Irish Trojan in Tennessee

On the surge

By Brendan Loy

Ross Douthat has a good post about Iraq and the surge.

Hope for Iraq

By Brendan Loy

Optimism about Iraq: it's not just for neocons anymore! From this week's issue of The Economist:

After all the blood and blunders, people are right to be sceptical when good news is announced from Iraq. Yet it is now plain that over the past several months, while Americans have been distracted by their presidential primaries, many things in Iraq have at long last started to go right.

This improvement goes beyond the fall in killing that followed General David Petraeus's “surge”. Iraq's government has gained in stature and confidence. Thanks to soaring oil prices it is flush with money. It is standing up to Iraq's assorted militias and asserting its independence from both America and Iran. The overlapping wars—Sunni against American, Sunni against Shia and Shia against Shia—that harrowed Iraq after the invasion of 2003 have abated. The country no longer looks in imminent danger of flying apart or falling into everlasting anarchy. In September 2007 this newspaper supported the surge not because we had faith in Iraq but only in the desperate hope that the surge might stop what was already a bloodbath from becoming even worse (see article). The situation now is different: Iraq is still a mess, but something approaching a normal future for its people is beginning to look achievable.

The article proceeds to explain the improvements in greater detail, and then concludes:

In highlighting the improved conditions in Iraq we do not mean to justify The Economist's support of the invasion of 2003 (see article). Too many lives have been shattered for that. History will still record that the invasion and occupation have been a debacle. Iraqis even now live under daily threat of violent death: hundreds are killed each month. They remain woefully short of the necessities of life, such as jobs, clean water and electricity. Iraq's government is gaining confidence faster than competence. It is still fractious, and in many places corrupt.

Nor does it follow that a turn for the better necessarily validates John McCain's insistence on America staying indefinitely. A safer Iraq might make Barack Obama's plan to pull out most American troops within 16 months more feasible, though at the moment a precipitate withdrawal looks foolish. But to guard the fragile improvements, the key for America must be flexibility. Both candidates have to keep their options open. If America's next president gets Iraq wrong because he has boxed himself in during the campaign, all the recent gains may be squandered and Iraq will slide swiftly back into misery and despair. That would be to fail twice over.

More from The Economist here and here. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Victory in sight?

By Brendan Loy

Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War, and Frederick Kagan, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, claim in the WSJ:

America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The "near-strategic defeat" of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government's security forces over illegal Shiite militias, including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the political process builds momentum.

These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.

(Hat tip: Youngblai.) I have no idea whether the Kagans are correct, but in general, the problem with claims like theirs is one of credibility: back in 2006, most folks on the Right did not contemporaneously admit that we were "unequivocally losing in Iraq," so it's hard to know how much credence to lend to their claims now. (Honest query: I'd be curious if somebody can find an example of the Kagans bucking this trend back in '06, and forthrightly admitting then that we were losing. Maybe they did; I have no idea. But many conservatives -- and administration officials -- didn't.)

Listening to a hawkish conservative who always claimed we were winning say, "we were losing then, but we're winning now," is sort of like listening to a far-left liberal who opposed the war in Afghanistan say, "we should have stayed out of Iraq and focused on Afghanistan." Maybe they're right, but they have no credibility saying it!

Actually, though, the former example is arguably worse than the latter one, because whereas a lefty who rallies 'round a war he opposed is making a self-contradicting statement of opinion, a hawk who rewrites the war's history is making a self-contradicting statement of fact. And, as the saying goes, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but nobody's entitled to their own facts.

That's what makes this Iraq debate so frustrating for someone like me -- someone who is by no means an expert on what's happening in Iraq, but who wants to support the right course of action based on sound
reasoning and properly understood facts. Both sides are so committed to their ideological preconceptions that it's seemingly impossible for them to agree on what the facts are. The Left will claim we're losing, or are inevitably bound to lose, and must therefore get out, whether that's factually true or not; and the Right will claim that we're winning, and can succeed if only we keep at it for a little longer, and must therefore stay the course, whether that's factually true or not.

For many on both sides, I think, it's past the point of being dishonest: they're so committed to their argument that they convince themselves to honestly believe their version of reality. One of the reasons I'm undecided between Obama and McCain is because I feel like I'm choosing between these two camps, both of which have ideological blinders on, which is not exactly an appealing choice -- and meanwhile, I don't have the requisite information to decide whose preconceptions are closer to the truth, largely because I don't trust either side to present that information accurately! Nor do I trust the liberal media, or the conservative media, or the right-blogosphere, or the left-blogosphere. On this issue, it seems like everybody has an agenda.

