Two authorities, both highly respected by neoconservatives, cast doubt on Iraq “success”

Last month, in light of the glowing reports we were hearing about Iraq, I asked, “Could it really be true that Iraq is on the verge of being self-sustaining? … Was I wrong when I repeatedly said that our policy, by itself, could not produce a self-sustaining Iraq?”

While I haven’t yet gotten around to addressing that complex question, as I said I would, two items I’ve read today lead me to question the increasingly accepted idea that the “war is won.”

The first is an interview with Gen. David Petraeus, the departing Iraq ground commander, in today’s New York Times:

“I don’t know that it was a death spiral, but I mean it was a pretty dire situation,” General Petraeus said, referring to the situation upon his arrival here as the senior commander in Iraq in February 2007. “There have been very substantial gains at this point. Don’t take any of this to imply that we think we’re anywhere near finished.”

“It’s not durable yet. It’s not self-sustaining,” he added. “You know—touch wood—there is still a lot of work to be done.”

If, as Petraeus clearly states, the dramatic drop of violence in Iraq is not self-sustaining, meaning that Iraq is not at the point of being able to sustain its own internal security but requires the indefinitely prolonged presence of U.S. combat forces for that purpose, then Iraq is not a self-sustaining country and the war is not won.

Here is a further piece of revealing information which I came upon today by serendipity. Discussing the situation in Russia, a friend and I decided to check out the website of Freedom House, the organization that tracks all countries on earth according to whether they are free, partly free, or not free. To our surprise, we found that Freedom House does not consider Russia to be even partly free, but designates it as not free. (See FH’s chilling summary of the Russian situation.) Then we checked out Iraq, and found that Iraq is also considered not free: Here is the summary statement:

In an effort to stem sectarian killings in 2007, the U.S. military initiated a troop surge to augment the number of soldiers already in Iraq. While the effort did reduce civilian casualties, terrorist violence continued. Also during the year, Sunni Arab political participation increased, and tribal cooperation with U.S.-led coalition forces dealt significant blows to al-Qaeda. However, the Iraqi government remained unable to independently provide security and other essential services, and made little progress toward enacting long-delayed reform legislation. [Italics added.] The Kurdish north further consolidated its status as an autonomous region in 2007. The Kurdistan National Assembly passed its own oil law in August even as national oil legislation stalled, allowing foreign companies to invest in the development of the northern region’s oil resources.

Thus Iraq fails to meet a defining test of freedom, that its government is able independently to provide security and other essential services. And that’s coming from Freedom House (see their mission statement), a neoconservative-associated organization, which, according to some paleoconservative critics in the past, uses too broad a definition of freedom, in order to promote the idea of the steady spread of freedom everywhere. (Certainly the fact that FH designates as “free” all of western Europe, where people can be arrested and their lives ruined for criticizing Islam, indicates to me that FH’s definition of freedom is too broad.)

However, on the other side of the issue, the AP reports today:

Officials: Iraq, U.S. Finish Draft Agreement for Troop Withdrawal

Iraqi and American negotiators have finished work on a draft security agreement that would see all American troops leave Iraqi cities by June 30 and the rest of the country by the end of 2011, Iraqi officials said yesterday.

The deal still needs approval by both governments—and some members of Iraq’s Cabinet oppose some of its provisions.

In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said talks with the Iraqis were ongoing and “we are trying to bring the agreement to a close. It is not done yet.”

This of course is just a draft document. If it goes beyond the draft form to a real agreement, and if U.S. forces actually withdraw from Iraq cities in ten months, at that point it might be arguable that Iraq’s government can sustain the country’s security and services, and therefore that our Iraq policy has been a success. But this happy expectation is contradicted by Gen. Petraeus, a man who in my reading of him has never thrown the bull, and who in his cautious comments to the New York Times seemed to indicate that true Iraq self-sufficiency is not yet on the horizon.

- end of initial entry -

August 22

Alan Levine writes:

I think Petraeus has always made it plain that at most we have “turned the corner IF we stick it out” and has not disguised the point that the war is bound to go on for years. The turning point in many wars is often long before the fighting ends. This is even more true in guerrilla war. The British probably “turned the corner” in Malaya in 1951, but the war (“emergency”) was not declared over until 1960, and there was fighting even after that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2008 01:34 PM | Send