Getting Iraq Wrong
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 19, 2007

The 1200-year-old Al-Askariya “Golden Mosque” in Samarra, struck for the second time in 16 months last Wednesday, is in many ways a fitting symbol of post-Saddam Iraq: the product of an ancient culture literally torn apart by inter-religious strife. There is little doubt that the bombing, which shattered the mosque’s two soaring 120-foot minarets, does great damage to the cause of securing the war-riven country. What is now in contention is whether the destruction of the holy site implies the corresponding failure of the ongoing troop surge and the broader effort to pacify Iraq.



That was certainly the early forecast of the post-attack political climate. Countless news reports predicted countrywide mayhem and a wave of inter-religious massacres. In fairness, such suspicions were not without precedent. The first attack on the Askariya mosque, in February of 2006, collapsed the mosque’s storied golden dome and triggered a bloody backlash that left over 170 people dead within three days of the bombing.



So far, at least, history has not repeated itself. Despite predictable provocation from renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, never one to pass up an opportunity to grandstand against the United States, Iraqis have largely remained calm. Concurrently, a government-imposed curfew has contained fallout violence to isolated attacks on Sunni mosques and few casualties -- nothing to celebrate, to be sure, but scarcely cause for “abandon-ship!” despair.



Try telling that to the Democratic leadership. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seized on last week’s attack to dispatch a letter to the president judging the surge strategy a failure. “As many had foreseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results,” the antiwar duo insisted. “The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation,” they concluded. As an expression of the party’s defeatist consensus that Iraq is a lost cause, the assessment was apt enough.



Beyond that, however, it had little to recommend it. Inconveniently for Reid and Pelosi, the Pentagon this week issued its quarterly report to Congress analyzing the security situation in Iraq and providing the first detailed overview of how the surge has fared to date. The report, titled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” (pdf) makes no sunny guarantees about success; on the contrary, much in the report is cause for concern. But neither does it justify the politically motivated gloom-and-doom in vogue among senior Democrats.



Begin with the claim that the increased troops strength has failed to stem violence. That’s partly true, and it is reflected in the report’s conclusion that the “aggregate level of violence in Iraq remained relatively unchanged during this reporting period.” But readers who noticed only this section of the report -- that is, most newspaper readers -- would have at best an incomplete image of the reality in Iraq.



Consider that the security crackdown in Baghdad, the main component of the surge, has succeeded in reducing the number of sectarian killings. True, that number has started to rise, but it is “still below levels seen last year.” As for the increased violence in other provinces, it is largely a coefficient of Shiite radicals who have fled the capital after declining to take their chances with American troops. In other words, and contrary to the Democratic spin, the surge is working -- at least for now.



Regrettably, many in the media are not waiting for anything so banal as the evidence before writing off prospects for success. Thus, the Los Angeles Times, pointing to mounting violence in provinces like Diyala and Nineveh concluded that the violence was likely to continue since “U.S. military plans do not include deploying additional troops in outlying provinces.”



This logic is more than a little suspect. While it is true that the U.S. has no immediate plans to deploy additional forces in those provinces, it does not follow that this is the only solution to quelling the violence. One of the ignored findings of the Pentagon report is the steady buildup of Iraq’s security forces, which now stand at 347,00 strong. What’s more, the report notes that nine Iraqi divisions, 31 brigades, and 95 battalions are “in the lead or operating independently in their areas.” To imply that the current military strategy will not bring stability to the embattled provinces is to go beyond the available evidence. It is also to miss the point: Devolving responsibilities to Iraqis has all along been the guiding purpose of the American mission in Iraq and once-violent provinces like Anbar, where the local tribes have risen up against Al-Qaeda infiltrators and where attacks have fallen by 34 percent since December of 2006, have already shown themselves equal to the challenge.



What of the claim that the surge has had no impact on national reconciliation? Again, the picture is more nuanced than Democrats would have Americans believe. Iraq fits no one’s definition of model coexistence, but the Pentagon’s report charts some hopeful trends. In March, for example, Iraqis’ confidence in their government’s ability to improve security -- essential to any lasting political cohesion -- jumped to 63 percent, a 12-month high. Meanwhile, just 36 percent of Iraqis -- Kurds are the main dissenters -- think that the county would be better off divided into three. Significant too is that that Iraqis seem to be more optimistic about the security environment at the local level than at the national level. The late Tip O’Neill, a longtime Democratic Speaker of the House, well understood the phenomenon, summed up in his adage that “All politics is local.” In the case of Iraq, his successors are all too eager to discard that wisdom to score political points against the Bush administration.



None of this is to obscure the real problems in Iraq. Violence is depressingly persistent; Iraqi security forces are inadequately trained and all-too-often unreliable (American commanders consider Iraqi security forces in charge of guarding the Golden Mosque as possible suspects in last week’s attack); Shiite police and militiamen continue to assault Sunni civilians and ethnic tensions endure; the government is mired in corruption and legislation to promote national reconciliation has stalled.



At the same time it‘s important to bear in mind that, as the Pentagon’s report notes, “It is too soon to assess results.” Yes, the surge may still fail. But until now, the only demonstrable failure has been that of political will in the Democratic Party.

Ellie