It's Not Over, Over There

In a remarkable and rare display of both caution and good sense, no one in the Bush administration has begun doing victory laps over the good news coming out of Iraq.

Yes, the numbers of American troops and Iraqi civilians dying there have fallen sharply in the past six months, along with the number of roadside bombs going off and suicide car bombs detonating. Anbar province is, at last and at the moment, relatively peaceful.

The jihadists of al Qaida in Iraq seem to be in retreat or on a retreat, licking their wounds and rethinking their strategy. Better yet, radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al Sadr's murderous Mahdi Army militia has largely stood down as he ordered it to last August.

In Baghdad, some neighborhoods have cautiously come back to life; open-air markets are again thronged with shoppers who for so long had cowered inside their homes out of fear of death squads and suicide bombers.

A small fraction _ 20,000 or so _ of the 2 million Iraqis who've fled across the borders into Syria and Jordan in flight from the terror have begun trickling home. Some forced by Syria's hardening attitude toward the Iraqi refugees; others tempted by the good news from home.

All of this is good news; all of this is welcome news.

But everyone from our military commanders in Iraq to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the White House and its denizens is being very careful to avoid premature celebration, and rightly so. Even the lord of darkness, Dick Cheney, has avoided any pronouncements about the insurgents being in their death throes.

It would be easy _ and wrong _ to claim that the temporary surge of an additional 30,000 American troops is entirely responsible for the scaling back of violence and civil war in Iraq. The beefing up of our forces helped. What helped even more was a change of both American tactics and strategy in Iraq that was four years overdue and coincided with the arrival of Gen. David Petraeus as the new U.S. commander.

But the truth is that much of this reduction in violence is, like the violence itself, entirely homegrown and thus resistant to the analysis and understanding of foreigners.

We don't know why al Sadr stood down his murdering militiamen for six months beginning last August or why, this week, he sent signals that he may extend the truce. What we do know is that his militia was, at the height of the killing, responsible for more than 60 percent of American combat deaths.

We know that Anbar province almost overnight changed from a killing field for American Marines because the local tribal sheiks had had enough of the al Qaida jihadists they'd sheltered. When the jihadists began killing the sheiks themselves and imposing their idea of Islamic law _ cutting off the heads of barbers, bootleggers and women not sufficiently subservient _ they crossed the line.

It was easy enough to begin dropping the dime to the American forces on the jihadists.

More important, the sheikhs decided to stop their own Sunni insurgency and stop killing Americans. Before, they had refused to participate in the Iraqi central government and army and police, which are almost entirely Shiite, and this didn't bode well for the day when the Americans would leave and the night of the long knives would arrive.

So the Sunnis began to participate, sending their sons to attempt to join the army and police. When the government resisted and turned them away, they signed up to fight with the Americans for $300 a month, a rifle and some training.

That model has been successfully applied in once-rebellious towns and communities elsewhere, to the dismay and opposition of the U.S.-backed Shiite central government.

So let's review the bidding. The key decisions that have led to this reduction in the slaughter weren't made by us or by what passes for a national government in Baghdad. They were made by the people who were happily killing American troops just six months ago.

It would appear that all politics are local, and all Iraqi politics are impenetrable, byzantine and beyond the understanding of foreigners.

It also would appear that the prospects of the national government of Iraq doing anything to meet Washington's benchmarks for progress toward national reconciliation _ the reason why the troop surge was mounted in the first place _ remain slim to none.

So there's good reason aplenty for our leaders and commanders to avoid any victory parades, "Mission Accomplished" banners or "last throes" pronouncements and instead wait silently for the next shoe to drop. If only President George W. Bush had known that Iraq was harder than algebra back in 2003, maybe we could have avoided the whole thing.

Comments

[Stevelagain]

Wow, an honest and rational look at Iraq. Who woulda thunk?

But you are offering it up to an "us vs them", Let wing, cultural-warrior crowd who view fellow citizens who do not agree with them politically as the greatest evil enemy of humanity. They are not capable of accepting your analysis.

[bobh]

Meanwhile, a near-holocaust has been inflicted on the Iraqi people.

[researcher]

the surge is working

the surge is working

the surge is working

americans are happy because the surge is working.

how about the war was and is illegal

the war was and is illegal based on lies and greed

americans are imperialist at heart care more about a surge is working than the war was and is illegal.

the iraqis will bleed us dry in money and blood

someone filling in for glen beck yesterday was happy that the iraqis have purchsed thier first what hospital? no their first oil tanker.

that is the fruits of captialism.

we are the most dangerous nation of earth and should be put up for war crimes against humanity.

bush was looking for his evil empire look on the map for a country called united states.

[sonofloud]

Of course it's not over.
The Iraqis are laying low until Bush's surge fades away and as soon as troop levels go down, the attacks will go back up. Which is what they have done from the beginning.
So what does the idiot Bush plan on doing, keeping troops there forever? Just ask Russia how well that worked in Afghanistan.

[Doofus]

It ain't over til it's over, but...

Best outcome would be that Humpty Dumpty's
pieces actually do get put back together
again. And there is that 'purple thumbs' thing.

At a cost of $1T or so, 4K American dead,
30K or so wounded, *maybe* 1M Iraqi dead, etc.

But we got rid of Saddam Hussein, gave them
their country back. You just know they're going
to be eternally grateful, once they've cleared
away all the debris, maybe? (We can hope.)

And the US Armed Forces did what they were
asked to do, one more time, which is no small accomplishment.

Not a reason to let a Repo man anywhere near
the presidency again any time soon.

Now, let US get the f*ck out of there.

[Tellmethetruth]

How come so little news about Turkey bombing Iraq? Isn't that an escalation of the war? Doesn't that mean the "surge" didn't work?

We have got to investigate the MSM as assessories to the crimes for their failure to report the news of Iraq to the American people and tell it like it is.

[FullChat]

Don't be too happy about the progress in Anbar just yet. Yes, the Sunni are fighting Al Qaeda - the worst enemy - with our assistance. We're paying them large sums ($200k in one small case) and supplying them with weapons. Today, it's great.

And for the Sunni, it continues to be great after we leave, because they now have weapons and money to fight the Shia!

[oldpotsmuggler]

My newspaper this morning had a little thing about Bush trying to get Maliki to attend the big Mid East peace thing recently, and failing. Maliki didn't want to go but setteled on sending an envoy, but even that didn't end up flying. The whole move was basically vetoed by Iran.

If that be true we either will have to maintain full forces in Iraq unless and until Iraq has some sort of a conversion that makes them leave their hands off of Iraq, or we will have to leave and take our chances on what transpires next. Purely internal events in Iraq, in other words, seem to be only a part of the real picture, and looked at in this way it really seems like we have nothing extra to lose by leaving now rather then ten years from now.

[BillZBubb]

Iraq is like a volcano rebuilding energy for a new eruption. The "surge" is a farce--at best a bit of expensive temporizing by the dimwit in the Oval Office. Baghdad has been ghetto-ized and ethnically cleansed. The Sunni chieftains are building their own bases of power and forces. The Shiites are biding their time until the US leaves. The Kurds are waiting to break away, which will bring the Turks down on them.

The inevitable outcome of this Bush/Republican debacle will be very bloody. Anyone who thinks the "surge" is working is a fool (and probably the same fool who believed Bush's lies about Iraqi WMD activities).