Michael O'Hanlon: The Clown Prince of War Mongering

The debate over Iraq funding is beginning even if everybody knows that the Bush administration is going to get Iraq funding in the end.

Bush is going to win the struggle over funding because he is more than cynical enough to play chicken with the lives of American troops. The Democratic leadership has enough backbone to pursue some kind of legislation tying war funding to withdrawal from Iraq. But Bush would veto any withdrawal legislation and the Democrats are not determined enough and don't have enough support in their own caucus to respond effectively to a veto.

Meanwhile the debate over the war goes on.

Clown Commentator Michael O'Hanlon and co-authors have an op-ed in the New York Times trying to document the progress of the surge.

But there's been almost no bang for the surge buck.

There aren't even that many more foreign troops in Iraq. Right now, there are 174,000 American troops and allied troops. That sounds like a lot, but it's not much more than the the U. S. and allies had from 2003-2005 when troop numbers ranged from 161,000-164,000.

Certainly, the effort by American troops is there. Daily patrols have gone up from 1,500 to 4,000 and the number of Iraqi prisoners in American facilities has gone up to 60,000.

But all the work has had minimal impact. Daily attacks by Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda, and Shiite militiamen have declined from 160 to 120 (all statistics from chart accompanying O'Hanlon article). But the drop isn't attributable to the surge at all and actually obscures some disappointing news. The decrease in daily attacks occurred because Sunni insurgents switched from al-Qaeda to the American side. Attacks in the former insurgent strongholds of Ramadi have dropped 90%. The same has been the case throughout Anbar province as a whole.

However, the number of daily insurgent attacks remains high despite dropping so precipitously in Anbar. That means the surge has had a negligible impact on its main target of Baghdad and that al-Qaeda remains a very potent force despite losing their Sunni allies.

In other words, the U. S. military have not been able to capitalize on the enormous break they caught when Sunni insurgents switched sides. The failure to reduce the number of attacks even further has to considered a disappointment.

More evidence of the disappointing failure to improve security can be seen in the economic statistics. O'Hanlon, et. al, claim that "roughly six of Iraq’s 18 provinces are making significant economic and security gains, up from three a year ago."

However, this is a place where their clownishness comes out. Their own chart shows that economic measures for Iraq as a whole have been regressing over the last year. Oil production, electricity production, and household fuel production are all down for Iraq as a whole while unemployment has stayed steady at 33%. Given that the economic situation is worsening as a whole, that means that progress in six provinces is being more than compensated for by economic regression in other provinces.

There's a general consensus that the economic situation is not going to improve significantly until security improves. The fact that the Iraqi economy is still declining after 8 months of the surge is another indication that the additional American troops have not meaningfully improved security.

So what's happened?

To think about what happened, it is necessary to divide Iraqi violence into al-Qaeda and Shiite components.

The surge has not had a very meaningful effect on al-Qaeda capacities. Al-Qaeda might have gone into hiding, but it appears that they are still a potent force.

Meanwhile, things have actually gotten worse in relation to the Shiite militias. Sadr has lost control over the Mahdi Army and the militia has fractured into a number of violent sub-units attacking American troops and other Shiite militias on their own. Given the intense conflicts among the Shiite militias in Basra and Karbala, there's a chance that Shiite areas could descend into the same anarchy that has plagued Baghdad for the last eighteen months.

And the American military isn't even relevant to the growing civil war among Shiites.

This is the problem in a nutshell. The American military caught a big break with the "Anbar Awakening" but hasn't been able to capitalize. Despite the intensity of American effort, the thirty thousand additional troops and thousands of daily patrols have had little impact on al-Qaeda capabilities and aren't even relevant to the Shiite meltdown.

Given that we're accomplishing so little, I wonder why we're there at all.