It's September 2006 in Iraq

Under Saddam Hussein, I was a doctor. But I took up journalism in late 2003, when it was clear that the best jobs in post-Hussein Iraq were those in the news media. Building a free press in Iraq was one of America’s greatest achievements. When the American-led coalition installed itself in the Green Zone, it created the Combined International Press Center, where American soldiers issued press passes to Iraqis and Westerners alike.

...

In the last year, however, as successive short-term governments have taken power in Baghdad, American support for the Iraqi news media has waned. In May the United States ambassador announced the transfer of the International Media Center, which has served as a headquarters for the international and local news media, into the hands of the new Iraqi government, which is dominated by militias and regards the news media as akin to the insurgency, something that it must defeat and suppress. In mid-July, the Iraqi prime minister threatened to close any news media outlet that insufficiently supports the Iraqi government in its fight against sectarian violence. I fear that if this government survives, the press in Iraq will become similar to that in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria.

...

The Western news media could not function in Iraq without the dedication of Iraqi journalists. And those Iraqis were first inspired to become journalists because of the United States. Now the United States has turned our fate over to Iraqi politicians. If our government continues to be dominated by militias and to draw closer to the insurgency and the Islamic extremists, then in just a few months, no news will be reported from Iraq at all.

The Iraqi people, however, will continue to suffer. There will be new mass murders, committed or encouraged by the very same people who denounced the killings under Saddam Hussein. And just as back then, there will be no news media to inform the world.

"the thin, clear voice of truth is difficult if not impossible to ascertain amidst the rumpus raised on today's radio broad-casting stations!"

It also closely follows the advice put forward in the infamous "letter" supposed to have been written by al-Zarqawi, discovered by US troops, and widely publicized by the Bush administration way back in 2004, in which he outlined the basic strategy for al-Qaeda-in-Iraq. Which strategy is no surprise at all and doesn't even suggest that Iran and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq have ties. ANY DAMN FOOL could have concocted this general strategy, provided their major goal was to defeat the US war aims in Iraq.

Our vulnerability to this strategy all goes back to fucking Donald fucking Rumsfeld and his insistance that this war could be won with half the troops the war planners wanted, and Bush, Cheney and Rove eating this shit out of Rummy's hand, because they all knew that it would be politically expedient to sell this plan to the US public. What those fucking arrogant jerks never counted on was losing the goddamn fucking war through their own fucking incompetance.

but works perfectly with Homer's "Internet, eh?" voice

Other than oil, that region has very few resources the western economies give a shit about. And Iran would have its hands full trying to dominate that herd of cats. So long as we guzzle oil, disengagement is not an option. Remove oil from the picture and disengagement is a no-brainer.

(I apologize to Ned for once more using his monthly Iraq thread in which to vent my boundless, but futile, frustration with BushCo's towering incompetance.)

the stratfor thing does point up the weakness (or absence) of real alternatives to the bush policy (if you can call what we have a policy). just saying "pull the troops out" is frustratingly inadequate. obviously we're going to continue to have some substantial number of troops there for some substantial number of years. i cannot imagine a scenario in which we don't. so that being the case we need an actual intelligent policy to go along with their presence.

But hey, Iraq controls its own army now. Allegedly. Apparently. Suspiciously.

Yesterday Maliki took over operational control of the Iraqi armed forces, the one national security institution that works. He needs to demonstrate the will to use it. The American people will support a cause that is noble and necessary, but not one that is unwinnable. And without a central Iraqi government willing to act in its own self-defense, this war will be unwinnable.

He might even believe it. (He kinda has to, in that if/when this hope falls through, that's that.)

What's been more interesting is the wavering and silence among usual suspects on an increasing level. At NRO, ever since Lowry started admitting that things weren't happy, there's been a quietly tangible air of grinding frustration or reflexive rah-rahing anytime Bush speaks, just to keep themselves going. But to give you an idea of where the wind really sits, Stratfor's piece up above got some major play there yesterday, while that hoohah I linked about Iraq's government 'taking over' the army apparently didn't even get a mention. Up until now their tendency would have been to play up the two things in a much different fashion, trumpeting the 'handover' and ignoring Stratfor entirely. They also gave some major play to a recent piece from the newly reemergent Gingrich where amid the expected 'Democrats are defeatist' hoohah he did some other specific trashing:

Most government officials constitute the second wing, which argues the system is doing the best it can and that we have to "stay the course"--no matter how unproductive. But, after being exposed in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, it will become increasingly difficult for this wing to keep explaining the continuing failures of the system.

Just consider the following: Osama bin Laden is still at large. Afghanistan is still insecure. Iraq is still violent. North Korea and Iran are still building nuclear weapons and missiles. Terrorist recruiting is still occurring in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and across the planet.

...

To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.

Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.

It's a toadying response, of course -- "Hey, Bush understands, why don't the rest of you fools get it?" But the portrayal of internal fracture and inertia is the key part.

Meantime, I've long since figured that when Instapundit finally snaps then it all goes down amid the true believers -- Glenn Reynolds is an unusual character, and though I'll take him over the likes of Malkin or RedState any day, his insistence that everything is just being badly reported or the like is wearing thin, and even he doesn't know how to react any more. In response to the news about the deaths in Iraq being revised upward, he said this:

Huh. I don't know what could account for this discrepancy.

