Happy Birthday Iraq War
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Stratfor's War: Five Years Later</font size></center>
StratFor - Strategic Forecasting, Inc.
Geopolitical Weekly
By George Friedman
March 18, 2008
Five years have now passed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney, in Iraq with Sen. John McCain — the presumptive Republican nominee for president — summarized the five years by saying, “If you reflect back on those five years, it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor. We’ve come a long way in five years, and it’s been well worth the effort.” Democratic presidential aspirant Sen. Hillary Clinton called the war a failure.
It is the role of political leaders to make such declarations, not ours. Nevertheless, after five years, it is a moment to reflect less on where we are and more on where we are going. As we have argued in the past, the actual distinctions between McCain’s position at one end (reduce forces in Iraq only as conditions permit) and Barack Obama’s position (reduce them over 16 months unless al Qaeda is shown to be in Iraq) are in practice much less distinct than either believes. Rhetoric aside — and this is a political season — there is in fact a general, but hardly universal, belief that goes as follows: The invasion of Iraq probably was a mistake, and certainly its execution was disastrous. But a unilateral and precipitous withdrawal by the United States at this point would not be in anyone’s interest. The debate is over whether the invasion was a mistake in the first place, while the divisions over ongoing policy are much less real than apparent.
Stratfor tries not to get involved in this sort of debate. Our role is to try to predict what nations and leaders will do, and to explain their reasoning and the forces that impel them to behave as they do. Many times, this analysis gets confused with advocacy. But our goal actually is to try to understand what is happening, why it is happening and what will happen next. We note the consensus. We neither approve nor disapprove of it as a company. As individuals, we all have opinions. Opinions are cheap and everyone gets to have one for free. But we ask that our staff check them — along with their personal ideologies — at the door. Our opinions focus not on what ought to happen, but rather on what we think will happen — and here we are passionate.
<font size="4">Public Justifications and Private Motivations</font size>
We have lived with the Iraq war for more than five years. It was our view in early 2002 that a U.S. invasion of Iraq was inevitable. We did not believe the invasion had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — which with others we believed were under development in Iraq. The motivation for the war, as we wrote, had to do with forcing Saudi Arabia to become more cooperative in the fight against al Qaeda by demonstrating that the United States actually was prepared to go to extreme measures. The United States invaded to change the psychology of the region, which had a low regard for American power. It also invaded to occupy the most strategic country in the Middle East, one that bordered seven other key countries.
Our view was that the Bush administration would go to war in Iraq not because it saw it as a great idea, but because its options were to go on the defensive against al Qaeda and wait for the next attack or take the best of a bad lot of offensive actions. The second option consisted of trying to create what we called the “coalition of the coerced,” Islamic countries prepared to cooperate in the covert war against al Qaeda. Fighting in Afghanistan was merely a holding action that alone would solve nothing. So lacking good options, the administration chose the best of a bad lot.
The administration certainly lied about its reasons for going into Iraq. But then FDR certainly lied about planning for involvement in World War II, John Kennedy lied about whether he had traded missiles in Turkey for missiles in Cuba and so on. Leaders cannot conduct foreign policy without deception, and frequently the people they deceive are their own publics. This is simply the way things are.
We believed at the time of the invasion that it might prove to be much more difficult and dangerous than proponents expected. Our concern was not about a guerrilla war. Instead, it was about how Saddam Hussein would make a stand in Baghdad, a city of 5 million, forcing the United States into a Stalingrad-style urban meat grinder. That didn’t happen. We underestimated Iraqi thinking. Knowing they could not fight a conventional war against the Americans, they opted instead to decline conventional combat and move to guerrilla warfare instead. We did not expect that.
<font size="4">A Bigger Challenge Than Expected</font size>
That this was planned is obvious to us. On April 13, 2003, we noted what appeared to be an organized resistance group carrying out bombings. Organizing such attacks so quickly indicated to us that the operations were planned. Explosives and weapons had been hidden, command and control established, attacks and publicity coordinated. These things don’t just happen. Soon after the war, we recognized that the Sunnis in fact had planned a protracted war — just not a conventional one.
Our focus then turned to Washington. Washington had come into the war with a clear expectation that the destruction of the Iraqi army would give the United States a clean slate on which to redraw Iraqi society. Before the war was fought, comparisons were being drawn with the occupation of Japan. The beginnings of the guerrilla operation did not fit into these expectations, so U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the guerrillas as merely the remnants of the Iraqi army — criminals and “dead-enders” — in their last throes. We noted the gap between Washington’s perception of Iraq and what we thought was actually going on.
