whac-a-moliana forever

 

Fineman’s strawman: Dems advocate leaving Iraq “overnight”

Summary: On Countdown, Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman asserted that “[t]he problem that the Democrats have got, indeed, that all America has got, is that having gone into Iraq the way we did, there is, in the opinion of many fair-minded observers, chaos and hell to pay if we get out overnight.” While Fineman did not specify which “Democrats” have advocated withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq “overnight,” Democrats support several plans that call for a “gradual” withdrawal or a “phased redeployment” of U.S. troops from Iraq, with some troops remaining in Iraq for specified missions after the withdrawal of most combat troops.

During the August 26 special edition of Countdown on NBC, Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman asserted that “[t]he problem that the Democrats have got, indeed, that all America has got, is that having gone into Iraq the way we did, there is, in the opinion of many fair-minded observers, chaos and hell to pay if we get out overnight.” While Fineman did not specify which “Democrats” have advocated withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq “overnight,” Media Matters for America has documented that several plans supported by Democrats — including at least one supported by some Republicans — call for a “gradual” withdrawal or a “phased redeployment” of U.S. troops from Iraq, with some troops remaining in Iraq for specified missions after the withdrawal of most combat troops. In addition, Fineman also suggested that only the Democratic “base” favors setting a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, claiming that “[t]he Democrats want to set a deadline for withdrawal because that’s what their base tells them to do.” Yet according to recent polling, a majority of Americans, not just the Democratic “base,” support setting a timetable or deadline for withdrawal.

Regarding Democrats’ plans for withdrawal, the Senate recently debated an amendment to the defense authorization bill — offered by Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI) and Carl Levin (D-MI) — that calls for a “reduction” of U.S forces in Iraq, to begin “not later than 120 days” after the amendment’s enactment, but the amendment also stipulates that the United States maintain a “limited presence” of troops there to protect U.S. and coalition infrastructure, train Iraqi security forces, and conduct counterterrorism operations. The amendment specifies that the transition to this limited presence must be complete by April 30, 2008. A motion to cut off a filibuster of the Levin-Reed proposal (which needed 60 votes to succeed) garnered 52 votes on July 18, including those of Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Chuck Hagel (NE), Gordon Smith (OR), and Olympia Snowe (ME). Moreover, Iraq withdrawal plans from two leading Democratic presidential contenders, Sens. Barack Obama (IL) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY), contain provisions that call for a “retention” and a “limited presence” of U.S. forces, respectively, for counterterrorism operations, force and infrastructure protection, and training Iraqi security forces. Obama’s plan called for the redeployment of troops to occur in “a gradual manner,” while Clinton’s stipulated that the withdrawal should be a “phased redeployment.”

Further, contrary to Fineman’s suggestion that only the Democratic “base” supports setting a timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, recent polling shows that a majority of Americans, a large majority of Democrats, and a large minority of Republicans favor setting a deadline. For example, when asked if Congress should “block all funding for the war in Iraq no matter what,” “allow funding, but only on the condition that the U.S. sets a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,” or “allow all funding for the war without any timetable conditions,” 63 percent of all respondents to a July 20-22 CBS News/New York Times poll said that Congress should fund the war with a timetable for withdrawal. Seventy-six percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans polled favored funding with a timetable. In addition, a July 18-21 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 55 percent of respondents support “legislation that would set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq by next spring.”

From the August 26 special edition of Countdown with Keith Olbermann on NBC:

OLBERMANN: But the purpose of Whac-a-Mole is, at least in Iraq, is to unify Sunni and Shia and everybody else, and then we have this Democratic congresswoman, [Jan] Schakowsky of Illinois, saying she made her first trip to Iraq this month. The deputy prime minister there told her delegation, “There’s not going to be political reconciliation by this September, there’s not going to be political reconciliation by next September.” So is this now — is the American political solution in Iraq a question of just holding positions until the 2008 campaign and the election?