What are the actual facts? Are we winning or losing? Is there a reasonable hope of genuine success in building a reasonably stable and at least somewhat democratic Iraq, or are we just wasting our time on a quixotic and unsustainable effort to do so, and suffering needless losses in the process? If we leave, will things get better or worse -- and if worse, how much worse? The "facts on the ground" that would help answer these questions are absolutely essential pieces of information for any rational decision-maker, yet they get lost in the fog of war -- and, perhaps more pertinently, of politics. Argh.

Bush lied!

By Brendan Loy

Or not.

McCain: Let's go to Mars

By Brendan Loy

In an obvious and blatant attempt to shore up the crucial Space-Obsessed Law Professors With Highly Trafficked Blogs voting bloc, John McCain said yesterday he would like to put a man on Mars.

Sounds good to me, but what I want to know is, will we do the other things?

P.S. In other John McCain-related news, he's apparently trying to fight off the "age issue" by making references that the youngsters of today will understand -- like, for instance, comparing Obama to William Jennings Bryan.

The year was eighteen ninety-six, and John McCain was just sixteen...

:)

P.P.S. And yet more McCain-related news: he's released his first general-election ad, in which he states: "Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war. ... I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are."

TPM's Greg Sargent says "McCain is using his bio to achieve separation from George W. Bush," suggesting that "even if he's continuing Bush's war policies, he's different from Dubya in that he understands the costs in a way that Bush never did." The subtext, Sargent writes, is: "Even if that reckless chicken-hawk took us to war, someone who actually understands and has experienced the costs of war -- someone you can actually believe -- is here to tell you that we must continue it."

So, to review: John McCain hates war, yet he wants to send a man to Mars, a planet which is named after... war. :)

UPDATE: Glenn links here, and says of my above joke, "somehow the Obama backers manage to make everything about Iraq... Heh." Hey, now! What's this about "Obama backers"? I know it might be hard to believe, given my blog's recent focus, but I repeat:

I am undecided. In fact, if you put a gun to my head right now and made me choose, I think -- *think* -- I'd vote for McCain. But it's really entirely up in the air how I'll vote in November. I like and admire Obama, but that doesn't mean I think he'd make the best president. The best Democratic nominee, yes, but that's only because his opponent is such a lying, conniving, deceitful [bad word]. Against McCain, he doesn't have such an obvious "character" advantage (both candidates are, as best as I can tell, generally good, decent and honest, though of course not pure or perfect), and I'm not at all sure who I think is, on balance, better on policy.

If that confuses you, consider this: "The portion of my brain that views politics as a sport can't help 'rooting' for Obama (he's exciting! he's inspiring! he's shiny!), [but] the rational part of my brain, which governs my actual vote, is totally undecided between Obama and McCain." Obama is the scrappy mid-major going up against the staid, boring, established program; he's Boise State against Oklahoma ("They said this day would never come: a WAC team in a BCS bowl! Yes, we can!"), he's Appalachian State against Michigan, he's Davidson against Kansas. Or, as McCain might prefer to say, he's Hawaii against Georgia. :) The point is, he's fun to root for, and that fact bleeds over into my blog coverage. (Also, my blog coverage has just been generally Dem-dominated because that contest has been much more exciting since late January.) Moreover, it's fun to poke fun at John McCain because, you know, he's old. (In fairness, I've also poked fun at Obama for being messianic and cultish. Whee, humor is fun!) But none of that necessarily means that I support Obama, because in the end, politics isn't a sport, and voting isn't about "rooting" or making jokes, it's about deciding the future of the country. So yes, I'm undecided. Really.

P.P.P.S. Speaking of the Red Planet, Andrew Sullivan this morning posted a picture from 2005 of Sunset on Mars. He should have included it in his "The View From Your Window" series!

Invade Burma?

By Brendan Loy

Last weekend, there was an interesting discussion in comments here on the blog about the merits of forcably bringing humanitarian aid to the people of Burma/Myanmar, the junta be damned. Now the New Yorker's George Packer ponders the same question, asking, "Should Burma Be Saved from Itself?" He writes:

Forcing the regime to let the rest of the world save its people would have a devastating effect on morale. Burma’s leaders are so isolated and irrational that they actually believe their own propaganda about being the only group that can hold the country together. It’s possible that the junta would collapse out of sheer humiliation. It’s also possible, though it seems unlikely to me, that Burmese military units would be ordered to engage the foreigners. Shots might be fired, people might be killed. No one knows what will happen if British sailors and American airmen arrive on soggy Burmese soil. Hanging over the question is, of course, Iraq. No one expects an intervention to go smoothly anymore; now we expect it to go terribly wrong. I doubt the American, British, French, Australian, and other governments, with or without U.N. consent, will decide to invade Burma with boxes of oral rehydration kits and high-energy biscuits. But if the fear of Baghdad and Falluja is what keeps foreign powers from saving huge numbers of Burmese from their own government’s callousness, that will be one more tragic consequence of the Iraq war.

