April 9, 2008
The Gen Petraeus - Amb Crocker Hearings Day 2
Before we get into today's testimony, did you know that today is Iraq Liberation Day?
On April 9, 2003, this image greeted television viewers worldwide:
Thank you to all American troops who have participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom, from the invasion to today!
As with yesterday, I listened to the testimony today on and off. Today Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker testified before the House Armed Services Committee.
Following are my impressions.
As with the Senators yesterday, the Representatives give longwinded introductions. Drew Cline says today's took thirteen minutes and 52 seconds between Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) the committee chairman, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, (R-CA) the ranking minority member. Ridiculous. I guess that's better than yesterday's 19 minutes, 57 seconds in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and 22 minutes, 47 seconds in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, but it still seems like a bit much.
In his opening speech Skelton felt necessary to claim that we started the war on the basis of "false information" (as if WMD was the entire basis of the war, see the actual authorization for details). The supposed purpose for all this is that they're here to find out what's going on in Iraq, but most seem to have their mind made up.
Rep Hunter actually used his intro to tell Petraeus and Crocker what he wanted to find out today. In other words, Hunter laid out his expectations for what information he was looking to obtain. I always knew he was a stand-up guy.
Skelton, like so many others, is myopic when it comes to the war. They see it in the narrowest of terms; a war just against al Qaeda and only in Afghanistan. Frederick Kagan did a good job today of pointing out that the Democrat claim that they want to fight the "real war" against al Qaeda in Afghanistan is a lot of hot air; if they cared so much about the country they could vote for the supplemental defense appropriation that would send much needed money to our troops already there. Development money, not so much more troops, is what that country really needs.
Crocker said that "the era of US funded major infrastructure improvements is over" Congress will want to hear that.
Crocker also said that support from other Arab states "has not been strong" Me: That's because they fear a democracy in Iraq. The left tell us that everyone in the region, including Iran, wants a stable Iraq. Bunk. They may not want violence that spills over into their countries or sends refugees streaming into their countries, but what they really want is a weak Iraq that they can dominate.
Like Petraeus, he stressed the Iranian Quds forces that are causing trouble in Iraq. Wretchard over at The Belmont Club has perhaps the most insightful explanation for all the talk about Iran at the hearings yesterday
If America loses in southern Iraq, Iran will have strangled a nascent rival political power center on its border. But if America wins, then the Ayatollahs will be facing what amounts to a domestic challenge.That's why I believed that the really big news in the Petraeus/Crocker testimony was their repeated emphasis on Iran. It's no accident. They want to focus the policy attention on Iran. Because the Iran/Southern Iraq phase will be the most important phase in the Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Iraq was always a two-front war, even from the days of the First Fallujah. In those days the US made a strategic decision to leave the south alone and deal with the Sunni insurgency first. Now that has been dealt with and the Syria/AQI front been substantially won. That's what the Petraeus charts are saying. On the clock of World War 2 History the defeat of the Sunni insurgency would correspond to the crossing of the Rhine. VE isn't there yet, but the enemy is in flight. Maybe there's still a Battle of the Bulge ahead for the Sunni insurgency/AQI, but they are essentially beaten, absent a blunder.
In response to a question by Hunter, Petraeus gave the Iraqi Armed Forces a "B minus or B". Some units are very good but some are "new". Says that the Iraqi special ops are very good. Also, that Iraqi deployment to Basra went very well.
Rep John Spratt (D - SC) gave a speech before asking questions. These politicians just can't stop from pontificating. Spratt even had his own cost charts. This is the new Democrat argument against the war, the one that the surge couldn't stop the violence, and that the Iraqis weren't making political progress, having been proven wrong.
Me: So now Freedom has a cost. Hope the Dems remember this. Spratt also complained that Iraq is taking resources from Afghanistan.
Had Spratt read Frederick Kagan on NRO yesterday, he would have learned that compared to past wars, this one's pretty cheap. Larry Kudlow makes similar points. As a percentage of GDP, this war barely registers. It's all that social welfare spending that's killing us.
With a 5 minute rule in the House, you'd think that the Democrats would would want to spend most of the time learning from the General and Ambassador. But that would assume that their purpose was to learn. Most, but not all, Democrats use their time to give speeches, with the question being purfunctory. Most Republicans get right into their questions.
Rep Jim Saxton (R-NJ) asked a real question instead of speechifying
But Rep Solomon Ortiz (D - TX) only speechified more than asked questions. He said that the security gains of the surge were "arguable". He stressed that the military had been stretched by the surge. Me: then authorize more money to expand the size of the force.
Petraeus to Ortiz: The troops "get it" with regard to counterinsurgency doctrine. We have much better equip than when I was a division commander. He also praised the MRAP family of vehicles and thanked Congress for voting the money for them.
Gen Petraeus and Amb Crocker are first-class gentlemen and scholars. They are absolutely unshakable and unperturbable.
Rep John McHugh (R - NY) brought up the British withdrawal from Basra, and how the lessons there may be learned about the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal from all of Iraq. Petraeus somewhat agreed, and also pointed out that this is why he opposes a timetable and wants withdrawal to be conditions based.
The most foolish question I heard was asked by Rep Vic Snyder (D - AR), who said that a commander (I didn't get the name) told him that we need 2,000 more troops in Afghanistan. He asked Petraeus how Congress should respond to that request. Petraeus, looking only barely incredulous at this bizarre question, responded "you're asking the commander in Iraq?" And then said words to the effect that "I only command the troops in Iraq, sir?"
It was clear that Snyder had no idea that the commander of MNF-Iraq doesn't follow the situation in Afghanistan in detail, and can't just order some of his troops to move to there. Sheesh!
Petraeus continued, half asking "I think you're already funding an increase for the Army/Marines?" in what almost looked like an attempt to help Snyder out of his predicament. However, Snyder ignored Petraeus and went on, saying that Afghanistan is not getting the troops they need because of Iraq. Me: oh brother. Snyder showed the "Anaconda Plan" chart (see yesterday's post), and complained that it didn't show social services. Crocker went into social services, and Petraeus "put in a soldier's plug for the PRTs"
Rep Buck McKeon (R - CA) had a fantastic quote from Osama bin Laden and how bin Laden sees the struggle in Iraq as central. I can't find the quote on the Internet, but if you've got the time you can go to McKeon's House webpage and watch the testimony.
McKeon asked Petraeus about troop morale. Petreus said that morale had been going down until sometime in 2007 (I didn't catch the exact date) when it started going up. Today morale is good overall, and the reason is because the troops can see tangible results and that believe that we are making progress. He also pointed out that reenlistment rates among troops in-theater was way up.
Rep Loretta Sanchez (D - CA) gave what must have been the longest speech disguised as a question that I heard all day. She talked about a report by Gen James Jones (USMC Ret) unofficially called the Jones Commission Report, which essentially criticized the new Iraqi Police. She seemed to go on forever. Good question, but she just went on for too long.
Petraeus said he agreed with the report and had in fact acted on it's recommendations. At the end of her question he even joked with her (again he is unflappable). He also said that the IP did need to be cleaned out but has now made much progress. The Italian Caribinieri have been helping out tremendously in training them.
The next rep, who's name I didn't get, asked about the benchmarks, and that the GAO said we'd only met 3 of 18(?) Crocker disagreed with that number, but annoyingly would not give a hard and fast number of how many had been met. But he did say that it's more complicated than just a checkoff. He said that you can check something off but are not getting reconciliation, and vice versa. But Crocker promised to get info on the benchmarks in writing to the committee next week (see this article for a comparison, where Frederick Kagan says that "Government of Iraq has now met 12 out of the original 18 benchmarks set for it, including four
out of the six key legislative benchmarks"). The bottom line is that the issue of reconciliation in Iraq is complicated and it's not a simple check-off of something on a sheet of paper.
Rep Ellen Tauscher (R - CA) brought up lots of polls and how at least her constituents are all against continuing the war etc. Me: So...we change direction every time the polls change? Petraeus tried to answer her question, and she basically cut him off. Petraeus had to then give her a lesson on how the military takes orders from the civilian authorities.
All in all the Democrats gave speeches and the Republicans asked questions. Maybe the Dems should have read Barham Salih's article in today's Washington Post, in which he sees real military and political gains in Iraq, if they don't believe the testimony they heard today.
Gen Petraeus and Amb Crocker? They were magnificent and could not be shaken. I feel good with them in charge over there.
Update
Don't miss the background information, video, slides, and links to editorials and analysis pieces over at Small Wars Journal.
Posted by Tom at 9:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 8, 2008
The Gen Petraeus - Amb Crocker Hearings Day 1
I managed to catch part of the hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee today in which Gen David Petraeus and Amb Ryan Crocker testified. Below the fold are my notes, but first, here are most of the slides that Gen Petraeus used in his testimony (thanks to Michelle Malkin You can also download all them from the Senate website )
For context and explanation see the transcript of Gen Petraeus' opening statement at RealClearPolitics
(also, don't miss the excellent commentary on them at The Belmont Club)
What strikes me is that many of the Senators already seems to have minds made up. Some ask good questions and others just give speeches. The opening statements of the Senators I heard (Levin & McCain) indicate to me that they have their minds made up.