And seriously, that was it. No questioning, nothing. But it was a terribly inconvenient realization to deal with, it seems. And again, nothing on his site today about the handover.

As for those incorrect numbers, you can hear the lameness in this:

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said Thursday that the U.S. figures were based on the military's "consolidated reporting with the Iraqi government." Johnson also disclosed that the military's numbers included only "individuals targeted as a result of sectarian-related violence, to include executions," and did not include "other violent acts such as car bombs and mortars."

Johnson said he did not track the morgue's figures and could not account for the substantial gap between the military's count for August killings and the latest figures from Baghdad's morgue.

Meanwhile:

Separately, the Health Ministry confirmed Thursday that it planned to construct two new branch morgues in Baghdad and add doctors and refrigerator units to raise capacity to as many as 250 corpses a day.

Meanwhile:

Roadside bombs in Iraq rose to record numbers this summer -- to about four times as many as in January 2004 -- as tips from Iraqi citizens warning of the bombs and attacks have dropped sharply amid a flaring of sectarian violence, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

About 1,200 improvised explosive devices (IEDS) -- the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq -- were detonated in August as insurgents continue to invent new ways to design and hide the lethal munitions, according to retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, which is spearheading efforts to curb the bombs.

"We're making slow, grudging progress," Meigs said in a briefing with reporters. "We're not going to bat a thousand." But he predicted his organization -- which has grown from a small Army initiative of 12 people in 2003 to a Pentagon entity with 269 employees and a fiscal 2006 budget of $3.47 billion -- will "do better" over time.

Meanwhile:

Make no mistake about the seriousness of this issue -- our nation's warriors are being sent into harm's way wearing a body armor substantially inferior to a version that surpasses by a significant margin the Interceptor Body Armor in nearly every category. Key people in Army acquisition know this to be true and are willfully, wantonly exposing our troops unnecessarily to serious and mortal wounds when a substantial proportion of these wounds could be prevented with the better product, Dragon Skin.

Someday, and maybe not too far off, there may be a criminal investigation of how and why this sordid mess has been allowed to develop and to fester.

Meanwhile:

Insurgents have killed at least 39 Iraqis as a wave of car bombings in the capital marked the day when the embattled Baghdad government began to take command of its own armed forces.

Meanwhile, as lawmakers debated a controversial law which could see the country divided into rival regions, gunmen kidnapped a nephew of parliament's hardline Sunni Arab speaker, who opposes the break-up.

Two more American soldiers also died, the US military said, bringing the week's coalition fatalities to 17.

And on, and on. And on.

is this the new fallback position? he's not actually in charge? the mighty warrior, waylaid by pencil-pushers?

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), September 8th, 2006.

Damn that intransigent Democrat minority in Congress! Think of the things he could've done without that bunch of spoilsports gumming up the works!

Any idiot can make a speech that says "We have enemies who wish to destroy our nation. We cannot allow them to succeed." At that motherhood-and-apple-pie level of analysis, Bush is as smart as anyone else in the barber shop down on Main Street. Where Bush runs into trouble is the moment he exercises his judgement.

He often says he knows what leadership looks like and he does. He is The Deciderer, and once he has made up his mind what is right, he is set and determined. This is the look of leadership, all right. But it doesn't matter if you look like Admiral Nimitz, if you navigate like the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

Those damn commies undermining our best efforts!

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

Belgravia follows up:

Meantime, on the Shi'a front, SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim has been calling more vigorously for a so-called Shi'a 'super-state' in the south (read: more lebensraum for Iran). In countering Hakim's objectives, it appears we are pinning our hopes on Maliki, probably a losing proposition, though perhaps too Sadr can be deftly used to counter Hakim on this issue (Sadr's firebrand nationalism is, of course, deathly opposed to the US, but on the issue of federalism, his inclination is likely still more oriented towards preservation of a unitary state). No wonder so many bloggers are grasping onto Peter Galbraith's 'send the GIs to Kurdistan' gambit, as the Kurds are friendly to us--not least as they want protection from the Turks--which could create something of a mess going forward. Regardless, as long as US forces don't put real pressure on the Kurds to cease the reverse Arabization underway, and Kurdistan gets its fair share of oil revenues--the amicable relations won't turn sour, at least in the short to mid-term.

Great.

Death death death and all.

Morea about the proposed division:

The main Sunni Arab political bloc boycotted parliament Sunday to protest legislation supported by Shiite Muslims and Kurds that would carve Iraq into a federation of three autonomous states.

The bill would create a predominantly Shiite region in the south of Iraq much like the largely independent zone currently controlled by the Kurds in the north. Sunnis vigorously oppose the plan, which would leave them with the center of the country, a vast desert devoid of the oil reserves of the other regions.

A few other people start thinking, "Hey, maybe that Al-Sadr guy needs watching." You'd think.

There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops. A few thousand U.S. troops have already been transferred to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq. Where more U.S. troops have been deployed, the situation has gotten better. Those neighborhoods intensively patrolled by Americans are safer and more secure. But it is by no means clear that overall troop numbers in Baghdad are enough to do the job. And it is clear that stripping troops from other fronts risks progress elsewhere in the country.

