Iraq: The McCaffrey Memo

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has been making annual trips to Iraq to see for himself the progress -- or lack of progress -- of the U.S.-led effort to rebuild the war-torn country.

McCaffrey is back from his third fact-finding trip and has written a summary laden with good and bad news.

The good news is that the U.S. military is doing a heckuva job, the Iraqi Army is getting its act together and most Iraqis want a real national government. The bad news is that it will take at least 10 years to accomplish these goals.

McCaffrey, who is chairman of the social science department at West Point, has been a steady supporter of the war's aims and critic of the Bush administration's conduct of it.

I suppose whether McCaffrey's Iraq glass is half empty or half full depends upon one's perspective.

Here is Wretchard's at the Belmont Club:

Whatever one thinks of McCaffrey's 2005 and 2006 Iraqi memos, [his] observation that "armies do not fight wars - countries fight wars" should be non-controversial. One of the themes of the 2005 memorandum, re-emphasized in 2006, was that while military systems have adapted, two key political systems -- the political and economic reconstruction mechanism; and public diplomacy, including the press -- have not. The first failure is manifested by the inability of civilian agencies to deploy personnel able to "live and work with their Iraqi counterparts" in the manner of the military or to adapt to the challenges of providing economic development assistance in a terrorist-threatened environment. The institutional failure of the Press is no less signal. Unable to cover Iraq in the normal way; unwilling to assign its stars for long periods of embedding with the US military, it has been "degraded to reporting based on secondary sources, press briefings which they do not believe, and alarmist video of the aftermath of suicide bombings obtained from Iraqi employees of unknown reliability". And if it is true that countries, not armies fight wars, then it is a depressing commentary that only one of three legs has adapted to the exigencies of combat.

And Fred Kaplan's at Slate:

He concludes his memo by urging perseverance but conceding some doubt. He asks, "Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims?"

Whether or not McCaffrey meant to imply as much, the answer to all three questions is probably "No." By his own formulation, after all, mustering the will, power, and resources will require 10 more years of occupation, $50 billion to $100 billion in economic aid alone, who knows how many more hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending, who knows how many more thousands of casualties—and even then great uncertainty would remain about the Iraqis' ability to hold their nation together.

The light at the end of the tunnel seems to be a very dim bulb. Blithe talk of "staying the course" is beside the point. Here is the real choice that Gen. McCaffrey's memo thrusts before President Bush and his top aides: If the goals are worth the costs, then state them clearly; if the goals can't be met by the effort they're willing to put out, then scale back and cut losses. Anything in between is not merely a fantasy but a horrible waste.