Sen. Kennedy, in particular, used most of his Q & A time to simply give a lecture. Kennedy complained about our "open ended commitment", yet this is the same guy who demands more and more money for an endless "war on poverty" which seems without end or success. Every year we hear the same thing from the libs; the poor are getting poorer and we need to spend more money on anti-poverty programs. Hello?
Did you also notice that Kennedy had the shortest "thank you for your service" of any of the senators? Even the other critical senators seemed genuine in their thanks but for him it was totally pro forma (video here).
Also, notice how the critics are almost totally dismissive of the sacrifices made by loyal patriotic Iraqis? They just totally ignore all this. When this was pointed out to Kennedy, he just brushed it aside with a "well there have been 4,000 Americans killed"
To a large extent that the whole thing is sort of a show, with everything said decided ahead of time. Each side is speaking really to the public.
Senators Leiberman (I-CT) and Inhofe (R-OK) asked good questions, as did Sen Reed (D-RI)
Some of the critics do bring up good points. The issue, it seems to me, is whether they state problems in order to find a way to solve them or are just looking for an excuse to withdraw.
We've all heard about how the Army is stretched too thin, and that troops are not getting enough rest time. This complaint is usually made as a veiled excuse to bring the troops home. Yet when the schools say that they are stretched we spend more money on education, and do not cut back on classes. When the military says it is stretched we cut back on commitments. It seems to me that the obvious solution to is to increase the size of the force.
Sen Collins (R-RI, or is that RINO-RI?) did the same thing. She said that they in congress are always told that progress is being made by Iraqi armed forces, yet problems continue. Again does this apply to other foreign aid? She says that as long as we take the lead in combat operations, the Iraqis will never step up to the plate. Well, as long as we provide handouts to poor countries around the world, why should they step up to the plate? Does the same logic not apply? Yet if the U.S. does not pony up for some new program designed to help Africa or wherever we are attacked as "miserly", and how dare we ask whether the money is well spent.
Sen Bill Nelson (D-FL) brought up the "retired general" complaint, saying that he'd heard retired Generals McCaffrey and Odom say that things weren't going swimmingly in Iraq. He did at least admit that the Iraqi parliament had been passed several of the laws required in the "benchmarks", but complained that they had not been implemented?. Again, the goalposts keep moving.
Sen. Warner (R-VA) asked whether the Iraq war made us safer. Gen Petraeus said "I do believe it is worth it", and Amb Crocker said that "Al Qaeda is our mortal and strategic enemy. To the extent that its capabilities have been diminished in Iraq, it makes our country safer." Not the best answers they could have given.
Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the other hand did well and pointed out the the surge changed the trend lines, which had been going in all the wrong directions. He admitted that the challenges were real, but sees the glass as half full and getting fuller rather than as half empty. Rather than everything falling apart he sees the surge has having reversed the negative trend lines. For all the grief conservatives have given Sen Graham he shone during the hearings. For what it's worth, he's a (Lt Col ? in the Army or Air Force reserve ? ) Graham's main thing was to point out that the trend lines are all in our favor. Also asked if Iraq as a failed state would negatively affect US national security and Petraeus said "yes"
Sen Ben Nelson (D-NE) wants the Iraqis to pay us back at least some of the money we've given Iraq. I've heard this also from the right. Well ok, I understand the complaint, but I see it as very shortsighted and spiteful. btw, are we asking countries who receive food or other assistance to pay us back? Do we even put realistic conditions on them for the aid? Or track it to make sure it isn't wasted, and if it is cut off future aid? And let's ask those on poverty assistance programs to pay us back also once they "step up to the plate" and get self-sustaining jobs.
At 1:55 the hearings adjourned. Code Pink members sang and held signs in the back of the hearing room. Boring....
All in all the Dems seemed less aggressive. There was no "willing suspension of disbelief" moments and no Movon.org "General Betrayus" ads. They seemed to have learned their lesson from a PR perspective, at least.
All in all, I'd say that the Democrats were shooting blanks. They may have satisfied their anti-war base but that's about it. Petraeus and Crocker told it straight; we're winning, success so far is fragile but if we cut-and-run all would probably be lost, and that a failed Iraq harms the U.S. We should listen to them.
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March 17, 2008
Iraqi Perspectives Project - Saddam and Terrorism - The Bush Administration
Yesterday I introduced the latest report from the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP); Saddam and Terrorism. I'll have more about it in later posts, but for now I wanted to discuss something else; the state of the Bush Administration and why they let this report get portrayed in a negative light.
And unless you only read right-wing blogs, it has been portrayed negatively. Many or most press reports have fixated on a single sentence in the Executive Summary, whereby the authors said that "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." Smugly satisfied that this alone "proved" that "Bush lied", they blithely ignored the rest of the report. As I illustrated yesterday, that single sentence proved nothing of the sort, and even a casual perusal of the rest of the report showed many links between Saddam's regime and all sorts of terrorist regimes, including indirect ones with al Qaeda. Indeed, unless you're a complete Bush-hater, the report quite condemned Saddam Hussein's regime.
There were also a few articles in the conservative press bemoaning the fact that the Bush Administration was nowhere to be found. Indeed, they have been almost completely AWOL in this entire affair, apparently happy to have it released and let events take their course. The administration has been totally silent on the IPP report.
This whole affair got me to thinking; in all the writing I've done about Iraq and the War on Jihadism ("War on Terror", or whatever we're going to call it), the administration has hardly figured at all. For military information I go directly to the source, relying on Pentagon press briefings and journalists in-country. For information on Jihadism and radical Islam, I rely on scholars and writers.
Indeed, most of my discussion of the administration over the past two years has been to criticize it. This post won't be much different.
To be fair, I haven't been universally critical of the administration. They did eventually recognize that the Rumsfeld/Abizaid/Casey strategy in Iraq was failing, and approved the "surge" plan, which was carried out by the winning team of Gates/Petraeus/Odierno.
But in 2006 and 2007 I did take the administration to task for many things; the Harriet Myers fiasco, the prolifigate spending, the belated recognition that our strategy in Iraq wasn't working, the inability to articulate or even try to make the case for Iraq or the wider war, their negligence in using our vast amounts of "soft power" in addition to military force, the fixation on the ridiculous "peace process" in the Middle East, and the refusal to say forthrightly that our enemy is more than just a gang of terrorists but an entire movement of Jihadists.
Obviously much of the media will be focused on the presidential campaign. Nevertheless, the administration should at least be trying to make itself relevant. The fact that it has figured so little in my writing speaks volumes about how they haven't.
Bill Kristol, writing on The Weekly Standard , tells us how and why they have been so absent when this most recent IPP report was released
If you talk to people in the Bush administration, they know the truth about the report. They know that it makes the case convincingly for Saddam's terror connections. But they'll tell you (off the record) it's too hard to try to set the record straight. Any reengagement on the case for war is a loser, they'll say. Furthermore, once the first wave of coverage is bad, you can never catch up: You give the misleading stories more life and your opponents further chances to beat you up in the media. And as for trying to prevent misleading summaries and press leaks in the first place--that's hopeless. Someone will tell the media you're behaving like Scooter Libby, and God knows what might happen next.
Ok, I understand the bit about not wanting to refight the reasons we went to Iraq. We are where we are and unless anyone can produce a time machine the only thing relevant at the moment is what we are going to do next. Most of those who insist on talking about why we went in are only looking to force a precipitous exit anyway. Let's save the histories for the next decade.
But when a major report does come out you have to take the bull by the horns and get out in front of the story. A basic rule of politics is that either you define the situation or your opponents will define it for you, and once they have done so it's almost impossible to get back in control of events.
David Frum, writing on his blog at National Review, summed it up
This is a psychologically broken administration: exhausted, passive, prematurely aged, self-defeated.It is lying on the mat moaning as its opponents kick it, unwilling/unable to block a blow or raise a hand in self-defense.
The indifference to quality of personnel - always a problem - has now become the defining characteristic of the administration. The president continues to imagine he is pursuing one set of policies. But because he allows retiring principals to be succeeded by their deputies, and then those deputies to be followed by their deputies, he has passively acquiesced in allowing his administration to be staffed by people who regard his policies as at best impossible, at worst actively wrong. And then he is surprised when his administration does the opposite of what he wished! Of course it does! If you won't steer the car, it won't go where you want!
Frum believes that the moment when things started to go wrong came at the beginning, with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as National Security Adviser. The reason, he says, was that bush "needed a strong figure at NSC to broker those clashes. Instead, he chose the weakest NSC adviser in that institution's history." The result was "a total breakdown of policy coordination."
I don't know enough about the inner workings of the administration to say whether that analysis is accurate or not. My take is more that the administration simply became exhausted by the Iraq War. The failure to advance Social Security reform in 2005 and the twin disasters of the Katrina hurricane and the appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court derailed his domestic policy.