FINEMAN: Well, my sense is — and I’ve covered George Bush for a long time — that his goal is to keep as many American troops in Iraq as long as possible until January 20, 2009, when he leaves office. That’s his goal. The Democrats want to set a deadline for withdrawal because that’s what their base tells them to do. But the fact is that there is going to be no political reconciliation in Iraq because that’s what the National Intelligence Estimate, what the CIA and the other agencies themselves have said.

The problem that the Democrats have got, indeed, that all America has got, is that having gone into Iraq the way we did, there is, in the opinion of many fair-minded observers, chaos and hell to pay if we get out overnight. We can’t do it.

Benjamin J. Armbruster

some recent links

The Iraqis Don’t Deserve Us, So We Betray Them
Robert Fisk

The Real Iraq Progress Report
Robert Scheer

War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities: How Killing Becomes a Reflex
Penny Coleman

Iraqis Find Themselves Caught Between U.S. Troops and “al Qaeda in Iraq”
Ahmed Ali

Seven Iraq Vets: “The War as We Saw It”
Seven U.S. Iraq War Veterans

Muqtada al-Sadr: The British are Retreating From Basra
Nazr Latif, Phil Sands

challenging the generals

Challenging the Generals (excerpt)

By FRED KAPLAN,  August 26, 2007, New York Times

(also see my blog: A Failure in Generalship, April 29th, 2007)

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

Ralph Gibson

Yingling’s article — published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal — noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on obedience and hierarchy. Yet the scene at Fort Knox reflected a brewing conflict between the Army’s junior and senior officer corps — lieutenants and captains on one hand, generals on the other, with majors and colonels (“field-grade officers”) straddling the divide and sometimes taking sides. The cause of this tension is the war in Iraq, but the consequences are broader. They revolve around the obligations of an officer, the nature of future warfare and the future of the Army itself. And these tensions are rising at a time when the war has stretched the Army’s resources to the limit, when junior officers are quitting at alarming rates and when political leaders are divided or uncertain about America’s — and its military’s — role in the world.

Colonel Yingling’s article gave these tensions voice; it spelled out the issues and the stakes; and it located their roots in the Army’s own institutional culture, specifically in the growing disconnect between this culture — which is embodied by the generals — and the complex realities that junior officers, those fighting the war, are confronting daily on the ground. The article was all the more potent because it was written by an active-duty officer still on the rise. It was a career risk, just as, on a smaller scale, standing up and asking the Army vice chief of staff about the article was a risk.

There has always been a gap, to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel let down….

The gap is widening further, Snider told me, because of this war’s operating tempo, the “unrelenting pace” at which soldiers are rotated into Iraq for longer tours — and a greater number of tours — than they signed up for. Many soldiers, even those who support the war, are wearying of the endless cycle. The cycle is a result of two decisions. The first occurred at the start of the war, when the senior officers assented to the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, to send in far fewer troops than they had recommended. The second took place two years later, well into the insurgency phase of the war, when top officers declared they didn’t need more troops, though most of them knew that in fact they did. “Many junior officers,” Snider said, “see this op tempo as stemming from the failure of senior officers to speak out.”

Paul Yingling did not set out to cause a stir. He grew up in a working-class part of Pittsburgh. His father owned a bar; no one in his family went to college. He joined the Army in 1984 at age 17, because he was a troubled kid — poor grades and too much drinking and brawling — who wanted to turn his life around, and he did. He went to Duquesne University, a small Catholic school, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship; went on active duty; rose through the ranks; and, by the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was a lieutenant commanding an artillery battery, directing cannon fire against Saddam Hussein’s army.

“When I was in the gulf war, I remember thinking, This is easier than it was at training exercises,” he told me earlier this month. He was sent to Bosnia in December 1995 as part of the first peacekeeping operation after the signing of the Dayton accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. “This was nothing like training,” he recalled. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he was trained almost entirely for conventional combat operations: straightforward clashes, brigades against brigades. (Even now, about 70 percent of the training at the Captains Career Course is for conventional warfare.) In Bosnia, there was no clear enemy, no front line and no set definition of victory. “I kept wondering why things weren’t as well rehearsed as they’d been in the gulf war,” he said.

