Surge and Backwash

ANOTHER NAIL IN NEO-LIBERAL COFFIN. One of the real pleasures of the collapse of the Bush administration has been watching neo-liberalism go down with it. The tactic among neo-liberal Democrats like Joe Lieberman was to be almost as conservative as the Republicans while treating liberals as their chief opponents. But the neo-liberal "liberal hawks" who were almost as eager to invade Iraq as the Bush administration now look almost as stupid and delusional as Dick Cheney.


One liberal hawk who probably won't get a job in a Hillary administration is Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. On Monday, O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack were promoting the surge in a New York Times op-ed entitled "A War That We Just Might Win." Five years ago, promoting a Bush administration line like that would have been the hip, counter-intuitive thing to do for a neo-liberal Democrat who wanted to get ahead. But Democratic leaders have stopped waffling between support for the war and tepid opposition any more. Now, they're waffling between cutting off funding for the war and contempt of Congress prosecutions for the Bush White House.

In that context, the O'Hanlon/ Pollack article was a stab in the back for Democratic presidential candidates and Congressional leaders. Somebody with some clout must have told that to O'Hanlon because he recanted on Tuesday for what he wrote on Monday.

A WEAK SURGE. But the case for the surge is extremely weak.

We have 38,000 additional troops in Iraq. What have they accomplished since the first additional troops allied in February, 2007.

The major objective of the surge was stability in Baghdad? Has that been accomplished? No! Even a guy as pro-war as Michael Totten emphasizes that nowhere in Baghdad is safe, including the Green Zone.

As mentioned in previous posts, what makes the failure to secure Baghdad particularly telling is that U. S. forces have had nearly ideal conditions. Sunni tribes began turning against al-Qaeda last September and the Shiite militias decided not to confront American troops.

But Baghdad isn't secure, there's only one hour of electricity a day (according to Michael Totten), and terrorists have been able to attack "high value targets" like open-air markets, funeral processions, and soccer celebrations. If anything, the counter-surge of Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda looks like it's having more success in Baghdad than the American surge.

EVEN WORSE, it looks like the American military and American embassy have decided to throw their weight behind a hoped for and inevitably unwieldy alliance of Sunnis, Kurds, and secularists. The U. S. also is pushing against the Shiite militias, forcing the Iraqi government to fire sectarian Shiite military officers, and arming Sunni militias.

It's a recipe for disaster. What the U. S. is doing is driving large sectors of the majority Shiite population toward insurrection. Shiite violence has already flared twice with al-Sadr's campaign againt the U. S. military in 2004 and the death squads of 2006. U. S. policy is pushing the Shiites toward another big blow-up that will reverse months of patient progress.