Joe Lieberman has an editorial in today’s Washington Post. I am going to present it to you below in blockquotes. In between the blockquotes I am going to present a reality check for each of Lieberman’s assertions. Joe Lieberman in correct to be concerned but he is just plain wrong to think we can salvage Iraq. All we would accomplish by following his advice would be to waste billions more dollars and get more Americans killed. Iraq is lost and we need to face up to it.
I’ve just spent 10 days traveling in the Middle East and speaking to leaders there, all of which has made one thing clearer to me than ever: While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States.
I hate to tell Joe Lieberman that we ‘told you so’ but we did. Here’s Lynn Woolsey from House floor on September 18, 2002.
“Invading Iraq could have drastic repercussions by energizing extremists looking to overthrow governments across the Mideast.”
Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought. How we end the struggle there will affect not only the region but the worldwide war against the extremists who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.
“America’s attacking Iraq alone would ignite a firestorm of anti-American fervor in the Middle East and Muslim world and breed thousands of new potential terrorists”.- Ted Strickland, from the House floor October 9, 2002.
Because of the bravery of many Iraqi and coalition military personnel and the recent coming together of moderate political forces in Baghdad, the war is winnable. We and our Iraqi allies must do what is necessary to win it.
“Nothing’s going to help. It’s a religious war, and we’re caught in the middle of it,” said Sgt. Josh Keim, a native of Canton, Ohio, who is on his second tour in Iraq. “It’s hard to be somewhere where there’s no mission and we just drive around.”
The American people are justifiably frustrated by the lack of progress, and the price paid by our heroic troops and their families has been heavy. But what is needed now, especially in Washington and Baghdad, is not despair but decisive action — and soon.
Spc. Don Roberts, who was stationed in Baghdad in 2004, said the situation had gotten worse because of increasing violence between Shiites and Sunnis.
“I don’t know what could help at this point,” said Roberts, 22, of Paonia, Colo. “What would more guys do? We can’t pick sides. It’s almost like we have to watch them kill each other, then ask questions.”
The most pressing problem we face in Iraq is not an absence of Iraqi political will or American diplomatic initiative, both of which are increasing and improving; it is a lack of basic security. As long as insurgents and death squads terrorize Baghdad, Iraq’s nascent democratic institutions cannot be expected to function, much less win the trust of the people. The fear created by gang murders and mass abductions ensures that power will continue to flow to the very thugs and extremists who have the least interest in peace and reconciliation.
Sgt. James Simons, 24, of Tacoma, Wash., said Baghdad is so dangerous that U.S. forces spend much of their time in combat instead of training Iraqis.
“Baghdad is still like it was at the start of the war. We still have to knock out insurgents because things are too dangerous for us to train the Iraqis,” he said.
This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq’s fragile political center. By ruthlessly attacking the Shiites in particular over the past three years, al-Qaeda has sought to provoke precisely the dynamic of reciprocal violence that threatens to consume the country.
On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.
“Most attacks on Americans still come from the Sunni Arab insurgency [ed note: not al-Qaeda or Iran]. The insurgency
comprises former elements of the Saddam Hussein regime, disaffected Sunni Arab Iraqis, and
common criminals. It has significant support within the Sunni Arab community. The
insurgency has no single leadership but is a network of networks.”- Iraq Study Group (.pdf)
To turn around the crisis we need to send more American troops while we also train more Iraqi troops and strengthen the moderate political forces in the national government. After speaking with our military commanders and soldiers there, I strongly believe that additional U.S. troops must be deployed to Baghdad and Anbar province — an increase that will at last allow us to establish security throughout the Iraqi capital, hold critical central neighborhoods in the city, clamp down on the insurgency and defeat al-Qaeda in that province.
Sgt. Justin Thompson, a San Antonio native, said he signed up for delayed enlistment before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, then was forced to go to a war he didn’t agree with.
A troop surge is “not going to stop the hatred between Shia and Sunni,” said Thompson, who is especially bitter because his 4-year contract was involuntarily extended in June. “This is a civil war, and we’re just making things worse. We’re losing. I’m not afraid to say it.”
In Baghdad and Ramadi, I found that it was the American colonels, even more than the generals, who were asking for more troops. In both places these soldiers showed a strong commitment to the cause of stopping the extremists. One colonel followed me out of the meeting with our military leaders in Ramadi and said with great emotion, “Sir, I regret that I did not have the chance to speak in the meeting, but I want you to know on behalf of the soldiers in my unit and myself that we believe in why we are fighting here and we want to finish this fight. We know we can win it.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that senior U.S. commanders in Iraq have expressed concern that sending more troops to Iraq might delay that country from taking responsibility for its own security. In spite of a growing consensus against the surge proposal, President Bush has made it clear that the opinions of the nation’s military commanders may not trump the feeling he has in his gut, which is still telling him that victory is “achievable”. The only calls for more troops at this point come from those troops already in harm’s way, who say they would welcome help fending off constant attacks.
