Tuesday, 04.08.08
The Silent Majority
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images News
Watching David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testify for hours on Tuesday was a grueling experience, and one can only pity the men who actually had to sit through it. But while the substance of the hearings was deadly dull, the political dynamics around it were fascinating. Petraeus and Crocker got a brief lunch break between testifying before Senate Armed Services and Senate Foreign Relations during which time C-SPAN switched over to one minute speeches in the House of Representatives. Every Republican who spoke offered a vociferously pro-war oration, accusing their opponents of all manner of ills. The GOP, it seems, is not only convinced that we're "winning" in Iraq (though they can't define what this means) but they're sure they've found a winning issue in the war.
Their confidence is a little hard to understand. A Gallup article characterizing American views on Iraq as "polarized" shows that while 65 percent of Republicans reject the idea of a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, 60 percent of Americans favor such a timetable. Similarly, according to Rasmussen by a 2-1 ratio Americans reject staying in Iraq for longer than a year. Perhaps their substantive confidence in the alleged success of the surge is just so great that they believe public opinion will turn around by November. If so, they may want to pay closer attention to what their hero, Petraeus, is actually saying. In the past, he's analogized Iraq to the U.K.'s decades-long peacekeeping effort in Northern Ireland and observed that "a nine or ten year endeavor" would be average for the sort of counterinsurgency he's envisioning. Those of us who doubt that such a lengthy and expensive commitment to a mission in Iraq that never should have been undertaken is worthwhile appear to be overwhelmingly in the majority.
Liveblogging: not just for bloggersThomas Ricks, military correspondent for the Washington Post, liveblogs the Petraeus-Crocker hearings. |
Beyond Code PinkSurveying the survey data, Glenn Greenwald finds the pro-war camp offering nothing but "profoundly anti-democratic propaganda." |
Monkey in the middleInstead of an insurgency, Abu Muqawama finds violence in Iraq increasingly the result of "intra-Iraqi political disputes [that are] none of [America's] business." |
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THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!!
!!!HILLMENTUM™!!!!
The Petraeus Strategy is entirely political show. He's achieved a short-term decline in casualties by limiting patrols into dangerous areas. What he calls a victory is in reality a retreat.
Now the insurgents have advanced into the vacuum left by our troops and are within striking range of the Green Zone. The new political strategy is therefore to go on the offensive again and take high casualties over the summer, then disengage again so that casualties trend down in time for the Election and the Neocons can claim (once more with feeling) that We're Turning a Corner.
I don't know about the gullibility of the average voter, but I'll bet certain bloggers will continue to fall for it. Or at least pretend they do.
Just wanted to say that Crocker is a lot of things, but political hack? No way. He's spent a lifetime working in the middle east and is literally the best diplomat for the job. Unfortunately for him (and us), he is in the completely untenable position of having to defend this s*pile.
Public opinion polls function as a snapshot of the current American attitude. It is not a barometer for conducting foreign policy. Even when the election of 2004 gave us an alternative candidate, we reelected President Bush. Are we that naive to believe that the U.S. can invade Iraq, leave it unstable, and suffer no consequences?
The American media seems as mystified about the surge as the public. This is how counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen identifies a winning strategy. First, success is defined by marginalizing the enemy from the civilian population and rescuing them from enemy intimidation. Our adversaries are al Qaeda in Iraq, the militias, and other terrorist groups. Second, "protecting and controlling the population is doable, but destroying the enemy is not." Third, by reintroducing security forces and economic and political programs within the community, the enemy is "hard-wired" out of the environment.
The most difficult part of a counterinsurgency is vetting and reorganizing a corrupt police force. It usually takes ten years to resolve. As the events in Basra have demonstrated, the surge is very fragile in some areas of Iraq. However, Iraq's tribes' rights operate as a parallel to states' rights, and police reform could be expedited.
We Americans need to lose our reverence for figures such as Petraeus -- our superstition that anyone in a uniform (remember Ollie North?) is a selfless hero.
The general is exactly the kind of butt-kissing "executive" as the political hack Crocker sitting next to him, and he's sending people to their death to advance his career and send himself into eventual retire-dom and book contract heaven.
Such a mental evolution would put John McCain's ideas in their proper perspective. His war-hero status having nothing to do with the soundness of his ideas, we'd stop our submissive bowing to his service and judge him on the multiple fallacies he's pushing on the electorate.
Posted by denis arvay | April 9, 2008 7:28 AM