That Other Thing…

Even before the news cycle was dominated by the country’s financial meltdown, one would have been hard pressed to find significant television coverage on the war in Iraq–the one where over 4,000 Americans, and somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 Iraqis, have perished. The arguments for and against the war aside, that a media would devote such little attention to one of the most important wars in our country’s history does a profound disservice to any semblance of democratic inquiry and transparency.

Much of this has to do with the now well-established meme that says the surge of U.S. troops in 2007 has been an unqualified and undeniable success. In his interview with Obama, Bill O’Reilly admitted that while he [Obama] might have had good judgment in opposing the war initially, he was completely unjustified in holding onto the position that the surge was anything but an astonishing victory. In their first debate, John McCain hammered home this point home, urging Americans that as Obama had been absolutely wrong in his opposition to the surge, he was in effect unfit for the role of commander-in-chief.

Now, I would be the first to acknowledge and welcome the fact that bloodshed in Iraq has dipped significantly in the last year. There is no one who should find this development as anything but a positive step for the Iraqi people. But when we get to the question of causation, the matter is far less unequivocal.

Peter Galbraith’s article in the most recent New York Review of Books does a masterful job describing how the short-term and tactical success of the surge are part of a much larger and more complicated picture.

Few grasped the most obvious explanation: Nouri al-Maliki wants US troops out of Iraq. He leads a Shiite coalition comprised of religious parties, including his own Dawa party, which is committed to making Iraq into a Shiite Islamic state. Like his coalition partners, al-Maliki views Iraq’s Sunnis with deep—and justifiable—suspicion. For four years after Saddam’s fall, Iraqi Sunnis supported an insurgency that branded Shiites as apostates deserving death. Now the Sunnis have thrown their support behind the Awakening, which is portrayed by American politicians, including Senator McCain, as a group of patriotic Iraqis engaged in the fight against al-Qaeda. Iraq’s Shiite leaders see the Awakening as a Baathist-led organization that rejects Iraq’s new Shiite-led order—an accurate description.

The surge was only part of this picture. And as General Petraeus has noted many times, the point of the surge was to buy, in effect, security time to hold out hope for a political breakthrough. Well, that hasn’t happened, and the only way we’re getting out of that country is when that does happen. But it all becomes a vicious circle, because the effect of our ad hoc approach in creating the now relative security improvement has been achieved on the back of a policy which necessitates the separation of Iraq among ethnic and sectarian lines…you know, the kind of thing that makes political breakthroughs unlikely.

It’s ironic that Joe Biden’s plan to create a tri-partite Iraq–with Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish zones– instead of trying to find the panacea of an elusive federal Iraq, was almost unanimously pilloried by political experts, yet it is the almost unanimously praised surge that has expedited the process whereby that scenario becomes the most likely outcome. Iraq can in no functional way be thought of as a nation, but should rather be seen as an amalgamation of three disparate ethnic/sectarian groups, each of which has its own internal divisions and rivalries.

I’m afraid that the next time we start hearing about Iraq on the news, it’s going to be because of increasing cracks in a policy that has no measurable end point. Achieving “victory” in this kind of conflict and at this stage will invariably result in the least bad option at the least inopportune moment. But as long as incoherence masquerading as policy continues to be the standard of victory and praised as a feasible long term strategy, there are going to be many dark days in front of us.