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Five American troops died in July as a result of combat in Iraq, by far the lowest monthly U.S. death toll of the five-year war. Read the entire article. As to the WaPo author's gratuitous attribution of the success in Iraq to events other than the surge, I would suggest reading Michael O'Hanlon's articulate assessment. That is the WaPo author inserting a pro-Obama political opinion into what is supposed to be a news article. I do hope Petraeus or some of our soldiers who have fought in Iraq so valiantly weigh in on this before the left can repeat their new myth so often it becomes accepted as reality. It is a tremendous disservice to our soldiers.
The success of the surge cannot be denied - only spun now. With security improving and with U.S. deaths now decreasing to their lowest monthly total since the war began, President Bush has announced that he is reducing the length of combat tours for soldiers deploying to Iraq from 15 months to 12 months. He also indicated that, as security conditions improves, he will begin drawing down more units. All of the additional combat brigades sent over as part of the surge have now redeployed from Iraq, leaving 140,000 soldiers in country, 10,000 more than prior to the surge. These additional forces are logistics.
July was the lowest month for casualties - 5 combat deaths and 8 non-combat deaths - recorded in Iraq since the start of the war. This tracks with ever reducing violence throughout Iraq that has fallen to levels not seen since 2004. To their credit, both the Washington Post and the NYT run their stories on this on page 1. Unfortunately, WaPo also takes the line that the security improvements are due in part to events unrelated to the surge - i.e., the good will of Sadr and the Awakening movements. To call that partisan and demonstrably false is an understatement.
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This from the Washington Post:
The number of Iraq-related American troop fatalities in July -- a total of 13 when noncombat deaths and the discovered bodies of two missing soldiers are included -- is a dramatic drop from just over a year ago, when more than 100 troops a month were confirmed dead for several months in a row.
In a brief statement at the White House early Thursday, President Bush suggested that the decreasing violence in Iraq would allow him to withdraw additional U.S. troops before he leaves office. He said that the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would make recommendations in September for "future reductions in our combat forces, as conditions permit."
"The progress is still reversible," Bush said he was told by top U.S. officials in Iraq. "But they report that there now appears to be a degree of durability to the gains we have made."
Bush struck a delicate rhetorical balance between asserting his view that sending additional troops to Iraq has been a success, while at the same time cautioning that withdrawing troops too rapidly could jeopardize security improvements.
. . . Starting Friday, Bush said, troop deployments in Iraq will shorten from 15 months to 12. The policy, first announced in April, applies to troops heading to Iraq but not those already stationed there.
The decline in American deaths highlights improvements in security that are widely attributed to three factors: a cease-fire by the country's largest Shiite militia, the decision of former Sunni insurgents to join with U.S. troops and the buildup of American forces. [emphasis added]
"It just feels so much safer than I ever thought it would," said Sgt. Daniel Ochoa, 26, of Highland Park, Calif., who is based in southern Baghdad. "We don't really go out anymore looking to go and fight the enemy. Things are stabilized, so now we're working more on helping the economy and getting people on their feet."
Despite the increased sense of security, deep-rooted tensions remain that continue to provoke violence. This week, more than 50 people were killed in a series of attacks related to a power struggle over control of the oil-rich and ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
The situation grew more tense on Thursday when the Kurdish majority on the council of Tamim province, which includes Kirkuk, voted to join the neighboring Kurdish regional government.
The move is largely symbolic, because the Iraqi parliament would have to approve it, but it provoked denunciations by representatives of rival ethnic communities, who said they would fight to prevent the Kurds from taking over the city.
"The fires of Kirkuk will eat all Iraq's cities and even the Americans," said Hussein Ali al-Jubouri, the head of the largest Sunni Arab political bloc in Kirkuk.
. . . At military bases across Iraq, American soldiers have been paying close attention to the security situation and what it might mean for the timing of their return home.