Either way, the failure to make the case for Iraq and Saddam's link to terror is inexcusable.
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September 9, 2007
Democrats Behaving Disgracefully III
Via Redstate we have Senator Harry Reid joining Senators Durban and Schumer in an unparalleled showing of disgraceful behavior. ABC News reports this
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in his party's weekly radio address today that he expects the Petraeus report to be nothing more than the Bush administration's selective take on the surge."Before the report arrives in Congress, it will pass through the White House spin machine, where facts are often ignored or twisted, and intelligence is cherry-picked," said Reid.
On Friday, Reid went so far as to question not only the true source of the report but also the four-star general's honesty.
"He has made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual," Reid said. "I have every belief that this good man will give us what he feels is the right thing to do in his report, but it's not his report anymore. It's Bush's report."
This is doubletalk. If Gen Petraeus is a "good man" he will not deliver a report as his own that he knows is written by the White House and contains false or misleading information. But Harry Reid is saying that he will deliver such a report, one written by the White House and which contains false or misleading information.
Further, Reid called Petraeus a liar when he said that "he has made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual." He can't be much of a "good man" if he has made false statements, can he?
Reid can't have it both ways. Either the general is a liar and a purveyor of false information, or he is a "good man", but it can't be both.
What Reid is doing is obvious; he is at once trying to discredit the report while not appearing to be "anti-military". It won't work.
Here's more of the same doubletalk from Reid, this time from the New York Times (also via Redstate)
“I have every belief that this good man, General Petraeus, will give us what he feels is the right thing to do in this report, that is now not his report,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “It’s President Bush’s report. President Bush took final ownership of this when he landed in Anbar Province just a few days ago.”
This would be the same Senator Harry Reid who on January 26, 2007, voted along with 81 other Senators (the other 19 simply didn't vote) to confirm then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus to 4 star rank, and commander of MNF-Iraq.
If we were to give Reid every benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he thought Petraeus was an honorable man in January but has since changed his mind, then he is a dolt.
More likely though Reid was playing politics in January and he is playing politics now. He voted to confirm Petraeus because he thought it the politically expedient thing to do. He now disparages the same man because the nutroots have told him that he has to end the war or else. In other words, the Democrats are so invested in an American defeat that they have to make it happen whether it is or not.
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Democrats Behaving Disgracefully II
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September 8, 2007
Democrats Behaving Disgracefully II
Continuing the Democrats disgraceful attempt tos slander General Petraeus before he makes his report next week to Congress, Senator Chuck Schumer says that U.S. forces had nothing to do with the dramatic turn-around in Anbar. On the floor of the Senate last Wednesday he said that
And let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the Surge, not because of the Surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al Qaeda said to these tribes: We have to fight Al Qaeda ourselves. — Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Congressional Record, 9/5/07, p. S 11090
Schumer was one of 81 Senators who voted to confirm Petraeus last January, but the political winds were blowing another direction back then.
As former Marine W Thomas Smith points out over at NRO (link above)
The violence has gone down in Anbar because of the approach to operating joint U.S.-Iraqi military stations in cleared areas of Anbar, especially where it all began up on the Syrian border following Steel Curtain in 2005. And the surge of forces throughout central Iraq and in the west has most certainly played a role in the success of the Anbar turnaround, though the turnaround did indeed begin before the surge.Additionally, many of the Sunni tribal leaders were in league with Al Qaeda, but over time began switching sides because (a) they were sick of the civilian-targeting and threat tactics of Al Qaeda, and (b) they knew that the only armed elements in the region who were able to protect them and their families were U.S. forces.
Down the Memory Hole
But Schumer's offense goes farther than just not being honest about what's happening in Anbar. He has tried to have his comments erased from history.
Sweetness and Light caught him. Here again, is what he actually said
And let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the Surge, not because of the Surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al Qaeda said to these tribes: We have to fight Al Qaeda ourselves.
And here is how Schumer has it on his website
And let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The lack of protection for these tribes from al Qaeda made it clear to these tribes, “We have to fight al Qaeda ourselves.” It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords had to create a temporary peace here on their own. And that is because there was no one else there protecting them.
Not quite the same, is it?
Here's the video to prove it
You're a clear liar is what you are, Schumer. You changed what you said on your website because on the floor of the Senate you said what you really think and later realized that it didn't look good politically. Everyone cleans up speeches to get rid of the occasional "um" and "ah" or when you transpose words, but this is more than that.
The Washington Times had this to say about Senator Schumer and his fellow Democrats yesterday
The most disgraceful player so far is Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who in speech ridiculed as "desperate" the successful strategy implemented by Gen. Petraeus, which has dramatically reduced violence in Anbar province and saved both American and Iraqi lives. The alliance between the U.S. military and Sunni tribesmen has encouraged the Sunnis to stand against al Qaeda. "Are we placing our faith in the future of Iraq in the hands of some warlords?" asked Mr. Schumer with a sour verbal sneer. "Some tribal leaders who at the moment dislike al Qaeda more than they dislike us? Is this the vaunted clarion cry for democracy in the Middle East that the President announced when he started the build-up in Iraq?... This is a policy of desperation."Only a poisonous partisan — or someone ignorant of history and geopolitical reality — could say something like that. Using the Schumer standard, FDR and Churchill were wrong to form an alliance with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin because he was an evil man who didn't share our regard for "democracy." The World War II leaders of the West rightly judged that Hitler and the Axis powers posed a greater threat to U.S. interests than Stalin at the time — hence the decision to ally the United States and Britain with the Soviet Communists. No one now pretends that Sunni tribesmen have very much in common with Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. But only fools would take Mr. Schumer's advice to give the back of the hand to the Arab Muslims who are willing to join the fight against our mortal enemy.
Churchill and Roosevelt knew exactly what they were doing when they allied with Stalin. They may not have known the full extent of Stalin's mass murders, but they knew that he was an evil dictator. But as the Times said, they also knew that at the time Hitler was the greater danger. Churchill and Roosevelt where right then, and we are right now. Schumer is just a bitter partisan desperate for political advantage. General Petraeus' report is going to be largely positive and they have bet the farm on an American defeat.
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Posted by Tom at 9:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 6, 2007
Democrats Behaving Disgracefully
The Democrats are already dismissing General Petraeus' report, and he hasn't even given it yet. From today's Washington Times
Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can't be trusted."The Bush report?" Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said when asked about the upcoming report from Gen. Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq.
...The top Democrats — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California — also referred to the general's briefing as the "Bush report."
These Democrats are nauseating. They know Petraeus will have good things to say, and they can't have any of that. Captain Ed has it right, they're trying character assassination on him. What's particularly galling is that most of them, including the Senator Durbin quoted above, voted to confirm him 81 - 0 last January. A few abstained, and one wonders if they did so in order to attack him later.
The charge that President Bush is writing the report, or that it will be "tainted" is utter B.S., and here's why:
From Blackfive
There has been some talk in the press and on the blogs that suggests the White House intends to tamper with -- or simply write -- General Petraeus' assessment to Congress. In a discussion today with a DOD Legislative Affairs expert, we got the truth.Congress itself mandated by law who will assemble each of the several reports due in September. It also, separately, mandated that General Petraeus be available to testify to them at this time.
Public Law 110-28 specifes that "the President, having consulted with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Commander, Multi-National Forces-Iraq, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, and the Commander of U.S. Central Command, will prepare the report and submit the report to Congress."
The law separately requires that: "[T]he United States Ambassador to Iraq and the Commander, Multi-National Forces Iraq will be made available to testify in open and closed sessions before the relevant committees of the Congress."
So, in answer to the question: there is a report, and there is a separate assessment. The law requires the President to prepare the report, and General Petraeus to consult with him on that. The law also requires the General to testify separately before Congress.
There are no political games here: the US military is simply complying with the law as passed by Congress.
It is Congress who passes laws. The same Congress that is now complaining that the president will prepare the report is the same Congress that passed a law saying that "the president...will prepare the report."
A commenter on Captain's Quarters(link above) said it best
The fact is the "face" on this report is Gen. Petraeus. He played the major role in preparing it and he will be delivering it to congress. It represents to a large degree the view of the military on the ground in Iraq. In contrast we have a GAO report which represents the analysis of bureaucrats in the capitol far from Iraq. Now who do Americans trust more: the military? or Congress? ... This is an imbecilic move by the Dems.
Exactly.
In a related note, Senator McCain stood tall during last night's GOP debate. Unfortuantely it was at Governor Romney's expense, but that's how these things are.
ROMNEY: I don't have a time frame that I've announced. What I've indicated is very consistent with what the president is speaking about and what we're hearing from Iraq right now, and that is that the surge is apparently working.
...
MCCAIN: Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir.
ROMNEY: That's just what I said.
MCCAIN: It is working. No, not "apparently"; it's working. It's working because we've got a great general. We've got a good strategy. Anbar province, things have improved.The Maliki government is not doing the things we want it to do, the police are not functioning the way we want them to do, but we are succeeding.
