[lbo-talk] Bacevich on The Surge

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Jan 20 05:23:21 PST 2008


[I finally realized the level at which this metaphor is appropriate: it was always a "surge over the finish line," i.e., the election cycle. After which they could collapse politically happy.]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802873.html

Sunday, January 20, 2008; B01

The Washington Post

Surge to Nowhere

By Andrew J. Bacevich

<snip>

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that

the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in

Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S.

response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation

meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households

now receive power an average of 12 hours each day -- six hours fewer

than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned

to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer

ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace

that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000

AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets

intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government

Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials

repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling

inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi

ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services,

then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.

Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly

abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in

Baghdad. By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents -- an

initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction

in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops

-- U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the

political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni

tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the

civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque

in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile

connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the

deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that

dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry

Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It

looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?"

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of

state Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is

irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking

ass" will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma

remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no

end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of

failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has

ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was

one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI

military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable

candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the

Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete

withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks

of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to

contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving

it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out

of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a

masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William

Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat

out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in

recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain

caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

<end excerpt>

Full at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802873.html

Michael



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