A perfect storm arose in this gulf. First, no WMD were found. We were as surprised by this as anybody. But for us, this was an intellectual exercise; for the administration, it meant the justification for the war — albeit not the real motive — was very publicly negated. Then, resistance in Iraq to the United States increased after the U.S. president declared final victory. And finally, attempts at redrawing Iraqi society as a symbol of American power in the Islamic world came apart, a combination of the guerrilla war and lack of preparation plus purging the Baathists. In sum, reshaping a society proved more daunting than expected just as the administration’s credibility cracked over the WMD issue.
<font size="4">A More Complex Game</font size>
By 2004, the United States had entered a new phase. Rather than simply allowing the Shia to create a national government, the United States began playing a complex and not always clear game of trying to bring the Sunnis into the political process while simultaneously waging war against them. The Iranians used their influence among the Shia to further destabilize the U.S. position. Having encouraged the United States to depose its enemy, Saddam Hussein, Tehran now wanted Washington to leave and allow Iran to dominate Iraq.
The United States couldn’t leave Iraq but had no strategy for staying. Stratfor’s view from 2004 was that the military option in Iraq had failed. The United States did not have the force to impose its will on the various parties in Iraq. The only solution was a political accommodation with Iran. We noted a range of conversations with Iran, but also noted that the Iranians were not convinced that they had to deal with the Americans. Given the military circumstance, the Americans would leave anyway and Iran would inherit Iraq.
Stratfor became more and more pessimistic about the American position in 2006, believing that no military solution was possible, and that a political solution — particularly following the Democratic victory in 2006 congressional elections — would further convince the Iranians to be intransigent. The deal that we had seen emerging over the summer of 2006 after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, was collapsing.
<font size="4">The Surge</font size>
We were taken by surprise by U.S. President George W. Bush’s response to the elections. Rather than beginning a withdrawal, he initiated the surge. While the number of troops committed to Iraq was relatively small, and its military impact minimal, the psychological shock was enormous. The Iranian assumption about the withdrawal of U.S. forces collapsed, forcing Tehran to reconsider its position. An essential part of the surge — not fully visible at the beginning — was that it was more a political plan than a military one. While increased operations took place, the Americans reached out to the Sunni leadership, splitting them off from foreign jihadists and strengthening them against the Shia.
Coupled with increasingly bellicose threats against Iran, this created a sense of increasing concern in Tehran. The Iranians responded by taking Muqtada al-Sadr to Iran and fragmenting his army. This led to a dramatic decline in the civil war between Shia and Sunni and in turn led to the current decline in violence.
The war — or at least Stratfor’s view of it — thus went through four phases:
The key moment in the war occurred between May 2003 and July 2003. This consisted of the U.S. failure to recognize that an insurgency in the Sunni community had begun and its delay in developing a rapid and effective response, creating the third phase — namely, the long, grueling period in which combat operations were launched, casualties were incurred and imposed, but the ability to move toward a resolution was completely absent. It is unclear whether a more prompt response by the Bush administration during the second period could have avoided the third period, but the second period certainly was the only point during which the war could have been brought under control.
The operation carried out under Gen. David Petraeus, combining military and political processes, has been a surprise, at least to us. Meanwhile, the U.S. rapprochement with the Sunnis that began quietly in Anbar province spiraled into something far more effective than we had imagined. It has been much more successful than we had imagined in part because we did not believe Washington was prepared for such a systematic and complex operation that was primarily political in nature. It is also unclear if the operation will succeed. Its future still depends on the actions of the Iraqi Shia, and these actions in turn depend on Iran.
<font size="4">The Endgame</font size>
We have been focused on the U.S.-Iranian talks for quite awhile. We continue to believe this is a critical piece in any endgame. The United States is now providing an alternative scenario designed to be utterly frightening to the Iranians. They are arming and training the Iranians’ mortal enemies: the Sunnis who led the war against Iran from 1980 to 1988. That rearming is getting very serious indeed. Sunni units outside the aegis of the Iraqi military are now some of the most heavily armed Iraqis in Anbar, thanks to the Sunni relationship with U.S. forces there. It should be remembered that the Sunnis ruled Iraq because the Iraqi Shia were fragmented, fighting among themselves and therefore weak. That underlying reality remains true. A cohesive Sunni community armed and backed by the American s will be a formidable force. That threat is the best way to bring the Iranians to the table.
The irony is that the war is now focused on empowering the very people the war was fought against: the Iraqi Sunnis. In a sense, it is at least a partial return to the status quo ante bellum. In that sense, one could argue the war was a massive mistake. At the same time, we constantly return to this question: We know what everyone would not have done in 2003; we are curious about what everyone would have done then. Afghanistan was an illusory option. The real choices were to try to block al Qaeda defensively or to coerce Islamic intelligence services to provide the United States with needed intelligence. By appearing to be a dangerous and uncontrolled power rampaging in the most strategic country in the region, the United States reshaped the political decisions countries like Saudi Arabia were making.