And the great debate is not whether it's apparently working or not, the great debate is going to take place on the floor of the United States Senate the middle of this month. And it's going to be whether we set a date for withdrawal, which will be a date for
surrender, or whether we will let this surge continue and succeed.
And I can assure you, it's more than apparent, it is working and we have to rally the American people. People in New Hampshire are saddened and frustrated and angry over our failures in Iraq. I share their anger, their frustration and their failure, and I want them home too. But I want them home for the right reasons. I want our troops home with honor. Otherwise, we will face catastrophe and genocide in the region.
When McCain is good, he's the best. And he's right, it is going to be one knock-down drag out debate.
Posted by Tom at 9:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 25, 2007
Why Wait for Petraeus?
General Petraeus is due to make his report to Congress on September 11. It would appear, however, that many in Congress have already made up their minds.
Senator Warner seems to have already made his decision. He's now announced that the President should announce a withdrawal right now. At a press conference in Washington yesterday
Virginia Senator John Warner said President George W. Bush should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq on Sept. 15 to show the Iraqi government that the U.S. commitment there isn't open-ended.Bush should announce that ``we will start an orderly, carefully planned, thought-out redeployment,'' said Warner, 80, a Republican and former Navy secretary who three times chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Thanks, Senator. Democrats didn't waste anytime using this against the President. From the AP
Democrats say the grim (NIE) report and Warner's conclusion bolster their position that Bush should change course and start bringing troops home this fall. Party leaders this year tried to pass legislation ordering troops home this fall, but repeatedly fell short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate to pass.
In addition, yesterday radio talk-show hostLaura Ingraham played several clips of various media talking heads crowing over Senator Warner's statement. They seem almost joyous that this could lead to the defections of more Republicans
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division-Center and 3rd Infantry Division, was asked directly about Warner's comments at a press briefing on Friday, and he swatted down the notion that in the short run we can safely withdraw troops.
Q: General, Jim Miklaszewski with NBC. After his visit to Iraq last weekend, Senator John Warner said yesterday that he's recommending to the president that the U.S. begin to withdraw its forces from Iraq as early as December. From somebody who's conducting combat operations on the ground there, what's your reaction to that? How do you think that would affect your ability to conduct those operations?GEN. LYNCH: Yeah, thanks for that question, Jim. You know, what I find now -- as you all know, I was in Iraq, went away for 10 months, came back again -- and really the difference that's happening right now is twofold. One is, we're not commuting to work. In my battlespace there are 29 patrol bases that we have occupied, and we're out there with the local citizens. Being out with the local citizens allows us to let them know they're going to be secure, and as a result of that, they come to us with all sorts of actionable intelligence. And that's what happens.
And the other piece is the ability of the surge forces. You know, we now have units; we can take the fight to the enemy. If we were to lose that capability, I believe the enemy would just come back. What I've found studying the enemy is, he’s got amazing ability to fill the void. And it takes him about 48 hours. If it's an area that's no longer secure, he's going to fill that void in about 48 hours.
And any of the locals who are helping the coalition secure -- they're now subject to atrocious acts of violence, and we can't let that happen.
This is going to take some time. You know, we've always said the level of coalition forces is a function of three things. It's the level of the insurgency, it's the capability of Iraqi security forces, and it's the capacity of the Iraqi government at the national, provincial and local levels.
And in my battlespace right now, if soldiers were to leave, coalition soldiers were to leave, having fought hard for that terrain, having denied the enemy their sanctuaries, what happens is, the enemy would come back. He'd start building the bombs again, he'd start attacking the locals again, and he'd start exporting that violence into Baghdad, and we would take a giant step backwards.
So in my battlespace, in Multinational Division-Center battlespace, I need the forces I have until I can transition to sustained security presence by the Iraqi security forces. And that's going to take some time.
Earlier Lynch made clear exactly why it is important that Iraqis know that we are not going to pull out anytime soon but are going to stick it out.
We get to an area, the locals there, the first question they ask is, "Are you staying?" And once they're convinced we're staying, the question then becomes, "How can we help?" What we see as a result of that commitment is Iraqi citizens are coming forward and they're indeed saying, "What can we do to help?"
Here's the video, which I encourage you to watch in it's entirety, because he talks about a lot more than I can cover in this post.
Throughout this war various people have said that the President wasn't listening to his generals, that he was letting Secretary Rumsfeld run the war all by himself. The other complaint was that we didn't have enough troops in theater.
With the firing of Rumsfeld and the adoption of the "surge" plan, the President has alleviated both concerns.
But I worry that some in congress have already made up their minds. As a result they want to get out ahead of the general and push their agenda before he shows up. I think this is what Warner was trying to do.
If he had simply recommended that we threaten Maliki et al with withdrawal if his government doesn't get its act together, that would be one thing. Such a recommendation would be premature, I think, but I wouldn't object quite so much. He appears to have gone much further, however, actually saying that we ought to actually start the withdrawal.
Earlier this month I wrote that based on comments by Senators Durbin and Casey, the Democrat line after Petraeus gives his report will be that although military progress has been made, political progress is lacking, so we need to withdraw the troops. If that's going to be the Democrat line, the one for Republicans who follow Warner may be that we need to withdraw to show the central Iraqi government that they need to get their act together or else.
Ralph Peters says that Senator Warner has got "green-zone view"
He's got target-lock on the Baghdad government's failings, and, a titan of government himself, he can't get beyond the perfidy, greed and sectarian viciousness of Iraq's politicians.But the future of Iraq's government is, frankly, less than half of the equation at this point. Whatever may have been the situation is 2003, today Iraq is the main front in the war against Islamist terror and fanaticism. Our enemies have made it so.
Of the two simultaneous missions under way - maturing a responsible government and advancing our own strategic interests - the latter is far more important. In fact, it's vital. And on that track, we're making stunning progress.
Here is some additional insight on the issue of political progress from the editors of National Review
The new National Intelligence Estimate reports “measurable but uneven improvements in Iraq’s security situation,” and says a shift from counterinsurgency operations to efforts simply to train Iraqis “would erode security gains achieved so far.” On the other hand, the estimate is grim on the prospects of the Maliki government that, it predicts, “will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has become a favored target of Democrats this week as they shift the focus from military progress to the failure to meet the political benchmarks set out along with the surge in January. Trying to placate her Democratic critics, Clinton said on Wednesday, “The surge was designed to give the Iraqi government time to take steps to ensure a political solution. It has failed.”This is too simplistic. The surge has failed to enable legislative progress on the part of the central government (i.e., the benchmarks), but important political progress has been taking place in Iraq. The turn of the Sunni tribes away from al Qaeda and toward us is a crucial political development. If anyone had thought this was possible at the beginning of the year (it wasn’t even mentioned in the January 2007 NIE), it might have been included as a benchmark and considered the most important one. Are we really supposed to discount this political progress because it happened in a manner and on a timetable that no one would have predicted?
...The Democrats’ counsel of despair would only make sense if we had sent another 30,000 troops to Iraq to pursue a new strategy and nothing had come of it. Instead, we have seen results and the NIE forecasts more (“modest”) progress on the military front if we maintain our counter-insurgency operations.
It has become a favorite line of the left that "there can be no military solution". This is not correct. It would be accurate to say that "there can be no purely military solution", but a "pure" military solution has never been our strategy and isn't now. Further, it is just as accurate to say that "there can be no purely political solution".
The question is the proper mix of the two. As I've said many times, I think now that we got it wrong our first several years; we put political progress ahead of military operations. The lesson, I believe, is that political progress can only come after extremist groups have been smashed by smart counter-insurgency tactics, which involves what the military calls kinetic operations. Sitting back, training Iraqis, and letting them go out alone doesn't work, at least not yet.
General Petraeus will give us all the facts when he makes his presentation to congress starting Sept 11. Members of Congress should at least wait until then before making their recommenations. In the meantime, they ought to listen to generals like Rick Lynch.
Posted by Tom at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2007
The Issue of Political Progress in Iraq
Two things are obvious about Iraq.
One, the "surge" (more properly Operation Phantom Thunder and now Phantom Strike) is making good progress, perhaps even better than expected. General Petraeus will likely give a very positive report on military operations in September.
Second, at the national level at least the Iraqis are not making the progress some in the United States they ought to make. Those who are determined to get US troops out of Iraq ASAP regardless of consequences will use this to make their case. Democrat Senators Durban and Casey said as much last week.
As with all such matters, the issue is terribly complicated and there are no easy answers. I'm going to make a case that we ought to stick it out in Iraq but I can see the other side. Some time ago Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said last November of the Iraqis; "We have given them a republic and they do not seem able to keep it." Krauthammer is right about a lot, but I hope he's wrong here.
