If war is peace then perhaps failure is success.
Two years ago candidate Barack Obama criticised his rival John McCain for offering 'fake' change by stating that "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig". This evening President Obama will apply lipstick to the catastrophe that was the Iraq war. He will seek to suck the political poison out of America's involvement in Iraq by presenting a far more nuanced case for victory in the country than George W Bush's ill-advised words spoken on an aircraft carrier over seven years ago.
Obama has succeeded in depoliticizing the Iraq conflict. By virtually sticking to the identical exit plans of his predecessor, utilizing Vice-President Bidden as the face of American policy in Baghdad, and simultaneously withdrawing uniformed soldiers while up scaling the numbers of civilian contractors, Obama has been a champion for winning the official narrative for the US invasion of the country.
Yet as violence in Iraq continues to spike, with two consecutive months of over 500 civilian deaths, it would appear that Operation: New Dawn could be a case of rhetoric winning over reality.
Indeed over 50,000 American soldiers remain in the country, that's almost half the entire British army, and although they are not on combat missions they are entirely capable of doing so if requested by the Iraqis. Remember that no US soldiers were supposed to remain inside Iraqi cities since last June, but as Al Jazeera reported over the weekend they are still conducting missions in Mosul - how many other cities are they operating within? The 'State of Forces Agreement' (SOFA) states that all remaining US troops with withdraw and leave some 94 bases by the end of 2011, yet that deal can quite easily be renegotiated especially if Iraq's leaders listen to the demands of their senior military.
The beefing up of the civilian contractor presence guarding the largest US Embassy on the planet (some 80 football pitches large) and its new consulates in Kirkuk (where US-Iraqi forces joint patrol the ominously named 'trigger line') and Mosul by some 7,000 personnel equipped with MRAPs and Blackhawks is smart politics. This privatisation of the conflict takes the sting out of the argument around 'bringing our troops home' perhaps giving Obama a foreign policy win as Afghanistan continues to bleed American lives.
The supreme irony with the entire masquerade is that a US mission that originally invaded to locate WMD (there were none) changed tact to endorse the birth of democracy in Iraq. Yet as US Stryker vehicles roll across into Kuwait bearing the scars of seven-years of lessons learnt fighting IEDs, there is no democratically elected government in Baghdad to wave them goodbye.
Instead we have a caretaker government leftover from the elections that took place almost half a year ago. Prime Minister Maliki may dominate the television screens but he is an increasingly illegitimate figure who is sliding towards embracing all out sectarianism. Indeed reports emerged last week claiming that Maliki insisted on the Iraqi Prime Minister being a Shi'a, a move that would push Iraq towards a confessional system like that of Lebanon.
Maliki is symptomatic of the continued inability of Iraq's politicians to act as statesman, hamstrung as they are by a US co-designed constitution that has given them a federated system that demands gridlocked national unity governments who have not been able to address the significant challenges that the country faces.
The death toll is rising as the political vacuum forces people to embrace a blunter form of dispute resolution. There are 15.2 deaths per day today a dramatic increase from the first six months of the year that averaged 9.2 killed a day. The increased sectarian flavour that is emerging from Iraq's nascent political alliances is leading some to look over their shoulder to the bloody civil war in 2006/7 when thousands were killed each month and people were having their names and addresses tattooed on their bodies to avoid being murdered and then delivered to morgues controlled by militias.
The former Sunni insurgency, which was largely flipped by the US 'Surge', continues to hedge its bets. The inability or unwillingness of the Iraqi government to provide jobs and a place at the table for over 50,000 of the 90,000 strong-movement is a sword of Damocles that hangs over the fragile security gains of the past years. There are several other swords hanging nearby, whether it is Kurdish-Arab relations, the continued penetration of Iranian influence in the country, or more localised politics linked to the unresolved federalism and oil laws.
Stir all these ingredients together and you have the volatile broth that is the 'new Iraq'. Whilst some political relativists with no imagination will cling to the now redundant argument over 'things are better than they were under Saddam', most Iraqis are too busy trying to survive the present to argue over the past.
All things considered the lipstick applied on Iraq by the supposed US exit may quickly begin to smudge.
Follow James Denselow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JamesDenselow
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