Maliki's Move
My take is that Maliki reads the opinion polls in the United States. Because Barack Obama is ahead, and President Bush is a lame-duck, and Obama is about to visit perhaps (who knows), Maliki feels now is the moment to stand up to the proposed occupation and insist upon an American withdrawal roughly in accord with Obama's plan.
McCain can't say the war is intended to lead to an occupation. He can't say the Iraqis shouldn't stand up and so we shouldn't stand down. He can't say anything useful. He can say that the surge worked, and he is saying that, but it's Obama, not McCain, that Maliki is agreeing with.
Back at home, McCain has no plan for the economy. He fired Gramm, who had no plan for him, and also insulted the American people. But he still has no plan; his own record on the economy is a long litany of rejection of a useful role for government. But now everyone in America sees that the Republicans stand for government intervention, although not for everyone and long after the right moment. So where does that leave McCain? Same place Maliki has left him -- everyone agrees with Obama now, whether they admit or not, on the economy and on Iraq.
By the way, everyone agrees with Obama on Iran too, since apparently we are moving to opening dialogue with that particular component of the axis of evil.
I have just returned from my third trip to Iraq in 18 months. I am afraid that Americans cannot wrap their minds around the idea that Iraqis hate and fear them.
Let me observe that killing people is no way to make friends. War is personal. We bring an ideology that we truly think is the best in the world, but in the case of Iraq we also brought enormous suffering and death. Guess which is more important to the Iraqis?
Al Maliki (reluctantly, because he knows he will be swept away by someone who actually lives among the people) gave voice to what virtually all Iraqis think: the Americans have to leave, and the sooner the better.
July 19, 2008 6:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
What was your business in Iraq? Are you military? Are you infrastructure? Blackwater?
I certainly agree that killing people is not the way to make friends, and I could go on and on about what we are doing wrong there, but what were you doing there 3 times in 2 years? Just curious.
July 19, 2008 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am a civilian working with combat soldiers. My work necessitates the trips to stand up systems and train soldiers in their use. In that regard, I have been to several FOBs (forward operating bases) and have never spent time in the Green Zone (IZ).
The regular soldiers are like regular citizens in their opinions. The field grade officers are pretty solidly Republican, but the junior officers and NCOs have opinions that better reflect those of the larger public. Obama's trip will be interesting.
July 20, 2008 5:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let me ask you something. We keep hearing that the surge worked and that Obama has to concede that he was wrong on this account (setting aside the fact that we not have needed a new strategy if we not there in the first place). Do you think the surge (meaning in this solely the increase of U.S. forces to fight insurgents was the main reason for the decrease in violence? It seems there are a number of other factors that may be the actual primary cause and which could have taken place even without a surge or even with a reduction in troops. One was the cease fire of the Mahdi army, which had nothing to do with the surge. Arguably, Al-Sadr stopped fighting so the violence would settle down, the Americans would leave, and he could then make his move. And what about the Sunni Awakening? We could have paid these tribal leaders to fight extremists at any point in the past five year. They also may be playing a game to cause the Americans to leave. It also may be that most of the insurgents are dead or worn out at this point. Even in a culture that seems to breed a bizarre form of sociopathy (suicide bombings), there is a limit.
Basically, the main adversaries in Iraq made a decision not to fight, but not because they were beaten into submission. Most of the combat energy of the surge (as opposed to other tactics applied simultaneously) seems to have been directed at so-called al qaeda in Iraq, which by all accounts accounted for a miniscule amount of the insurgency (though perhaps for some of the more spectacular incidents). The fact that the Sunnis were so willing to work with the Americans to fight AQI is also further evidence that there was never any Iraqi sympathy for Osama bin Laden and his boys, supposedly one of the reasons we attacked in the first place. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting we should stay because all hell might break loose if we leave now. I think all hell might break loose if we leave in 10, 20, or 50 years. The U.S. definitely needs to get out, but it is an open question whether the Iraqis should be left to their own devices or if a U.N. peacekeeping force should replace us.