I'm going to cut to the chase; I think the editors of National Review had it right when they said that
Ultimately, reconciliation between the Sunnis and the Shiites is crucial. But it wasn’t going to happen in the next two months, whether the Iraqi parliament stayed in session or not. General Petraeus’s September report has come to be seen as a final test for Iraq, which makes sense only for Democrats hell-bent on leaving no matter what, and for nervous Republicans seeking a soft exit. We are beginning to see the fruits of a sound counterinsurgency strategy and, in this context, a debate focused on how to get out rather than how to consolidate our gains is shameful, however easy the sound bites are.
Cliff May points out that we are at least partially to blame for the lack of progress at the national level in Iraq
We are at least partly responsible for the Iraqi government's dysfunction. Watching the debates taking place in Washington — hardly the most inspiring example of democracy in action — Iraqis don't know whether we are going to stay to finish the job or abandon them to al-Qaeda terrorists and Iranian-backed death squads.And as long as Iraqis think we are heading for the exit, what possible incentive do they have to make painful political compromises?
I think he's on to something and l I'll just quote myself on what I said the other day about why I think so
My thought is that we've had Iraq backward all along. We've put political progress ahead of military progress, and we should have done it the other way 'round. We hurried to set up one provisional government after another, draft a constitution, hold elections, etc. Our hope was that by doing these things we could take the "legitimacy" out of the insurgency.It didn't work.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but we should have done this "surge" back in 2004 or at least 2005, and only when we'd squashed the terrorists worried about the political side.
The reason we got it wrong, I think, is that we have a tendancy to "mirror image" our thinking. We assume that hey, we can all get along without shooting each other, why can't they? We forget that the reality is that there are a lot of extremists over there who will shoot if they can't get their way politically. And before going in we completely underestimated extremism in Iraq. These people figure they can get what they want through violence, so they don't put much stock in what we consider normal political negotiations. Rather, they'll hold out for a better deal through violence.
Extremists will only negotiate in good faith when all violent options have closed; i.e., when the US military has crushed the insurgency.
All this is also why peace between Israel and Hamas or Fatah is a pipe dream. Or Israel and Lebanon. Until these terrorist organizations are destroyed or physically isolated there will never be peace.
David at The Thunder Run made another point to me in an email (which I won't print since it's private) that Iraqis are in fact making progress on the local level, and that this is in reality how most things get done in the US as well. He sees the war being won on the local level, both against al Qaeda and in the US military (primary leutenant colonels) working with local Iraqi leaders. As always he makes a good point and I tend to agree.
The bottom line is that the NRO editors have it right; Petraeus' Sept report is not a "final" report but an interim one, yes the Iraqis do eventually have to come together, but we ought to be talking about how to consolidate and expand on our victories, not how to cut-and-run.
Only time will tell if I'm right or not, but in the meantime Arnaud de Borchgrave throws some cold water on anyone who still looks at the situation in Iraq through rose-colored glasses
Mr. al-Maliki has little contact with his Cabinet ministers. Half are now off the job. The six Sunni ministers who resigned last week — and five independents who walked out this week — concluded the prime minister is not serious about reconciliation and national unity. They say he sees Iran, where he spent a few years in exile during the Saddam Hussein regime, as "more relevant to Iraq's future than the United States." Iran is here to stay as our neighbor, says Mr. al-Maliki's entourage. And Mr. al-Maliki remains close to Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery young anti-U.S. cleric who heads the 15,000-strong Mahdi Army militia and also has close ties to Tehran.With electricity down to an hour or two a day in Baghdad last week when temperatures hit a scorching 58 Celsius (134 Fahrenheit), and much of the city without running water, Mr. al-Maliki and his cronies, with the benefit of generators and air-conditioning, seem far removed from the urgent and monumental task of rebuilding the country. They gave their visitors the impression of being overwhelmed by the challenge. They don't want the U.S. military to abandon them, but at the same time wish them gone, a syndrome that borders on paralysis. Meanwhile, parliament gave itself a month off and many members went to European destinations to cool off.
The rest of the article isn't any better. He notes that "Iranian diplomacy has been diligent in laying the groundwork for an Iraqi satellite", and one of my fears is that we win the war only to end up with an Iraq that is no friend to the U.S.
If you'd like more bad news, there was this story in the Washington Post last Tuesday about how the British have been essentially defeated in Basra. The city is now a lawless place, with the Brits reduced to barracading themselves behind a makeshift fortress outside the city.
On the flip side of that story, though, is that the reason the Brits have lost is that they drew down their forces too soon.
Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq -- the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion -- and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office.
Hello Democrats and wobbly Republicans; we'll get the lawlessness of Basra if we draw down too fast.
The indefatiguable Michael Yon, who has spent a year and a half on the ground in Iraq as an independent journalist, believes that the charge that "there's no political progress" is bogus
False advertising is afoot. I write these words from Indonesia, soaking wet, having just returned from photographing rice paddies in a pouring rain, wearing a Florida Gators shirt. That means there is a green alligator on my chest. While supporting my team, my shirt perpetuates the myth that alligators are green, when in fact they are black when wet, gray when dry.The mantra that “there is no political progress in Iraq” is rapidly becoming the “surge” equivalent of a green alligator: when enough people repeat something that sounds plausible, but also happens to be false, it becomes accepted as fact. The more often it is repeated—and the larger the number of people repeating it—the harder it is to convince anyone of the truth: alligators are not green, and Iraqis are making plenty of political progress.There may be little progress on political goals crafted in America, to meet American concerns, by politicians who have a cushion of 200 years of democracy. Washington might as well be on the moon. Iraqis don’t respond well to rules imposed from outside their acknowledged authorities, though I have many times seen Iraqi Police and Army of all ranks responding very well to American Marines and soldiers who they have come to respect, and in many cases actually admire and try to emulate. Our military has increasing moral authority in Iraq, but the same cannot be said for our government at home. In fact, it’s in moral deficit because many Iraqis are increasingly frightened we will abandon them to genocide.
Yon gives three reasons why he thinks the "surge" is working, and as I said earlier I think that if we can make the military side work then we have a chance at the political
1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than they were in 2005. They are not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come soon.
3. General Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.
If you don't follow any of the other links in this piece, be sure to visit Yon's site. The photos alone are worth the visit.
Lastly are these thoughts from Jim Geraghty at NRO
Stuart Koehl of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS writes in with a good point:
The error being made—on your part as well as by others—is assuming that progress can only be made at the level of the national government. In fact, under the Iraqi constitution, the national government is rather weak, while traditionally real political power has been wielded on the local and regional level. And it is precisely at the local and regional level that we see real progress being made with regard both to power sharing and national reconciliation. Because of the social and constitutional structure of Iraq, political progress cannot be imposed from the top-down, but must percolate from the bottom up. To some extent, the members of the national assembly and the unity government are merely play-acting, posturing for the cameras until such time as a consensus emerges on the local level that will prompt them to act. The success of our counter-insurgency effort on the political front is not measured in the assembly chamber, but in the tribal councils. And there, we are definitely winning.UPDATE: I should note that I'm hearing a similar vibe from others who have been to Iraq recently — relationships between the local tribal councils are going pretty well, while the national assembly is a mess. "The bottom up strategy is making progress, but the national government is and is going to be a disaster... I think this means we're headed toward a soft partition."
Well, if the Kurds don't declare formal independence, and nobody sponsors al-Qaeda, I say, "hooray, good job everybody, and good luck. We'll be in Kuwait if you need anything. We're outta here."
It might just come down to that.
Posted by Tom at 9:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2007
The Democrat Line in December
Via NRO, I think that Senators Richard Durbin Bob Casey are floating a trial balloon regarding what the Democrat line in September will be when Gen Petraeus comes to Washington and reports that the surge is making good progress
(though the image here is that of a woman, it quickly goes to Senators Durbin and Casey on CNN)
Note how the CNN anchor seems amazed that Durbin would admit to any military progress at all. It's as if he couldn't quite believe his ears at first.
What's going on here is that the Democrats have learned that the "surge" (more properly Operation Phantom Thunder) is working better than they expected, or as I should say, feared. And I'm not going to go through the evidence here, but all signs point to military success in Iraq, at least right now.
Rep James Clyburn accidentally spoke the truth when he said that it would be a “real big problem for us” if Petraeus’s progress report is good.
Petraeus is not someone they can mock or disparage and get away with it. They know that if they take this tack they'll look stupid and will lose half their party. The nutroots may want to hear that Petraeus is Bush's lapdog, but it won't play with Joe and Jane Average.
What they'll do then is say we should pull out of Iraq because the Iraqis can't get their act together at the federal level.
To a certain extent the Democrats will have a point. Ultimately the Iraqis do have to make political progress. But it's not quite that simple. As the editors of National Review pointed out last week
Ultimately, reconciliation between the Sunnis and the Shiites is crucial. But it wasn’t going to happen in the next two months, whether the Iraqi parliament stayed in session or not. General Petraeus’s September report has come to be seen as a final test for Iraq, which makes sense only for Democrats hell-bent on leaving no matter what, and for nervous Republicans seeking a soft exit. We are beginning to see the fruits of a sound counterinsurgency strategy and, in this context, a debate focused on how to get out rather than how to consolidate our gains is shameful, however easy the sound bites are.
