As we sit here the day after the MLB All-Star game, we are in the midst of the only day in the entire calendar year with no televised event from any of the four major pro sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL). That means that today is a particularly difficult today for husbands across the U.S. to get out of doing the umpteen number of projects around the house they've been promising their wives they would do this last year or so, and bachelors will need to find some other thinly-veiled excuse to drink on a Wednesday. I will be "celebrating" by going to Home Depot (to get what will hopefully be the last supplies to put the finishing touches on the nursery) and Sam's Club (to get supplies for Christy's baby shower on Saturday). Seems pretty fitting.
I saw
this article on Yahoo the other day. You don't really need to click on the link (not that you were going to anyway). The title is "Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable" but in a Freudian slip moment I initially read it as "Swearing Makes Palin More Tolerable." Indeed it does . . .
Last week saw the passing of Robert McNamara (former Secretary of State) at the age of 93. Few people took a break from the Michael Jackson coverage to notice. I'd just like to take this opportunity to recommend (again) that everyone see the 2003 McNamara documentary
The Fog of War about the lessons learned from Vietnam. It is an absolutely fascinating film and gives you some great insight into how things that seemed so certain at the time turned out to be dead wrong. There are obvious parallels to the Iraq War (and really just about any war) and it makes you wonder if 20 years from now we'll be seeing anyone from the Bush administration being as forthright as McNamara is here. Regardless what you think of him, he is definitely worth listening to.
Speaking of passings that no one noticed, how about poor Bill Mays? My brother gets the award for funniest joke in bad taste that I've heard this year. Written to me via e-mail: "Ed, Michael, and Farrah; it always comes in 3s. But wait! Billy Mays will throw in one for free! Only if you act RIGHT NOW."
Anyone who might be keeping tabs on my movie and book lists on the right may have noticed that I finally finished another book: The Gamble by Thomas Ricks. It's only the 2nd book I've finished this year, which is way down from my average of 1/month the last couple years. I blame 1) my obsession with playing Donkey Kong on the el; 2) my Kindle New York Times subscription; and 3) my Economist subscription. In any case, The Gamble is a "sequel" to his 2006 book
Fiasco. That book covered the events of the Iraq War from 2003-2005 while the new one covers 2006-2008. The first question most people ask about the books is "Are they partisan?" In my opinion I don't think that they are. Sure, Fiasco was extremely critical about the handling of the war and that was controversial in 2006 but at this point you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who holds the position that the war was run well during that time. This book is definitely more optimistic but that's not saying all that much. You get a lot of great details into how the idea for the "surge" came about, how Petraeus came to be in charge of it, and how the tide slowly started to turn. However, you aren't left with a whole lot of optimism that the situation is not going to start deteriorating quickly after we've pulled out of the major cities (i.e. as of 6/30/09).
The conventional wisdom about the Surge is that it worked because we finally had enough troops there to do the job. That's true, but it's misleading. The real change was one of strategy: we moved from having a small number of large forward operating bases (FOBs) just outside the city limits to engaging in classic counter-insurgency strategy by having lots of small bases located within the cities in neighborhoods. Once it was decided to adopt that strategy, the generals (namely Odierno and retired Gen Keane) estimated how many troops would be needed to accomplish it and discovered that they needed 30,000 more.
In military speak, the "center of gravity" changed from seeking out and destroying insurgent and terrorist cells to protecting the local population with the hope being that once trust was gained with the people and local tribal leaders that they would assist the military in helping apprehend "unfriendlies". And indeed that is exactly what happened. After an initial spike in violence as the troops moved into hostile areas, casualties dropped dramatically and the focus of attacks increasingly became U.S. forces instead of locals.
So why the pessimism? Well, one of the least publicized aspects of the Surge is that one of the principle reasons for the decline in violence (at least initially) was due to the U.S. military deciding to put members of the Sunni insurgency on the payroll to get them to stop fighting. From the book:
This may have been the biggest gamble Petraeus took as the commander of the war in Iraq. He was going behind the back of the Baghdad government to put its enemies on the American payroll. Strikingly, he didn't seem to think he needed to get clearance from the American government, either. When asked about how he had gotten the president to agree to the program, he indicated that he hadn't asked Bush about it. "I don't think it was something that we needed to ask permission for. We had the authority to conduct what are called security contracts, and that was how we saw these."
In other words, the insurgents (particularly those not religiously motivated) were happy to lay down there arms as long as they were being paid to do so. They were paid ostensibly to keep security in their own neighborhoods, but of course the truth of the matter was that with them no longer creating the violence there was not a lot of security forces needed.