This all came at a price that few of us would have imagined five years ago. Cheney is saying it was worth it. Clinton is saying it was not. Stratfor’s view is that what happened had to happen given the lack of choices. But Rumsfeld’s unwillingness to recognize that a guerrilla war had broken out and provide more and appropriate forces to wage that war did not have to happen. There alone we think history might have changed. Perhaps.
Tell George what you think[/hide]
<A HREF="http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/stratfors_war_five_years_later">link</A>
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[hide]<font size="5"><center>
Stratfor's War: Five Years Later</font size></center>
StratFor - Strategic Forecasting, Inc.
Geopolitical Weekly
By George Friedman
March 18, 2008
Five years have now passed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney, in Iraq with Sen. John McCain — the presumptive Republican nominee for president — summarized the five years by saying, “If you reflect back on those five years, it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor. We’ve come a long way in five years, and it’s been well worth the effort.” Democratic presidential aspirant Sen. Hillary Clinton called the war a failure.
It is the role of political leaders to make such declarations, not ours. Nevertheless, after five years, it is a moment to reflect less on where we are and more on where we are going. As we have argued in the past, the actual distinctions between McCain’s position at one end (reduce forces in Iraq only as conditions permit) and Barack Obama’s position (reduce them over 16 months unless al Qaeda is shown to be in Iraq) are in practice much less distinct than either believes. Rhetoric aside — and this is a political season — there is in fact a general, but hardly universal, belief that goes as follows: The invasion of Iraq probably was a mistake, and certainly its execution was disastrous. But a unilateral and precipitous withdrawal by the United States at this point would not be in anyone’s interest. The debate is over whether the invasion was a mistake in the first place, while the divisions over ongoing policy are much less real than apparent.
Stratfor tries not to get involved in this sort of debate. Our role is to try to predict what nations and leaders will do, and to explain their reasoning and the forces that impel them to behave as they do. Many times, this analysis gets confused with advocacy. But our goal actually is to try to understand what is happening, why it is happening and what will happen next. We note the consensus. We neither approve nor disapprove of it as a company. As individuals, we all have opinions. Opinions are cheap and everyone gets to have one for free. But we ask that our staff check them — along with their personal ideologies — at the door. Our opinions focus not on what ought to happen, but rather on what we think will happen — and here we are passionate.
<font size="4">Public Justifications and Private Motivations</font size>
We have lived with the Iraq war for more than five years. It was our view in early 2002 that a U.S. invasion of Iraq was inevitable. We did not believe the invasion had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — which with others we believed were under development in Iraq. The motivation for the war, as we wrote, had to do with forcing Saudi Arabia to become more cooperative in the fight against al Qaeda by demonstrating that the United States actually was prepared to go to extreme measures. The United States invaded to change the psychology of the region, which had a low regard for American power. It also invaded to occupy the most strategic country in the Middle East, one that bordered seven other key countries.
Our view was that the Bush administration would go to war in Iraq not because it saw it as a great idea, but because its options were to go on the defensive against al Qaeda and wait for the next attack or take the best of a bad lot of offensive actions. The second option consisted of trying to create what we called the “coalition of the coerced,” Islamic countries prepared to cooperate in the covert war against al Qaeda. Fighting in Afghanistan was merely a holding action that alone would solve nothing. So lacking good options, the administration chose the best of a bad lot.
The administration certainly lied about its reasons for going into Iraq. But then FDR certainly lied about planning for involvement in World War II, John Kennedy lied about whether he had traded missiles in Turkey for missiles in Cuba and so on. Leaders cannot conduct foreign policy without deception, and frequently the people they deceive are their own publics. This is simply the way things are.
We believed at the time of the invasion that it might prove to be much more difficult and dangerous than proponents expected. Our concern was not about a guerrilla war. Instead, it was about how Saddam Hussein would make a stand in Baghdad, a city of 5 million, forcing the United States into a Stalingrad-style urban meat grinder. That didn’t happen. We underestimated Iraqi thinking. Knowing they could not fight a conventional war against the Americans, they opted instead to decline conventional combat and move to guerrilla warfare instead. We did not expect that.
<font size="4">A Bigger Challenge Than Expected</font size>
That this was planned is obvious to us. On April 13, 2003, we noted what appeared to be an organized resistance group carrying out bombings. Organizing such attacks so quickly indicated to us that the operations were planned. Explosives and weapons had been hidden, command and control established, attacks and publicity coordinated. These things don’t just happen. Soon after the war, we recognized that the Sunnis in fact had planned a protracted war — just not a conventional one.