My thought is that we've had Iraq backward all along. We've put political progress ahead of military progress, and we should have done it the other way 'round. We hurried to set up one provisional government after another, draft a constitution, hold elections, etc. Our hope was that by doing these things we could take the "legitimacy" out of the insurgency.
It didn't work.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but we should have done this "surge" back in 2004 or at least 2005, and only when we'd squashed the terrorists worried about the political side.
The reason we got it wrong, I think, is that we have a tendancy to "mirror image" our thinking. We assume that hey, we can all get along without shooting each other, why can't they? We forget that the reality is that there are a lot of extremists over there who will shoot if they can't get their way politically. And before going in we completely underestimated extremism in Iraq. These people figure they can get what they want through violence, so they don't put much stock in what we consider normal political negotiations. Rather, they'll hold out for a better deal through violence.
Extremists will only negotiate in good faith when all violent options have closed; i.e., when the US military has crushed the insurgency.
All this is also why peace between Israel and Hamas or Fatah is a pipe dream. Or Israel and Lebanon. Until these terrorist organizations are destroyed or physically isolated there will never be peace.
David at The Thunder Run made another point to me in an email (which I won't print since it's private) that Iraqis are in fact making progress on the local level, and that this is in reality how most things get done in the US as well. He sees the war being won on the local level, both against al Qaeda and in the US military (primary leutenant colonels) working with local Iraqi leaders. As always he makes a good point and I tend to agree.
The bottom line is that the NRO editors have it right; Petraeus' Sept report is not a "final" report but an interim one, yes the Iraqis do eventually have to come together, but we ought to be talking about how to consolidate and expand on our victories, not how to cut-and-run.
Posted by Tom at 9:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 17, 2007
The Polls! The Polls!
So Senator Webb thinks that we need to pull out of Iraq because a NYT poll says that 55% of enlisted soldiers say we should withdraw from Iraq. He said this in a debate with Sen Graham last weekend on Meet the Press. Webb also used this argument when he made the Democrat rebuttal to President Bush's State of the Union address last January.
It isn't just Sen. Webb, the anti-war folks in general use polling results incessantly to justify their demand that we withdraw now from Iraq.
Logically speaking this type of argument is called an enthymeme, which is a syllogism without one it it's parts; major premise, minor premise, or conclusion. Webb and those like him who use this argument don't spell out their reasoning, but based on what
We should base our policy on the latest poll
The latest poll on Iraq says that most people favor immediate withdrawal
Therefore we should withdraw immediately
If those who use polls as part of their argument deny that this is their argument, which part are they denying? Most likely they'd deny the major premise (line 1). Perhaps what they mean is
We should base Iraq policy on the latest poll
The latest poll on Iraq says that most people favor immediate withdrawal
Therefore we should withdraw immediately
or
We should base military policy on the latest poll The latest poll on Iraq says that most people favor immediate withdrawal Therefore we should withdraw immediatelyBut syllogisms 2 & 3 seem rather selective. If you're going to base Iraq policy, or military policy on the polls, why not policy in all areas? Why not decide other issues on the polls too, such as abortion, school choice, or illegal immigration? It is not clear why we should choose policy based on polls in one area and not another.
Perhaps, however, those who use polls as part of their argument are saying yet something else.
We should base our policy on poll readings if said poll holds firm over a period of time Polls on Iraq have said for some time that most people favor immediate withdrawal Therefore we should withdraw immediately
This is the only argument that really makes any sense. Unfortunately, those who make their argument based on polls rarely get into this level of detail, so I'm forced to guess.
Truth be told, I realize I am seriously overthinking this. My general observation is that people who make their arguments based on polls, whether they be conservatives or liberals, rarely think through what they are saying to this level. Most of they time they are simply pulling numbers to support a predetermined conclusion and we all know it.
And lets be clear, conservatives can be just as guilty of this as liberals. In the recent debate over the immigration (really amnesty) bill in Congress, some conservatives based their opposition to the bill on poll numbers which showed that the majority of Americans opposed the legislation.
But I think you need to be consistent. If you're going to use poll numbers to justify your position in one area, you've got to do it in others. You can't say, for example, that we should pull out of Iraq because the polls say we should, then take a position against school choice even though polls show the majority of Americans favor it.
We can get into a deep philosophical discussion on this whole matter of public opinion and public policy, and I'm sure it gets rather complicated, but since that isn't really the subject of this post I'll just touch on a few areas.
Of course in any republic public opinion matters. But this opinion gets to be expressed at regularly scheduled intervals called voting. The founding fathers were just as afraid of mob rule as they were of tyranny. They wanted a government somewhat insulated from the passions of the moment. This is one reason why our Congress is divided into two houses, in which the House most closely represents the immediate will of the people with the Senate a bit more insulated.
Once elected, should represenatives take notice of changes in the public mood? My answer is that yes they should take notice but they should be wary of making radical policy changes based on polls and focus groups.
A few months ago I wrote a post on the Democrat Party's "New Rules for Going to War" Two of my mock rules were
• It at any time a poll of the American people show that their support for military operations goes below 50% the troops are to be immediately withdrawn• It at any time a poll of active-duty military personnel show that their support for military operations goes below 50% the troops are to be immediately withdrawn
I guess I could call my latter rule the "Senator Jim Webb honorary rule for going to war".
It'd all be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. They didn't poll the troops in the Revolution, Civil War, WWII, or Korea, or any other war to see what they thought. Yes public opinion matters, yes it matters what the troops think. It's rather the modern obsession with polls, especially when they're used selectively and really to bolster predetermined conclusions that bothers me. And you just can't make public policy by turning to the latest poll, whether it's of the general public or the military.
Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly the public thinks we ought to do about Iraq, and how long they've felt that way. On the one hand I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as the anti-war left would have us believe, but at the same time there's no denying that there's a deep frustation and disillusionment.
But enough of my philosophical ramblings. The bottom line is that too many politicians and people in general use polls to justify predetermined positions. They also only use polls when it bolsters their position on an issue, and ignore them when they go against their position. I'm sure I've been guilty of this too on occasion. It's an easy trap to fall into.
The bottom line is that too many politicians, mainly in the Democrat Party but also in the GOP, are completely poll-driven and seem utterly devoid of principle. This needs to change.
Posted by Tom at 9:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 14, 2007
Determined to Lose
Charles Krauthammer, I think, summed up the situation pretty accuratcly when he said that
Finally, after four terribly long years, we know what works. We don't yet know if this strategy will work in mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods. Nor can we be certain that this cooperation between essentially Sunni tribal forces and an essentially Shiite central government can endure. But what cannot be said -- although it is now heard daily in Washington -- is that the surge, which is shorthand for Gen. David Petraeus's new counterinsurgency strategy, has failed. The tragedy is that, just as a working strategy has been found, some Republicans in the Senate have lost heart and want to pull the plug.
By my count we're in the fifth phase of the war. The first was the original invasion in March and April of 2003. The second was the formation of the insurgency and our slow response to it. We lost much ground later that year and in early 2004. In late 2004 or early 2005 we found a new strategy, and for awhile it seemed to be working. This by my count marked the third phase. The bombing of the "Golden Mosque" (the Great Mosque of Samarra or al-Askari Mosque) in February 2006 ignited simmering sectarian violence that marked the start of the fourth phase. The situation steadily got worse and by the end of the year it was clear that our strategy was failing. President Bush replaced the Secretary of Defence, and the commanders of CENTCOM and MNF-Iraq. The new team immediately embarked upon a new strategy (popularly called the "surge"), with full operations commencing June 15 in Operation Phantom Thunder.
These ups and downs should not be unfamiliar to anyone who's read much history. Rarely do wars proceed in a nice linear fashion. Reverses are quite common, many occuring in the final year or so of fighting.
Kimberly Kagan has a good summary of current operations in the WSJ, and concludes that so far Phantom Thunder is working. However, "In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality", the perception being that operations have failed. Yesterday, for example, the House of Representatives voted 223-201 to demand a withdrawal of troops by April 2008. The view that we are doomed to fail, she says,
... isn't an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May. Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.This is remarkable because the military operation that is making these changes possible only began in full strength on June 15. To say that the surge is failing is absurd. Instead Congress should be asking this question: Can the current progress continue?
The answer, she believes, is yes. Read the whole thing.
As I think was fairly predictable, the interim report delivered yesterday on the "surge" is mixed. You can read the whole thing at the Washington Post website.
We hear a lot these days about the "benchmarks" that the Iraqi government is supposed to achieve. Of the 18 benchmarks, the interim report gives the Iraqi government a "satisfactory" mark on 10, "not satisfactory" on 7, and "mixed" on one.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, and 36-year career diplomat, says that "the longer I'm here, the more I'm persuaded that Iraq cannot be analyzed by these kinds of discrete benchmarks." The editors of the Wall Street Journal conclude from his remarks to the New York Times's John Burns in an interview on Saturday that
Mr. Crocker's comments are a useful reminder of the irrelevance--and disingenuousness--of much Washington commentary on Iraq. For proponents of early withdrawal, the "benchmarking" issue has provided a handy excuse to make the Iraqi government rather than al Qaeda the main culprit in the violence engulfing their country.