Upon returning, he spent the next six years pondering that question. He studied international relations at the University of Chicago’s graduate school and wrote a master’s thesis about the circumstances under which outside powers can successfully intervene in civil wars. (One conclusion: There aren’t many.) He then taught at West Point, where he also read deeply in Western political theory. Yingling was deployed to Iraq in July 2003 as an executive officer collecting loose munitions and training Iraq’s civil-defense corps. “The corps deserted or joined the insurgency on first contact,” he recalled. “It was a disaster.”

In the late fall of 2003, his first tour of duty over, Yingling was sent to Fort Sill, Okla., the Army’s main base for artillery soldiers, and wrote long memos to the local generals, suggesting new approaches to the war in Iraq. One suggestion was that since artillery rockets were then playing little role, artillery soldiers should become more skilled in training Iraqi soldiers; that, he thought, would be vital to Iraq’s future stability. No one responded to his memos, he says. He volunteered for another tour of combat and became deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was fighting jihadist insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar.

The commander of the third regiment, Col. H. R. McMaster, was a historian as well as a decorated soldier. He figured that Iraq could not build its own institutions, political or military, until its people felt safe. So he devised his own plan, in which he and his troops cleared the town of insurgents — and at the same time formed alliances and built trust with local sheiks and tribal leaders. The campaign worked for a while, but only because McMaster flooded the city with soldiers — about 1,000 of them per square kilometer. Earlier, as Yingling drove around to other towns and villages, he saw that most Iraqis were submitting to whatever gang or militia offered them protection, because United States and coalition forces weren’t anywhere around. And that was because the coalition had entered the war without enough troops. Yingling was seeing the consequences of this decision up close in the terrible insecurity of most Iraqis’ lives.

In February 2006, Yingling returned to Fort Sill. That April, six retired Army and Marine generals publicly criticized Rumsfeld, who was still the secretary of defense, for sending too few troops to Iraq. Many junior and field-grade officers reacted with puzzlement or disgust. Their common question: Where were these generals when they still wore the uniform? Why didn’t they speak up when their words might have counted? One general who had spoken up, Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, was publicly upbraided and ostracized by Rumsfeld; other active-duty generals got the message and stayed mum.

That December, Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers wounded in Iraq. “I was watching these soldiers wheeling into this room, or in some cases having to be wheeled in by their wives or mothers,” he recalled. “And I said to myself: ‘These soldiers were doing their jobs. The senior officers were not doing theirs. We’re not giving our soldiers the tools and training to succeed.’ I had to go public.”

schakowsky’s petraeus prelude: the surge is working and we need ten more years

After Iraq Trip, Unshaken Resolve

By Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 26, 2007

CHICAGO When Rep. Jan Schakowsky made her first trip to Iraq this month, the outspoken antiwar liberal resolved to keep her opinions to herself. “I would listen and learn,” she decided.

At times that proved a challenge, as when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her congressional delegation, “There’s not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there’s not going to be political reconciliation by next September.” Schakowsky gulped — wasn’t that the whole idea of President Bush’s troop increase, to buy time for that political progress?

But the real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, he argued, that the troop increase is doing some good.

Still, the U.S. commander cautioned, it could take another decade before real stability is at hand. Schakowsky gasped. “I come from an environment where people talk nine to 10 months,” she said, referring to the time frame for withdrawal that many Democrats are advocating. “And there he was, talking nine to 10 years.”

The trip gave Schakowsky a good look at the challenge that Democrats face next month, when Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker travel to Washington to testify before Congress, presumably with similar charts and arguments that the U.S. military is making strides in Iraq, and that withdrawal dates would be reckless and wrong.

