Iraq: After the US "Withdrawal" (Rosen)

UPDATE 0840 GMT: Two US troops were killed and nine others wounded when a Kurdish Iraqi soldier sprayed them with gunfire at an Iraqi army commando base north of Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon. Juan Cole offers a comment.

---

Nir Rosen writes in Foreign Policy:

Hundreds of cars waiting in the heat to slowly pass through one of the dozens of checkpoints and searches they must endure every day. The constant roar of generators. The smell of fuel, of sewage, of kabobs. Automatic weapons pointed at your head out of military vehicles, out of SUVs with tinted windows. Mountains of garbage. Rumors of the latest assassination or explosion. Welcome to the new Iraq, same as the old Iraq --- even if Barack Obama has declared George W. Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom over and announced the beginning of his own Operation New Dawn, and Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has declared Iraq sovereign and independent.

US Politics: How Can Obama Deal with a World after Iraq? (Cohen)

Iraq has had several declarations of sovereignty since the first one in June 2004. As with earlier milestones, it's not clear what exactly this one means. Since the Americans have declared the end of combat operations, U.S. Stryker and MRAP vehicles can be seen conducting patrols without Iraqi escorts in parts of the country and the Americans continue to conduct unilateral military operations in Mosul and elsewhere, even if under the guise of "force protection" or "countering improvised explosive devices." American military officers in Iraq told me they were irate with the politically driven announcement from the White House that combat troops had withdrawn. Those remaining still consider themselves combat troops, and commanders say there is little change in their rules of engagement -- they will still respond to threats pre-emptively.

Iraq is still being held back from full independence -- and not merely by the presence of 50,000 U.S. soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement, which stipulates that U.S. forces will be totally out by 2011, deprives Iraq of full sovereignty. The U.N.'s Chapter 7 sanctions force Iraq to pay 5 percent of its oil revenues in reparations, mostly to the Kuwaitis, denying Iraqis full sovereignty and isolating them from the international financial community. Saudi and Iranian interference, both political and financial, has also limited Iraq's scope for democracy and sovereignty. Throughout the occupation, major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq have been made by the Americans with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, the control over airspace, and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects will linger for decades, regardless of any future milestones the United States might want to announce.

The Americans, meanwhile, worry about losing their leverage at a time when concerns still run high about a renewed insurgency, Shiite militias, and the explosion of the Arab-Kurdish powder keg everybody's been talking about for the last seven years. Many in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad wonder what Obama's vision for Iraq is. By the summer of 2006, Bush woke up every day and wanted to know what was happening in Iraq. Obama is much more detached.

American diplomats also worry that they will soon lose their ability to understand and influence the country. In addition to Baghdad, there will soon be only four other posts. Much of the south will be without any U.S. presence: There will be no Americans between Basra and Baghdad, no Americans in Anbar or Salahuddin provinces. Some in the embassy fear they are abandoning the "Shiite heartland." The diplomats still in the country will have less mobility and access, even if they are nominally taking the lead over the military, because it will be harder to find military escorts when they want to travel. "You can't commute to a relationship," I was told....

Read full article....

Iraq: Obama and A Meaningless Date of Withdrawal (Packer)

George Packer writes in The New Yorker:

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war zone. The proclaimed end of Operation Iraqi Freedom has little or nothing to do with the military and political situation in Iraq, which is why Iraqis were barely aware when the last U.S. combat brigade crossed into Kuwait a few days ago. And for most of us, too—except, perhaps, those with real skin in the game, the million and a half Iraq war veterans and their families—there’s hardly any reality or substance to the moment.

Iraq: Obama Wants Us to Forget the Lessons (Bacevich)

It’s hard to have an honest emotional response or even know what one feels. After seven years of war, the occasion deserves some weight of feeling, but many Americans stopped paying attention a long time ago. And that’s exactly why the President made his announcement: because Americans want the war to be over, have wanted it for years. Tonight he told us what we wanted to hear. August 31, 2010, will go down in history as the day Americans could start not thinking about the war without feeling guilty.