Some say that the reason we need benchmarks is to encourge, indeed force, the Iraqis to take hard decisions. Without them, the argument goes, the Iraqis will squabble endlessly and we will have to do all of the heavy lifting. This argument is not without merit, but I think it unpersuasive. To be sure, I wish the Iraqis had met them. However, the WSJ concludes that political reconciliation in Iraq will not happen
...if Congress insists on using troop withdrawals to punish Iraqis for their supposed political delinquency. The central issue is whether the Iraqis can make those decisions without having to fear assassination as the consequence of political compromise. The more insistent Congress becomes about troop withdrawals, the more unlikely political reconciliation in Iraq becomes.That said, it's becoming increasingly clear that the issue of reconciliation has become a smokescreen for American politicians who care for their own political fortunes far more than they do about the future of Iraq or the consequences of Iraq's collapse for U.S. interests in the Middle East. Here again, they could stand to listen to Mr. Crocker.
"You can't build a whole policy on a fear of a negative, but, boy, you've really got to account for it," he said. "In the States, it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we're done here . . . and we leave the theater and go on to something else. Whereas out here, you're just getting into the first reel of five reels, and ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse."
John Podhoretz also believes the benchmarks to be a smokescreen
(A)sk yourself this: If Iraq's politicians had agreed on a hydrocarbon law, would terrified Senate Republicans suddenly stiffen their spines and support the "surge" - the new military offensive in Iraq - they suddenly decided wasn't working about a week ago? The same "surge" that seems to be paying off with shocking rapidity in the once-left-for-dead province of Anbar?Of course not.
Instead, as David Ignatius of the Washington Post believes, politicians are coalescing around the recommendations of the Jim Baker/Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which would in opinion guarantee defeat. In my opinion, if Republicans think they can save their skins by hiding behind the ISG, they are sorely mistaken. Some even want to write its recommendations into law (Sens. Ken Salazar D-CO and Lamar Alexander R-TN), which would be a huge mistake.
Rather, as Mario Loyola says, Congress is shirking its responsiblies. They voted for this war, now that we (finally!) have a good strategy they want to abandon the effort. To be sure, it won't be easy, and we have a ways to go: "Phantom Thunder is meant to lay the groundwork for a “clear, hold, and build” operation set to commence in coming weeks. Stay tuned. The real offensive has yet to begin." Loyola concludes that
As things now stand, they (al Qaeda) cannot win. Their only hope is Congress. And now — at the very moment that our troops finally have the chance to prove they can win — a majority of the Congress wants to legislate defeat, by interfering in the strategic and tactical judgments of the constitutional commander-in-chief and his generals, and force them to do things that they are convinced will throw to the winds all that we have gained at such a terrible price.
If there's any good news on the political front, it's that President Bush is holding firm. Unfortunately, even this must be tempered with the distain in which he is held even by conservatives; witness Peggy Noonan's much talked about column yestery in which she is quite put off by his "seemingly effortless high spirits" in the midst of a huge crisis. A good mood and jocular attitude is just not appropriate for our current situation, she says.
Many in Congress seem determined to lose regardless of what happens on the ground. What it all comes down to is whether Gen Petraus and our troops can stabilize Iraq before Congress forces a pullout. Defeating an insurgency takes time, but time is running out.
Posted by Tom at 12:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 22, 2007
Feel Good Politics
Several congressmen from both sides of the isle have introduced something called the Armenian Genocide Resolution(House Resolution 106). There are some 150 bipartisan co-sponsors.
You can read the full text of the resolution by following the link above, but here is it's "Declaration of Policy"
The House of Representatives—(1) calls upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide and the consequences of the failure to realize a just resolution; and
(2) calls upon the President in the President’s annual message commemorating the Armenian Genocide issued on or about April 24, to accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide and to recall the proud history of United States intervention in opposition to the Armenian Genocide.
I'm going to take a leap and say that the House should not be in the business of passing resolutions of this sort. It is simply feel-good politics and selective indignation.
Just so we're clear, we're talking about something that happened between 1915 and 1917. Here's the Wikipedia entry on it, which I suppose is as good a description of what happened as any.
I see nothing good coming from this resolution. Genocide, or for that matter murder or mass-forced deportation, is certainly to be condemned. But if we're going to pass resolutions condeming this atrocity, why stop there? How many murderous campaigns go on in Africa every year that we vitually ignore?
It has become fashionable these days for people who haven't done anything wrong to apologize to people who haven't been at least directly harmed. President Clinton famously apologized for slavery while in Africa, not knowing or not caring that the Africans themselves were complicit in the crime.
It's all very fine to become indigant and say that "We cannot let realpolitik dictate truth", as Jules Boyadjian of the Armenian Youth Federation France says in a letter printed in the Washington Times today. I understand that Armenians do not want what happened to them to be forgotten. Their organizations deserve to be heard, and we should all become educated on what happened.
By the same token such education should occur in the private sector. Government should become involved only when the atrocity is ongoing or might happen again, for example when the killers are still in office. We should use our power to stop murder and/or punish the perpetrators whenever possible. We should also be generous to victims who survive.
No one who committed the Armenian massacre is alive. No one who was directly harmed is alive. Reasonable people may say that the next generation was harmed and deserves compenstation too, but surely everyone would agree that at some point decendants are not really affected anymore, at least not to the degree that requires government conpensation. We wouldn't compensate descendants of the Anglos, Saxons, or Judes even if we could find them.
Who is beind this resolution? According to a Washington Times editorial on Tuesday, "H. Res. 106 has far more to do with the power of ethnic lobbies" than anything else. Armenian and Greek lobbying organizations in the US are simply out to settle a score with Turkey, and don't care about the consequences.
As Soner Cagaptay points out in today's Washington Times, US-Turkish relations will be seriously harmed if this resolution passes. Among other things, the large Air Base at Incirlik in southern Turkey, is an invaluable asset that we might well lose if this resolution goes though. France passed an "Armenian Resolution" last year, and the Turks have cut military relations with them. To be sure, it's one thing to do without the Frence militay and quite another to be without US protection, but the point is that there should be no doubt that the Turks would retailiate.
But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems unaware of all this. She supports this resolution. Just as she and her fellows think that passing resolutions against the "surge" will have no effect on the morale of our troops or of the enemy, they seem to think that they can pass this resolution with out serious consequences.
We should also remember that as imperfect as it is, Turkey is the world's only secular Muslim democracy. Some Turks say that what happened in 1915 was not genocide but more a forced deportation to Syria. My guess is that this is mostly cover-up, and that while some of it was deportation there was also a lot of murder. Either way, as the Times editorial points out, passing a congressional resolution would mean that our government is passing judgement on Turkish history. Given that the event in question happened 90 years ago, I don't think we as a government ought to be involved.
But the Democrats, and some Republicans, want to feel good about themselves. They want to pat themselves on the back and say "look at us, we're good people because we condemn genocide". This is feel-good politics and should be avoided. This resolution should not be passed.
Posted by Tom at 8:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 18, 2007
Copperheads in Congress
I don't suppose there's anyone in their right mind today who couldn't imagine not fighting to free people imprisoned in the hell of slavery, especially when it's happening on your own soil.
And if you're like me, when you were younger and less well-read you had this view of events like the American Revolution, Civil War (from the North's perspective), and World War II as glorious crusades in which "of course" we were all in it together.
But it were the truth. Most history books will tell you that only about 1/3 of the colonists supported independence, another 1/3 were loyal to the crown, and the last 1/3rd just didn't care. Up until Dec 7 1941 up to 80% of Americans wanted nothing to do with aiding the British in any shape way or form. Yet who today could imagine not wanting to fight the Nazis?
We all know, I suppose, that the North stumbled many times in the road to victory. Lincoln went through general after general before he found one who could consistently win. And then after the victories of early 1863, came the losses of later in that year and early 1864.
The Federal Army was unable to fill it's ranks with volunteers and resorted to a draft, which proved so unpopular that riots broke out in New York City over it. Many northern Democrats, disappointed in the way the war was being conducted, decided that it wasn't worth it.
These "peace Democrats" became known as Copperheads. By 1864 they had gained effective control of their party.
There was a presidential election in 1864. From the Democrat Party Platform:
Resolved, That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.
Amazing, isn't it? Yet it's true; the "peace Democrats" of 1864 wanted an immediate end to the fighting and a negotiated peace that would undoubtably have left slavery in peace. Today's Democrats want an immediate withdrawal regardless of consequences, which would be a huge victory for the jihadists.
As with the Civil War Copperheads, today's variety think that they have the public behind them. They are convinced that the results of the last election "prove" that the American people want an unconditional withdrawal. But as a poll published in Investor's Business Daily points out, it isn't that simple (hat tip Power Line)
From the accompanying editorial
The party of John Murtha shamelessly seeks to defund and defeat U.S. troops on the battlefield and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Congress the terrorists wanted is doing their bidding ...As we've noted on several occasions, Democratic talk of "redeployment" has encouraged terrorist groups around the world.
Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said before the 2006 vote: "Americans should vote Democratic," adding that "it is time the American people support those who want to take them out of the Iraqi mud." The statement could have come from Murtha, Kerry, Hillary or any number of Democrats.
We find it scary that the Democratic and terrorist game plans are indistinguishable.
I'd say that's about right. I'm reading Walid Phares' Future Jihad, which is the best book I've read on the terrorists period. He lays it out just as IBD says; that one of OBL's objectives was to get us to become divided and fight each other. Critics will say that it's all President Bush's fault, that if only we hadn't invaded Iraq we'd all be in it together.
Hogwash. The left would still object to the Patriot Act and Gitmo. Take Iraq out of it and the right and left still have fundamentally different views of what the war is even about. The right sees it as a war against fundamentalist Islam, and the left sees it as a police action against criminals. But more on that when I review Phares' book.
John Murtha has become the chief Copperhead and his plan for our defeat is in full swing. The Washington Times explained on Friday that
When the House votes today on the resolution denouncing Mr. Bush's plans for additional troops to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq, members should be under no illusions about what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are trying to do: to make it impossible for American troops to properly do their job in Iraq. In an interview yesterday with MoveCongress.org, a Web site for a coalition of anti-war groups, Mr. Murtha, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, explained that by placing conditions on $93.4 billion in new combat funds, he would make be able to effectively stop the troops in their tracks. "They won't be able to continue. They won't be able to do the deployment. They won't have the equipment, they don't have the training and they won't be able to do the work. There's no question in my mind," Mr. Murtha said."We will set benchmarks for readiness," a top Democratic leadership aide told the nonpartisan Politico.com Web site, which summarized the Democrats' strategy this way: "If enacted, these provisions would have the effect of limiting the number of troops available for the Bush surge plan, while blunting the GOP charge that Democrats are cutting funding for the troops in Iraq."
No one should be fooled by Murtha's "readyness standards". They're fraudulent and everyone knows it. If you don't believe me listen to what Murtha himself said as quoted by the IBD article
"We're trying to force a redeployment not by taking money away, (but) by redirecting money,"
The Democrats, and some Republicans, don't just think that the Keane-Kagan plan, "A Plan for Success in Iraq", around which the "surge" is based, won't work, they're trying to ensure that it won't . It's shameful enough that they've given our most vicious enemies aid and comfort with their stupid resolutions, now they're trying to pull the rug out from under our troops feet too.
Copperheads, all of them.
Posted by Tom at 9:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 24, 2007
So the anti-war crowd's new line is that they want to win in Afghanistan but not in Iraq.
Sure.
Last night at the State of the Union speech the Democrats didn't stand up when the President called for victory in Iraq.
How long before they won't stand up when there's a call for victory in Afghanistan?
But the anti-war crowd insists that no, they really and truely want to win in Afghanistan. It's just Iraq that they oppose.
And I believe them, too. I believe that right now that short of the International ANSWER/Code Pink left, they do want to win in Afghanistan. I believe that they want to win, as long as it is politically expedient, that is. Because as soon as it isn't, they'll want to cut-and-run there too.
Supporting the war in Afghanistan has become the latest tool to oppose the war in Iraq.
"We support more troops in Afghanistan!", we are cheerfully told.
Sorry, but I ain't buying it.
Iraq is important in a way that Afghanistan will never be. It is the center of the Middle East, where Afghanistan is a sideshow. I'm not going to review the good reasons we had to invade, suffice it to say that a loss there would be devastating to the West.
Defeat in Iraq will embolden the enemy in Afghanistan. It will also lead to a "redeployment" of forces by the jihadists, who will shift their forces from Iraq to Afghanistan. Do the Democrats realize that a pullout from Iraq will lead to increased attacks on our forces in Afghanistan? Are they ready for additional casualties there?
More to the point, are they willing to commit the money and resources necessary to win in Afghanistan? Sure, leaving Iraq will free up money. But my guess it that before it can be "redeployed" to Afghanistan most of the money be eaten up by domestic spending, with the big-spenders in the GOP happily going along with it. How long before they decide that money can be saved by pulling out of Afghanistan too?
Now, as a matter of record, I think that more troops in Afghanistan would be useful. But anyone who's even taken a cursory look at the situation there knows that as with Iraq it's pretty complicated, and solving it is not just a simple matter of sending more troops.
Besides, the issues in Afghanistan are larger than troop numbers. Let's quickly go over a few of the issues that are preventing a complete victory.
This past summer Pakistan signed an agreement with the Taliban essentially ceding control of North Waziristan to them. Two years ago they signed a similar one giving up South Waziristan. Waziristan is in northwest Pakistan and borders Afghanistan. I can't find the link as present, but have read that the Taliban have 20+ bases there, and al Qaeda at least 5.
So we just go in and take them out, right? Not so fast. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits precariously atop a government that is full of anti-American and pro-Taliban Islamists, all of whom would like to overthrow him. Fifty years ago, when Pakistan was formed, it's goverment made a de facto agreement with the tribes of their wild northwestern mountainous
regions. This agreement effectively said "you don't bother us and we won't bother you. You don't support people who want to overthrow us and we'll let you govern yourselves."
It worked out fine until the US discovered that Osama bin Laden was probably hiding there, and we asked the Pakistani government to go and get him. They tried to do so, and thus effectively broke the fifty-year old agreement.
The Pakistanis didn't find OBL, and Musharraf was afraid that if he pissed off the tribes and Islamists too much they'd overthrow him. Since his army was being beaten by the tribes who were aided by the Taliban we chased out of Afghanistan, they decided to do the prudent thing and call a truce.
So if we simply flood Waziristan with American troops, we run a serious risk of all hell breaking lose in Pakistan and Musharraf being replaced with a radical Islamic government. Did I mention that Pakistan has nuclear weapons?
My point here: Since the anti-war crowd isn't willing to take risks in Iraq, what makes you think they'll take risks going after the Taliban inside Pakistan?
If this isn't enough for you to digest, there's the fact that we've been betrayed by our NATO "allies". The reason has more to do with changing demographics in Europe than anything else.
If you want one more vexing problem that won't be solved by adding more troops, there's the issue of the poppy fields. The Taliban make a ton of money off the stuff, and getting rid of it isn't easy. Similar to the situation in Central and South America, farmers grow the stuff because they make more money on it than with traditional food crops. Destroy the crops and they'll trade their plow for a gun and come after us. The only way to solve it that I can see is outbid the Taliban or find another more profitable crop for them to grow.
Will the anti-war crowd be willing to spend the money necessary to get rid of the poppy fields? How long before we're told that we need it here at home for a school lunch program?
Bush's Fault, Too
Although I'm sure some readers won't want to believe this, I do go after both sides when I think they are wrong. I make no secret of my distain for the anti-war left, and think that for all our mistakes the neo-cons are mostly right. But I've gone after the President for screwing things up both domestically and in Iraq, and I'm going to do it again.
Here's the bottom line: Bush fooled around for several years, letting Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey continue on with their "light footprint" strategy. It didn't work. Last year saw the bombing of the Mosque/Golden dome and an escallation in sectarian violence. A year ago he should have fired his generals, if not Rumsfeld, and demanded that more troops be sent while he still had the political capital to do so. Now, finally, he's woken up, but at the political 11th hour.
The President gave a great speech last night, clearly and persuasively laying out the case for victory in Iraq. As with a change in war leadership, he should have done this a year ago.
We shouldn't be surprised that he's lost so much support. The American people want to win, but what they hate is a politician that doesn't seem to have the will to win. Now, the truth may be that Bush had the will but simply bought into the "light footprint" strategy, legitimately thinking that it would work. Perception, however, counts, and many Americans perceived that "light footprint" as a lack of will. Now at the final hour he's decided to send more troops, but many are so fed up that they won't give him one last chance.
There's also the fact that there aren't many more to send, because Bush and the GOP congress spent 6 years increasing domestic spending instead of building up the military.
Back to Iraq
The bottom line is that we're there in Iraq and a victory there for the Jihadists would be devastating for both the Middle East and entire Western world. The communist victory in Vietnam emboldened the Soviet Union for another 10 years. Let's not have another round of Carterism, please.
The most immediate effect of a withdrawal would be a slaughter in Iraq, and then an Iranian influenced or controlled Iraq. The Sunni Arab states would be in an uproar, so if you think there's instability now just wait until we pull out. And then, of course, there's the fact that parts of Iraq would become terrorist training centers. All of this would solve nothing, but would rather only mean fighting by American troops at a later date.
At least the Vietnamese didn't come after us here at home. The Jihadists want to convert the world to Islam or destroy us if we refuse. Laugh if you like but it's the truth. So if you think we've lost a lot of people in Iraq so far, we'll lose a lot more later if we don't win now.
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