On the other hand, if it’s going to be done, it should be done quickly. I know all the arguments why we shouldn’t. But there are at least a million counterarguments why we should.

Andrew Sullivan links to Packer's piece, and explicitly jumps on the bandwagon with the title, "Invade Burma, Please." He writes: "A brief, decisive international effort to reach the starving and sick seems important to me. If it helps demystify this vile regime, great. But in its demonstration of humanity, it is also a great way for the US to enhance its soft power in the developing world."

Discuss.

P.S. Meanwhile, Dr. Jeff Masters notes that the seasonal monsoon rains are rapidly approaching the Irrawaddy Delta.

With "analysts" like these...

By Brendan Loy

...who needs P.R. hacks?

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. ...

[C]ollectively, the...several dozen...military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. ...

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

(Hat tip: copndor.)

Blogger-soldier dies in Iraq

By Brendan Loy

InstaPundit: "BLOGGER ANDREW OLMSTED has died in Iraq. (Via Blackfive). He left a last post for publication in this event; you can leave a note of condolence for his family in the comments, but please, nothing political. Here's his blog, always worth reading."

This is a job for the Army

By JLR

Well, that's what the Marines are saying, anyway.

The spin given by the Corps is that the Army can take care of Iraq, but it's messing up in Afghanistan.  By sending in the Marines, at least they claim, the Marines can help fix up Afghanistan.

The other spin (that is, the antiwar spin) is that Iraq has gotten so bad that the Marines just want out.  I couldn't find a link on that, but I heard this argument on the Bill Press show this morning.

Apparently we've killed some bad guys in Iraq

By Brendan Loy

One of the things that struck me watching the first part of Ken Burns's The War last night on my TiVo was the focus on body counts. Whenever he would talk about a battle in the Pacific, it was always the comparitive body count that seemed to matter most: yeah, we lost X number of men, but the Japanese lost more, so it was a success! And it wasn't just Burns. One of the soldiers he interviewed talked about a failed Japanese ambush on Guadalcanal in which 900+ Japanese soldiers were killed, but only 36 Americans died. "That was really great for morale," the soldier said. And of course, I understand why -- that's a huge victory -- but at the same time, I thought, wow, it really shows how your perspective changes in war. Those 36 dead Americans undoubtedly had good friends in the unit who were devastated to lose them. And yet it was "great" for morale that they were the only ones who died.

With that in mind, I was struck by the top headline in today's issue of USA Today as I walked past a news box in downtown Knoxville this afternoon:

"19,000 militant fatalities since '03." My initial, instinctive reaction upon reading that was: "Really? 19,000? Well, hey, that puts those 3,800 American fatalities in perspective, doesn't it?" To which I think, upon reflection, that the correct answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, this is a very, very different kind of war than the mass-mobilization, fight-to-the-last-man battle that was World War II, so the cruel arithmetic of body counts doesn't have the same significance. Plus, unlike in conventional wars, we have to ask whether our presence in Iraq is breeding anger to such a degree that two new militants are popping up for every militant who dies. (I don't presume to know the answer to that question; I'm just saying it has to be asked.) But on the other hand, it is nice to know that we're more efficient at killing the enemy than they are at killing us. I mean, I think we all suspect that instinctively, but it's nice to have hard numbers to back it up.

Here's the full story. It points out that "U.S. commanders consider the number of enemy deaths a poor measure of progress in an insurgency." I sort of figured that, but even so, seeing the headline got me thinking along lines similar to the question I asked earlier this month in reference to blogger Michael Totten's account of the surge's success: "why aren't we hearing more about this sort of thing?" The subheadline on the USA Today story reads, "Military discloses stats for first time." Well, for heaven's sake, what's taken them so long?

Leaving aside the merits for a moment, and looking at this purely as a P.R. issue, it strikes me as head-smackingly stupid for the Bush Administration to not publicize these numbers. Even if they're not terribly meaningful in reality, an awful lot of people will have the same initial reaction I did -- or perhaps even a more rah-rah version of it, along the lines of Hey! We're kickin' ass! -- and many won't then retreat to the more philosophical "yes and no" answer that I eventually settled on. They'll stick with instinctual "hell yeah!" sort of response. Needless to say, from President Bush's perspective, such reactions are pure gold.

Memo to the Bush Administration: If you want people to support an ongoing war, you need to tell them we're killing the bad guys. It helps with morale. It gives people something to rally around. It prevents them from feeling like the whole effort is pointless and we're just wasting money and lives. Helping the Iraqi people build a stable democracy -- that's a worthy goal, but an esoteric one, hard to wrap your mind around. But killing bad guys: everybody understands that.