All of the strategic steps taken during the Surge were with one goal in mind: creating enough temporary stability to allow the political process to move forward. And quite simply that has not happened. 5 years since the first Iraqi elections and there is still not an agreement in place for territories to share oil revenue; an item that was one of their top priorities. Maddeningly, as the violence got better the politics have actually gotten worse. With the situation not as dire, a lot of the politicians have decided that instead of forging compromises they can afford to take harder lines and be more demanding. The bottom line is that right now Iraq is not a melting pot so much as it is oil and water. As a group the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds simply don't like each other much, and it's just very hard imagining them co-existing peacefully without the U.S. acting as constant mediators.
And in case you are not utterly sick of me rambling on about this subject, here are some other quotes from the book that I found interesting:
“The surge may have bought transitory successes . . . but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism.”
"One of the lessons of the twentieth century, noted David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency expert, was that “there has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years.”
"A senior intelligence officer in Iraq described the long-term American goal as 'a stable Iraq that is unified, at peace with its neighbors, and is able to police its internal affairs, so it isn’t a sanctuary for al Qaeda. Preferably a friend to us, but it doesn’t have to be.' He paused, then pointedly noted that his list doesn’t include democracy or the observation of human rights."
"The Americans have imposed power sharing on Iraq’s factions, he said, and that should worry us for several reasons. First, it produces what looks like peace but isn’t. Second, in such situations eventually one of the factions seeks to break out of the arrangement. 'Thus,' McCreary wrote, 'power sharing is always a prelude to violence,' usually after the force imposing it withdraws."
"'I don’t think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,' he said. 'I suspect Sadr is recruiting and amassing weapons and resources for that day we pull down our troop levels to the point where he can make a grab for the seat of power in Baghdad. I’m sure his boys are infiltrating all levels of the Iraqi army and police, and he is smart enough to wait until he realizes we are drawn down to a point where we can’t effectively stop him without a massive rebuild of troops, . . . a point where the American public will not stomach another buildup.'"
"The less the Iraqi generals need American support, the more they might be inclined to take control of the government, so one reason to keep a substantial number of troops there, said Biddle, was to deter them from launching a coup. One nightmare scenario, he noted, leads eventually to a Shiite general who takes over explicitly as a Shiite out to suppress the Sunnis—and who has at his disposal a military and an economy more effective and efficient than Saddam Hussein’s ever were. 'Imagine an Iraq-Iran axis with their oil wealth, a modern equipped army, in cahoots with each other,' he said."
"The role of Iran remains problematic. At this point it appears to be the biggest winner in the Iraq war, and perhaps in the region—both in the short term and long term. As former Iranian president Muhammed Khatami boasted to the scholar Vali Nasr, 'regardless of where the United States changes regimes, it is our friends who will come to power.' In other words, all Iran really has to do is stand back and collect its winnings as Iraqi Shiites take power and realize they have few allies in the region aside from Iran."
"Iraqi counterparts would candidly say they were just waiting for the Americans to depart so they could revert to their old methods of population suppression. Older officers 'would sit and tell us they wanted to go back to the old way underneath Saddam and were just waiting for the U.S. to leave,' reported Maj. William Arnold, who in 2007 advised a battalion of the Iraqi 9th Division (Mechanized), a particularly significant unit because it was part of the only armored brigade in the Iraqi army and so would be key to launching a military coup d’état. 'We felt that those guys would listen to us just because they were using us as a checkbook.'”
"Gen. Odierno said in my last interview with him in November 2008 that he thinks Iraqi commanders have improved and that they no longer will automatically revert to Saddam-era viciousness. 'I think two years ago that was true. I think maybe even a year and a half ago it was true. I think a year ago it was a little less true. I think today it’s less true.'”
"When you got to know them and they’d be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous.”
"'We’re thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War,' Miller added. That may be a historically insightful way to think about the duration of the American presence in Iraq, but it probably is not a good sign politically, given that Reconstruction was a failure, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that for the next century violently intimidated American blacks and any whites who might seek to help them exercise their civil rights. Nor have Americans signed up for a century-long mission in Iraq."
"The heart of the Iraq matter still lies before us, Crocker maintained in both my interviews with him in Baghdad in 2008, and he likely is correct. 'What the world ultimately thinks about us and what we think about ourselves,' he said, 'I think is going to be determined much more by what happens from now on than what’s happened up to now.' In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."
