Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.Far be it from me to doubt this report; after all, Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack are from that great bastion of liberalism, the Brookings Institution. So if they're on board with the likes of Joe Lieberman and John McCain, well, gosh, the war must really be going well.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.
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In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
And I'd like to believe it. I'd like to believe that the war in Iraq is going well and that the Iraqis are working their way toward reconciliation, that democracy is beginning to take hold. After all, we completely destroyed the country and killed thousands of our own people and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in an adolescent explosion of American neocon machismo, ruined our fragile global reputation as a beacon of democracy and the rule of law, trashed our Constitution, and decimated our military, so even some small progress would be cold comfort indeed. I'd also like to believe that a good-looking, well-built, and open-minded rich guy is going to ring my doorbell and give me a check for ten million bucks. But I know reality when I see it, as do a lot of other people, including some prominent Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who think that we're up the creek.
Glenn Greenwald enlightens us as to the background of Messrs. O'Hanlon and Pollack. It turns out that they've been leading the We're Winning pep squad for quite a while.
I'm always suspicious when the right wing suddenly realizes that there really are, as Mr. Greenwald calls them, "really smart, serious, credible Iraq experts" lurking in the liberal institutions like Brookings and writing for the New York Times. It makes me think that instead of O'Hanlon and Pollack being convinced that we're winning this war by a nose, they were being led around by it.