The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment. This means the ability to succeed in Iraq is, to some significant degree, within our control. The president should therefore order a substantial surge in overall troop levels in Iraq, with the additional forces focused on securing Baghdad.

Watch it not happen. And watch them cry.

...and make excuses, like a beaten wife.

Loyola wrote the most slavish gibberish I've ever read last week after the prez's speech moved him beyond measure.

Our strategy is to build walls and theirs is to undermine them. So far, our walls keep developing gaping holes full of dust and rubble. Loyola wants to point out that some stretches of wall remain standing and all we have to do is rebuild the gaps. He is stupid.

Loyola continues: Bill Kristol and Rich hint that Sadr stands to profit from this violence, but they do not explain how in practice Sadr could leverage that violence to his benefit. Indeed it's not clear to me that he benefits from the violence at all...

Sadr benefits from a power vaccuum for his militia to fill, you idiot. So long as the elected government cannot function as a government, his power is secure and can grow. The ubiquitous violence rewards him for the number of guns and recruits he commands, not the number of votes he can muster. If he had chosen to enter the government, he would have been rendered irrelevant by the Shi'a majority. Instead, the violence renders the government irrelevant, until they can field a stronger army -- which is what Lowry and Kristol are advocating.

Fucking eeedjit.

But then he posts stuff like this and I'm all, "Dude, this isn't the Model United Nations project for your 11th grade class or your speech at the College Republicans meeting."

In a nation where just under half of the citizens believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 -- despite the President recently publicly and repeatedly admitting there was no such connection -- we're past message control. We're into hard-wiring.

It is lovely that he knows something. But what he obviously doesn't know are the limits of his understanding.

When it comes to this war it is as if he is trying to make a souffle, except he doesn't have any eggs or milk to work with, but he has some nifty free samples of calf brains and corn syrup the Bush administration has been giving out, so he substitutes those in the recipe and serves up the results as souffle.

We asked the President repeatedly about the issue of troop levels in Iraq. He noted that a Stryker brigade has been sent to Baghdad from Mosul and there are 147,000 troops in theater. He went on to say that anyone who is 60 years old—like himself—is a product of the Vietnam era, and “it was a mistake then to make tactical decisions out of the Oval Office.” He said he had “confidence and faith” in the military leaders, including Gen. Casey, who are on the ground and not asking for more troops.

Asked what if Gen. Casey is wrong, Bush said, “Then, I picked the wrong general.” Bush emphasized that he’s not a military expert and he’s not in Baghdad, but “I know how to ask the right questions [of the generals].” Again, he said of Casey, “If he’s wrong, I’m wrong.” He said that U.S. generals are saying “we need more troops and we need them to be Iraqis.” He continued: “Gen. Casey is a very capable man, who’s got a depth of understanding of politics [in Iraq] and his role as a military commander.”

Asked if generals might be inhibited in asking for more troops because it might be such a politically unwelcome request, Bush used a dismissive expletive for the notion. He expressed his conviction that his generals know he has what it takes—briefly showing his fluidity in Spanish—to get them the troops they need even if the politics isn’t favorable. To increase Gen. Casey’s comfort level with him, Bush said he had invited Casey and his wife to spend time with him informally.

The last paragraph is of course the entertainment value one.

Someone asked if Iraq would still be experiencing awful difficulties even if we had done everything right, given the state of Iraqi society. Bush said, “The politics of Iraq are going to take a while to settle out.” Bush said the Iraqi government has to convince people that a unified government is in their interest, and emphasized the importance of time—it will take “time for people to learn to trust each other.” He reminded us that Maliki has been in office since only June: “The man’s been there for three months and he’s beginning to make some tough choices.” On the social distrust, Bush said “people still believe Saddam Hussein has the possibility of coming back.” He continued, “It’s the psychology of the country that concerns me most, because he was successful in pitting people against one another.” He also said that the “criminal element” in Iraq is a problem, and that “can and will be cured when law enforcement becomes more effective.”

He appears to believe it all.

Am I the only one who saw the word "Stryker" spelled slightly differently the first time?

oh yeah, just what we'd all wanna do, go fishin' with our loudmouth boss

President Bush has acceded to his father's urging and has made former Secretary of State James Baker a leading adviser on Iraq.

Administration sources said Mr. Baker, head of the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group, has been discussing with the president recommendations on an exit strategy that could begin after the November elections. They said Mr. Baker's approach to Iraq differs sharply from that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The sources said Mr. Baker has maintained an extremely low profile and slips in and out of Baghdad without fanfare. They said that unlike the elder Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Baker has avoided stepping on the toes of such senior officials as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has been wary of Mr. Baker's access to the president.

"The president has understood that he needs a trusted outsider without any personal stake in U.S. policy on Iraq," an administration source said. "Jim Baker also has a lot of clout and credibility on the Hill."

Over the past two months, Mr. Baker has been shuttling to Baghdad where he has been meeting U.S. diplomats, military commanders as well as Iraqi politicians. The sources said Mr. Baker has also been quietly meeting with leaders in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The sources said Mr. Baker's increasing access to the president comes amid declining confidence in Mr. Rumsfeld. They said that until June 2006 Mr. Rumsfeld consistently reassured the White House and Congress that the Sunni insurgency war would diminish.