Our focus then turned to Washington. Washington had come into the war with a clear expectation that the destruction of the Iraqi army would give the United States a clean slate on which to redraw Iraqi society. Before the war was fought, comparisons were being drawn with the occupation of Japan. The beginnings of the guerrilla operation did not fit into these expectations, so U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the guerrillas as merely the remnants of the Iraqi army — criminals and “dead-enders” — in their last throes. We noted the gap between Washington’s perception of Iraq and what we thought was actually going on.
A perfect storm arose in this gulf. First, no WMD were found. We were as surprised by this as anybody. But for us, this was an intellectual exercise; for the administration, it meant the justification for the war — albeit not the real motive — was very publicly negated. Then, resistance in Iraq to the United States increased after the U.S. president declared final victory. And finally, attempts at redrawing Iraqi society as a symbol of American power in the Islamic world came apart, a combination of the guerrilla war and lack of preparation plus purging the Baathists. In sum, reshaping a society proved more daunting than expected just as the administration’s credibility cracked over the WMD issue.
<font size="4">A More Complex Game</font size>
By 2004, the United States had entered a new phase. Rather than simply allowing the Shia to create a national government, the United States began playing a complex and not always clear game of trying to bring the Sunnis into the political process while simultaneously waging war against them. The Iranians used their influence among the Shia to further destabilize the U.S. position. Having encouraged the United States to depose its enemy, Saddam Hussein, Tehran now wanted Washington to leave and allow Iran to dominate Iraq.
The United States couldn’t leave Iraq but had no strategy for staying. Stratfor’s view from 2004 was that the military option in Iraq had failed. The United States did not have the force to impose its will on the various parties in Iraq. The only solution was a political accommodation with Iran. We noted a range of conversations with Iran, but also noted that the Iranians were not convinced that they had to deal with the Americans. Given the military circumstance, the Americans would leave anyway and Iran would inherit Iraq.
Stratfor became more and more pessimistic about the American position in 2006, believing that no military solution was possible, and that a political solution — particularly following the Democratic victory in 2006 congressional elections — would further convince the Iranians to be intransigent. The deal that we had seen emerging over the summer of 2006 after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, was collapsing.
<font size="4">The Surge</font size>
We were taken by surprise by U.S. President George W. Bush’s response to the elections. Rather than beginning a withdrawal, he initiated the surge. While the number of troops committed to Iraq was relatively small, and its military impact minimal, the psychological shock was enormous. The Iranian assumption about the withdrawal of U.S. forces collapsed, forcing Tehran to reconsider its position. An essential part of the surge — not fully visible at the beginning — was that it was more a political plan than a military one. While increased operations took place, the Americans reached out to the Sunni leadership, splitting them off from foreign jihadists and strengthening them against the Shia.
Coupled with increasingly bellicose threats against Iran, this created a sense of increasing concern in Tehran. The Iranians responded by taking Muqtada al-Sadr to Iran and fragmenting his army. This led to a dramatic decline in the civil war between Shia and Sunni and in turn led to the current decline in violence.
The war — or at least Stratfor’s view of it — thus went through four phases:
- Winter 2002-March 2003: The period that began with the run-up to invasion, in which the administration chose the best of a bad set of choices and then became overly optimistic about the war’s outcome.
- April 2003-Summer 2003: The period in which the insurgency developed and the administration failed to respond.
- Fall 2003-late 2006: The period in which the United States fought a multisided war with insufficient forces and a parallel political process that didn’t match the reality on the ground.
- Late 2006 to the present: The period known as the surge, in which military operations and political processes were aligned, leading to a working alliance with the Sunnis and the fragmentation of the Shia. This period included the Iranians restraining their Shiite supporters and the United States removing the threat of war against Iran through the National Intelligence Estimate.
The key moment in the war occurred between May 2003 and July 2003. This consisted of the U.S. failure to recognize that an insurgency in the Sunni community had begun and its delay in developing a rapid and effective response, creating the third phase — namely, the long, grueling period in which combat operations were launched, casualties were incurred and imposed, but the ability to move toward a resolution was completely absent. It is unclear whether a more prompt response by the Bush administration during the second period could have avoided the third period, but the second period certainly was the only point during which the war could have been brought under control.
The operation carried out under Gen. David Petraeus, combining military and political processes, has been a surprise, at least to us. Meanwhile, the U.S. rapprochement with the Sunnis that began quietly in Anbar province spiraled into something far more effective than we had imagined. It has been much more successful than we had imagined in part because we did not believe Washington was prepared for such a systematic and complex operation that was primarily political in nature. It is also unclear if the operation will succeed. Its future still depends on the actions of the Iraqi Shia, and these actions in turn depend on Iran.
