Catch That Goalpost

by dday

Over the last few days, White House officials and military leaders, either by themselves or through the press, have been steadily lowering expectations about the current situation in Iraq. They’ve walked this tightrope for quite a while now, between promoting the message that the war is going so well that we have to stay and finish the job, and that the war is not going so well and we have to stay or chaos will reign. Hence, here’s A Man Called Petraeus:

Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that “no one” in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation,” or in the provision of basic public services.

Outside of the fact that the violence has actually ticked back up and this opportunity is increasingly slipping away, this is generally correct. The various parties in Iraq aren’t even speaking to one another, let alone producing legislation aimed at reconciliation. The Sunni political groups aren’t focused on returning to the coalition government, Sunni provinces like Anbar are not repesented in the Parliament because of the boycott during the last provincial elections, the Awakening groups are growing restless (as well as being bolstered by US weapons and funding, forming into something of a militia), and the internal squabbles in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south are growing. Juan Cole offers a charitable reading of Petraeus’ statements.

So you could understand how Gen. Petraeus, having sacrificed so much to get some sort of social peace in Baghdad that would allow some major steps toward political reconciliation, is frustrated that no such major initiatives have been launched and that Iraqi politics just seems to be stuck.

Now we get an article by Robert Burns for the AP, suggesting that Al Qaeda in Iraq is stronger than the Bush Administration is letting on.

Al-Qaida is in Iraq to stay. It’s not a conclusion the White House talks about much when denouncing the shadowy group, known as al-Qaida in Iraq, that used the U.S. invasion five years ago to develop into a major killer.

The militants are weakened, battered, perhaps even desperate, by most U.S. accounts. But far from being “routed,” as Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed last month, they’re still there, still deadly active and likely to remain far into the future, military and other officials told The Associated Press.

Commanders and the other officials commented in a series of interviews and assessments discussing persistent violence in Iraq and intelligence judgments there and in the U.S.

There are some named sources in that story, but they’re all military. And Petraeus has been carrying the Administration’s water for some time. So what’s going on here? It seems to me that, having overplayed the “surge is working” meme, the White House is reacting to imminent dangers and increased violence by working the other angle, that Iraq is so dangerous that we can’t just up and leave and risk catastrophe, as if we’re not there now. This is the Iraq conundrum that conservative warhawks have skillfully used time and again, moving from success to failure over and over and offering the EXACT same conclusion.

We know that the latter is not true, by the way, we know that Iraq will not become a Qaedistan whether we leave now or in 20 years. Not to mention the fact that things got steadily worse for four years, and having 100,000-plus troops there didn’t stop that.

With Petraeus’ report set for April, and clear signs that violence is rising, we’re seeing the Administration move into the McCain argument, that we can’t leave or there will be genocide. So seizing on these statements that appear to be hedges or flip-flops actually plays into Administration hands. Instead of playing a game of inches and using one statement to highlight the situation in Iraq TODAY, people who want to actually end the occupation have to talk about it in the context of the big picture, about how the Bush strategy can NEVER work. Otherwise we chase headlines and rise or fall on them.

What may be most effective heading into those hearings is pointing out this deception, and this game that Bush and his cronies continue to play.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, it’s important to place all of this in the context of keeping us in Iraq well into the future, whether for the purposes of keeping the contracting money flowing or maintaining a presence in the Middle East. Here’s William Arkin on the firing of Admiral William Fallon from CENTCOM:

The man most responsible for the departure of Fallon is Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, the savior of the war and the Bush administration with the surge, the counter-insurgency genius, the Washington-savvy Princeton grad, and a pretty boy called “King David” by many. His boss in the military is Fallon, commander of the Central Command, but from day one of his assignment to Iraq, Petraeus reported directly to the White House, thus circumventing the chain of command and virtually ignoring the views of his superior officer.

As my friend Fred Kaplan reports in Slate: “It is well-known that Fallon has long been at odds with Gen. David Petraeus…. I have heard from several sources that the two men dislike each other and that their disagreements have been tense, sometimes fierce.”

Yesterday, I was hearing from Pentagon officials, high-ranking military officers and close observers of the building that the two were at odds on virtually every element of Iraq policy, which of course put Fallon on a collision course with the White House. In other words, Iran was the excuse but Iraq was the reason: Fallon thought that the Iraq war was a dead end and a drain on resources, that the surge should brought to a quick and successful conclusion, and that the drawdowns should continue. But most important, Fallon argued at the highest level that Petraeus was just not going to get everything he wanted, according to individuals privy to the fights.

But then Petraeus had the White House and Fallon, despite his command and authority to set priorities and decide on what resources are needed, was frozen out.

A senior officer in theater sent me an e-mail: “Petraeus has accomplished a great deal, but he is very reluctant to get rid of force structure.” This officer writes that the political imperative to withdraw has become virtually overwhelming. “I think Gates, the Army, and Fallon are all pressing” Petraeus to give up more resources, he writes, but so far Petraeus is winning the battle.

My take is that Bush has voted with Petraeus and has decided to tough it out with 130,000-140,000 troops in Iraq through the end of the administration. Fallon lost the battle. The good news is that with those kinds of resources being committed to Iraq, and with the lessons of the war, the likelihood of Bush and Cheney starting an Iran war is virtually zero.

You have to look at every Petraeus statement through this lens.

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