"Those who sought to join Baker and Bush came from the circle around the former president [Bush]," a source said. "But in this case, there was clear support from Republican leaders in the Senate and House."

One such Republican was Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. Mr. Wolf said Mr. Baker, who in 2004 was the president's envoy to win debt relief for Iraq, was serving the role of a physician solicited for a second opinion.

"What the United States needs on Iraq is some fresh ideas from people able to speak out, and no one is more qualified to do that than Jim Baker," Mr. Wolf said.

Mr. Baker's role has already resulted in quiet agreement by Congress to support the war in Iraq through 2006. On Sept. 7, the Senate agreed by a 98-0 vote to allocate an additional $63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Mr. Baker is not expected to simply draft recommendations. The sources said the president has been quietly using the former secretary of state to convince key Arab allies to support Washington's strategy in Iraq. They said the most important of those allies is Saudi Arabia, which has been highly skeptical of the administration's policy.

Mr. Baker has been in his post since March 2006 and was said to have urged for a clear exit strategy in 2007. At the same time, the former secretary was said to have envisioned a long-term regional and international effort to stabilize Iraq. Last week, the Pentagon reported that 145,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq, the highest level since December 2005.

"It is clear that the president will make his decision based on his own judgment," the source said. "But there are already signs that Baker has become an influence."

Lots of potential hearsay here beyond the comment from Wolf. It is interesting, though.

...some people were afraid, above all in the administration. "Reaction was mixed," Wolf told me. "Initially, there was not a lot of support for the idea." Backed by congressional heavyweights, including Warner, Wolf met privately with Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and others in the administration. His message? "If you're so confident it's going well, why are you so afraid for someone else to take a look at it?" Wolf, as the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds the State Department, had clear leverage with Rice. Not surprisingly, according to an aide to Wolf, the vice president was the most resistant to the idea. But, reluctantly or not, perhaps unwilling to challenge an idea with strong support from House and Senate Republicans, Bush and Cheney signed off on the idea. "Gradually," Wolf told me, "they came to see the merit of it." In June, President Bush himself met briefly with the task force. "Iraq is a complex situation," Bush told them. "And the fact that you are all willing to lend your expertise to help chart the way forward means a lot."

The president may have had another political motive for giving his blessing to the endeavor. If--and it's a very big if--Baker can forge a consensus plan on what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee--whoever he (or she) is--will have a hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans.

Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat and foreign-policy wise man. Working with a quartet of think tanks--the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy--Baker and Hamilton recruited a star-studded task force, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans include Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director; Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Justice; Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator; and Edwin Meese III, attorney general under President Reagan. The Democrats are William Perry, President Clinton's secretary of defense; Charles Robb, the former Virginia senator; Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff; and Vernon Jordan, the lawyer and Friend of Bill.

Since April, operating almost entirely under the radar, the task force has spawned four working groups, recruiting scores of U.S. experts on Iraq and the Middle East to look at military and security issues, Iraqi politics, reconstruction, and the regional and strategic environment surrounding the war. Among the participants in these working groups are former ambassadors and State Department officials, intelligence officers from the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community, and think-tank denizens from the RAND Corporation, the Nixon Center, the Henry L. Stimson Center, the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Middle East Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and others, along with a panel of retired military officers: three army generals, an air-force general, and an admiral.

But according to all accounts, the Iraq Study Group is Baker's show, with the assembled cast of characters there to give Baker the bipartisan, protective coloration he needs. "Jim Baker is the gatekeeper," one task-force participant told me, insisting on anonymity. "He's by far the most dynamic, and everyone else is intimidated by him." And Baker is keeping his cards very close to his chest. "He's very secretive, he keeps his distance, and he compartmentalizes everything, which is not a bad way to organize a political conspiracy," says another member of one of the working groups.

I wouldn't be surprised by any of this.

Great Rich, you and Bill say we need more troops. Good idea — you're absolutely right. One question: where the hell are they going to come from? To get to the generally agreed upon level we need (about 250,000), we simply don't have that number right now, and we can't get them.

You and Bill seem to forget that we have an all volunteer force, and that the additional troops will have to be raised. We cannot raise an excess right now — just to get to make our numbers we have had to (1) raise the eligible enlistment age to 42, (2) lower our standards on education level (3) lower our standards on things like visible tatoos (i.e. indicators of behavior that may not be overly positive). We also have had to involuntarily hold people past their scheduled retirement or ETS dates.

The culture has also changed — there was no big rush to enlist after 9/11 as there was after WWII. All this "support the troops" rhetoric is very hollow. Young men just aren't joining up in droves.

Additionally, the type of troops we need is at issue. Right now in Iraq, we have essentially retrained artillery, air defense, and other specialties to do basic infantry missions. Not only do we not have enough troops, we don't have the right mix — we need more engineers, more transportation, and much much more military police. We are making our recruiting number, but we don't need more supply clerks. We need more warriors.

I dislike the "chickenhawk" slur, but this column of yours reflects the complete lack of reality that permeates some people who have never served in the military. Guys are on their 3rd or 4th tours in Iraq. You simply can't say "we need more troops" without reinitiating the draft. That will never happen.

and this sounds like wishful thinking:

And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans.

there's no way it'll be "off the table." arguments about short-term strategy might be somewhat ameliorated -- which could work in the democrats' favor too -- but the big picture questions about wtf we were doing in there to start with and overall foreign-policy vision will still be completely front and center.

