Reaching Two Dead Ends on Iraq

This topic deserves a lot more attention than I'm going to give it here, but the war effort in Iraq may have reached two dead ends today.

The first dead end was reached by the Democratic leadership which appears to have given up on its effort to seize control of the war from the Bush administration and is agreeing to provide four more months of war financing without either a timeline for withdrawal or meaningfully enforceable benchmarks. The main left-wing blogs are not happy but not too surprised either. Word of a 90% Democratic cave-in emerged last week and it turned out that there were only two ways to force a military withdrawal from Iraq--pass a bill with a veto-proof majority or don't pass a war funding bill at all.

The second concerns the surge itself. It appears from a David Ignatius Washington Post op-ed that "senior administration officials" have concluded that the surge is not going to work. The two major goals of the surge were to stabilize Baghdad and push the Maliki government to pass legislation designed to reconcile Shiite and Sunni factions. It appears that "senior administration officials" have decided that the American military is not going to stabilize Baghdad. Instead, "The Iraqi government [itself] needs to show that it can take control of the capital." Of course, the major key to stabilizing Baghdad was to control the sectarian killing that was making the entire city into a kind of killing field. But American officials also have decided that they aren't going to be able to stem sectarian violence either. "'Sectarian violence is not a problem we can fix," said one senior official."

The American military is also convinced that the surge is a loser. "[T]he new head of Central Command, Adm. William Fallon, has publicly stated his view that the surge strategy is just "chipping away at the problem" and that "reconciliation isn't likely in the time we have available.'"

It's easy for those on the left to miss the significance of the emerging thinking about the surge because of David Ignatius' predictable mainstream media conclusion that "bi-partisanship" is needed to change course in Iraq. In fact, Ignatius' "senior officials" (my guess would be Defense Secretary Robert Gates) and the military are beginning to openly adapt the views of war opponents and the Democratic congressional leadership. The "post-surge plan" is to focus on training the Iraqi military, engaging in special forces operations against al-Qaeda, and securing Iraq from invasion by Turkey, Iran, or Saudi Arabia (mostly Turkey). The Democrats have been producing plans like this for a couple of years now with Hillary Clinton wanting to keep 75,000 American troops stationed inside Iraq while John Murtha wants those troops stationed just outside Iraqi territory. The only difference is that the current "post-surge" plan entails going after the sectarian militias that the Democrats would just as soon leave alone.

In other words, "senior officials," the American military, and leading Democrats all agree that the U. S. should cease combat operations in Iraq and retreat to a supporting role. For better or worse, that probably won't be enough to move President Bush off his "dead-ender" position. If Hillary or Obama win in 2008, however, there will be a broad elite consensus on the Iraq policy that needs to be adopted when they take office.

P. S. Fred Kaplan's Slate article on Ignatius' op-ed comes to some of these conclusions as well.