Krauthammer on Iraq: I Knew It All Along

This is Charles Krauthammer at his most smug and infuriating. Reading this I asked myself, "Are we talking about the same Iraq?" and, "Is he mentally retarded or just pure evil?"

I've inserted my comments into the body of this stinking beast….

Now We're Getting Somewhere
The Iraq debate comes to Earth.
By Charles Krauthammer
August 24, 2007 | Washington Post

After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.

In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.

[I want to come up with an analogy that illustrates the profound absurdity of this statement, since Krauthammer is not the only one saying it. Even Hillary is uttering this nonsense. Saying that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the same time the government remains a disaster is like a dentist telling his patient, "Your surgery yielded considerable progress, although you still have no teeth." Somebody help me out, if you can do better!.... -- J ]

The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong Iraq-war critic. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird (D., Wash.): Al Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala, and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.

[Blowback, blowback, blowback. We're arming and funding Sunni ex-insurgents in exchange for their not shooting at us. Krauthammer calls that "switching to our side." What's to prevent them from switching back… Scout's honor? This risky strategy is bound to go south on us. At the very least it's pissing off the Shi'ite militias, who aren't getting free cash and weapons from Uncle Sam like the Sunnis are. To them, America is choosing sides in a civil war. – J]

As critics acknowledge military improvement, the administration is finally beginning to concede the political reality that the Maliki government is hopeless. Bush's own national-security adviser had said as much in a leaked memo back in November. I and others have been arguing that for months. And when Levin returned and openly called for the Iraqi parliament to vote out the Maliki government, the president pointedly refused to contradict him.

[This is what we call "the Washington narrative." The current Washington narrative is that the Iraqi government would be doing fine if it weren't for the "hopeless" al-Maliki. Don't you believe this baloney for a second! It is yet another blame & delay tactic: blame Maliki for the absence of political reconciliation; delay until the U.S. can install a more "effective" puppet leader. They're jerking us around – again! Don't let them delay and draw this thing out another 6 months, another 12 months, always blaming this or that, and promising that things will get better if we only do a, b, and c. That's what they've been saying for 5 years. Enough already! – J]

This convergence about the actual situation in Baghdad will take some of the drama out the highly anticipated Petraeus moment next month. We know what the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are going to say when they testify before Congress because multiple sources have already told us what is happening on the ground.

[We knew what Petraeus and Crocker were going to say 6 months ago! "Well, we have good news and bad news, but more good news than bad, so we should stay in Iraq just a little longer." – J]

There will, of course, be the Harry Reids and those on the far Left who will deny inconvenient reality. Reid will continue to call the surge a failure, as he has since even before it began. And the Left will continue to portray Gen. David Petraeus as an unscrupulous commander quite prepared to send his troops into a hopeless battle in order to advance his political ambitions (although exactly how that works is not clear).

But the serious voices will prevail. When the Democratic presidential frontrunner concedes that the surge "is working" (albeit very late) against the insurgency, and when Petraeus himself concedes that the surge cannot continue indefinitely, making inevitable a drawdown of troops sometime in the middle of next year, the terms of the Iraq debate become narrow and the policy question simple: What do we do right now — continue the surge or cut it short and begin withdrawal?

Serious people like Levin argue that with a nonfunctional and sectarian Baghdad government, we can never achieve national reconciliation. Thus the current military successes will prove ephemeral.

The problem with this argument is that it confuses long term and short term. In the longer run, there must be a national unity government. [Wow, what a casual assertion. Please define the "longer run," because in the long run we'll all be dead, and I want to live long enough to see Iraq's unity government! – J] But in the shorter term, our assumption that a national unity government is required to pacify the Sunni insurgency turned out to be false. The Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda and are gradually switching sides in the absence of any oil, federalism, or de-Baathification deal coming out of Baghdad.

In the interim, the surge is advancing our two immediate objectives in Iraq: (a) to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq and prevent the emergence of an al-Qaeda mini-state, and (b) to pacify the Sunni insurgency, which began the post-liberation downward spiral of sectarian bloodshed, economic stagnation and aborted reconstruction.

[Are those really are two immediate objectives in Iraq? I can't be sure. Bush hasn't told us lately what our objectives are, except "getting the job done." – J]

Levin is right that we require a truly national government in Baghdad to obtain our ultimate objective of what O'Hanlon and Pollack call "sustainable stability." The administration had vainly hoped that the surge would provide a window for the Maliki government to reform and become that kind of government. It will not.

We should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.

[Krauthammer casually tosses yet another rhetorical grenade into the debate…. Think about what he's really saying: America should decide who runs Iraq. If that's the case, then Iraqis don't have a democracy. It's that simple. If Maliki can be replaced on a whim by the U.S., then the Shi'ite cleric and militia leader al-Sadr is right: Maliki is just an "American puppet."

Also, his phrase "We should have given up on Maliki long ago" gave me a laugh. Again, how does Krauthammer define "long ago?" Does "long ago" mean before the 'surge' began in earnest on June 15, or before the 'surge' was announced in January, or some time after April 2006 when Maliki became prime minister? If Krauthammer was sure "long ago" that Maliki was hopeless and there could be no political reconciliation with him in power, then why in the world did Krauthammer support the 'surge' in January-February 2006, whose real objective was to give Iraq's politicians "breathing space" (Bush's words) to hammer out a political compromise? Wouldn't Krauthammer have known that the 'surge' would be a waste of time??

The point is that Krauthammer and most other war apologists have known all along the 'surge' would be a waste of time, blood, and treasure. What they want is to keep the Iraq occupation going as long as possible, and they'll use any pretext that's convenient. – J]

The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. [Man, do you remember when we could just roll in and take down the whole Iraqi government in like 2 weeks? Ah, the good old days! – J] Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat — a defeat that is not at all inevitable and would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted.