Obama: We’ll be in Afghanistan forever

Consider these two starkly juxtaposed sentences from President Obama’s West Point speech tonight:

And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

That makes no damned sense, as critics and political opponents will point out again and again in the coming years. If Afghanistan constitutes a “vital national interest”, then the US cannot afford to walk away from the country until all tranquility breaks out.

In fact Obama later went on to box himself in even more decisively:

I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.

This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al-Qaeda can operate with impunity.

We must keep the pressure on al-Qaeda.

[…]

To abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

If al Qaeda remains permanently wedded to a base of terrorist operations in Afghanistan directed at the US, as Obama asserts, then what possible justification is there for setting a withdrawal date in 2011? Or for talking about any manner of withdrawal as long as “pressure” is needed on al Qaeda? Why “abandon” Afghanistan starting in 2011 when it’s “an unacceptable risk” now?

Obama’s attempt to justify the inherent contradictions of his position doesn’t come close to addressing our supposedly vital stake in Afghanistan or the dangerousness of al Qaeda. What he says is simply that the cost of an open-ended commitment is too great to bear, and besides a timetable for withdrawal is needed to force the Afghan government to take responsibility for its own security. All that tells us is that the American government has little to work with in Afghanistan, a country that by the way is vital to our national security.

Obama’s pronouncements that the US has “vital” interests in Afghanistan imply that we’re never pulling out. He may or may not fully realize that.

Woodward discovers that the "surge" is overhyped

In the Washington Post today Bob Woodward reports that the reduction in violence in Iraq during the past year isn't entirely due to the increase in troops, as the Bush administration and its apologists would have it. Who would figured that out were it not for Woodward's ballyhooed access to the White House? I mean, apart from all the bloggers who've been saying this for the past year.

Woodward finally gets around to telling us the obvious because he's flogging a new book. He tries his best to dress this up as news, emphasizing three factors that helped to decrease violence in Iraq in 2007. They are in order:

(i) Assassination of anti-American terrorists and milita leaders based on new intelligence "sources, methods and operations".
(ii) The Anbar "Awakening" and "Concerned Local Citizens" groups.
(iii) Moqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire.

None of this is news, although Woodward tries hard in his book to portray the first as if it were a revelation. He also makes a big mystery of the details of how the military suddenly became more successful in identifying and locating those who were leading attacks on US forces. Woodward claims he's being vague in order to preserve military secrecy. It's all just a sham, however, and a piece with the fact that the item is listed first rather than, say, second. The sources for all this new actionable information are obvious – the former Sunni insurgents who turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq and decided to allow themselves to be bribed by the US to switch sides. Of course they were going to work with the US to settle scores against the anti-American Al Qaeda and Shia militia leaders. That was one of the points of bribing them.

So Woodward's first point is just a corollary of his second.

Meanwhile Woodward neglects to mention one of the most salient facts, a point that none of his sources in the White House or in the military command can have wanted to emphasize. The sectarian/ethnic cleansing of Baghdad (in particular) continued unabated during the first half year of the "surge", in some cases right under the noses of the stepped up American patrols. By August 2007, Sunnis had been driven out of most of the areas of Baghdad that they formally inhabited. Since that was what most of the violence was about, inevitably it subsided once the Sunnis retreated to a few enclaves to the east of the river (where most of the remaining violence is now located).

The White House and military are painfully aware of this. One of the key goals of the "surge", as Bush explained, was to put more troops in Baghdad to stop the ethnic/sectarian cleansing. It failed miserably. Thus the WH and Gen. Petraeus have had almost nothing to say on the topic of cleansing since the surge began.

In fact, as I've reported, in his first report to Congress in September 2007, Petraeus used grossly misleading slides that were designed to cover up the fact that Baghdad neighborhoods had been cleansed horrifically. And the following April, without acknowledging that he'd misled Congress the previous summer, Petraeus quietly replaced those earlier, falsified slides with accurate ones. In other words, Petraeus is highly sensitive to the significance of the sectarian/ethnic cleansing.

Bob Woodward, by contrast, neglects even to mention it. As so often, he appears to be captive to those inside sources he prizes so highly.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Why is the death toll way down in Iraq?

There’s an assumption built into that question, accepted uncritically even by many who should know better. And who’s keeping the death toll? Consider this report today from McClatchy:

Gunmen in Baghdad's Shaab neighborhood stormed into a house not far from an Iraqi police checkpoint and killed 11 members of an Iraqi journalist's family, witnesses and journalism organizations reported Monday.

Iraqi police and U.S. military officials said they had no record of the killings.

In August Patrick Cockburn offered this definitive account of the matter.

The real death toll

More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: "One to deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to achieve themselves."

The American attitude to Iraqi civilian casualties is along much the same lines. The Baker-Hamilton report drawn up by senior non-partisan Democrats and Republicans last year examined one day in July 2006, when the US military had reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces. Investigation by US intelligence agencies revealed that the real figure was about 1,100.

The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported, 2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the last month for which the government gave a figure.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100 wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded, compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in the area.

The US military began the war by saying that it was not keeping count of Iraqi civilians killed by its troops. It often describes bodies found after a US raid as belonging to insurgents when the local Iraqi police say they are civilians killed by the immense firepower deployed by the American forces. Almost the only time a real investigation of such killings is carried out is when the local staff of Western media outlets are among the dead.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Bush on Iraq: the view from the ground

Milo rang last night to suggest I repost this piece written a few years ago. He thinks new readers might still find it relevant. Milo believes that Bush administration policies on Iraq never really go out of style, as I too discovered in the past. So without further excuse, "The view from the ground" (lightly revised).

I don't want to badmouth anybody, but I think he was misleading you. It's much worse than he's letting on. The whole situation is a mess. It's not going to just get better by itself, you can see for yourself that it's broken beyond repair. It's up to you of course whether you want to trust him. But I think he's leading you down the path, making you think you can get off easy, then dropping the bad news on you later.

It's just not possible to do it his way. And they won't let us anyway even if it would work, which it won't. He's already wrecked so much of the...well, I don't want to badmouth anybody, but take it from me it's beyond repair.

You see those pipes? That's your leech field and they're all clogged. You've got to replace the entire septic. Dredge all this muck out and put in a new system.

But once you do that, you're all set.

Just like in Iraq. Cut out the terrorists, drop in a new army, and you're ready to go. You've got to listen to the generals. Just let the experts do their work, you'll get the best results.

I'm with the President a thousand percent, don't understand what those Democrats want from him. Did you see his speech yesterday? Made sense to me. So what if Iraq's a mess now? Let'm backfill and landscape, and you're all set.

Just too many bodies exposed at the moment.

It's all Saddam's fault anyway. He's the one who chose to go to war against us, we didn't attack him. He kicked out the inspectors. If he didn't want war, he shouldn't have done that.

What's that? They're all smashed right through here. If you ask me, some idiot drove a truck right over the yard and crushed the pipes. You've got an oil fill pipe over there. I bet it was an oil tanker backing up to the house instead of parking at a safe distance.

Idiot, if you ask me.

It was up to Bush to decide whether or not to go into Iraq, it wasn't Congress's decision to make. Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in, so what could Bush do? He couldn't let'm thumb his nose at us. Course if he let them in, they'd've found the WMDs so he slammed the door in their face.

Can't believe the French couldn't even see that.

They go straight down the hill. Bet they polluted the stream. Even back then there were rules. Can't believe they got away with it. You know some money changed hands. That's the way this town council has always been.

Can't trust politicians about anything.

Bush admitted the WMD intelligence was bad, you gotta admire his honesty. Of course it was bad, the CIA just didn't do its job.

You can't fault Bush for that.

Gotta come out too. I know he tried to convince you he could save it, but you can see for yourself it's all fouled up. I've got some expertise here, so I think you gotta take that seriously.

Never seen anything quite this messed up. They did everything wrong, including a few things I've never seen before.

Amazing, really.

Not that any of it matters. Saddam was a danger and we had to take him out first before he hits us with WMD. Even if Bush got everything else wrong, he got that right. You don't want to see a mushroom cloud over Cincinnati or wherever.