<font size="4">The Endgame</font size>
We have been focused on the U.S.-Iranian talks for quite awhile. We continue to believe this is a critical piece in any endgame. The United States is now providing an alternative scenario designed to be utterly frightening to the Iranians. They are arming and training the Iranians’ mortal enemies: the Sunnis who led the war against Iran from 1980 to 1988. That rearming is getting very serious indeed. Sunni units outside the aegis of the Iraqi military are now some of the most heavily armed Iraqis in Anbar, thanks to the Sunni relationship with U.S. forces there. It should be remembered that the Sunnis ruled Iraq because the Iraqi Shia were fragmented, fighting among themselves and therefore weak. That underlying reality remains true. A cohesive Sunni community armed and backed by the American s will be a formidable force. That threat is the best way to bring the Iranians to the table.
The irony is that the war is now focused on empowering the very people the war was fought against: the Iraqi Sunnis. In a sense, it is at least a partial return to the status quo ante bellum. In that sense, one could argue the war was a massive mistake. At the same time, we constantly return to this question: We know what everyone would not have done in 2003; we are curious about what everyone would have done then. Afghanistan was an illusory option. The real choices were to try to block al Qaeda defensively or to coerce Islamic intelligence services to provide the United States with needed intelligence. By appearing to be a dangerous and uncontrolled power rampaging in the most strategic country in the region, the United States reshaped the political decisions countries like Saudi Arabia were making.
This all came at a price that few of us would have imagined five years ago. Cheney is saying it was worth it. Clinton is saying it was not. Stratfor’s view is that what happened had to happen given the lack of choices. But Rumsfeld’s unwillingness to recognize that a guerrilla war had broken out and provide more and appropriate forces to wage that war did not have to happen. There alone we think history might have changed. Perhaps.
Tell George what you think[/hide]
Mission Still Not Accomplished
It seems like Bush can't convince ANYONE of the success of his Mideast policy. I wish the media had been so realistic and critical before the war started.
Mission Still Not Accomplished
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 20 March 2008
It has been five years since the United States invaded Iraq and the world watched in horror as what seemed like a swift victory by modern soldiers and 21st-century weapons became a nightmare of spiraling violence, sectarian warfare, insurgency, roadside bombings and ghastly executions. Iraq's economy was destroyed, and America's reputation was shredded in the torture rooms of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prisons.
These were hard and very costly lessons for a country that had emerged from the cold war as the world's sole remaining superpower. Shockingly, President Bush seems to have learned none of them.
In a speech on Wednesday, the start of the war's sixth year, Mr. Bush was stuck in the Neverland of his "Mission Accomplished" speech. In his mind's eye, the invasion was a "remarkable display of military effectiveness" that will be studied for generations. The war has placed the nation on the brink of a great "strategic victory" in Iraq and against terrorists the world over.
Even now, Mr. Bush talks of Iraqi troops who "took off their uniforms and faded into the countryside to fight the emergence of a free Iraq" - when everyone knows that the American pro-consul, L. Paul Bremer III, overrode Mr. Bush's national security team and, with the president's blessing, made the catastrophically bad decision to disband the Iraqi Army and police force.
Mr. Bush wants Americans to believe that Iraq was on the verge of "full-blown sectarian warfare" when he boldly ordered an escalation of forces around Baghdad last year. In fact, sectarian warfare was raging for months while Mr. Bush refused to listen to the generals, who wanted a new military approach, or to the vast majority of Americans, who just wanted him to end the war.
All evidence to the contrary, Mr. Bush is still trying to make it seem as if Al Qaeda in Iraq was connected to the Al Qaeda that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001. He tried to justify an unjustifiable war by ticking off benefits of deposing Saddam Hussein, but he somehow managed to forget the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Vice President Dick Cheney was equally deep in denial on Monday when he declared at a news conference in Baghdad that it has all been "well worth the effort."
Tell that to the families of nearly 4,000 Americans who have been killed - far too many of them because Mr. Bush and his arrogantly incompetent secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, failed to plan for an insurgency that many others saw coming. Thousands more Americans have been wounded and deprived of adequate post-conflict care while Iraqis have died by the tens of thousands. More than five million have been driven from their homes.
Add in a cost to the United States that some say could exceed $3 trillion, the new political opening created for Iran, the incalculable damage to America's reputation and the havoc wreaked on Iraqi society. Few lament Saddam Hussein's passing, but the war has left Iraq a broken country, made the United States more vulnerable, not safer, and stretched the American military to a point that compromises its ability to fight elsewhere.
The increase in American forces last year initially produced a steep decline in insurgent attacks. But the conflict has drifted into a stalemate with the levels of violence remaining constant, and unacceptably high, from November 2007 through early 2008, according to a Government Accountability Office report. As Mr. Cheney visited Iraq, a bombing killed 43 people.
