This week’s Petraeus/Crocker testimony has prompted another round of stern lecturing by war supporters about the cost of failure in Iraq. Most Americans know full well: it is the Bush administration that has given us failure in Iraq. Even the most diehard war supporters concede that “mistakes were made.” Sorry, the passive voice will not do. Bush took us to war without justification. He compounded the mistake by losing the war. Watch Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary “No End In Sight” and you will see Donald Rumsfeld laughing — laughing — back in 2003 as Iraq descended into chaos thanks to his utter negligence. Responding to those who rightly issued dire forecasts, Rumsfeld indulged in mockery (“henny-penny, the sky is falling!”). Now, Bush and his surrogates in congress and the media have the gall to warn the rest of us about the fate of Iraq and the safety of the United States.
It is vital to note that Petraeus openly admitted he “doesn’t know, actually” whether his mission in Iraq is making America safer.
On NPR this morning, Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation debated the matter. After impugning the patriotism of troop-withdrawal advocates, repeatedly declaring Moveon.org a “far left” group (it is not) and insisting that only the far left has criticized General Petraeus (presumably Chuck Hagel is a leftist), Darling said (I paraphrase) that no reasonable person could disagree with the idea of a stable, democratic Iraq. He’s right. But U.S. troops are in a state of open warfare with the Mahdi Army, led by Moqtada al-Sadr, one of the major power-holders in Iraq’s supposedly freedom-loving new government. The Badr Corps, linked to the even more powerful Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, is at war with the Sadrists and yet just as ruthless an enforcer of Shia dominance. These groups are intrinsically linked to the government and also major drivers of sectarian killing, torture, forced relocation and every other sort of crime plaguing Iraq. So when representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) declares that “the enemies of the Iraqi government are the enemies of freedom everywhere,” as she did on the opening day of Petraeus’s testimony, she is voicing a cartoonish and yet widespread view of the conflict. (This is not to deny that the Iraqi government’s enemies include some very despicable people indeed.)
War critics, amazingly, are still chastised for ignoring the “good news” from Iraq. Here is George Packer’s assessment in the New Yorker:
Though the streets of Baghdad are marginally less lethal than they were during 2006, sixty thousand Iraqis a month continue to leave their homes … joining the two million who have become refugees and the two million others displaced inside Iraq. The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength…. In the backstreets, the local markets, the university classrooms, and other realms beyond the reach of American observers or American troops, there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun. The lives of most Iraqis are dominated by a complex array of militias and criminal gangs that are ruthlessly competing with one another, and whose motives for killing are more often economic or personal than religious or ideological. A recent report by the International Crisis Group urged the American and British governments to acknowledge that their “so-called Iraqi partners, far from building a new state, are tirelessly working to tear it down.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan notes the preponderance of misleading news headlines about Bush’s proposed troop “drawdown,” as if a summer ’08 reduction to pre-surge levels can legitimately be called a drawdown. But such is the effectiveness of prowar propagandists at steering the discussion.
Good to see Barack Obama tearing away the curtain on this during his Senate panel comments. I haven’t fully digested Obama’s own troop-withdrawal plan, which is drawing criticism for leaving too many troops still in place. That could give us the worst of both worlds: deeper sectarian violence, even less ability to tamp it down, and more U.S. casualties to boot. Anne Applebaum of Slate put it best: U.S. soldiers can’t just redeploy to the periphery and announce they’d like to no longer be shot at, please.
John Edwards’s rebuttal to the Bush speech tonight will be worth watching.
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