The Times' Trifecta on Iraq

This past Sunday's New York Times op ed pages offered a brilliant triad of analyses of where the US Iraqi policy is in the wake of congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

First, Frank Rich in a tough-minded column, "Will the Democrats Betray Us?," got to the heart of the matter:

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.... General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not.

Rich then turned to President George W. Bush's repackaging of the limited 2008 troop withdrawals:

The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Finally, Rich, understanding that there is NOTHING more that can be expected from the Bush administration, challenges the 2008 contenders to offer more and to offer specifics:

New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.... Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality.

Paul Krugman in "A Surge, and Then a Stab," focuses on Iraq's economic bloodline to diagnosis the surge's failure:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed... Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources. Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed. What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.... Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Having failed, Krugman writes, Bush has only one option -- to write that failure into the next president's history, not his own:

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

And finally, Thomas L. Friedman, the pundit who of these three has been most credulous about what Bush has attempted in Iraq, in "Somebody Else's Mess," offers the most damning assessment, echoing Rich's view, but going further:

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

Friedman is clearly prepared to go long on Democratic stock, but also issues a warning to them:

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

And Friedman too argues that the Democrats will have to have a proactive stance on national security, not one based solely on being the un-Bush:

Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

That argument is much the same as a warning Rich issues regarding the obsessively cautious signals coming from the Democratic presidential camps not only in their criticisms of Bush, but also in their unwillingness to take on those allies on the left -- specifically MoveOn.org -- who are muddying up the debate and throwing fuel on the fire of political divisiveness (though probably gathering a fair amount of cash in the process) rather than contributing to a national dialogue of clarity and purpose:

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

Read these three pieces.

Answering Petreus and Crocker

In Manhattan today, the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice issued the following release:

With General Petraeus claiming significant progress in Iraq, United for Peace and Justice, the largest national coalition of peace organizations with some 1,400 member groups, deplores his misleading and cynical report to Congress. The "surge" of U.S. forces in Iraq has not led to security, stability or peace. In fact, this past summer was the deadliest since the war began in 2003. General Petraeus' recommendation to withdraw one Marine unit this month and a bridge combat team sometime in December comes nowhere near ending the U.S. military engagement in Iraq.

United for Peace and Justice has produced an assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq that contrasts sharply with the comments from General Petraeus, which barely mention the impact the U.S. war and occupation has on the lives of the people of Iraq.

Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator of UFPJ, says, "We feel it is essential to provide a true picture of what the shattered lives of the 25 million Iraqis look like today. For four years now we have been hearing the same false claims that the U.S. is making important gains, but they have never been true. Prepared by Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver, researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies, Iraq: The People's Report, takes an honest look at what this war has cost the people in Iraq and our communities here in the U.S."

Iraq: The People's Report notes that:

Two million Iraqis have fled the war to seek hard-to-find refuge in neighboring countries, and an additional two million Iraqis have been forced by war fueled violence to flee their homes and remain displaced and homeless inside Iraq.

Most Iraqis have electricity for only about five hours a day, clean water remains scarce for most and unobtainable for many, and Iraq's oil production remains a fraction of what it was before war.

Occupation, war and violence have so decimated the Iraqi economy that unemployment has reached up to 40% and higher, and underemployment an additional 10% or more.

In spite of the appalling conditions that most Iraqis now find themselves living in, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are trying to convince Congress that the situation is improving. "We hope that Congress will remember that these small improvements in a horrific situation have cost U.S. taxpayers over $480 billion so far, with no end in sight," remarked Sue Udry, Legislative Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice. "That is $480 billion that we could not spend here at home to rebuild the Gulf Coast, improve education or healthcare and more."

The People's Report also notes that:

The failure of the Iraq War has also meant a huge cost to our democracy at home. We have paid an enormous price: in the deaths and shattered minds and bodies of our young soldiers; in the threats to an economy ravaged by billion-dollar bills to pay for an illegal war; in the destruction of so much of our infrastructure, security and social fabric because of human and financial resources diverted to Iraq; and in the shredding of our Constitution and civil rights as fear becomes a weapon in the hands of the Bush administration aimed at Congress, the courts and the people of this country.

United for Peace and Justice has been working throughout the summer to pressure members of Congress to take a firm stand against the White House. "General Petraeus' testimony today illustrates once again the urgency of congressional action," observed Leslie Cagan, UFPJ's National Coordinator. "Congress has the constitutional right and moral obligation to use the power of the purse to force a complete withdrawal from Iraq. The people of this country are looking to them to take leadership in this effort."

Sue Udry, UFPJ's Legislative Coordinator, said, "In the weeks ahead, the pressure on Congress to rein in the White House will accelerate. The public knows this policy is a failure and wants a rapid change of course."

The full report from United for Peace and Justice is available for download:

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/peoplesreport.pdf

Frank Rich on the Return of the Whigs

In his September 9 New York Times op ed, Frank Rich, looking at this week's reports to Congress from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, warns that what he calls a "24/7 Pentagon information ' war room'" will do work to do for the surge what the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, did for the new product launch of a war on Saddam five years ago this month.

White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

And Rich points fingers at those responsible for the credulity with which the new Bush PR initiative is being received:

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers.... Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

"As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up," by Frank Rich, September 9.