Getting out in front of victory in Iraq
Iraq isn't just a win. It's a win-win.
By AcademicElephant Posted in 4th Anniversary | War — Comments (22) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I think I have been unduly critical of the crowd that is trying to "get out in front of history" by declaring failure in Iraq. While I do not believe that Iraq has been a failure (more on this below), I must say I am impressed by how effective their effort has been over the last four years. By consistently and loudly declaring Iraq a failure, they have made it so, at least in our media and political spheres. It doesn't really matter anymore why they've done it--my interest now is in how they've done it and arrived at a point where senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) can emerge from his burrow on the anniversary of an ongoing war for very high stakes and feel completely justified declaring it "four years of failure" to an eagerly-waiting press. And no one says "boo," even though the what's happening in the theater suggests Senator Reid is dead wrong.
You see what I mean. It's an impressive achievement.
So I'm going to stop criticizing the campaign to "get out in front of history" and join it, at least in a methodological sense. I'm going to throw caution to the winds and not temper my analysis with caveats or conditions.
I'm going to get out in front of victory in Iraq.
Here goes.
We're going to win in Iraq. Even better, we have, to all intents and purposes, already won. We defeated Saddam Hussein, dismantled his regime, and he and his loathsome sons are dead and gone. We established a viable, duly-elected government in his place that is--miracle of miracles--holding and gaining popular support almost a year after being formed. We have trained increasingly effective and independent Iraqi security forces that are playing an integral role in current operations. We have established and supported a new Iraqi currency that will be the foundation of an increasingly prosperous economy fueled by an equitable and progressive hydrocarbon policy. And with these pieces in place, we are now in a position to decisively confront the terrorist-sectarian violence that has plagued Iraq for the last four years. General David Petreaus can play offense and the results are impressive. Our armed forces and their leadership have done (and are doing) a tremendous job under very difficult circumstances, and they deserve our gratitude, respect and support as they complete the mission.
Yes, it is time to complete the mission. At four years we are well on our way to victory. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said something on Sunday about "buying time" to allow for victory in Iraq. He may have sounded a little desperate, but he has a point. In a way, that has been the strategy for the last year--to buy the time for the Iraqi government to find its footing. For the ISF to stand up. For the economy to stabilize. Of course, achieving real progress rather than the artificial impression of temporary success has taken substantial time, and time has been in short supply. We have had to purchase it at a high price, especially over the last six months. But we paid that chit. And now the victory we have slowly won over the last four years is coming into focus. It is a great victory for America, and for the world. We have removed a time-bomb of a regime, and planted the seeds of a constitutional democracy in the Middle East. And as an unexpected bonus, we managed to focus the best and the brightest of al Qaeda far from our shores for four years. We've shown them we could come and fight them--and beat them--in their own back yard and kept them out of ours.
Iraq isn't just a win. It's a win-win.
Is my narrative simplistic? Biased? Do I cavalierly disregard any evidence that might disrupt the triumphant, preordained march to victory over the last four years? Perhaps. But that's the method I'm imitating, and I'm not so sure my conclusion is less plausible than "four years of failure," especially given what is actually happening in Iraq. Based on that evidence, I'm willing to get out in front of history on this one.
Victory in Iraq. It's not something that can happen. It's something that is happening. You heard it here first.
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Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words...-Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
haystack's 12th:
Conservatives (and Presidential Candidates especially) shall offer no aid and comfort to the opposition in times of legislative conflict (and ensuing political campaigns).
...I call for the immediate re-deployment of all Defeatocrats from Washington to an over-the-horizon base in Davos.
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"We can all do our part to save the planet by dying." - R.E. Finch
...but it didn't pass JFK's global test (close proximity to skiing and windsurfing).
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"We can all do our part to save the planet by dying." - R.E. Finch
and rename it Pinhead park. It should be a fairly docile crowd, unless the antiwar protestors muscle their way in.
for nothing. Caring at it's best.
Things are looking up, forecasts of victory are at the least plausible, which gets the patriotic Left even crazier then usual. What will or can lead to victory is staying power. If we have it then liberals[?] everywhere will have to search elsewhere for their necrophilliac and destructive passions.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
According to the post article, putting coalition (i.e., American) troops into the neighborhoods and letting the local people get to know them is one of the keys of the current strategy.
When you think about it, this is an amazing testament to the basic decency of the American serviceman. Despite a huge cultural barrier and a lifetime of Arabic media claiming that we're all sorts of evil, a few weeks in proximity to these kids is convincing the locals that we're the ones they want to partner with. And despite four years of being in-country with targets on thier backs, the Americans are acting in a manner that commands respect and trust.
If "the surge" finally ends up winning this war, it will be a victory against the Islamists in much more than a military sense, because it won't just be a victory won by arms and armament, it will be a triumph of the American character. We won't have just beaten them on the field of battle, we'll have beaten them in the hearts of the Iraquis. This despite the media (here and in the Middle East).
Once again, I'm astounded that the most spoiled, self-indulgent, self-absorbed generation in American history (mine) has given rise to a generation of kids truly worthy to inherit the country from the WWII generation.
Marines to do the job and not Washington politicians (who would likely be hung from the nearest bridge).
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Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — J. Michael Waller
I would, however, have no problem convening House and Senate hearings in Antarctica just before winter sets in to discuss the fate of the polar ice and global warming.
