I'm sure the leader writers of the New York Times have waited as patiently as they claim for signs of real improvement in the administration's war strategy. But this last lapsed deadline for "milestones" — all of which have failed to be achieved — has got them throwing up their hands in terminal frustration. It's time to leave Iraq and let the skies fall, if they must.
Am I the only one who gets the impression the Times editorial board isn't terribly concerned about the bloody aftermath of their bring-them-home-now proposal, judging by this sentence? "At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq." It's almost as if stability and unification were the only elements missing from Mesopotamia prior to 2003.
Setting a firm date might, according to this editorial, force "Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — [to] be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes." That "perhaps" does more work than the absence of any mention of how ethnic and religious cleansing would be redoubled in the event of our army's departure, or fall-back to permanent but scattered garrisons in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia-dominant south.
No biggie. This much-discussed op-ed, given the sententious and misleading Cormac McCarthyesque title "The Road Home" (it's to be airlifts all the way), arrives too late and with no new information to be of great moment. Joe Klein has recently written in Time that a de facto deadline for troop withdrawal — or rather the declaration of U.S. military defeat, has long been established, whether or not an incompetent president acknowledges it or not:
There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.
As the matter stands, the actual "surge" hasn't yet begun. We've only just imported the sufficient number of troops for Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine to be put into full effect, and his Operation Phantom Thunder is only just beginning. As Frederick Kagan, the main articulator the surge policy, puts it like this in the Weekly Standard:
[P]revious clearing operations in Iraq were not part of a coherent plan to establish security in a wide area, but rather reactions to violence in particular places. Thus, U.S. commanders made no extensive efforts to contain the accelerants to violence–vehicle-bomb factories, insurgent safe houses, training grounds, smuggling routes, and weapons caches–located outside the cities being cleared. By contrast, the current strategy aims to establish security across greater Baghdad, and Petraeus and Odierno have added a phase between the preparation phase and the major clearing. This is Operation Phantom Thunder, which aims to disrupt enemy networks for many miles beyond the capital, as far away as Baquba and Falluja. What's more, Phantom Thunder is striking the enemy in almost all of its major bases at once–something Coalition forces have never before attempted in Iraq.
And John Burns, whose own newspaper doesn't really deserve him, has a cautious but encouraging article about the success of turning Sunni tribal networks against Al Qaeda in areas like Ramadi, the Amariya district in Baghdad, and the notorious Triangle of Death.
When I first investigated in this magazine Gen. Petraeus and his plan for revolutionizing the nature of combat in Iraq, I said that the full measure of his success would not be evident, if at all, for at least a year. It has been five months so far. This strikes me as preferable to the Times' fingers-crossed endorsement of the worst colonial exit strategy for the Middle East, or anywhere: divide and quit.
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