Iraq in Review

Is there anything left of the antiwar Left’s criticisms of the Iraq war?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war.

1. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan by going into Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban to regain the advantage.

Any two-theater war can result in less resources allotted to one of the two fronts. But such multiple-front wars, whether in World War II or the Cold War, have never stymied the United States military. More importantly, if we are truly in a global war against Islamic extremists — as al-Qaeda itself reminded us when it announced that Iraq was the key front in their jihad against infidel crusaders — then the problem is not necessarily fighting the insurgents in Iraq, but whether it is a theater conducive to our aims and resources — and can be won.

In other words, Iraq simply upped the ante of a larger war, promising disaster if we lost, and enormous advantages if we won. Progress in Iraq is already having positive effects in Afghanistan, where an experienced American counterinsurgency force is fighting extremists who know that their kindred are on the verge of losing militarily and politically in Iraq, and are afraid that the same bitter calculus now applies to them.

In the first years, the odds were with the terrorists — given indigenous Muslim local populations, the hostile neighborhood of a Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and anti-war fervor at home and abroad. But once the U.S. military defeated al-Qaeda in Anbar, the population turned on Islamic terrorists, and the elected Iraqi government gained stature, then Islamists in and out of Iraq suffered a terrible defeat.

We learned to fight a war of counterinsurgency and win hearts and minds far from home; they lost an insurgency — and with it the support of the local and once naturally sympathetic Muslim population. Note that suddenly journalists, intelligence analysts, and politicians are struck by al-Qaeda’s implosion, as the Muslim street turns on radical Islamists, who themselves are torn apart by internal ideological schisms.

While many critics remain too heavily invested in antiwar positions staked out between 2003–7 to cite the war as a contributory cause, the obvious catalyst for al-Qaeda’s fiasco is its terrible performance in Iraq. Remember, if Americans adjusted their own support for the war on their perceptions of the success or failure of the U.S. military, why wouldn’t millions in the Middle East do the same with radical Islamists like al-Qaeda, whose fortunes on the battlefield have only gone from bad to worse?

2. Bush lied about the war and entered it under the false circumstances of fears of WMD and Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda.

Bush erred in focusing on WMDs when the Senate and House approved over 20 writs for war, all of them as valid now as they were in October 2002. That said, it is hard to find a single prominent congressional critic of the war who has made the case that the administration itself altered intelligence information, doctored reports, or had substantially different assessments than those provided to Congress or offered up by foreign governments. The reason recent critics of the war such as Sen. Rockefeller are utterly unconvincing in their allegations of administration malfeasance is that the record shows that they themselves had access to the same information, and often outdid the President in their prewar rhetoric and saber-rattling about Saddam.

But again, the battlefield, rightly or wrongly, colors these controversies. In a world in which there is no longer a Saddam Hussein (who would now have had his hands on trillions of dollars in oil revenue), a Libyan WMD program, and Dr. Khan’s nuclear export business, the proliferation issue is becoming less contentious. (If one were to believe the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran ceased its weapons-grade nuclear track opportunely right after Saddam’s capture). Since 2003, thousands of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda’s notables have been killed, and the organization routed and discredited; it is hard to see how Iraq has not had positive effects in curbing proliferation and damaging the organization that was responsible for 9/11. Moreover, disputes about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s post-Afghanistan odyssey, assorted terrorists in Saddam’s Baghdad in 2003, or al-Qaeda in Kurdistan during Saddam’s rule become less contentious with the knowledge that al-Qaeda, between 2003–7, tried to win, and then lost, Iraq.

3. Mistakes in Iraq were legion and irreversible.

It is better to see such controversies in terms of long- and short-term consequences. Examine the two most discussed — the Iraqi army and troop levels. Disbanding the Iraqi army without providing temporary financial support for young males with military skills was disastrous. Yet in the long-term, building a new army without tens of thousands of hard-core Baathists — as was true of the de-Nazification program with German army in 1946–7 — offered a greater chance for eventual success.

Did we send too few troops? Apparently we had enough manpower to take out Saddam, which we did brilliantly in three weeks — a force determined partly in reaction to the first Gulf War, when current critics then alleged that we had needlessly sent over far too many troops, both our own and those of the unwieldy coalition.