On Sept. 7, the Senate agreed by a 98-0 vote to allocate an additional $63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes. The GOP was right: the Democrats don't care about troops and are in collusion with the enemy.

My God: Lee H. Hamilton, William Perry, Vernon Jordan, Panetta, Gates...and Meese! – all mandarins and hacks.

Well of course, voting with the GOP like that and all.

Which statement is a damning indictment of Bush's Iraq policy.

If this war were genuinely central to the suppression of anti-USA terrorism and the US public clearly understood this, then the draft would be more than politically feasible; it would be a done deal in 48 hours. Americans know this war was Bush's choice and an adventure he could have avoided, and I have been amazed at their patience with it so far.

We're on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and no amount of spin can change the outcome. Yet the administration continues to balk at doing the one thing that could make a difference: namely, putting more U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq to bring a measure of order and security to a nation incurring some 3,000 civilian casualties each month.

...

It is long past time to quit arguing whether we should have gone into Iraq. And the president should stop trying to win that argument -- most people have made up their minds and can't be persuaded to change them. He would be better off trying to marshal support for increasing troop strength.
More American troops in Iraq might mean more American casualties. But we cannot fight wars if we are unwilling to assume the risk of American deaths. The men and women who bravely serve this country understand the sacrifices that may be required of them. What is inexcusable is asking Americans to give their lives for nothing. If Iraq continues to spiral downward into civil war and we leave a country that is worse off than when we entered it, we will have dishonored the more than 2,600 Americans who have already shed their blood in battle.
We cannot afford to lose the war in Iraq, and we don't have much time to turn things around. If Baghdad cannot be secured, there is little chance for the rest of Iraq. With an election just around the corner, the president has some tough choices. He can concentrate on winning the battle for Congress, which means more speeches defending his policies and those who supported them. Or he can do what is necessary to win the war, which means sending more troops to Iraq. History will not be kind if he chooses the former.

Meanwhile, over in the New York Times, a striking op-ed from a former Marine officer who served two tours of duty in Iraq:

APPROACHING the city of Karbala last year for a meeting with a local Iraqi Army commander, my convoy of four Army Humvees came across hundreds of bearded men in green camouflage uniforms lining the road. They were directing traffic and searching vehicles for bombs — good things — and they waved us through, just as Iraqi security forces should.

But we don’t issue green uniforms to Iraqi troops.

After the meeting, I sent an e-mail message to my headquarters in Baghdad, asking whether an entire Iraqi battalion, usually 700 to 1,000 soldiers, had been newly authorized for this relatively peaceful province.

Of course, it hadn’t. This was another new militia. And even though the militia had already been approved by Iraqi officials, and recruited, outfitted and deployed in daily operations, no senior American commander in Baghdad knew about it.

Still, it wasn’t hard to explain how this could happen in Karbala, a major city just two hours from Baghdad. There were hardly any Americans there.

...

So, what should we do? The obvious prescription to stop the rising violence is more troops, but the wrong kinds of soldiers and tactics only alienate the Iraqi people, strengthening the insurgency. On top of that, the Army and Marine Corps don’t have any extra troops to send. President Bush recently sent more American forces back into Baghdad, another place where militias took over after United States troops were withdrawn too quickly. But they too have to come from somewhere, and in turn we should expect those areas to become more violent.

This makes it all the more important to use the troops we have as effectively as possible.

We need more military advisers, including both Special Forces teams and specially trained conventional units. Our precious few Special Forces troops must focus on mentoring Iraqi troops, rather than on the more exciting diversion of unilateral raids. Some of our best Special Forces units were devoted to hunting down the Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but violence has only increased in the three months since his death. Had that same manpower and money been devoted to training Iraqi troops and stemming the growth of militias, we would have another Iraqi battalion or two ready to take our places.

...

Yet despite the success of advisers, the Army and Marine Corps still have a habit of sending their least capable troops to fill these positions. Many teams have trouble getting essential supplies like weapons and ammunition, even as the Army finds the resources to man speed traps on its ever-growing bases. Only 1 in 30 Americans deployed to Iraq serves as an embedded adviser. We can’t win this war from the Burger Kings and rec centers of our largest bases, nor can we afford the thousands of non-combat troops needed to support them.

Iraq’s militia problems are likely to get worse before they get better, and only a legitimate Iraqi government can rid the country of them completely. But we must be sure we are fighting the war we say we are. Both problems with our current strategy — not waiting for Iraqi forces to be ready, and consolidating our bases at the expense of classic counterinsurgency tactics like small adviser teams — emanate from the overriding concern for bringing the troops home.

Pushing for withdrawal timelines is not helping the struggle in Iraq; encouraging the military to better fight the insurgency will. After all, winning the war would be the best reason to leave.

Finally, the official said that early in the week, Bush will meet with the president of El Salvador, a country that 20 years ago was torn by violence and insurgency. "Flash forward to the last ten or fifteen years," the official said, "and you've had a very successful democratic country where people who were former combatants have managed to re-integrate into a very successful society." Any comparisons to any countries currently torn by violence and insurgency are completely intentional.

