Iraq War Roundup: The Surge 'Window' Begins to Close & Other Forever War News

Baghdad market blasts today killed 64, scattering body parts

You don't have to be a bloody genius to know that sooner or later the window of opportunity for Iraqi national reconciliation and a lasting reduction in sectarian violence as a result of the successes of the Surge would begin to close unless there was progress by the Baghdad government.

Well, boys and girls, it would appear that the window is indeed beginning to close since there has been no progress whatsoever except for a totally bogus un-de-Baathification law passed earlier this month.

As a consequence, insurgents have predictably adapted their tactics amidst this power vacuum, there has been an uptick in high-profile bombings and U.S. and civilian casualties, and the level of violence in Mosul is at a two-year high despite intense U.S. pacification efforts. The twin suicide bombings apparently involving mentally retarded women that took over 50 lives in mainly Shiite areas of Baghdad today were the worst since additional U.S. troops began flooding into the capital last spring.

Spencer Ackerman, writing in the Washington Independent, has it exactly right when he says:

"It used to be that surge enthusiasts would at least hint at the unachieved strategic objective of the surge. As Bush himself put it, the surge was meant to provide the Iraqi government 'the breathing space it needs to make progress' on sectarian reconciliation. But reconciliation hasn’t happened, and, in important respects, sectarianism has deepened over the past year. So surgeniks are now simply declaring victory by the sheer fact of reduced violence itself, unmoored to any strategic goal."

Now you would expect William Kristol and other willfully blind Bush sycophants to ignore the elephant in the room (yes, the one with really big and really sharp tusks) while declaring victory.

But this myopia has reached epidemic proportions on Capitol Hill and out on the campaign trail where only Barack Obama is asking hard questions about the war while John McCain is telling everyone who will listen that he'd be happy if the U.S. stays in Iraq for 100 years. And didn't you just love it when Hillary Clinton stood and applauded during the State of the Union speech when The Decider declared the Surge "a success" and got all wiggy last night during CNN's Democratic debate when Obama called her out on her support of the war?

With talk in Washington dominated by the need to expedite Candygrams to taxpayers hush recession fears, you'd hardly know that nearly two thirds of Americans want the U.S. to get the hell out of Iraq, according to one recent poll.

But alas, that's not going to happen because the Al-Maliki government has no incentive to take advantage of the opening the Surge has given it because President Bush has given something far more important to he and his Shiite cronies -- coup insurance in the form of a long-term troop precsence. This is the status quo for the forseeable future. There is no post-Surge strategy, let alone an endgame, because in the Bush Universe politics yet again trump policy.

Colin Kahl, a counterinsurgency expert at the hawkish Center For a New American Security, warns of the consequences of this sorry state of affairs:

"The violence came down for four reasons . . . what we’re doing, the decision the Sunni combatants made to turn against al-Qaeda, Moqtada Sadr’s ceasefire and the prior ethnic cleansing of 2006 and early 2007. All those things could unwind. We're unsurging. The talk is that for the next couple of months, if the Maliki government doesn't do enough to appease the Sunni groups [that have turned against al-Qaeda] and incorporate them into the Iraqi security forces, they could go game-on again."

THE TROOP WITHDRAWAL CHA-CHA

There will, in fact, be troop withdrawals in coming months -- some 20,000 boots in all -- as the five combat brigades sent to Iraq a year ago in the run-up to the Surge begin rotating home. This would leave 15 brigades when the drawdown is completed by mid-July.

But The New York Times reports that despite the vociferous objections of congressional Democrats (who while occasionally loud are, as a group, spineless) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who are rightly concerned about the long-term health of the military), President Bush is drawing the line on further withdrawals:

"Four months after announcing troop reductions in Iraq, President Bush is now sending signals that the cuts may not continue past this summer . . . White House officials said Mr. Bush had been taking the opportunity . . . to prepare Americans for the possibility that, when he leaves office a year from now, the military presence in Iraq will be just as large as it was a year ago, or even slightly larger."

This is okey-dokey with Max Boot, who in a lengthy Weekly Standard treatise also declares the Surge a success but cautions that U.S. forces better keep bribing those insurgents who turned against Al Qaeda in Anbar and elsewhere with arms and lucre so that the gains made in those areas are not transitory. These Iraqis are known in military parlance as Concerned Local Citizens (CLC). Kind of like school crossing guards with automatic weapons.

Explains Boot:

"American commanders in the field fear that they will be forced to stop paying the CLCs without being able to provide them another livelihood -- something that senior officers in Baghdad privately assured us would never happen. Nevertheless, a number of officers scattered across the country independently used the phrase 'perfect storm' to describe what might happen this summer with a reduction in the CLC ranks.

"This worst-case scenario centers around the planned reduction of U.S. forces . . . to the pre-surge level . . . "

Boot, like the William Kristols, cannot think outside the military -- which is to say troop-level box -- because to do so he would have to acknowledge that the Surge is in reality merely a half a success and the other half -- which the Al-Maliki government shows no interest in delivering on -- is an illusion. Then there's that elephant.

TRICK OR TREATY

I was one of the first people to state the obvious last November -- that Iraq war was morphing into a business deal between Bush and Al-Maliki -- and in an ultimate betrayal of the separation of powers, Congress would have no say in whether that deal came to fruition, let alone what it would involve.

Brian Beulter reports at The American Prospect that the deal -- which gives the U.S. first dibs at Iraq's immense oil wealth in return for a long-term troop presence -- is shaping up to be just that:

"If covered within a treaty, Congress could block the president from making this sort of agreement with Maliki. But without one the president could provide similar assurances informally, leaving the future president -- Democrat or Republican -- in a tricky diplomatic position if he or she decides not to honor Bush's promise."

Testifying before Congress last week, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute noted that any guarantee that U.S. troops would defend Iraqi territory would demand a treaty, but the White House has signaled otherwise.

Indeed, General Douglas Lute, Bush's war czar, noted after the outlines of the deal were announced in November that:

"We don't anticipate now that these negotiations will lead to the status of a formal treaty which would then bring us to formal negotiations or formal inputs from the Congress."

The goal for hammering out a final agreement is mid-July when the last elements of those five combat brigades head stateside.

SUICIDE IS NOT PAINLESS

The Army reports that reenlistments are up. Less noticed is that so are suicides.

Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002.

Photograph by Agence France-Presse