"My soldiers ask me that every day: I heard a rumor they're reducing our deployment! Is it true?" said 1st Lt. Matthew Linton, 24, of Florida, N.Y., a platoon leader based in the once volatile Sadr City district of Baghdad. "Everybody wants to come home early."
Linton's troops spent Thursday distributing $2,500 grants to merchants in Sadr City's Jamila Market and chatting with the owner of a candy store.
"When we used to walk the streets in April, they were empty and we would be destroying buildings used by enemy positions," he said. "Now we walk the same streets that were covered in sewage and rubble and utter destruction, and they are vibrant and full of people.
"As the situation improves, it feels more like the race is almost finished," Linton said, "compared to you're in the middle of the race and you have a long way to go."
As to Kirkuk, I've written many times before that Kurdish seperatism and adventurism could well be the flashpoint for a true civil war in Iraq. The U.S. weighed in on this issue by supporting Turkey's incursions into the Kurdish north. That seemed to cow the Kurds somewhat, though clearly the underlying issues are divisive and still extant.
Showing posts with label Awakening Movements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Awakening Movements. Show all posts
Friday, August 1, 2008
Iraq Continues to Improve - But Why?
Monday, July 28, 2008
Michael O'Hanlon - Assessing Success In Iraq
What was the most important factor in the dramatic turnaround in Iraq over the past year or so (a period during which violence rates have declined by at least 75 percent and about half of key legislative goals have been partially or fully satisfied, even if much remains to be done?) There is room for some debate in this matter, to be sure, but only so much. It seems incontrovertible to me that several major factors, including certainly the surge, were hugely important--and also synergistically important, in that the sum of effects was much greater than the sum of the parts. Yeah. What he said.
At the American Prospect, the editors ask "how important was the surge?" This after Obama who, in order to suggest that his judgement in opposing the surge was not as grossly poor as in reality it was, has shown the even worse judgment in denigrating the importance of the surge, crediting the lions share of the success to the Anbar Awakening and Sadr's cease fire, as if both were unrelated to the surge. I've answered this question several times, but Michael O'Hanlon has the most articulate and accurate answer to date.
Certainly the Sunni Anbar Awakening gets high marks. It was the first thing to happen in the last two years of major note. It brought much of the core of the insurgency into alliance with the United States and Iraqi government, and over time it spread to the Baghdad belts and increasingly to the north of Iraq.
However, it was the United States that organized the Awakening tribes into a coherent military and policing effort.
It was the United States, with Iraqi Security Forces, that cleared cities like Ramadi -- and unlike in past efforts, kept forces there afterwards to preserve the stability and keep extremists like al-Qaeda in Iraq out of the places from which they had been driven. It was the United States that sufficiently intimidated Muqtada al-Sadr into realizing a ceasefire better served his interests than would a renewal of battle. It was American and Iraqi security forces that, in larger numbers than before and with new operational guidelines and tactics, built blast barriers near markets, put up concrete dividers along sectarian fault lines in Baghdad, created joint security stations and started walking the streets to protect the Iraqi population, and conducted raids on insurgent safehouses and weapons caches at two to three times the rate of previous years (largely due to improved intelligence made possible by a safer, friendler, better protected population). And through all these combined efforts, it was largely the United States that was able to figure out which Iraqi commanders needed to be purged -- and that then put pressure on the Iraqi government to replace them.
On balance, many things were important, but the surge and the associated emphasis on better protection for the Iraqi population were crucial -- and absolutely necessary to the huge progress that has been made.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Refocusing McCain's Message After The Maliki Embrace of Obama
PM Maliki undercut McCain's stance on Iraq by embracing Obama's call for short timelines. Obama, a man who narcissim and arrogance clearly outweighs his judgment, has given McCain an incredible gift by denigrating the surge and claiming, incredibly, that his own plan for withdraw might have had the same impact as the surge. In light of all this, McCain can still eviscerate Obama on the issue of judgement, he merely needs to make the focus of his arguments less about Iraq in particular and more about the larger challenges we face.