I would not bet more than a nickel on that, personally.

Filkins, one of the longest-lasting and most-honored reporters in Iraq, said that many situations lately have become even too dangerous for Iraqi reporters to report on. He described the current climate as "anarchy," and, when asked if the country was already involved in a civil war, he said, "Yeah, sure."

Asked what advice he had for a reporter from a small paper going to Iraq now without the kinds of money and backup that the Times was able to afford him (or previous reporting experience in Iraq), Filkins replied: "Don't go."

...

As a result, the paper increasingly relies on its 70 Iraqi staffers to go out into the streets and do the actual reporting. These Iraqi journalists, both Sunni and Shiite, do "everything" according to Filkins, and are paid handsomely (by local standards) for their efforts. But they live in constant fear of their association with the newspaper being exposed, which could cost them their lives.

"Most of the Iraqis who work for us don't even tell their families that they work for us," said Filkins. "It's terribly terribly dangerous for them."

...

According to Filkins, the New York Times is burning through money "like jet fuel" simply to securely maintain its operations in the country. In addition to the 70 local reporters and translators, the Times employs 45 full-time Kalashnikov-toting security guards to patrol its two blast-wall-enclosed houses -- and oversee belt-fed machine-guns on the roofs of the buildings. The paper also has three armored cars, and pays a hefty premium each month to insure the five Times reporters working there.

American journalists, he said, spend their days piecing together scraps of information from the Iraqi reporters to construct a picture, albeit incomplete, of what life is like these days in the war-torn country. But he says that the work is slow and difficult, and it is hard in such an atmosphere for reporters to nail down specifics. "Five people doing a run-of-the-mill story takes forever," he said.

Most troubling was Filkins' assessment that the U.S. military may not know much more than the Times does about what life is like on the ground in Iraq. Soldiers barely leave their bases and they don't interact very much with average Iraqis, he said, so it is hard to say who, if anyone, has an accurate picture of the current situation.

"Everyone is kind of groping around in the dark," he said.

Pro-war bloggers have a habit of ignoring the bad news, in the same way that anti-war bloggers ignore the good news. I'll be the first to admit guilt in that courtroom. But that's the wrong path.

We simply must acknowledge our military defeats. We must learn from them, adjust, and rededicate ourselves to accomplishing the mission and winning the war. The news that 62 innocent Iraqis were tortured and beheaded isn't reason to despair or give up hope, it's a call to arms a reminder of the pure evil of that we are fighting. It reaffirms our belief that we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, and that good guys killing bad guys is one of the few cosmic rights in this universe.

Guys like Mike Yon understand that. In an email earlier today, he wrote:

We are going to lose that war if we do not make radical changes. We are not seriously trying to win it.

Yon's got what I call focused pessimissm. When he writes that the ground sit in Iraq or Afghanistan is taking a dive, it's out of a true, apolitical desire to win the war. He understands that selling blood, toil, tears, and sweat didn't go out of style in the mid-40s. People, Americans especially, respond to challenges. This war is a challenge, and it's time we start responding to it.

Half of any fight is how you pull yourself up after you've taken one on the chin. If we can't stand back up, then we stay on the mat. And we lose the war.

It's such poor locker room talk in the end, the more contemptible precisely because it's trying hard to be serious without admitting deeper-seated problems. (Trying to say there's learning from mistakes going on when that self-righteous clod up top won't ever admit it unless cornered is going to be the key stumbling block for this crowd from here until 2009.) Add to that some of the amazing callousness of the comments and it's all so sweetly obvious and useless.

(Mentioning Yon (site temporarily down, it seems) is an interesting case because he was v. much the darling of a lot of the pro-war types for a while with his admittedly detailed, in-depth/embedded reporting in Iraq. But now that he's expressing a slew of doubt and concerns (in these instances about Afghanistan), note how some blame him for not sticking to the script.)

As a frequent guest on Tim Russert's show, Kate also shows a talent for projecting unmitigated smugness.

The story I realize is officially in tomorrow's paper, but is on the site now. I haven't seen where it's being linked from but it's already in the top-five-viewed for the world/politics section, apparently, and that will only spike further. The more I think about it, the more I'm curious to see what either her response or her husband's, if he says anything, is -- a couple of comments in the story are anonymous but there's a slew of on the record stuff and it's not pretty. What's he going to do, say they're all lying?

Four months after Iraq's new government took office, U.S. officials are growing impatient with leaders in Baghdad and pushing them to move more quickly on the difficult agenda confronting them.

The top U.S. goal in Iraq is to help the regime led by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to suppress sectarian violence, strengthen the fragile government and economy and move toward national reconciliation, senior officials say. One of those officials, in a recent interview, praised goals Maliki had set in several of those areas, but suggested more could be done.

"The rhetoric has to be matched by concrete action," said the official, who asked to remain unidentified, citing the sensitivity of the subject. The Iraqi government "needs to begin acting, on the ground, on its own behalf."

So contemptible, but it's just growing more obvious. "How come these bastards aren't doing what we told them too!" The 'to hell with them hawks' are in the ascendant and it'll just get bitterer.

American government officials and their Iraqi counterparts have been frustrated by the reluctance of other countries to help what they see as the weak government of a troubled land.