This is not entirely ignoble, by the way. The war has gone on for a long time—almost as long as the Civil War and America’s part in the Second World War combined—and it has taken a heavy toll on the one half of one per cent of Americans who have fought it, and in a democracy this is an intolerable situation. A checked-out public, a stressed-out military, a war hardly anyone can explain: at some point it had to be declared over, and only the President could do it, and Obama is the President, and he was as good as his word in so declaring it on August 31, 2010, not a day sooner or later. He can claim full credit for sticking to his own date certain regardless of circumstances—for not postponing the artificial event that just happened until some future date certain. And in doing so, he restored a small measure of democratic credibility here at home. This is what it looks like when a wartime President is true to his word and the people are behind him. Strange, that it doesn’t look better than it does.

For almost all purposes, Iraq has no government. Almost six months after national elections, the country’s politicians remain unable to compromise and cut a deal, showing the persistent lack of maturity and vision that has earned the political class the justifiable contempt of the Iraqi public. Meanwhile, Iraq’s neighbors are playing their proxies against one another and jostling for a piece of the action. In the vacuum, Sunni extremists are showing just how much—and how little—Iraqi security forces are going to be capable of in the post-American-combat-mission era. It’s not a very encouraging picture. Even if a return to civil war or a military coup, or both, doesn’t happen in the near future, Iraq remains fragile and extremely violent. Daily life—electricity, water, security, the same things Iraqis have been complaining about since 2003—is pretty hellish for most Iraqis. Read the comments from Iraqis in these New York Times interviews. They show the same range of views, some of them within a single individual, that one heard throughout the war. There is great disappointment in and resentment of America, but only one expression of pure hatred, and a fair number affirmations that, at least, Iraqis have been allowed to join the world and enjoy a margin of freedom. Almost all of them fear the future and can only imagine a normal life years or decades from now (fifty years is a common marker). Many of them (especially in Sunni areas), as much as they dislike the occupation, dislike more the prospect of a return to the levels of chaos seen in 2006, which could accompany an American withdrawal. It’s a real possibility, and August 31, 2010 was actually not such a good choice for the end of the combat mission. March 31, 2010, right after the elections, would have been better.

And then there are the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of Iraqis who have fled the country and not yet deemed it in their interest to go back. Among them is the core of the country’s educated, secular-minded middle class, including the younger generation—those who had the most to gain by the American invasion. It’s going to be much harder for Iraq to build itself into a stable, modern country without them.

And yet, to hear the President tell it, Iraq is on the right path and in a surprisingly good position to take its destiny in hand. Those passages from the speech remind me of nothing so much as the fatuously optimistic updates one regularly heard from President Bush and others in the earlier years of the war. Whatever Iraqis said, whatever the evidence of one’s senses, things were always getting better (though “challenges” always remained). And, as it turns out, as of August 31, 2010, this is still the case. As a candidate, Obama was in a position to tell the truth about Iraq, and he did. As President, he’s learned the official language of euphemism and vagueness and distortion. Administration officials who, three years ago and not yet in power, were withering in their assessment of the war and Iraqi politicians, have become their unlikely boosters.

The language of Obama’s speech was as flat and forgettable as anything we’ve heard from him. Unlike Bush’s “major combat operations are over” address in 2003 (which came to be known as the “mission accomplished” speech), Obama’s “the combat mission is over” in 2010 failed to carry conviction—evidence of this President’s intelligence, if not his forthrightness. When he talks about Afghanistan, he thinks about what he’s saying, and as a result he says real things in a way that penetrates, even—or especially-—when he avoids grandiosity, as in his speech last December at West Point. On Iraq, he seemed to be trying not to think too hard about what he was saying, while sprinkling his words with a grandiose coating. Otherwise, he might have had to admit—among other things—that he strongly opposed the surge that his speech praised.