One of the cruelest ironies is that Iraqis have not taken advantage of the American troop surge, which was intended to create space for them to resolve their political differences. After much foot-dragging, they passed a 2008 budget and a law granting amnesty to thousands of Sunnis and others in Iraqi jails. But a law on sharing oil wealth is stalled and one aimed at allowing former Baathist Party members back into government may actually drive many out. Another bill, mandating provincial elections by October, was passed by Parliament, then vetoed by the Presidency Council of Iraq's top leaders. Only after pressure from Mr. Cheney was it suddenly revived.
The plight of Iraqis uprooted by violence is further proof of how broken the country is. Some 2.7 million Iraqis are displaced internally and another 2.4 million have fled as refugees, mostly to Syria and Jordan. That's nearly 20 percent of Iraq's prewar population - the kind of inconvenient truth the Bush administration would rather ignore.
Although thousands of refugees returned to Iraq last year, most ended up leaving again because they did not feel secure. American, Iraqi and international aid to Iraqi refugees is insufficient, and many refugees, their savings depleted and barred from most jobs, are despairing, aid workers say. No one knows when - or if - they can ever return. Syria and Jordan generously allowed Iraqis in, but the huge numbers could destabilize both countries and fuel anti-America resentment.
The United States agreed to admit a paltry 12,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal year 2008; so far, only 2,000 have been processed.
Brighter spots - Iraq's economy is projected to grow 7 percent this year - are offset by problems: millions of Iraqis still don't have clean water and medical care, thousands are jobless and the Iraqi Army, while improving, cannot defend the country on its own.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney refuse to let these facts interfere with their benighted notion of keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely and insisting that Iraq - not Afghanistan and Pakistan where Al Qaeda and the Taliban have gained ground - must remain America's top priority.
It was clear long ago that Mr. Bush had no plan for victory, only a plan for handing this mess to his successor. Americans need to choose a president with the vision to end this war as cleanly as possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20thu1.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
It seems like Bush can't convince ANYONE of the success of his Mideast policy. I wish the media had been so realistic and critical before the war started.
Mission Still Not Accomplished
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 20 March 2008
It has been five years since the United States invaded Iraq and the world watched in horror as what seemed like a swift victory by modern soldiers and 21st-century weapons became a nightmare of spiraling violence, sectarian warfare, insurgency, roadside bombings and ghastly executions. Iraq's economy was destroyed, and America's reputation was shredded in the torture rooms of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prisons.
These were hard and very costly lessons for a country that had emerged from the cold war as the world's sole remaining superpower. Shockingly, President Bush seems to have learned none of them.
In a speech on Wednesday, the start of the war's sixth year, Mr. Bush was stuck in the Neverland of his "Mission Accomplished" speech. In his mind's eye, the invasion was a "remarkable display of military effectiveness" that will be studied for generations. The war has placed the nation on the brink of a great "strategic victory" in Iraq and against terrorists the world over.
Even now, Mr. Bush talks of Iraqi troops who "took off their uniforms and faded into the countryside to fight the emergence of a free Iraq" - when everyone knows that the American pro-consul, L. Paul Bremer III, overrode Mr. Bush's national security team and, with the president's blessing, made the catastrophically bad decision to disband the Iraqi Army and police force.
Mr. Bush wants Americans to believe that Iraq was on the verge of "full-blown sectarian warfare" when he boldly ordered an escalation of forces around Baghdad last year. In fact, sectarian warfare was raging for months while Mr. Bush refused to listen to the generals, who wanted a new military approach, or to the vast majority of Americans, who just wanted him to end the war.
All evidence to the contrary, Mr. Bush is still trying to make it seem as if Al Qaeda in Iraq was connected to the Al Qaeda that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001. He tried to justify an unjustifiable war by ticking off benefits of deposing Saddam Hussein, but he somehow managed to forget the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Vice President Dick Cheney was equally deep in denial on Monday when he declared at a news conference in Baghdad that it has all been "well worth the effort."
Tell that to the families of nearly 4,000 Americans who have been killed - far too many of them because Mr. Bush and his arrogantly incompetent secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, failed to plan for an insurgency that many others saw coming. Thousands more Americans have been wounded and deprived of adequate post-conflict care while Iraqis have died by the tens of thousands. More than five million have been driven from their homes.
Add in a cost to the United States that some say could exceed $3 trillion, the new political opening created for Iran, the incalculable damage to America's reputation and the havoc wreaked on Iraqi society. Few lament Saddam Hussein's passing, but the war has left Iraq a broken country, made the United States more vulnerable, not safer, and stretched the American military to a point that compromises its ability to fight elsewhere.
The increase in American forces last year initially produced a steep decline in insurgent attacks. But the conflict has drifted into a stalemate with the levels of violence remaining constant, and unacceptably high, from November 2007 through early 2008, according to a Government Accountability Office report. As Mr. Cheney visited Iraq, a bombing killed 43 people.
