July 14, 2007
How Goes the War? VI Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked for my opinion of J.D. Johannes’s assessment of the Iraq war posted at Tech Central Station. The article asserts that “June 2007 saw a dramatic turnaround in our military fortunes, with the insurgents in headlong retreat in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diayala. But Al Qaeda continued to dominate its chosen battlefield: America’s living rooms.” I think there has indeed been good news in Anbar, as well as a fall in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad, and there is some evidence that the pattern in Anbar has repeated itself in a smaller way in some other places. Reducing Iraqi fatalities through more aggressive American action against insurgents in Baghdad does mean that American casualties have risen, although it would be strange to cite increasing American casualties as in themselves proof that the American effort is failing, when they are just as likely to be proof of the opposite. There is, unfortunately, some reason to doubt that the good news in Anbar will soon be repeated over most of Iraq. In Anbar province Sunni Arab militias now calling themselves the Anbar Salvation Council, which had once been the backbone of the insurgency, have recently turned on AIQ (Al Qaeda in Iraq) elements, and are now (to a degree) cooperating with American forces, although not with the elected Iraqi government, which is at best uneasy about the new American strategy in Anbar. There are similar trends in other regions—for example, Ninevah and Salahaddin—but all of these areas are dominated by Sunni Arabs, where there is less potential for protracted sectarian conflict than in more mixed regions, hence fewer Shiite reprisals for AIQ atrocities, and hence a smaller temptation for Sunni Arabas to look to AIQ atrocities as legitimate and necessary deterrents to Shiite actions. A sustained decrease in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad requires either a sustained increase in the numbers of American troops fighting there or significant numbers of reliable and competent Iraqi national forces augmenting those American troops, and neither of those outcomes is anything like certain; given U.S. manpower constraints, a sustained increase in U.S. troop numbers actively engaged Baghdad seems particularly unlikely, and there are no greatly encouraging results in our efforts to produce larger numbers of reliable Iraqi national forces. But good news is not bad news, and there has been some good military news from Iraq. Mr. Johannes also argues that most Americans do not know the extent of the good news, that media coverage of the war is the source of their ignorance, and that creating an impression of an inevitable insurgent victory is a crucial part of insurgent strategy. The first two assertions may be true, and the third is certainly true. As a general rule, I think it is hard to evaluate reports of progress or failure coming out of Iraq, because it is hard to tell how representative or even accurate any piece of news may be, and most observers appear to have a tendency to use news to confirm preexisting views. Impassioned partisans rarely give evidence a cool and disinterested examination, and this may be particularly true for wars. Are opponents of this war wishing for an American defeat, as Mr. Gordon suggests? In a very few cases, certainly: if you read (for example) the Guardian and The Nation, you can find a few such people, and if you read more widely, you can find more. But most American opponents of the war are not, in my opinion, consciously hoping for an American defeat; rather, they cannot (and in most cases could never) imagine any good outcome to the use of American force in Iraq. They urge actions that will make defeat certain in the belief that they are cutting short the duration of what they take to be at best an American tragedy, easily persuading themselves that they are doing the Iraqis no great harm, since the American military presence is simply assumed to be making things worse. I think there is very little clear and indisputable evidence for that latter proposition, so the question is what men and women are thinking when they choose to consider uncontestable a likely absurdity. I shall not try to answer that question here. In the case of American journalists who have been embedded with military units in Iraq, or Americans who are in Iraq for other purposes—I know some, and have read others—in my experience their reports are sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging, but almost always reports on a small and possibly unrepresentative piece of the war, or the country, and reporters and other observers are subject to their own momentary hopes and despairs. It is notoriously hard to judge the progress of a counterinsurgency campaign in the middle of things. Successful counterinsurgency campaigns tend to take a long time—consider the British victory over the Provisional IRA (1969–1997), or the campaign in Dhofar (1962–1976), or the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), or the Second Malayan Emergency (1967–1989), etc. There may be no indisputable progress for long periods of time, but the fact remains that most insurgencies fail. In Iraq, the chances for an AIQ victory are derisory, and the chances for a neo-Baathist or other Sunni Arab recapture of a unified Iraqi state also look derisory. We may lose in Iraq, but our most militant and brutal adversaries are also likely to lose, along with many (maybe all) other Iraqis. In any case, the modest good military news from Iraq coincides with some bad political news from both Iraq and the United States. In Iraq, the factions within the government seem deadlocked on the measures many American observers have decided are to be the benchmarks of progress in Iraq. If these benchmarks are not met, further pressure will build for a withdrawal of American forces, and they may carry the day. The leaders of all Iraqi factions (other than AIQ) seem to agree that a withdrawal anytime soon would be a disaster, but that does not seem to have spurred too much willingness to compromise, or made too much of an impression on the American Congress, or on the editorial writers of most of the papers I read. With respect to the question of whether people who have lost children in a war have any special claim on our deference to their views of that war: I do not think they do. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., lost a son in a war he detested; both my grandfathers had sons survive that same war, which they supported. I do not think I need defer to JFK’s father over my own grandfathers when judging the merits of the Second World War. Similarly, I have the impression that support for the war in Iraq tends to be higher among people with children bearing arms there than among those with no children at risk, and if this is no longer true it has certainly been the case until quite recently. This pattern does not mean that opponents of the war would have been obliged to suspend their own judgment because they did not have sons and daughters at immediate risk. Mr. Gordon also writes that “for better or worse, we started a war in Iraq and now must deal with the consequences of that action . . . what we should have done or not done in 2003 is one question and what we should do in 2007 is entirely another. In July 2007 the only alternative to war is not peace. It is catastrophic defeat.” On this particular issue, I think Mr. Gordon has a very good case.
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