Evaluating the surge is more complex, since in a vast theater the size of Iraq, an increase of a little more than 20 percent in troop strength probably does not per se win wars. We forget now that many supporters of the surge were calling for 80,000-100,000 more troops in 2004–7. The 30,000 troops was a compromise figure, given our commitments elsewhere.

As important as the 30,000 reinforcements were, just as critical were three other factors associated with it: a signal to both Iraqi friends and enemies that we were staying on and fighting to win; a radical change in tactics from counterterrorism based in compounds to counterinsurgency intended to protect the local populations from terrorist reprisals; and the appointment of Gen. Petraeus as senior commander in Iraq who won the confidence of the Iraqis; silenced critics at home; and energized his officers on the ground with a new commitment to victory.

Again, there were tragic mistakes — focusing on WMDs as a sole casus belli, the pullback from the first siege of Fallujah, and bellicose Presidential rhetoric coupled with operational tentativeness — all of them regrettable, none of them fatal or comparable to the disastrous foul-ups of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.

4. Democratization was naïve and bound to fail, given the realities of the tribal Middle East.

In fact, the promotion of constitutional government, however clumsy our efforts in 2003–4, was the only chance the U.S. had after the fall of Saddam Hussein to stabilize the country and hurt our terrorist enemies. No development infuriated al-Qaeda more than U.S. support for elections and a constitutional Iraq that undercut the slander of a 21st-century crusade to annex the ancient caliphate, and invested the Iraqi people themselves in the fight against terrorism for their own future. Iraq is not comparable to the Hamas plebiscite, in that its elections were in concert with a ratified constitution and a result of an American-led effort to depose Saddam Hussein.

One of the most surreal developments of the war has been the Left’s caricature of American idealism and our support for a democratic Iraqi government — a brave group of reformers who have been more tarred and demonized by American politicians than have been their al-Qaeda enemies.

Should we see a President Obama, and he realizes that Iraq is working, expect the Left to cease its criticisms of neocon democracy fantasies, and instead adopt Iraq’s democracy as yet more proof of Obama’s hope-and-change idealism in foreign policy.

5. The real winner of the war was Iran.

In the short-term, yes — Iran benefited from the removal of its traditional enemy, Baathist Iraq, and from the initial pan-Islamist rallying against the U.S. presence in Iraq. But in the long-term, should Iraq succeed, nothing will be more destabilizing to Iran than to have a free society next door, where Shiites say, write, and read what they wish, and do so in pluralistic fashion. Again, the ante has been raised. Should Iranian-backed militias lose in Iraq, the theocracy will have suffered a terrible defeat, at a time it diverts precious oil dollars to failed military adventures while its silenced population rations gas. Iran’s theocratic government must either incite a U.S. preemptive strike, or destroy Iraqi democracy — or it is doomed.

6. President Bush’s presidency was ruined in Iraq.

If we were to lose the war, then yes. But should we win, should a constitutional government stabilize, should al-Qaeda keep unraveling, and should the hiatus of terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad continue, then historians will rank Bush in Trumanesque terms: a similarly orphaned presidency that ended disliked — even as it crafted a strategy to defeat global Islamic terror by taking the fight to the heart of the Middle East, while establishing proof of America’s good intentions by fostering constitutional government that offered Iraqis an alternative other than the usual Middle East non-choice of theocracy or autocracy.

Bush was terribly damaged by a series of poor spokesmen, his own bellicose soundbites of 2002–3, a series of tell-all defections of former intimates and officials, and an inability to cut U.S. consumption of imported petroleum. But that said, years from now, historians will look at the record and the results, not the present rhetoric, and his legacy could well be — “He kept us safe.”

7. Our military is nearly ruined and the war was never worth the cost.

We have paid a high price for our efforts with thousands of dead and wounded, and billions spent. But if the deterioration of a-Qaeda continues, America is kept safe, and the Middle East at last has some alternative to the dismal autocratic norm — one that curbs future oil-fed extremism — then Iraq will be the most important American achievement since the end of the Cold War. If we lose or quit, and Iraq devolves along the lines of the badlands of Pakistan, then, yes, the losses were not worth it.