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I am not sure what game Iraq PM Maliki is playing by inserting himself into U.S. politics with his comments in Der Spiegel that, in essence, though unlcear, seem to be an embrace of a 16 month timetable for withdraw of all combat forces from Iraq. Whether or not this was a mistranslation is near meaningless as it has already had whatever impact it will in the U.S. Joshua Pundit speculates that this is an attempt by Maliki to play both ends against the middle in order to extract the maximum concessions from Pres. Bush in a high stakes game of chicken over the SOFA Agreement. It JP is correct, then Maliki has made a foolish move. He would do well to remember what happened to South Vietnman and how that country was treated by its neighbors and the the U.S. after the U.S. withdrew. If you don't recall the story, you can find it in the Arthur Hermann article here.
But Iraq is a sovereign and democratic country. If the elected government at any time asks for us to remove our troops, then out we should go, posthaste. That is not the central point of this post. The question is, how is McCain to regain his footing. The "time horizons for victory" versus "time tables for defeat" is still a valid argument. Even Obama admits that General Petraeus is strongly opposed to time lines as putting all of our gains in Iraq in danger. But because of Maliki, it no longer has the importance to make it alone the decisive issue.
We still have wars going on. There is still the war in Afghanistan. There is still the problem of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan which is only going worse by the day - and which at the moment we are watching from the sidelines. There is still the problem of Iran, which could very easily become a major shooting war. Even if we finish Iraq in uncontested victory and depart that nation, we are still a nation at war.
While Maliki may have undercut McCain, Obama has provided the gift of all gifts - Kerryesque nuance on the surge. Specifically, Obama said that knowing what he knows now, he still would not vote for the surge. He is defending the indefensible. He does so by denigrating the success of the surge, he credits the Anbar Awakening and Sadr's ceasefire as the unforseeable keys to the success in Iraq and he posits that these two acts where unrelated to the U.S. actions in Iraq. Finally, he just throws up his arms saying who knew what would have happened had his plan been followed. I've spelled out the utter gaping holes in Obama's positions here.
Obama could not have given McCain more ammunition. McCain's message needs to transcend Iraq. He needs to shift the focus from 16 months or time horizons in Iraq to a combination of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Global War on Terror generally. The arguments will be the same, he merely needs to make them more global - and mine Obama's "nuance" for all it is worth.
As an aside, Americans are hardly a stupid people. Even as the entirity of the MSM has gone in the tank for Obama, the rest of America seems not to be falling in behind the MSM like lemmings. Amazingly, even as the MSM holds a wall to wall Obamathon, the Washington Post is reporting that McCain is significantly closing the gap in major battleground states. If Obama can't improve his numbers under these absolutely most favorable of conditions, he is going to have a lot of problems when the debates come around and McCain is able to finally press him eye to eye for the nation to watch.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
McCain, The Anbar Awakening, & Intellectual Honesty At MSNBC
McCain, in a statement yesterday, stated that the surge was responsible for the Anbar Awakening. Though the Anbar Awakening was solicited by the U.S. - and indeed, soliticing popular support is at the heart of counterinsurgency strategy - it actually got its start in September, 2006, three months before the formal adoption of the counterinsurgency strategy. In any event, the Anbar Awakening was fully supported by the surge and was, as part of the counterinsurgency, used as the model to spread throughout the rest of Iraq.
The left has been swarming on this one, claiming McCain does not know what he is talking about because the Awakening technically started before the surge. Joe Scarborough and former Democratic Senatorial candidate Harold Ford Jr. put this one in brutal perspective.
I may have to start watching Mr. Scarborough. (Video from Olbermann Watch)
Below
Iraq Speech Part II: Obama Tosses Sunnis Under The Bus
Obama sipped tea in Anbar (because of the surge), listening to the Sunni leadership explain that they did not want to see the U.S. withdraw from Iraq in the foreseeable future. The Sunni Awakening Councils are at the top of al Qaeda's hit list and the Sunnis were, prior to 2007, suffering from constant militia attacks. They fear these will be repeated if the U.S. cuts and runs from Iraq. Obama essentially told them "too bad" - which is in keeping with his comments in 2007 that preventing genocide was not a sufficient justification to remain in Iraq.