Aluminum tubes? No, I'm going to use PVC. Never use aluminum that way, it would be all wrong for the job.

The people who are accusing Bush of lying just aren't telling the truth. There's no evidence he ever hyped the evidence for WMD, and it doesn't matter how many times the Democrats say it, it just isn't true.

Besides every other country saw the same intelligence, and they all voted to give the President authority to overthrow Saddam. You can't just go back and rewrite history.

It's always been about giving the Iraqi people freedom and democracy, simple as that.

This is just preliminary. I'll come back next week to take exact dimensions and measure your gradient. It'll take a few weeks to draw up a plan and get estimates back for materials and fill. This is a little tricky, I want to get everything right at the outset and give you folks an accurate idea of what you're getting into here.

As I said, I think you have to give Bush credit. He's admitting that not everything went according to plan in Iraq. You won't hear many presidents admitting that mistakes were made.

Especially when they're really big mistakes.

I'm gonna put in a tank triple the size of the current one. I'd put in a bigger one but there's no room. It's much more than you probably need, but it really makes sense to go with a bigger size than necessary so you don't have problems down the road when maybe you have kids. Trying to cut corners can really cost you in the end.

The generals in Iraq say they have everything they need to win. In fact they're already winning. They don't need any more troops.

Probably start bringing them home soon, maybe, but only when there's a complete victory.

If you ask me, Bush is right to refuse to explain when that'll be. That would be artificial. We don't want the terrorists to get any ideas.

I'm pretty sure I can begin this job in three weeks, if the permit comes through. It's complicated so count on it taking at least five days. I'm thinking more like seven. Eight at the outside.

My God, look at how fast he's going on this road. No concern for life and limb.

Can you believe they're even criticizing Bush now over civilian casualties. What did they think would happen when we went to war?

It's pretty irresponsible.

Better turn my engine off. Gas is so expensive now I can barely afford to fill up. What was I saying.

crossposted from unbossed.com

"Remove one zero": Manipulating body counts in Iraq

Together with the Maliki government, General Petraeus is campaigning aggressively to convince reporters and the public that his claims of diminished sectarian violence are based on sound statistics. The GAO, the Associated Press, McClatchy and others have found that the Pentagon is undercounting and underreporting deaths and violence generally. The credibility of Bush and Petraeus, and their prescription of more-of-the-same, won't stand up if their statistics are revealed as nothing but a load of hooey.

At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Petraeus was greeted as a conquering hero. Never the less he remained sufficiently defensive as to wave around some papers that, he claimed, showed he was being straight regarding his highly dubious statistics. He called it "setting the record straight":

As only the military can, we have a three-page document on ethnosectarian violence methodology. And it is fairly comprehensive. And it's pretty logical and rational.

Today's LA Times has more regarding the record-straight-setting operation from the Pentagon:

U.S. military officials sought Wednesday to counter accusations that they were manipulating death tolls to make Iraq look more secure.

Stung by accusations that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, had presented selective statistics during his testimony before Congress, the military released a statement here outlining its definition of sectarian violence: bombings, killings or other attacks committed by an ethnic group or religious sect against another, for purely sectarian purposes...

The Iraqi government also compiles statistics, but does not differentiate between sectarian and other violent deaths.

And there's the rub. Petraeus is far from eager to acknowledge that the Pentagon is dependent for its statistics upon those compiled by Iraqi civil authorities—which often are inaccurate, unmethodical, falsified, and incomplete, and always dispersed rather than centralized. The figures given for murders, bombings, and other acts of violence are a minimum count rather than an accurate representation of what is happening. The central Iraqi government, naturally, has an interest in cooperating in the pretense that the situation is really not so grim as news reports suggest:

In Baghdad on Wednesday, the national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, agreed with the U.S. military that numbers coming from the media and other outlets were "very, very, very exaggerated."

Asked what the true death toll was, Rubaie said, "I don't have a figure, but I can say one thing: You probably would be correct if you removed one zero from the figures which are in the public domain or published by the newspapers."

But bashing reporters who dig out the truth won't get you very far. Iraqis know perfectly well that the Maliki and Bush governments are minimizing the body count deliberately:

Noureddine Hayali, a member of the main Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, said he suspected officials were not reporting sectarian deaths in other cities.

He also questioned whether the U.S. military figures included such incidents as killings last March in the northern city of Tall Afar...

"It is not in the interest of the government to show all these numbers. They want to show that they have made progress by decreasing death numbers," Hayali said.

Even Iraqi officials, when pressed, admit that their own figures are incredible:

Rubaie acknowledged that the government needed to devise a method to account for its dead citizens.

"I admit that we, as the Iraqi government, have a responsibility to go back to our records and do this properly and openly and help produce a figure which is credible," he said.

It's simply preposterous, then, for Petraeus and Bush to pretend that these Iraqi statistics are reliable.

Retired Army Col. Douglas A. Macgregor, a defense analyst ... said several factors made body counts unreliable in Iraq. Among them are the Muslim practice of burying bodies as soon as possible, the general chaos of war, and sectarian agendas within Maliki's government.

"You're talking about an environment where there is absolutely no accountability for anything," Macgregor said. "The bottom line is, whatever figures you are given are simply inaccurate."

Don't think so? Here are pertinent comments by the Independent's Patrick Cockburn in what is, to my mind, one of the classic dissections of Bush's "surge".

More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: "One to deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to achieve themselves."

The American attitude to Iraqi civilian casualties is along much the same lines. The Baker-Hamilton report drawn up by senior non-partisan Democrats and Republicans last year examined one day in July 2006, when the US military had reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces. Investigation by US intelligence agencies revealed that the real figure was about 1,100.

The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported, 2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the last month for which the government gave a figure.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100 wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded, compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in the area.

That is a measure of how much lying is going on. For General Petraeus and George W. Bush to pretend to the American public that their statistics are credible is a mark of extreme arrogance.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Bush & Co. not even trying to make sense

Today some Bush administration mouthpieces floated so far free of logic, reason, and fact that they must now count as extraterrestrial objects.

For example, this idiocy:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said a status report going to Congress on Friday would not show "dramatic differences" from a similar one in July. That review found satisfactory progress on just eight benchmarks.

"It has only been 58 days since the last assessment," she said.

How does that square with Petraeus' testimony to Congress that "progress" has been especially significant during the last few months ("the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.")? Indeed, when pressed by Senator Biden to explain why his own rosy scenario differed radically from other recent pessimistic reports, such as the GAO report on Iraq, Petraeus replied that the other reports did not incorporate the remarkable results of the last five weeks.

The appeal to the last 5 weeks made no sense, of course, even on its own terms. We've been told over and over again that the occupation of Iraq is a very long term project and "progress" has to be measured in small increments over years. Along comes Petraeus claiming that "progress" revolves around events of just five weeks' time.

In any case, Perino's statement today shows the contempt that the White House holds for any who took Petraeus' words seriously.

*
* *

Then there was all the nonsense about the circumstances and meaning of the murder of sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha.

The White House said Abu Risha's death was an "unfortunate and outrageous act" and that it believed al-Qaida was responsible.

The White House had no actual details, but General Petraeus wasn't waiting around for pesky facts.

General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, issued a statement calling the sheikh's death a tragedy. "It's a terrible loss for Anbar province and all of Iraq. It shows how significant his importance was and it shows al-Qaida in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy. He was an organising force that did help organise alliances and did help keep the various tribes together."

The CSMonitor adds:

Petraeus first met Abu Risha during an encounter outside a US military headquarters building in Ramadi in March.

"I have enormous respect for what you and your tribe have started," Petraeus told the sheikh during the meeting, captured by a videographer.

This is the General whose judgment we are supposed to accept as the first and last word of wisdom on Iraq?

To begin with, nobody has produced any clear evidence to show which group killed Abu Risha. Even the WH, not known for its subtlety, hasn't gone as far as Petraeus—who immediately rushed to the conclusion that al Qaeda was responsible.

