The New York Times piece on the White House’s management of Iraq is pretty telling.
The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.
Reading this one can only get the understanding that no one understood that Iraqis didn’t necessarily view a strong central government as a good thing. Iraqis standing up often meant they stood up to defend their neighborhood or religious sect, not a country to which most had been repressed under.
The assumption that this was the goal of enough Iraqis to overcome separatist tendencies was simply the dumbest assumption made in this war. Turning over responsibility to Iraqis generically never was designed to deal with tensions between sects and ethnic groups in the country. In fact, it had the very real possibility of aggravating such tensions in the military was not evenly controlled.
So what happens then? You create a militia and the monopoly on coercion and violence any government must have is lost. It’s not like Hobbes and Locke didn’t point these problems out for us. Since they were from Old Europe, maybe their works weren’t important.
And it is here that we see the problems with escalation. And let’s not kid ourselves about ‘surges.’ What happens when a temporary surge doesn’t work? It turns into a permanent surge–escalation. More to the point, what do we do with more troops?
You increase clear and hold operations. And what does that mean? It means taking on the Sadr militia which is the military wing of one part of the coalition holding the government together. This isn’t going to produce a functioning nation, it’s going to further insert the US in the middle of a civil war that was only averted previously through mass killing and repression.
Making matters worse is the Hussein execution. How one could bungle this further from the US perspective is hard to imagine other than to simply throw him into the streets of Sadr City. Taking a pretty much universally hated man even amongst Baathists and allowing the execution to look like sectarian payback just complicates the entire situation with Sunnis feeling threatened–as probably the Shiites wanted them to.
The assumption before was the Iraqis wanted to be one nation and that assumption underlies the escalation, but the evidence suggests that no such urge exists amongst Iraqis.
The Times article does nothing to address exactly what an increase in troops will accomplish nor does it ask the administration to argue what is wrong with Casey’s logic regarding not wanting more troops. And hence, we’ll move on to increasing troops because while Democrats oppose it along with some in the GOP, no one will tie the President’s hands.
The problem is it’s time. He’s lost the majority of Americans with only his hard core base supporting his effort in Iraq. He’s losing moderate Republicans and even some conservatives. And it should:
The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.
The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.
If there is any clearer message of the decision being political and not strategic or tactical I don’t know what it is. While I understand the Democrats shyness at pulling funding, the election was an intervention that didn’t work. The Baker-Hamilton report was a second intervention and it didn’t work. It’s time for a third intervention and one that will work. An intervention that requires the President begin to pullout is the only way to start the process.
It’s not ideal because security situations require a fair amount of discretion, but discretion is a tool this President uses to avoid being held accountable.
DeLong reads this as a hatchet job; that WH aides have thrown Casey and Rumsfeld under the bus (convenient, since they no longer work for the govt and are thus less likely to be asked questions by reporters). I would not take too much of a policy reading of the whole thing. In fact, it’s usually safest not to read too much policy into lots of what is produced by the Washington Post (and to a lesser extent the New York Times).
I think Fiasco, or Blind Into Iraq, or whatever, have a much better reading of the situation. The real problem wasn’t that the Casey/Rumsfeld (but not Bush?) plan failed, it’s that there was no plan; no one seems to have thought about post-conflict stabilization at all.