The lack of political progress among Iraq’s rival factions and Petraeus’s estimate of the time needed to stabilize the nation left Schakowsky all the more convinced that Democrats must force Bush to begin bringing troops home.

“This is not the structure that’s going to say, ‘Why? Why are we here? What are we really accomplishing here?’ The mission is to take down the bad guys, to establish order,” she said of her sessions with Petraeus and other military leaders. The meetings “made me feel more determined that the policy is going to have to be set in Washington, that the Congress is going to have to exert its will here to end this war.”

The Illinois Democrat recounted her trip from a table in the front window of the Venus Cafe, an Iraqi restaurant not far from her home on Chicago’s North Side. A line was forming in the next room — local Iraqi Christians, many of whom have relatives displaced by the war, were eager for their own debriefing.

A co-founder of the House Out of Iraq Caucus, Schakowsky saw only fleeting glimpses of Iraqis’ day-to-day life during her one-day trip. The few times she ventured out of the Green Zone, she was in a helicopter or a speeding convoy, soldiers hanging out of the windows with machine guns, obscuring the view. She heard about dire power and water shortages, yet saw nothing firsthand.

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus’s words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. ” ‘We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,’ ” Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: “Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.”

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”

As a war opponent, Schakowsky has always taken extra care to do her homework, and she can recite facts and figures on the conflict with agility. But after Democrats won control of the House, Schakowsky — a member of the leadership — joined the intelligence committee and found herself squirming when people asked how many times she had visited Iraq. None, she had to confess. So when she learned of a trip that House Armed Services Committee members had scheduled for the August recess, she invited herself along, becoming one of about two dozen members of Congress to travel to Iraq this month.

Seated at the Venus, her white notebook in front of her, Schakowsky recounted some of the day’s more vivid images. The irony of having to wear body armor to a meeting of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss their progress in working together. The creepy feeling when she examined the improvised explosive devices used to devastating effect against U.S. soldiers, from crude models activated by cellphones to sophisticated Iranian designs that Schakowsky described as “sleek copper bowls.” The blasts of a simulated raid by Iraqi soldiers on a terrorism suspect’s house. And the stifling heat that felt “like a hair dryer on the back of your neck.”

She lost track of all the PowerPoint presentations that she and her colleagues sat through — it was either five or six. “You would get these organizational charts that were all acronyms — I mean like, 30 of them,” Schakowsky recalled with a laugh. “And the danger of asking a question about them is it would add another 10 minutes” to the presentation.

One pleasant surprise was how much Schakowsky enjoyed the company of her Republican colleagues, including Reps. Phil Gingrey of Georgia, Jeff Miller of Florida and Thelma Drake of Virginia. They kidded each other, “We’re going to all be best friends until the press releases come out.”

And that’s more or less how it unfolded. After the group returned from the trip, which also included visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Schakowsky and Gingrey offered opposite assessments during an appearance on Fox News. Drake’s local newspaper in Newport News, the Daily Press, wrote an article about the contrast headlined “Drake, Democrats Tour Different Iraqs.”

But it wasn’t just Republicans who came away impressed after visiting Iraq. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) announced that he will no longer support a timetable for withdrawal, warning of a “potentially catastrophic effect” on the region.

Schakowsky acknowledged that the military’s presentation may have been effective. “If you took the briefings at their face value, without context, without bringing anything to it — clearly they were trying to present that positive spin, and that’s what [other lawmakers] took away from it.”

Schakowsky said she asked U.S. officials about the consequences of withdrawal, and she conceded that “they painted a very dire picture.” She looked again through her notebook for a Petraeus quote. “He said: ‘If you don’t like the humanitarian crisis, the refugees and the internally displaced people, you can’t draw down. If you are concerned about these people, the humanitarian crisis, you should be for our staying here.’ “

In the next room, her Iraqi Christian constituents were still waiting. Schakowsky said she didn’t respond to Petraeus; she let the comment drift by. “I was not arguing,” she said. “I wanted to see what his take was.”