Makes you wonder how Petraeus attained the reputation, at least among the DC elite, for being level-headed and brilliant?

As the Monitor points out, Abu Risha had tense relations with other powerful sheiks even within the (mainly tribal) "Anbar Awakening" group. He was also loathed by many other Sunni groups in Anbar Province, including a rival tribal coalition and especially the anti-occupation insurgents, particularly after he appeared with George Bush ten days ago.

Among Abu Risha's chief rivals in Anbar was Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, another leader in the Duleimi tribe.

"Clans that cooperated with the British nearly a century ago still live in shame," al-Suleiman told the AP by telephone Wednesday, referring to Britain's period of colonial rule in Iraq. "Only a mercenary would meet with Bush, who had no business coming to Anbar anyway."

And then there were all those who detested Abu Risha because he was a crook and a thug, a leader of highway robbers, who had among other things stolen millions of dollars donated by the US.

Sheikh Sattar, whose tribe is notorious for highway banditry, is also building a personal militia, loyal not to the Iraqi government but only to him. Other tribes — even those who want no truck with terrorists — complain they are being forced to kowtow to him. Those who refuse risk being branded as friends of al-Qaeda and tossed in jail, or worse. In Baghdad, government delight at the Anbar Front's impact on al-Qaeda is tempered by concern that the Marines have unwittingly turned Sheikh Sattar into a warlord who will turn the province into his personal fiefdom.

It takes a particular kind of fool to rush immediately to the conclusion, in the absence of evidence, that al Qaeda was behind Abu Risha's murder. But then Petraeus and the administration cannot bring themselves to admit, even now, that they were playing a dangerous game showering money, power, and influence on a petty crook.

crossposted from unbossed.com

President Petraeus

Have you had the sense deep inside your thumos, right in the very core of your truthiness, that saint General Petraeus' behavior as a Bush administration shill is just a little bit, well, odd? Composing a flagrantly political op-ed for the Washington Post in the dying days of the 2004 campaign? Pressing hard for a "surge" that he'd been highly skeptical of? Ignoring a mental health survey on the effects of prolonged deployments in Iraq, until it was made public half a year later, and then expressing shock, shock at its findings. Lying flat out to Congress about the extent of continued violence in Iraq—and meanwhile suppressing the statistics? Failing even to submit a written report? Calling his behavior "odd" is putting the matter charitably.

The resourceful Patrick Cockburn may have identified the explanation that makes sense of it all finally: Petraeus has his eyes set on the White House.

From tomorrow's Independent:

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05.

"I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said.

General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army for being a man of great ambition. If he succeeds in reversing America's apparent failure in Iraq, he would be a natural candidate for the White House in the presidential election in 2012.

If the "surge" is abandoned now as a failure, however, Petraeus' putative political career will go nowhere.

This information comes from a single source, it's worth emphasizing, and one who expresses skepticism about the success of the "surge". But Cockburn is a canny reporter, and I trust that he has confirmed that Khadim did indeed work closely with Gen. Petraeus during the period in question.

It's also worth mentioning this new article by the equally formidable Gareth Porter, who depicts intense hostility between Petraeus and his Commanding Officer, Admiral William Fallon. If Porter's sources are right, Fallon thinks Petraeus is far more interested in making powerful connections and advancing his own career than in doing what is necessary and right by the military.

In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior...

The policy context of Fallon's extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus's agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration's effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress.

In a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war, Petraeus was installed in the office of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, in early February just before the Senate debated Bush's troop increase. According to a report in The Washington Post Feb. 7, senators were then approached on the floor and invited to go McConnell's office to hear Petraeus make the case for the surge policy.

Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia -- the area for which Fallon's CENTCOM is responsible.

Those who are familiar with the US Navy will recognize that "chickenshit" is a technical term of abuse that has highly specific applicability.

crossposted from unbossed

Iraq is for Lovers

The civil war in Iraq has become sexy again and the love-struck are everywhere today.

At the National Press "Club" luncheon, saint General Petraeus announced right away that he'd dispense entirely with the Tiresome Litany of evidence, argument, and analysis. Instead, he performed a few Card Tricks and then took questions.

