Now that we’ve gotten another 9/11 anniversary out of the way, there’s an opportunity to let the testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker really sink in. And unless you’re one of those delusional souls for whom the corner in Iraq has been just about to be turned for years, the upshot of their dog-and-pony show is deeply depressing. But not surprising.
As I noted in my sum-up of Petraeus’ first day of testimony on Monday, another 500 or so Americans will die and perhaps 20 times as many Iraqis before the general returns to Capitol Hill in March to offer another progress report and no doubt argue that the U.S. should continue to stay the course.
The general and ambassador dutifully paid lip service to the notion that the Al Maliki government has to be goosed into working toward national reconciliation or some other form of rapprochement. Lest we forget, the whole purpose of the surge strategy was to give Shiites and Sunnis the “breathing room” to find ways to come together.
They have not come together and show no sign of doing so, which means that the surge, the crowning achievement of the Bush administration’s half-trillion dollar version of Hurricane Katrina, has been a failure in the most fundamental way since no less an authority than Petraeus himself has said that any military gains will be hollow without political gains.
As Juan Cole notes and few Americans bother to understand, there are three wars going on in Iraq: The war between Shiites and Sunnis for Baghdad and environs, the war between Shiite militias and tribes for oil-rich Basra in the south, and the war between Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen for control of oil-rich Kirkuk in the north.
Petraeus (who along with Crocker do not strike me as the partisan pawns that some lefty bloggers have portrayed them as) has chosen to focus on the first war, and his declaration that violence in and around the capital has returned to 2006 levels is silly on its face because 2006 was a particularly violent year — in fact, the year in which the Civil War ignited by the badly botched American occupation shifted into high gear.
As it is, the troop-level formula delineated by Petraeus would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody tragic.
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