When the topic of Iraq comes up in conversations with my friends and acquaintances these days (which is sadly increasingly rare) I generally encounter one of two types of attitudes. The first one, from people on the political left and center, is one of utter exasperation and hopelessness. Not only have we lost, we’ve failed so badly that we may as well leave the stadium and get to our cars as fast as possible to avoid the traffic jam and the inevitable rowdiness soon to be displayed by the opposition. The second attitude, from those who still inexplicably cling to the right-of-center view on Iraq, is one that features mindless tu quoque utterances: “Well, at least it is better than Saddam.” What I fear, however, is that both sides are so frustrated that they no longer care what is going on over there. Even as Bush’s poll numbers plummet, more American soldiers die, and death squads roam Baghdad’s streets (something that even laymen easily predicted two full years ago), the conflict is ever evolving. It is imperative that we recognize that evolution and not think that it is simply business as usual over there. It is in fact getting far worse every day, and in historically predictable ways.
Three articles published on Sunday collectively do a fine job of bringing us all up to speed on where things stand at the present and why adding 20,000 additional troops is nothing but the final desperate maneuver of a man who was always ten steps behind. The first article comes to us from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City. In it he describes how the Bush administration is rounding up all the people that it originally thought didn’t understand the situation in Iraq, and is now asking them to salvage what little they can of the mess.
Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn’t fazed by chaos. He’d been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia’s civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, “was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them.”He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned…
Desperate for new approaches to stifle the persistent Sunni insurgency and Shiite death squads that are jointly pushing the country toward an all-out civil war, the White House made a striking about-face last week, embracing strategies and people it once opposed or cast aside. [Link]
Now that the Neocons and “swamp drainers” have been discredited, it is time for the pragmatic adults to clean up their mess. These are the same pragmatic adults who were accused of not understanding the real threat of terrorism by the idealogues who lost their reason to fear, post 9/11. Part of the new plan for Baghdad is what the people worth listening to were saying all along. That is what makes the present bloodshed even harder to witness:
The plan unveiled by Bush last week calls for many people who lost their jobs under Bremer’s de-Baathification decree to be rehired. It calls for more Sunnis, who were marginalized under the CPA, to be brought into the government. It calls for state-owned factories to be reopened. It calls for more reconstruction personnel to be stationed outside the Green Zone. It calls for a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes providing security to the civilian population over transferring responsibility to local military forces.
Carney believes such measures could have been effective three years ago. Today, he worries they will be too little, too late. [Link]