O.K.—why should we expect him to be that much better than any other politician? Presidents never admit they were wrong. (Bush turned the refusal into a badge of honor.) We know how much credit honesty would have gained him among his opponents. John Boehner’s speech on Iraq (which, though it preceded Obama’s by a few hours, was a kind of Republican response) proved that the opposition has no interest in Iraq, except as yet another weapon to use against Obama. So Boehner wants Obama to declare victory, and he suggested that it’s unpatriotic not to do so—Boehner, who couldn’t pronounce General Ray Odierno’s name.

There is no American victory in Iraq, and there is not going to be any American victory in Iraq, and Obama was right not to talk about V-I. There isn’t even a clear truce, with a D.M.Z. and a southern half that, under American protection, might evolve into an economic powerhouse and a liberal democracy. In the Times Tuesday, Paul Wolfowitz proposed South Korea as a model for Iraq. The analogy is closer than Vietnam or the Second World War, but it still fails the test of commensurateness—among other reasons, because there will not be tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq sixty years from now, or even two years from now. We are leaving, undefeated and unvictorious—we are leaving it to the Iraqis....

Read full article....

Iraq: Obama Wants Us to Forget the Lessons (Bacevich)

Andrew Bacevich writes for The New Republic:

The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. “Now, it is time to turn the page.” So advises the commander-in-chief at least. “[T]he bottom line is this,” President Obama remarked last Saturday, “the war is ending.” Alas, it’s not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page—something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do—common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.

For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let’s provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq’s unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.

Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home.

Operation Desert Storm didn’t turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn’t enough: In Baghdad, Bush’s nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America’s war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush’s decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination.

The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991—so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, “we got him.”

Yet by the time Bremer spoke, it—Iraq—had gotten us. Saddam’s capture (and subsequent execution) signaled next to nothing. Round two of the Iraq war had commenced, the war against Saddam (1990–2003) giving way to the American Occupation (2003–2010). Round two began the War to Reinvent Iraq in America’s Image.

With officials such as Bremer in the vanguard, the United States set out to transform Iraq into a Persian Gulf “city upon a hill,” a beacon of Western-oriented liberal democracy enlightening and inspiring the rest of the Arab and Islamic world. When this effort met with resistance, American troops, accustomed to employing overwhelming force, responded with indiscriminate harshness. President Bush called the approach “kicking ass.” Heavy-handedness backfired, however, and succeeded only in plunging Iraq into chaos. One result, on the home front, was to produce a sharp backlash against what had become Bush’s War.

Unable to win, unwilling to accept defeat, the Bush administration sought to create conditions allowing for a graceful exit. Marketed for domestic political purposes as “a new way forward,” more commonly known as “the surge,” this modified approach was the strategic equivalent of a dog’s breakfast. President Bush steeled himself to expend more American blood and treasure while simultaneously lowering expectations about what U.S. forces might actually accomplish. New tactics designed to suppress the Iraqi insurgency won Bush’s approval; so too did the novel practice of bribing insurgents to put down their arms.

Yet as a consequence the daily violence that had made Iraq a hellhole subsided—although it did not disappear.

Meanwhile, once hallowed verities fell by the wayside. U.S. officials stopped promising that Saddam’s downfall would trigger a wave of liberalizing reforms throughout the Islamic world. Op-eds testifying to America’s enduring commitment to the rights of Iraqi women ceased to appear in the nation’s leading newspapers.

Respected American generals—by 2007, about the only figures retaining a shred of credibility on Iraq—disavowed the very possibility of victory. In military circles, to declare that “there is no military solution” became the very height of fashion.

By the time Barack Obama had ascended to the presidency, this second phase of the Iraq war—its purpose now inverted from occupation to extrication—was already well-advanced. Since taking office, Obama has kept faith with the process that his predecessor set in motion, building upon President Bush’s success. (When applied to Iraq, “success” has become a notably elastic term, easily accommodating bombs that detonate in Iraqi cities and insurgent assaults directed at Iraqi forces and government installations.)

Which brings us to the present....

Read full article....