from their dancing in the streets, from the way they tore down the statues.

Desperation and progress; progress and desperation. They'd become rhetorical tropes by the time Cheney growled this to an AEI audience on July 24.

We still have many tasks to complete in Iraq, and many dangers remain. There are still some holdouts of the regime, joined by terrorists from outside the country, who are fighting desperately to prevent progress of any kind for the Iraqi people.

By late July, no discussion of Iraq was complete without the obligatory nod toward "progress".

The plan sets out ambitious timetables and clear benchmarks to measure progress and practical methods for achieving results. Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment. America and our partners kept our promise to remove the dictator and the threat he posed, not only to the Iraqi people, but to the world...In the 83 days since I announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, we have made progress, steady progress, in restoring hope in a nation beaten down by decades of tyranny.

Four years after "progress in Iraq" became a by-word, George Bush is still hearing reports about it. June 14, 2007:

General Dempsey has just come out of Iraq, where he is working with the Iraqi troops to prepare for -- to prepare them for the day when they will be responsible for the security of their country. He explained to me the progress that has been made over the years that he has been there.

Bush & Co. continues to feel reassured about the progress in Iraq. June 18, 2007:

President Bush had a nearly hour-long secure video teleconference with Iraqi leaders on Monday and came away impressed and reassured by the progress they're making on political, security and economic reforms, the White House said...

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, on Sunday called the situation in Iraq "a mixed picture, but certainly not a hopeless one." He noted frustrations among signs of progress, and cautioned against withdrawing troops too soon.

Too soon, evidently, would be any time before we stop seeing signs of "progress in Iraq". June 18, 2007:

Q But, Tony, can you give us some sense of why [the President] felt reassured, given that we've heard reassurances before?

MR. SNOW: Well, again, it is clear that you've got an environment now where the key leaders are working together on these issues. And, yes, we have heard a lot of these things before, but without -- and I'm not in a position to go into the details and what they were saying, but there are reasons we think they're very serious in moving forward on the key items.

Q But, Tony, we've heard that before, many times.

MR. SNOW: I understand. I understand.

Q I mean, why is there any more reason now to believe that they're serious about moving forward than there was the last time you said that? Or the time before?

MR. SNOW: I understand. But, again, I think -- let me put it this way, that you see that there are tangible efforts going on and I'm just not going to go into any greater detail...

Q Tony, do you agree with General Petraeus's assessment that it could take about a decade to stabilize Iraq, to fully stabilize --

MR. SNOW: Well, what General Petraeus was pointing out -- this is pretty much standard doctrine when it comes to counterinsurgency, is that counterinsurgency is something that does take a great amount of time. He says 10 years. That does not mean that you're going to have people on a forward combat operation posture for 10 years, but it does mean that -- he says that it's perfectly conceivable, and that tends to be kind of the textbook sense of how long such operations take place.

On the other hand, what he also said is, if you take a look at what's going on in the key areas of concern when we were talking about the Baghdad security plan -- what were they? They were Anbar and they were Baghdad -- you see signs of progress there.

Maybe you do, Mr. Snow. My eyes aren't that sharp.

crossposted from Unbossed