July 20, 2008 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Heretic,
I believe there's another part of the story; that the Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, at least in Baghdad, are now separated, no more Shiites in Sunni neighborhoods and visa versa.
July 20, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
The surge period saw a number of developments, the most important being
(1) engagement with Sunni tribal insurgents that more or less were carrying on as normal. They never liked AQ much, so by paying them a little something and letting them be "Sons of Iraq", we squelched AQ and eliminated a lot of homegrown nonsense.
(2) engagement, at arms length, with Sadr. The Sadr problem is that his movement actually doesn't depend on him - the decapitation option wouldn't work. Too bad, he is a thug and a killer, but there it is. Our current policy seems to be: hunt the Sadrists known to plan/execute attacks and let the politics be an Iraqi problem.
(3) Presence. I don't dismiss this - it was clearly lacking in early 07, with the result that villages and muhollahs were controlled by bad guys. They aren't now. Increasingly, Iraqi Army (IA) and Iraqi police (IP) are the security presence. This is a good thing, although they are taking significant casualties and are much more inclined to form local accommodations with militias. Of course, living conditions are hell for our soldiers on the COPS and COBS.
Now as to the success of all of this: the surge was to create political space for the creation of a new, unitary Iraq. I haven't seen this, have you? My belief is that there are real tough underlying problems in Iraq that we really cannot influence. Fights over oil, Kurd/Arab tensions, armed politics, these are things that we really cannot solve and really are not our problem.
So: the surge did what it was supposed to do, but it is a failure because the transformative Iraqi political accommodations never happened.
In my opinion, we not only did all that we can do, we did too much, way too much. Our shifting goals, driven by domestic politics, ended up in a place best described as a fairyland, high on democratic panaceas and extremely low on a factual grounding in Iraqi problems.
I believe the last four years in Iraq are best described as the result of a US domestic political dynamic where any admission that we had it wrong would have caused the party in power to lose power. They lost anyway in 2006, proving that the public is smarter than the politicians or the media.
July 20, 2008 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
SLE,
excellent post, thanks.
July 21, 2008 7:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would just like to correct one item: initially the combat power was directed at AQ, but Sadrists have been increasingly in our sights. One way of seeing this is force protection - we direct our combat against those that represent the largest threat to our soldiers. The Sadrists (JAM, Jaish Al Mahdi) set EFP-IEDs, a lot of them. They are also responsible for almost all the indirect fire on the IZ (Green Zone). We are responding pretty effectively at the moment.
Diyala and the northern provinces still have AQ, when you see a suicide bomber think AQ.
July 20, 2008 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate the insights. Thanks.
July 22, 2008 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
The UN would never go into Iraq given the conditions. There is no peace to keep, pace the improvements of the surge.
Again in my opinion, peace will come when the internal Iraqi dynamic has played out. I think the notion of a bloodbath is probably incorrect. I actually doubt genocide, although gruesome violence is a specialty of that part of the world.
This is a fight for power and money (oil). That fight will end in some sort of stable configuration after the Iraqis have had it out. We only have 2 levers to influence the outcome: money and weapons. We can use those levers from afar; I doubt they will be determinative.
July 20, 2008 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find myself sad and cynical. I don't believe anybody. Americans delude themselves that we understand the layers of games going on among the middle eastern states. Likewise, who can tell how many games our own government is playing, both parties.
In doesn't matter what any of them say, it only matters what they do. The only way to get back to some semblance of truth is to stop funding the war and bring the troops home.
July 19, 2008 7:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
With you, Bluebell.
All foreign policy that has at its core ensuring oil supplies is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I've just started Scheuer's book `Marching toward Hell`. It didn't take me any time at all to conclude that the man's a lunatic, but I go a bit easy on him because I suspect that it was his involvement with CIA prior to and post 9/11 that made him that way!