Ideally, you'd like to be able to say that we're killing the bad guys more efficiently and consistently than they're killing us. The government understood that in World War II, which is why they initially suppressed the news of how bad the death toll at Pearl Harbor was, and how poorly things were going in some early Pacific battles. They had to lie to rally support. All the Bush Administration needs to do is tell the truth! So what's taken them so long? Why aren't they shouting these numbers from the rooftops?

The article explains that the answer is at least partially a reaction to Vietnam:

The U.S. military rarely discusses the numbers of enemy dead, fearful of raising parallels with the Vietnam War when the U.S. military's reliance on "body counts" led to allegations of inflated figures because of political pressure to show results.

Well, I understand that fear, I guess, but isn't this a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction? Just because you don't want to exaggerate body counts, which I certainly agree with, doesn't mean you shouldn't even release accurate ones! Especially with the media being veritably obsessed with the body count on our side, doesn't it make sense to tell 'em the count on the other side, to provide some context? Yet the military didn't even release this data of its own accord. It was "provided at USA TODAY's request."

Say what you will about the media and its biases, but one thing I know for sure is this: journalists love numbers. You give them a number that quantifies, or purports to quantify, a major news story, and they will report it far and wide. This is a reality that Rudy Giuliani understood when he refused to speculate about the death toll on 9/11, and that Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco and others failed to understand when they shot off their mouths about "10,000 body bags" after Katrina. (Giuliani, like everyone else, probably feared the World Trade Center toll was well into the five digits, but he knew better than to give voice to that fear, since his pessimistic estimate, based on nothing, would have been treated like gospel in the media. Instead, he said the toll would be "more than any of us can bear" -- a pitch-perfect answer, even if it frustrated the number-hungry journos. By contrast, the Louisiana officials had no such self-restraint, and the result was widespread and long-lasting overreporting of Katrina's toll.) Whether they love the war or hate it, the media would report these numbers if the administration was harping on them regularly, and the numbers would provide a valuable counterweight -- in media coverage and public perception, regardless of the realities on the ground -- to the ever-growing, always-heavily-reported "milestones" in the death toll among U.S. soldiers.

I am continually baffled and amazed by this administration's incompetence, not only in mismanaging the war in Iraq, but in mismanaging the propaganda war at home. Good grief.

New dad killed in Iraq one day after his son's birth

By Brendan Loy

This story, out of Hendersonville, Tennessee, is the sort of thing that's liable to make Becky cry these days. Hell, it might make me cry, if I think too hard about it. It's really, really sad. Excerpt:

On Friday, Mrs. Reeves delivered her seven-pound, 14-ounce boy into this world without complications. Soon afterward she phoned Iraq to deliver the happy news. There, Spc. Joshua H. Reeves, her soldier-husband of two years, was stationed with troops from Fort Riley, Kan. ...

One day's joy turned to sorrow on Saturday as a bomb detonated as Joshua Reeves' Humvee drove down a Baghdad street. Leslie Reeves...was still in the hospital with her new baby when she learned she was a widow.

130 degrees? More like 150. Arr.

By Brendan Loy

Aye, it be hot in Iraq, and don't let those bloody MSM scalawags tell y' different! (Tip o' the hat: Cap'n Glenn of the Good Ship InstaPundit.)

CNN Breaking News

By Brendan Loy

President Bush will announce this week plans to cut U.S. troops in Iraq by about 30,000 -- to pre-'surge' levels -- by next summer, a senior administration official confirms to CNN.

The surge is working

By Brendan Loy

John McCain and Joe Lieberman:

The Bush administration clung for too long to a flawed strategy in this war, despite growing evidence of its failure. Now advocates of withdrawal risk making the exact same mistake, by refusing to re-examine their own conviction that Gen. Petraeus's strategy cannot succeed and that the war is "lost," despite rising evidence to the contrary.

The Bush administration finally had the courage to change course in Iraq earlier this year. After hearing from Gen. Petraeus today, we hope congressional opponents of the war will do the same.

Some of that "rising evidence to the contrary" can be found in Michael Totten's absolutely fascinating first-hand account from Ramadi, a city once written off by the Marines as irretrievably lost, but now reclaimed thanks to the surge. It's the most convincing account I've read of the success we're (finally) having in Iraq, and frankly, I don't understand why the hell it's being left to individual conservative bloggers to write accounts like this. Where is the media? Where is the Bush Administration's vaunted propaganda machine? Seriously, why aren't we hearing more about this sort of thing? If we were, I think it would go a long way toward convincing Americans that there actually is a purpose to remaining in Iraq, that there are real, attainable goals we can achieve by continuing the fight -- that we can still win, and that "victory" actually means something real and tangible.

Anyway, whatever you think of the war, Petraeus, or the "surge," Totten's article is excellent and I highly recommend it. (Double hat tip: InstaPundit.)

CORRECTION: In comments, Totten himself writes, "for the record, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative." Well, I for one certainly know what that's like. :) I stand corrected, and I apologize for the error.