The Journalists in attendance, taking turns at plumping his pillows, hung upon his every Word. A few brave but trembling souls ventured to ask the Great Man some questions, with gushing avowal that Petraeus is the Bestest General Ever.

General, I congratulate you on your very, very successful accomplishment of the very difficult mission in Iraq.

Pesky Questions about the Saint's honesty and candor were banished on the breeze.

General, welcome home. I found your testimony to be most clear, concise and honest. And I thank you for that.

Gales of laughter greeted his every witticism, as if the Journalists were in the presence of Mark Twain himself. The blushing Young Things even tittered at Petraeus' Punctuation Marks.

But with that, I'd be happy to hand off to Ambassador Crocker.
(LAUGHTER)

It was a regular Love-In.

General, thank you very much for doing a wonderful and a magnificent job for the nation.

Petraeus' glamorous testimony in Congress ("his boyish straight talk", as one Serious Journalist opined) was so very manly that even the Bookish Types in the capital city were All Atwitter.

"I thought [Petraeus'] demeanor, along with his chest of medals, really bought all the time that George W. Bush needs right now," said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

In fact they were jostling each other over at Brookings for the pole Position next to his heart.

I was struck when I was in Iraq in July by how much information was whispered in my ear...I think the attacks on him have been unfounded

And who better to pass judgment in such a Sensitive Matter than Sen. Larry Craig, who today sprang forward to defend the honor of this truly Virtuous General?

"Unfortunately, many were quick to prejudge the surge..."

Love is back in the air, and we can thank Iraq for that.

crossposted from unbossed

What was the goal of the "surge", anyhow?

George Bush assured Americans more than half a year ago that his proposed "surge" had twin goals. The diplomatic goal was to give Nouri al Maliki's government "breathing space" during which to advance the cause of sectarian reconciliation. Nearly everybody, including Bush's ambassador in Iraq, agrees that nothing significant has been achieved toward that goal.

And the military goal of the "surge"?

Here was George W. Bush addressing the nation on January 10, 2007:

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq's sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis...

America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I've committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them -- five brigades -- will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

The military goal, simply, was to put a stop to the sectarian violence that was tearing neighborhoods apart, to secure them with the help of Iraqi troops, and to protect the population. So how has that part of the "surge" gone?

The mass expulsion of Sunnis from Baghdad has nearly been completed this year, right under General Petraeus' nose.

U.S. military officials say that Baghdad was once 65 percent Sunni and is now 75 percent Shiite.

Not only has the Sunni population not been protected during this period, but Iraqi government forces actively took part in the sectarian cleansing of the few remaining Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad.

The surge of U.S. troops—meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital—has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won. "If you look at pre-February 2006, there were only a couple of areas in the city that were unambiguously Shia," says a U.S. official in Baghdad who is familiar with the issue but is not authorized to speak on the record. "That's definitely not the case anymore." The official says that "the majority, more than half" of Baghdad's neighborhoods are now Shiite-dominated, a judgment echoed in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: "And very few are mixed." In places like Amel, pockets of Sunnis live in fear, surrounded by a sea of Shiites. In most of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, residents are trapped behind great concrete barricades for their own protection...

Shiites present their creeping takeover of Baghdad as part of a narrative of liberation—American officers have dubbed it Shiite "Manifest Destiny."...

Officially, the Iraqi government is asking residents to return to their old neighborhoods as the massive troop presence enforces a degree of calm; those who do are offered a million-dinar reward (approximately $800). But, says the U.S. official familiar with refugee issues, "Sunnis are reluctant to go back to areas when it's only Iraqi security forces there managing their safety. In a lot of cases security forces participated in their displacement." A humanitarian worker focused on IDPs and a U.S. military official both say that often families only return to their houses long enough to grab a suitcase and pocket the reward money before leaving again.

In brief: The stated diplomatic goal was a failure; the stated military goal was a failure.

What does the Bush administration call for? More of the same—exactly what it was calling for last January.

crossposted from unbossed