What it has served to do is remind me yet again how totally stuffed all policy mired down in oil is. It reminds me what studying international relations taught me: that EVERY time the US intervenes in another country that it doesn't understand for fundamentally economic reasons (which it seeks to cloak in high falutin' rhetoric) - you name it, back to the 50s and on, Indonesia, Iran, Afghanistan - it always ends up creating a new dilemma for the succeeding administration. And on and on it goes.
What it also served has been to bring home to me very forcefully that Obama should not let McCain get away with the argument that to talk about the fact that we should not have gone into Iraq is to be bogged down in a futile argument about the past: only the future matters.
By going into Iraq, Bush et al made such a horrendous blunder that it's created a totally no-win situation: they've ensured that there are no good policy choices/outcomes. All policy now is so damned fraught that the next administration is totally mired in dreadful choices. No foreign power has EVER won a war in Afghanistan: why the hell would it be any different now, especially given that that they have the NWP frontier to hide and regroup in? Especially now that the new coalition government there is even less committed to flushing out the Taliban and Al Qaeda there than even Musharraf was.
Whereas had the allies been totally focused on Al Qaeda & the Taliban in Tora Bora post 9/ll we'd have had a chance because the Taliban was so unpopular then.
The entire thing's a nightmare now with no positive policy alternatives.
July 19, 2008 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, it worries me to see so many Democrats eager to commit more resources to Afghanistan without any exit strategy whatever. It all seems pretty much clueless bumbling to me and I figure everyone from the Pakistanis, Taliban, Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis.... all figure they'll just wait us out and let us spend ourselves into bankruptcy. I'm basically anti-war but I could have been convinced if I had any inkling that any of them have a clue what they're doing. It all seems mindless waste to me.
July 19, 2008 9:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
But the surge is working! You libruls want Amerukuh to lewz, you wanna surrenduh to the terris!
July 19, 2008 9:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Everybody agree with Obama that we need withdraw all troops in 2 years but leave small residual force of 70000 - 90000 people indefinitely to fight remnants of Al Qaeda.
Everybody agree with with Obama that we need the surge in Afghanistan.
Everybody agree with Obama that we should be good parents.
95% of Americans agree with Obama that richest 5% should pay more in taxes to provide the rest of us good pensions, free universal healthcare, free college and pres-school education and affordable housing in Manhattan.
What I don't understand why a half of Americans still support McCain. Are they all morons or simply racists ?
July 20, 2008 12:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, some of us believe in bringing all the troops home, spending the money on universal healthcare and living in peace and harmony at home. If the two parties insist on perpetual war and sick kids, why don't the rest of us hoist the maple leaf, secede and live like Canadians instead of like Romans in the final days of empire.
July 20, 2008 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Who is your candidate?
July 20, 2008 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
My candidate? I may have to draft someone who isn't running or maybe they'll have some interesting characters on the ballot. We'll see how Obama frames himself in the next few months. Will he pick a warmonger bluedog like Bayh or will he run with a real change agent like Feingold?
July 20, 2008 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
A little from Column A, a little from Column B...
No, the truth is, the majority of voters in the U.S. are low information voters. Since they can't make an informed choice, they vote for the candidate who SOUNDS like he or she shares their preconceptions.
Please note, that is a sweeping generalization and not intended to slight the many individuals who make an effort to be well informed.
July 20, 2008 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with your explanation is that majority of low information voters are going to vote for Obama.
July 20, 2008 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
McCain is infinitely preferable to 43, but I believe he has it wrong on Iraq.
The "no timetable" crowd seems to advocate occupation until they themselves have decided that their goals, whatever those are, have been achieved.
Not only does this neglect Iraqi opinion, it is devoid of common sense. There is an occupation cost, a substantial cost, albeit borne mostly by 0.4% of the country. A sensible approach would define cost/benefit and attempt to maximize benefit and minimize cost. McCain's position doesn't do this - it is romantic and inchoate. Until "win" is precisely defined, it is simply a recipe for indefinite occupation.
July 21, 2008 5:00 AM | Reply | Permalink