The first U.S. official said that neighbors "have been very slow to move" to give political support, direct aid or even debt forgiveness. "That needs to change," he said.

You can almost sense the arrogance dripping off that, that idea of 'we say so therefore everyone must follow.' I wonder who this tool is?

Thanks for posting the WPost article, Ned. I'm feeling queasy now.

The man selected to oversee the rehabilitation of the Iraqi health care system James K. Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team. "Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and just extended it out for the entire state --that's what he was coming to save.

Then, of course, Bernard Kerik's exit -- like the fall of Saigon:

Three months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a few hours later.

"I was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."

Shiite militiamen and criminals entrenched throughout Iraq’s police and internal security forces are resisting recent efforts by some Iraqi leaders and the American military to root them out and help win the trust of skeptical Sunni Arabs, Iraqi and Western officials say.

The new interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, who oversees the police, lacks the political support to purge many of the worst offenders, including senior managers who tolerated or encouraged the infiltration of Shiite militias into the police under the previous government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials who work with the ministry and the police.

The Interior Ministry recently discovered that more than 1,200 policemen and other employees had been convicted years ago of murder, rape and other violent crimes, said a Western diplomat who has close contact with the ministry. Some were even on death row. Few have been fired.

Despite the importance American commanders place on hiring more Sunni Arabs for the overwhelmingly Shiite police force, the ministry still has no way to screen recruits by sect or for militia allegiance. Such loyalties are the root cause of the ministry’s problems.

A senior American commander said that of the 27 paramilitary police battalions, “we think 5 or 6 battalions probably have leaders that have led that part of the organization in a way that is either criminal or sectarian or both.” Death squads in uniforms could be responsible for the recent surge in sectarian violence, with at least 165 bodies found across Baghdad since Wednesday.

I presume his response will be crafted to protect the GOP's reputation among those who do not read the NYT article, whose numbers shall far exceed those who do read it. SOP.

Iraq has one of the world's largest oil reserves, but the Iraqi army can't get enough fuel for its tanks. It also can't get spare parts for its trucks or supply ammunition on its own.

While the U.S. training program has made great progress teaching Iraqi soldiers how to fight, the force still relies on American help for distributing supplies — a dependency that is another obstacle to sending U.S. troops home.

"Just because you stand up all the fighters, all the combat arms organizations, they're not self-sustaining until they have some form of a logistics system," said Brig. Gen. Rebecca Halstead, commander of the 3rd Corps Support Command. "It's not there yet."

As U.S. commanders worked the past three years to build Iraqi security forces, priority went to forming combat units capable of fighting Sunni Arab insurgents.

The task of maintaining those troops was left to U.S.-led coalition forces — who got Iraqis to their missions, gave them ammunition, fed them and, in many cases, even gave them their pay.

Even in areas where Iraqis have taken over security duties, they need help getting supplies from central and regional storage facilities. In volatile Anbar province, a hot bed of insurgents, it has been especially challenging for the Iraqis to keep troops supplied with food and water.

So there is now an emphasis on building an effective Iraqi logistics operation.

Of the roughly 120,000 Iraqi soldiers, about 10 percent to 15 percent are involved in supply-related activities, said Maj. Gerald Ostlund, a coalition spokesman.

By contrast, for every combat soldier in American and other foreign contingents, there are three performing support or logistics roles, U.S. officials say.

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/homepage/hp9-16-06a.jpg

U.S. troops relax in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave where many CPA workers spent their days. (AP)

I don't begrudge these dudes trying to chill, but I can see how the hacks and dorks working under Bremer thought everything was peachy keen if this is all they saw all day.

Baker and panel members have been exploring different ideas, such as a greater degree of regional autonomy for Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions. But those familiar with the group's work said there is far from a consensus yet on what to do. One well-placed source said panel members came away from their trip sobered, with "a sense that we can't continue to do what we have been doing," adding that Baker was not simply looking to protect the administration.

"I think he basically wants to call it the way he sees it," said this source, a critic of the administration's approach to Iraq. "He's also been frustrated by the mistakes that have been made. In many ways, it has damaged the legacy he established as secretary of state."

...

The administration's more hawkish supporters, meanwhile, are nervous about Baker's involvement, counting him as one of the "realist" foreign policy proponents they see as having allowed threats against the United States to grow in the '80s and '90s. Gary J. Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute voiced concern that the Iraq group was not listening to those advocating a more muscular military strategy to defeat the insurgency.

But Schmitt added: "People can worry about what Baker is going to say, but the president has a way of doing what he is going to do. There could be a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the older Bush crowd that the son got into trouble and now he's going to listen to Baker the strategist."

Bitter? Oh, a tad...

If I were a GOP candidate this year, I would not call the president an idiot (he isn't). But I would spend the next 50 days of the campaign telling conservatives and liberals alike that even though I voted for this war once and this president twice, time has proved that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were wrong to think that the nation could win Iraq on the cheap. I would also look them in the eye and say that our president was wrong to believe that the United States could fight a war, cut taxes and increase federal spending, all at once. I would castigate my president for claiming to support homeland security while allowing our borders to remain wide open.

I suspect that voters of all persuasions would like that message. Independence is almost always rewarded at the polls. I learned this by accident while running for Congress in 1994, when the local, state and national Republican machines worked overtime to elect my opponent in the primary. I was considered too young, too inexperienced and too conservative.

