Six Months That Could Change IraqThree possible post-surge scenarios.

Remarks from the Fray:

It's so hard even to get honest information about what's going on in Iraq, and harder still to take any comfort in the trends we're told are the fruits of the surge strategy. Take the situation in the southern Basra region as a related example. It has long been held up as one of the only cases in Iraq where the coalition had achieved something like the victory they once claimed to seek, and an example of how democracy and political stability was achievable with a little patience and a smart strategy. But what did the Brits really leave behind there after the recent withdrawal of their forces?

One recent Associated Press story initially tries to tout the "remarkable" 90% drop in violence that followed the British withdrawal from Basra as though this were a positive omen for the future stability of Iraq. But what does this statistic really mean? Well, farther down in the article, it turns out, the main explanation for this trend is that (1) there are no more British troops left for the militia-men to shoot at, and (2) the region is already firmly in the control of the Sadrist militia, making pointless any violent challenges from other militias like the Badr brigade. Since Basra has always been primarily Shiite, naturally, there is less occasion for inter-ethnic (e.g. Sunni-Shiite) violence seen in many other parts of the country. So violence is down 90% in Basra? Big deal. If this is supposed to be a best-case scenario, then was it really worth a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives?

Similarly, I'm sure that current reductions in coalition casualties and overall terrorist violence are, in and of themselves, a positive development. But does it have any correlation at all with the chances for future stability and democracy in the country, especially in the absence of any significant positive political developments in the meantime?

There is too much willingness on our side to be reassured by an incomplete and overly wishful interpretation of the situation in Iraq, as has been the case all along. The same entities who tried to tell us that Saddam had WMDs, who happily quoted Dick Cheney saying that the insurgency was in its last throes and that our campaign had just turned a corner, are mostly the same ones who now try to reassure us that the surge is working. Fortunately, there are notable commentators like Kaplan who've always been honest and shown the appropriate degree of skepticism. Otherwise, on even a question as basic as whether or not Iraq is now better off than it was under Saddam, I would take the opinion of the average American corporate journalist with a grain of salt.

If the surge is buying time and allowing breathing space for anyone, it's less for the Iraqi government than for the architects of this disaster to get out of Washington with what little is left of their reputations. Maybe some day they can try to blame it all on the Democrats.

--fingerpuppet

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You know, and I know, that the troops who made up the surge were only there for 15 months, but Bush/Cheney/Murdoch/Ailes will be claiming that they were withdrawn because a Democratic Congress refused to give them sufficient funding, and that failing to elect a Republican will be "surrender."

If the Iraq War had been fought as a REAL "war for civilization," Bush would have funded and manned it sufficient to win the thing. But that would have forced an end to the Bush tax cuts and forced the super-rich to begin to pay for the cost of the war. Instead, the war was fought with the maximum amount of money and manpower which still permitted Bush to preserve the tax cuts. And, of course, that wasn't enough.

The purpose of the Surge was to make it APPEAR that victory was possible into the 2008 election campaign. If the Surge had never taken place, there would be no question of victory because Iraq would be a cauldron of violence. The purpose of the Surge was to defeat the enemy. It's just that the enemy was never terrorism, Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein. It was us.

--the_slasher14

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The Maliki "government" is irrelevant to Iraq's future, and everybody knows it. It has never been anything but an American puppet with a Dawa agenda. It has never earned any claim on long-term Iraqi loyalties. It is profoundly corrupt and patently incompetent. It achieved power, more apparent than real, only by virtue of an alliance of convenience with Sadr, who is a life-long enemy of Dawa and whose objective is control of Baghdad, and with the Kurds, whose long-term goal is independence, de jure or de facto. The only function the Maliki government now has is to serve as a funnel for American aid to reach the Shi'ites. It represents yet another American blunder in Iraq, one that has become an encumbrance and an embarrassment. Anything the American military achieves in Iraq is achieved by working around the political farce in the Green Zone, not through it.

Yet Maliki's is the only government Iraq has. Everything else boils down to a regional militia. The elephant in the living room is that Iraq, as such, has nowhere to go. The most that can be achieved, from an American perspective, is a precarious balancing of the various factions against one another. That balance will depend on a great many factors, some of them outside American control. And, as Kaplan argues, even those factors ostensibly within American control are sharply limited by military feasibility, funding and politics.

In other words, by any objective measure, Iraq is still a fool's gamble for the Americans. Its prognosis is continued hostility and instability, meaning that desperately needed new investment in its vaunted oil resources will not be forthcoming. The country will remain a basket case. American forces in Iraq will be little more than a very high-cost way of doing what Saddam used to do without cost to them.

The real purpose of the surge and all of Bush's policies is, of course, political. The policies are intended to smooth things over, keep the superficial peace, and go on dangling the prospect of some sort of success in front of the American people (who are so weary of the war that they will take any excuse to stop thinking about it). All of this need last only until next November. Then Bush will be off the hook, at least in his own mind. Iraq's and his party's future will become someone else's responsibility, and he can return to Crawford and active alcoholism. He hasn't really been interested in his job since November 2004.

--Fritz Gerlich

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(12/25)