For all the wear and tear on our military, recruitments are up, we have developed the most sophisticated and experienced anti-insurgent force in the world, and we are just beginning to shake-up the entire military by promoting a new generation of brilliant officers who came of age in the cauldron of Iraq.

In the end, the U.S. military has achieved the near impossible by removing the worst government in the Middle East and fostering what has a real chance to become by far the best. In some sense, whether Iraq was worth the high cost depends on whether one thinks the present-day liberal and humane democracies in Europe, Japan, and Korea were likewise worth the past, and far more terrible, price that America paid in blood and treasure to secure their enduring freedom.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/06/19/the-foreign-policy-advantages-of-obama-as-bush-iii.html

The Foreign-Policy Advantages of Obama as Bush III

by Dan tdaxp ~ June 19th, 2008

Coming Anarchy, Phatic Communion, Soob, Tom Barnett, Weekly Standard, and zenpundit have thematically similar posts that boil down to a a discussion of America’s relatively talentless political class.
This is a good thing.
The most ambitious should be in the business of creating wealth, not redistributing it. I trust the emergent qualities of a free market a lot more than I trust the best plans in the world as far as it comes to global growth and global betterment. On a large scale, the role of government is exception handling, and I want those exceptions handled as smoothly (which means with as little divergence from the global system) as possible.
We’ve had about nine years of this style of leadership now (from the Seattle Riots to the Bush Administration). An Obama administration promises to continue this. Obam as Bush III is my kind of Obama: a long way down from the politician I once thought he was, but much better than I think many critics give him credit for.
An Obama Presidency offers a reasonable hope in the Establishment: a vote for Obama is a vote for the status-quo. As the status-quo is one of the best in world history, that’s a solid argument.
As it relates to Obama, many commentators are now raising the hope that Obama will be bureaucratically captured in the same way that Petreaues and Gates were. Even better for us, Obama will have little operational control over what actually happens.
John McCain, on the other hand, pushes well thought out ideas, eve if they are politically unpopular. This is dangerous. We had a good original thinker with Bill Clinton. But before Clinton, the last major American figures who were smart and energetic when it comes to economics were also disasterous and downright anti-Constitutional.
Great men make great mistakes. Weak men go with the flow. Sometimes it’s better to go with the flow.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear ...

If you set aside the war in Iraq, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years.
Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11:49 AM ET May 24, 2008

You know that we are living in scary times. Terrorist groups are metastasizing all over the globe. Al Qaeda has re-established its bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hizbullah, Hamas and other radical Islamic groups are gaining strength. You hear this stuff all the time, on television and on the campaign trail. Amid the din, it's hard to figure out the facts. Well, finally we have a well-researched, independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism, released last week by Canada's Simon Fraser University. Its findings will surprise you.

It explains that there is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions. The MIPT notes zero deaths that year from terrorism; and START, seven.

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world—from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative of fear that we have all accepted far too easily.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/138508

'Iran Preparing Graves for Its Enemies'
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com International Editor
June 30, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - A senior Iranian commander on Sunday said his country would prepare 320,000 graves to accommodate its slain enemies in the event of an attack on the country. The remark was a veiled warning amid increasing tensions over Tehran's controversial nuclear activities.

The Mehr news agency quoted Gen. Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh as saying the graves would be dug in Iran's border provinces, to provide for the burial of enemies in line with the Geneva Conventions.

"The burial of slain soldiers will be carried out decently and in little time," said Bagherzadeh, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who heads a propaganda body called the Sacred Defense Foundation.

"We do not wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War," he added, apparently referring to the ordeal faced by families of MIAs during and after that conflict.

Although couched in humanitarian terms, Bagherzadeh's comments come as top Iranians step up belligerent rhetoric in the face of reports suggesting that Israel or the United States are planning to attack Iran, and specifically its nuclear facilities.

The head of the IRGC, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, at the weekend delivered stern warnings to Iran's enemies, telling the conservative Jam-e Jam newspaper that Israel was within easy range of Iran's missiles.

