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A silver lining in Iraq?
I just read an article that for the first time makes some sense out of American efforts in Iraq and shows that the U.S. has been engaged in a coherent and effective counter-insurgency campaign there. In the cover article of the May 9 National Review, “What Went Right,” Richard Lowry says that we are now winning in Iraq, and he bases this statement, not, as the Bush administration and most Bush supporters have done, on the mere fact that an election took place or on the “intoxication” and “exhilaration” of freedom, but on the way that ever-more effective reconstruction efforts by the U.S. military have gradually and steadily strengthened the pro-democracy forces and weakened the insurgency. Most importantly, Lowry, who has some credibility on this front because of his grim assessment in NR last fall, “What Went Wrong,” shows how U.S. forces have won Iraqi fence sitters away from potential support for the insurgency toward support for the new Iraqi government. He thus establishes a link between the re-building and democratization efforts on one side and the counter-insurgency on the other. Prior to this, every account that I had heard made the rebuilding work seem like an escape from the insurgency rather than part of a strategy for dealing with it; U.S. spokesmen, instead of talking about what we were doing to destroy the insurgency, would talk about the marvelous progress we had made in fixing up schools or getting electicity grids working, which was nice, but always seemed irrelevant to the main point. Just a couple of months ago, Gen. Abizaid in a tv interview was saying things like, “We’ve got to go after the insurgents.” He didn’t say, “We have been going after the insurgents.” The clear impression he gave was that we were essentially doing nothing about the insurgency. It was on the basis of innumerable statements of this nature, from both the administration and the media, that I have made my repeated criticisms of the Bush policy. Lowry also suggests that the insurgency consists predominantly of former Baathist regime elements rather than jihadists from outside the country, which in turn implies that the manpower behind the insurgency is not endlessly renewable but is finite and running out. However, that last statement remains a hope rather than a certainty. And, of course, the larger question, which has always been my number one question, remains. Even if a new Iraqi government with a functioning army can be set up, will it be able to survive without ongoing U.S. intervention?
If President Bush all along had been making the kind of informative presentation that Lowry makes in this article, instead of endlessly emitting mindless boilerplate about “freedom,” he would have had a lot more credibility as a leader. Email entry |