An Iraq War Roundup: The Surge ‘Window’ Begins to Close & Other Forever War News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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