You have to love Obama's facile non-sequiters. We can't stay in Iraq forever to protect the Sunnis so it is sufficient if we leave completely in 16 months. Mention of security conditions - the logical binder - is simply dropped from the equation.
Iraq Speech Part I: Obama Tosses Our Military Under The Bus To Defend His Poor Judgment (Updated)
Obama's latest ploy is to claim that his judgement in opposing the surge was not poor because: . . . With respect to the surge, you know, we don't know what would have happened if I -- if the plan that I put forward in January 2007 to put more pressure on the Iraqis to arrive at a political reconciliation, to begin a phased withdrawal, what would have happened had we pursued that strategy. Read the entire transcript. Just when one thinks that Obama has plumbed the depths of political cynicsm, he hits a new low. Obama's attempt to take away credit from U.S. forces and denigrate their achievement, their sacrifice and the brilliance of their command is the lowest he has gotten - so far. And to claim that no one could forsee what would have happened had we followed his plan to withdraw immediately in 2007 is just ridiculous.
1. No one could have foreseen the rise of the Anbar Awakening movements, and it was these movements that played a large role in the success we see today in Iraq.
2. No one could have foreseen the simultaneous "cease fire" by Sadr, an act taken apparently unilaterally and with no relationship to U.S. combat actions.
3. The two events above are what truly have led to security in Iraq, with the "surge" of U.S. forces being an ancillary factor.
[Update: The videos that were here are now replaced by quotes from the transcript. The videos became non-operational after RedLasso was forced to cease operations by a lawsuit - another MSM attack on bloggers and rights of fair use.]
This from the NYT Transcripts of the Obama's speech & Q&A session:
I am pleased that as a consequence of great effort by our troops, but also as a consequence of a shift in allegiances among the Sunni tribal leaders as well as the decision of the Sadr militias to stand down, that we've seen a quelling of the violence.
. . . Second question was how would I apportion the improvements in Iraq. I don't know how to put a numerical factor on that. There is no doubt that when we put in 30,000 American troops, here is no doubt that when we put in 30,000 American troops, who are dedicated, who are brave, and who bring extraordinary skill to their jobs, that they're going to make a difference.
I think the commanders on the ground themselves would -- would acknowledge that, had you continued to see Sunni leadership align itself with AQI, that we would be in a different situation right now. That if you continued to see ethnic cleansing in Baghdad or the Sadr militias continuing to engage in some of that activity and constant reprisals, that you'd still have some big problems there right now.
But I don't know how to put a numeric -- you know, a number to that.
As I wrote yesterday, on the day the surge was announced, al Qaeda controlled practically all of the Sunni provinces and Iran through its proxies had a stranglehold on the South. Just how hard is it to assess where Iraq would be today if we had not challenged those situations militarily? One need engage in no speculation to make such an assessment.
How does Obama think the Anbar Awakening started? This didn't come about magically. U.S. forces solicited it from its very inception. It actually coallesced in September, 2006 and was well known - even the NYT was writing about its success by April, 2007. Does Obama think that the creation, survival or spread was unrelated to the surge?
Why does Obama think that Sadr left Iraq for Iraq in January, 2007 and all of his Mahdi Army suddenly dropped below the radar screen? A large part of the justification for the surge was to stop the militia attacks. In 2004 and 2005, the U.S. had decimated the Mahdi Army. They damn well knew what was coming in the surge if they tried to continue their operations to Lebanize Iraq.
The only way Obama can defend his judgment is by falsely minimizing the success of U.S. forces. The fact that he has chosen to do so tells you even more about just how partisan and warped his judgment truly is.
Update: Joe Scarborough and Harold Ford Jr. respond not to Obama, but the argument he is in essence making that the Awakening Movements and their success was unrelated to the surge. It is brutal:
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