Sunnis are opposed to autonomous regions because oil wealth is in the other areas. Would it be possible for them to develop the economy of their region in other ways and within a time frame that would make federalism a reasonable solution?

If the United States supports autonomous regions would that make them a target of Sadr? The article suggests that Sadr's opposition to autonomous regions is political. I wonder if that's the only reason.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s front-pager in yesterday’s Washington Post, about how Jim O’Beirne allegedly hired Bush loyalists over experts to staff the Iraqi occupation, was a hit piece, pure and simple: thinly sourced, fantastic in parts, and propagandistic. Note, for instance, the photo accompanying the story. It shows two “U.S. troops” relaxing in a swimming pool in the Green Zone, where, according to the caption, “many Coalition Provisional Authority officials spent their days.” (In the pool?) This has nothing at all to do with Chandrasekaran’s thesis—O’Beirne, even on the reporter’s account, was in charge of political appointees, not the R&R of troops. But the implication is clear: O’Beirne was sending these political appointees to cushy jobs in Iraq. The article is excerpted from a book titled Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGFlNGY3NDU0ZWI5YTQzMzJiMTEyMzY3MDIyMzZmNWY=

Meanwhile:

In a sober assessment, Abizaid, who has overseen the U.S. military strategy in Iraq since July 2003, said he had hoped six months ago for the withdrawal of several thousand U.S. troops from Iraq by now. "We clearly did not achieve the force levels that we had hoped to," he said, citing sectarian unrest, ongoing weaknesses in the capabilities of Iraqi security forces -- in particular the police -- and the five-month political void in the country after the December 2005 national elections.

Asked point-blank whether the United States is winning in Iraq, Abizaid replied: "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

Inspiring.

Goldberg's own judgment: "America could use a lot more Jim O'Beirnes." Ew?

But then there's this: while Simone was serving her country, in that same dangerous place, by doing such scut work as making sure officials there got paid, Chandrasekaran was given the awesome responsibility of shaping world opinion against the war. Goodbye.

Coyne is still in the Army Reserve and wants to go on at least one more deployment. But she is pessimistic about the military's ability to handle nation-building missions such as the one it faces in Iraq. She likens it to a person who can't swim diving into the water to try to save a drowning man, but instead being able only to stand on the poor man's shoulders.

Even so, she said she thinks the U.S. military probably needs to stay in Iraq: "The troops are resented, but they also may be the last bulwark against a total meltdown."

Baker's Iraq study group talks to the press. An utter fiasco -- read the whole thing, but this part especially:

The only thing the two would say yesterday is that they had met with lots of people, including several Iraqis on a 3 1/2 -day visit to Iraq recently.

"How much were you able to leave the Green Zone while you were in Baghdad?" a woman in the audience asked.

Baker admitted that only one of the 10 members, former senator Charles Robb (D-Va.), left the capital's heavily fortified enclave to see the violence-torn land. "It was recommended to us that it would probably be something that we ought not to do but they were willing for us to do it if we insisted," reasoned Baker. "We didn't insist because we didn't want somebody to write a story that we were cowboyin' down there in Iraq."

And besides, cowboy Hamilton added, "we had a very brief period in Iraq."

Hmm.

More thoughts on the troop numbers:

The Army has been aiming to reorganize its combat forces in such a way as to increase the number of brigades available for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, but thus far it is six brigades short of its goal of 42. That is one reason why the Army was forced in 2004-05 to use more National Guard combat units in Iraq than normal; at one point there were seven Guard combat brigades there, compared with just one now.

But even now, active-duty Army brigades are cycling in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan at a faster pace than the goal of one year deployed for every two years at home. That puts a great deal of stress on the soldiers and their families.

"I don't know how long" that can go on, a senior defense official said in an interview this week. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the problem, which is being discussed behind closed doors.

The official likened the earlier troop-reduction plan for Iraq to the situation facing a soldier traveling down a road with a map that does not match the terrain he's seeing: The soldier has to deal with the terrain as it actually exists.

But hey, you go to war with the army you have and all. Yup.

The U.S. Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, current and former Pentagon officials said.

"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, or nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."

She was talking about her husband, the soldier who died in a far-off war zone. Tears rolled down her face as she mentioned two children left fatherless. His eyes welled up, too. He hugged her, held her face, kissed her cheek. "I am so sorry for your loss," he kept repeating.

So nice that he feels others' pain too.

Bush is more open with confidants about his aggravation over events in Iraq. "He's unbelievably candid in person," said another person close to the president. "Of course it frustrates him. You can't not be frustrated by four car bombs a day and that sort of thing. But I think he's confident it's going to work out. I think he also thinks there's not much of an alternative."

Mmf.

Yet, the US public has apparently ignored this fact despite its being thrust at them repeatedly, each time a new batch of ex-generals issues a statement (there must be over fifty ex-generals by now). It's just baffling to me that this gets so little attention. This is the equivalent of the military screaming in pain at Rumsfeld's strategic incompetance.

So the month ends with a total curfew in Baghdad (or so it is claimed), while Woodward's book is imminent. The Washington Post's featured selection is up.

This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.

Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."

Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."