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Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — J. Michael Waller
But going forward, we've finally got the right strategy: community policing.
All of the right-wing talking points from 2004 about this being a war, not a police action couldn't have been more wrong. Luckily, Bush has recognized that, and probably was only using it as a talking point all along.
In the city of Lowell, in MA-05, crime was a huge problem in the 80s, drugs, gangs, prostitution, etc. They initially tried to address the problem by arresting lots of people. Once a day they'd swing through and arrest anybody committing a crime. They got a lot of arrests, but it didn't accomplish anything other than wasting a lot of money in the judicial system.
Then they set up a precinct in the middle of downtown which was a mess at the time. They rented an office and put a huge LPD placard in the window. They started having "community meetings" with turnout in the 100s. Crime was down 40% within months and continued to decline in the double-digits for years afterwards.
That's how you solve a crime problem. Sustained presence like the new plan in Baghdad. Here's hoping it actually works.
...should have taken place sooner, but maybe it took longer than we thought to bring a country shattered by war and traumatized by a mass murderer back to a point where effective policing was even possible.
What we on the right actually said was that you cannot treat acts of war committed by terrorists like random crimes committed by civilians. No conservative I know ever denied that a strong police force was essential to law and order in Iraq. In fact we were concerned at the time about reports that the Iraqi police force was riddled with corruption, and we hoped that something would be done to change this.
You say that Lowell tried to address the crime problem "by arresting lots of people", but you don't say what happened to those arrested. I'm willing to bet most of them were back on the streets in 48 hours, and those that were found guilty of crimes got slaps on their wrists. This appears to be what was happening in Iraq, and it seems that "catch and release" there is no longer standard policy.
I expect to see this headline soon in the NYT:
"Violence in Iraq Sharply Down, Yet Iraqi Prisons Overcrowded and Unsafe."
for the administration to pull its collective head out of its [redacted]. Debaathification was a nightmare and created a power vacuum way before we were ready. Force-fed free-market reforms were one of the single dumbest ideological-blinder-fed things I've ever seen - I'm not socialist but the goal should have been stability, not dismantling every institution we could find. Then there were the reports of them giving people political loyalty tests and putting campaign donors into the CPA - who cares about politics, do they speak arabic? I could go on, you get the picture.
Some of this is the typical idiocy you can expect in any venture. I think in this case, especially since they were 'mad' at State and didn't want to listen to the people who actually spoke arabic and knew the region's history, their triumphalism after Saddam's collapse is most directly responsible for where we are today.
And that's from a hawk.
I was a student at UMass Lowell in the late eighties and early nineties, and your narrative of how the city's crime problem was solved is, uh, somewhat unconnected from reality. To be sure the community policing efforts didn't hurt, but as someone who lived there at the time, I can confidently say that it wasn't the centerpiece of the turnaround. The LPD's main problems were that it was chronically short-staffed and lacked focus and expertise to address epidemic crack cocaine use, and all the associated pathologies, in the city; when those were addressed, things took a turn for the better.
I didn't live in Lowell at the time but am taking it on the word of 2 Lowell Captains I talked to a couple weeks ago. According to them, the original plan of "lock everyone up" didn't achieve anything until it was coupled with community policing that addressed quality of life issues. Locking up the junkies each week doesn't fix it - there are always more junkies.
I'm sure staffing helped just as much or more (no such thing as community policing if you don't have enough cops on the beat). Once you get the community's buy-in on quality of life issues like noise and blight, you start getting the tips you need to take out the big dealers and keep the new ones out.
News reports today on Al Hurrah television state that 39 Al Qaeda were killed in Anbar province by fellow SUNNI TRIBES along with the IRAQI army and police.
Hmm, sounds like failure to me!! If we do see great progress on the ground, this will lead to 10 years of GOP governance and the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream media. That is why the defeatocrats will do anything to make sure we lose in Iraq.
United States Air Force
http://airforcepundit.blogspot.com
Redstate needs more of this. Less doom and gloom.
I mean that as sincerly as Barack Obama meant it about John Edwards.
Kyoto Now! (Because only pollution from the US hurts the planet)
Catch it...
"Islamist Website Instructs Mujahideen in Using Popular U.S. Web Forums to Foster Anti-War Sentiment among Americans"
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD150807
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"We can all do our part to save the planet by dying." - R.E. Finch
What everyone, on both sides, continues to overlook is that we DID win the Iraq war--a long time ago! The hot war was over in a matter of weeks, and our mission--deposing a dangerous and defiant Saddam Hussein--was accomplished. What we're doing now isn't exactly war anymore. It's nation-building. It's what we did for years, decades, following World War II. We stayed in Germany, Japan, and other places to help rebuild those countries as democracies that would be less likely to threaten us in the immediate future. If you counted the nation-building and peacekeeping activities following World War II, I'd guess we were at "war" (by today's definition) for twenty or thirty years or more! We might still have troops in some of those places for all I know.
In that sense, we already have victory. Don't have to look into the future to know that. We just need to stay there long enough now to ensure that Iraq becomes a successful democracy that is less likely to threaten us in the future. That could take decades, unfortunately. More unfortunately, it doesn't look like Democrats, the media, and the ignorant public are willing to give it the same amount of time and patience they've give similar endeavors in the past. Are the people of the Middle East not as worthy of the effort as Europeans and Asians were? Hmmm.
n/t