"Our missile power and capability are such that the Zionist regime -- despite all its abilities -- cannot confront it," he said.

Jafari told Iran's neighbors that they would also be held responsible if they allowed their soil to be used to launch attacks against Iran.

He warned that Iran could strike back at its foes through Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Sunni and Shi'ite terrorist groups in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon respectively.

"Revolutionary Muslims, whether Shi'ite or Sunni, see the U.S. and Israel attack against Islamic Iran as an attack on the Islamic world and thus defense will be on their mind without a doubt," Jafari was quoted as saying.

Other Iranian retaliation could come in the form of disruption to Gulf oil supplies, transported to world markets through the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz, he said.

"Naturally every country under attack by an enemy uses all its capacity and opportunities to confront the enemy. Regarding the main route for exiting energy, Iran will definitely act to impose control on the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz," Jafari said, adding that the price of oil would rise dramatically in such circumstances.

Terror support

Meanwhile, Iranian media gave extensive coverage to a new report claiming that congressional leaders late last year okayed a request by President Bush to fund covert operations against Iran.

Sunday's report in The New Yorker magazine, citing current and former military, intelligence and congressional sources, said cross-border operations were being run into Iran from Iraq, and that members of the IRGC's Quds Force had been seized and taken to Iraq for interrogation.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on Sunday "flatly" denied that U.S. forces were operating across the border in Iran. He told CNN that Iran's influence in Iraq was declining, mostly because of Iraqi security force successes against Iranian-backed militias.

U.S. military officers in Iraq have long accused the IRGC, and specifically its Quds Force unit, of supporting and supplying anti-coalition Shi'ite militias in neighboring Iraq.

The Pentagon in a report to Congress last week said it had evidence that anti-coalition insurgents in Afghanistan were getting help originating from Iran, although it said it was "unclear what role, and at what level the Iranian government plays in providing this assistance."

The Bush administration last October imposed sanctions on the IRGC, the Quds Force and other entities to punish Tehran for its support of terrorism and its nuclear activities.

Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani at the weekend reiterated Iranian denials of U.S. claims of Iranian support for militias in Iraq.

Speaking on al-Jazeera, he said the U.S. would not likely attack Iran since the repercussions "would be disastrous for the entire region." Any Israeli attack, he said, would draw "massive and fatal" retaliation.

Rafsanjani is currently chairman of the Expediency Council, a consultative body appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The former president is wanted in Argentina for alleged involvement in a deadly 1994 terrorist bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.

'Iran must be dealt with urgently'

While claims of Iranian involvement in terrorism have added to regional tensions, the nuclear dispute is the key factor. The U.S. and its allies believe Iran is using its nuclear energy program as a cover for intensive efforts to develop a weapons capability.

Tehran has repeatedly ignored U.N. Security Council sanction-backed demands that it suspend uranium enrichment, saying it will never relinquish its inalienable right to access civilian nuclear energy. It says it is currently considering the latest offer of incentives by the UNSC permanent five members plus Germany in exchange for compliance, but has rejected previous such proposals.

A "sense of Congress" resolution before the House of Representatives and cosponsored by more than 200 bipartisan lawmakers states that "preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is vital to the national security interests of the United States and must be dealt with urgently."

Although it does not use the word "blockade," the non-binding resolution says steps should include "prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program."

The resolution explicitly says that it should not be construed as authorization of the use of force against Iran.

Iran's Press TV on Saturday accused the U.S. Jewish lobby of being behind the House resolution and a companion one in the Senate, and said they were "considered a tacit declaration of war against the Islamic Republic.

The Young government of Iraq continues to show area of great weakness in taking control of security.
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IRAQ: DIWANIYAH SECURITY HANDOVER CANCELED

The transfer of security for Iraq's Diwaniyah province from U.S. to Iraqi forces has been canceled, Agence France-Presse reported June 30, citing a spokesman for Diwaniyah's provincial council. The handover has been postponed indefinitely, the spokesman said, because of a lack of coordination between U.S. forces and Iraq's central government. The U.S. military also confirmed the cancellation. Diwaniyah would have been the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces to be handed over to local security forces.