One of the cruelest ironies is that Iraqis have not taken advantage of the American troop surge, which was intended to create space for them to resolve their political differences. After much foot-dragging, they passed a 2008 budget and a law granting amnesty to thousands of Sunnis and others in Iraqi jails. But a law on sharing oil wealth is stalled and one aimed at allowing former Baathist Party members back into government may actually drive many out. Another bill, mandating provincial elections by October, was passed by Parliament, then vetoed by the Presidency Council of Iraq's top leaders. Only after pressure from Mr. Cheney was it suddenly revived.
The plight of Iraqis uprooted by violence is further proof of how broken the country is. Some 2.7 million Iraqis are displaced internally and another 2.4 million have fled as refugees, mostly to Syria and Jordan. That's nearly 20 percent of Iraq's prewar population - the kind of inconvenient truth the Bush administration would rather ignore.
Although thousands of refugees returned to Iraq last year, most ended up leaving again because they did not feel secure. American, Iraqi and international aid to Iraqi refugees is insufficient, and many refugees, their savings depleted and barred from most jobs, are despairing, aid workers say. No one knows when - or if - they can ever return. Syria and Jordan generously allowed Iraqis in, but the huge numbers could destabilize both countries and fuel anti-America resentment.
The United States agreed to admit a paltry 12,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal year 2008; so far, only 2,000 have been processed.
Brighter spots - Iraq's economy is projected to grow 7 percent this year - are offset by problems: millions of Iraqis still don't have clean water and medical care, thousands are jobless and the Iraqi Army, while improving, cannot defend the country on its own.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney refuse to let these facts interfere with their benighted notion of keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely and insisting that Iraq - not Afghanistan and Pakistan where Al Qaeda and the Taliban have gained ground - must remain America's top priority.
It was clear long ago that Mr. Bush had no plan for victory, only a plan for handing this mess to his successor. Americans need to choose a president with the vision to end this war as cleanly as possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20thu1.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
<font size="5"><center>
In Iraq, a boy named 'War' turns 6</font size></center>
Mohammed Abd Badr and Iman Kahim sit with their son, Harb Zaid, who was born on
the day of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
McClatchy Newspapers
By Leila Fadel
Thursday, March 19, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iman Kadhim felt the contractions at 2 a.m. on March 20, 2003. The streets of Baghdad were deserted; people cowered in their homes awaiting the threatened U.S. invasion. But the baby wasn't going to wait.
A neighbor with a car gave Iman and her husband a ride to the hospital from their southern Baghdad neighborhood.
Nothing was easy that night. Kadhim heard the baby's first cry before dawn and held him in her arms. Then they heard the first explosions that heralded the arrival of the U.S. military.
She named him Harb, Arabic for war. His full name, Harb Zaid, translates as Zaid's War.
Neighbors joked that the child named War would only bring damar, or destruction. She worried about him, the boy with a difficult name and an uncertain future.
"I was scared. We didn't know how our life would go forward," she said in her small home in New Baghdad. "We didn't know the future."
War's six years have been scarred by violence — bombings in marketplaces, a foreign occupation, roadside bombs, sectarian killings, massive displacement and flight and a new — and often broken — political system.
On his birthday and the anniversary of the Iraq war, Iman's uncertainty about the future remains that of six years ago. No one knows the future of the nation or War's.
The tension has eased a little, however. The family has taken to calling the little boy with black eyes and a shy demeanor Taqawi, a nickname that has no burdensome meaning. It has no meaning at all, really. His older brother called him Taqawi one day and the nickname stuck.
It's enough that the reminders of war are right outside their door: the rusted coils of concertina wire that snake through the city, the high concrete walls that divide and contain neighborhoods to protect the population, the bullet scarred buildings and the Humvees of the Iraqi and American armies.
War wears Spider-Man T-shirts and loves soccer. But the dangers outside his parents' home often force him to stay inside, where he's glued to a computer screen.
His favorite game is "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." He hijacks cars, steals motorcycles, shoots pedestrians and runs over bystanders on the street. Digital blood seeps from the bodies.
Most 6-year-olds aren't allowed to play "Grand Theft Auto." It's too graphic. But War has seen real blood.
In 2006 he went with his brother to pick up kebabs when an explosion tore through the market. People ran from the bakery next door burning alive. But he wasn't scared, he said.
His father ran to the market when he heard the blast, barefoot and frightened. A neighbor saw the two boys and pulled them away from the carnage.
War recounted the tale to his father, Mohammed Abd Badr, without a trace of fear.
That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.
They left him on the street and drove away. It was one of thousands of killings by street militias at the height of sectarian violence. The body was one of many that littered the streets like garbage in 2006 and 2007. Often, 50 bodies were found a day.
Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.
War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.
"What are you doing?" his father asked, running up to the little boy.
"Look baba," he said. "Poor man."
He's seen things a child should never see.
His parents try to protect him, but he asks questions.
"If he sees a man with a gun, he asks if he's going to kill someone," Iman, his mother, said as she baked bread in her home. "I don't know yet how it is going to affect him."
She looked at her son and held her daughter, not yet 2, in her arms.
"Our life is destruction, on top of destruction," she said.
The U.S. military is supposed to draw down its forces in Iraq in the next two years, and it will be a new chapter in War's life.
"The world is scary," his mother said. "They are children."
On a recent afternoon, War couldn't play outside.
"We're worried about kidnappings. His dad won't let him out," she said.
War has never been to a playground and never been on a picnic. He's never been on a ride at an amusement park.
"He always asks to go out," his mother said. "He tells me, 'We haven't seen anything in our lives. Why are we like prisoners in our house?'"
Today, War turns 6. He's never had a birthday party.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/64196.html
In Iraq, a boy named 'War' turns 6</font size></center>
Mohammed Abd Badr and Iman Kahim sit with their son, Harb Zaid, who was born on
the day of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
McClatchy Newspapers
By Leila Fadel
Thursday, March 19, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iman Kadhim felt the contractions at 2 a.m. on March 20, 2003. The streets of Baghdad were deserted; people cowered in their homes awaiting the threatened U.S. invasion. But the baby wasn't going to wait.
A neighbor with a car gave Iman and her husband a ride to the hospital from their southern Baghdad neighborhood.
Nothing was easy that night. Kadhim heard the baby's first cry before dawn and held him in her arms. Then they heard the first explosions that heralded the arrival of the U.S. military.
She named him Harb, Arabic for war. His full name, Harb Zaid, translates as Zaid's War.
Neighbors joked that the child named War would only bring damar, or destruction. She worried about him, the boy with a difficult name and an uncertain future.
"I was scared. We didn't know how our life would go forward," she said in her small home in New Baghdad. "We didn't know the future."
War's six years have been scarred by violence — bombings in marketplaces, a foreign occupation, roadside bombs, sectarian killings, massive displacement and flight and a new — and often broken — political system.
On his birthday and the anniversary of the Iraq war, Iman's uncertainty about the future remains that of six years ago. No one knows the future of the nation or War's.
The tension has eased a little, however. The family has taken to calling the little boy with black eyes and a shy demeanor Taqawi, a nickname that has no burdensome meaning. It has no meaning at all, really. His older brother called him Taqawi one day and the nickname stuck.
It's enough that the reminders of war are right outside their door: the rusted coils of concertina wire that snake through the city, the high concrete walls that divide and contain neighborhoods to protect the population, the bullet scarred buildings and the Humvees of the Iraqi and American armies.
War wears Spider-Man T-shirts and loves soccer. But the dangers outside his parents' home often force him to stay inside, where he's glued to a computer screen.
His favorite game is "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." He hijacks cars, steals motorcycles, shoots pedestrians and runs over bystanders on the street. Digital blood seeps from the bodies.
Most 6-year-olds aren't allowed to play "Grand Theft Auto." It's too graphic. But War has seen real blood.
In 2006 he went with his brother to pick up kebabs when an explosion tore through the market. People ran from the bakery next door burning alive. But he wasn't scared, he said.
His father ran to the market when he heard the blast, barefoot and frightened. A neighbor saw the two boys and pulled them away from the carnage.
War recounted the tale to his father, Mohammed Abd Badr, without a trace of fear.
That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.
They left him on the street and drove away. It was one of thousands of killings by street militias at the height of sectarian violence. The body was one of many that littered the streets like garbage in 2006 and 2007. Often, 50 bodies were found a day.
Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.
War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.
"What are you doing?" his father asked, running up to the little boy.
"Look baba," he said. "Poor man."
He's seen things a child should never see.
His parents try to protect him, but he asks questions.
"If he sees a man with a gun, he asks if he's going to kill someone," Iman, his mother, said as she baked bread in her home. "I don't know yet how it is going to affect him."
She looked at her son and held her daughter, not yet 2, in her arms.
"Our life is destruction, on top of destruction," she said.
The U.S. military is supposed to draw down its forces in Iraq in the next two years, and it will be a new chapter in War's life.
"The world is scary," his mother said. "They are children."
On a recent afternoon, War couldn't play outside.
"We're worried about kidnappings. His dad won't let him out," she said.
War has never been to a playground and never been on a picnic. He's never been on a ride at an amusement park.
"He always asks to go out," his mother said. "He tells me, 'We haven't seen anything in our lives. Why are we like prisoners in our house?'"
Today, War turns 6. He's never had a birthday party.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/64196.html