In nearly four years of war, there have never been sufficient troops dispatched to accomplish our vital mission. The troop surge should be militarily meaningful in size, with a clearly defined mission.
A “surge” of the size possible under current constraints on U.S. forces will not turn the tide in the guerrilla war. Reinforcement of Bagdad several thousand U.S. troops last summer simply brought on more violence. Those who believe still more troops will bring “victory” are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up.
Moreover, major reinforcement would commit the US Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there are no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front. It will be a matter of win or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground will commit every ounce of their being to a hope of “victory,” and few measures will be shrunk from.
Analogies come to mind: the Bulge, Stalingrad, the Battle of Algiers. It will be total war with all the likelihood of excesses and mass casualties that come with total war.- Ret. Colonel W. Patrick Lang and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
More U.S. forces might not be a guarantee of success in this fight, but they are certainly its prerequisite. Just as the continuing carnage in Baghdad empowers extremists on all sides, establishing security there will open possibilities for compromise and cooperation on the Iraqi political front — possibilities that simply do not exist today because of the fear gripping all sides.
I saw firsthand evidence in Iraq of the development of a multiethnic, moderate coalition against the extremists of al-Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army, which is sponsored and armed by Iran and has inflamed the sectarian violence. We cannot abandon these brave Iraqi patriots who have stood up and fought the extremists and terrorists.
“The kind of service that the Americans, with all their hatred, have done us — no superpower has ever done anything similar. America destroyed all our enemies in the region. It destroyed the Taliban. It destroyed Saddam Hussein… The Americans got so stuck in the soil of Iraq and Afghanistan that if they manage to drag themselves back to Washington in one piece, they should thank God. America presents us with an opportunity rather than a threat — not because it intended to, but because it miscalculated. They made many mistakes”.- Mohsen Rezai, an adviser to Ayatollah Khamanei of Iran.
The addition of more troops must be linked to a comprehensive new military, political and economic strategy that provides security for the population so that training of Iraqi troops and the development of a democratic government can move forward.
The war in Iraq is lost. Now is the time for the United States and its several allies to leave Iraq. I believe the United States should leave Iraq by the end of this month. I know there are those who say that we cannot leave because it would make the situation worse. I disagree. The United States cannot bring peace to Iraq. The United States cannot bring democracy to Iraq. The United States cannot bring stability to Iraq. Every soldier, contractor, prison guard, administrator, diplomat and spy needs to get out of Iraq. –Jim Winkler, General Secretary, General Board of Church & Society, United Methodist Church, June 9, 2004.
In particular we must provide the vital breathing space for moderate Shiites and Sunnis to turn back the radicals in their communities. There are Iraqi political leaders who understand their responsibility to do this. In Anbar province we have made encouraging progress in winning over local Sunni tribal leaders in the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorists. With more troops to support them, our forces in Anbar and their Sunni allies can achieve a major victory over al-Qaeda.
The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.
The officials described Col. Pete Devlin’s classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.
One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, “We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically — and that’s where wars are won and lost.”
…Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province’s most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.- September 11, 2006.
As the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria appreciate — at times, it seems, more keenly than we do — failure in Iraq would be a strategic and moral catastrophe for the United States and its allies. Radical Islamist terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shiite, would reap victories simultaneously symbolic and tangible, as Iraq became a safe haven in which to train and strengthen their foot soldiers and Iran’s terrorist agents. Hezbollah and Hamas would be greatly strengthened against their moderate opponents. One moderate Palestinian leader told me that a premature U.S. exit from Iraq would be a victory for Iran and the groups it is supporting in the region. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have bravely stood with us in the hope of a democratic future would face the killing fields.
But according to the U.S. military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost.
Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: “Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse — he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.” He added: “Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving [Osama] bin Laden’s ends.”
Retired Gen. Joseph Hoar, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, told me: “The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We’re conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It’s so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong.”
“I see no ray of light on the horizon at all,” said Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College. “The worst case has become true. There’s no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and Japan.”
“I don’t think that you can kill the insurgency,” said W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, the top expert on Iraq there.- Sidney Blumenthal, September 16, 2004.
In Iraq today we have a responsibility to do what is strategically and morally right for our nation over the long term — not what appears easier in the short term. The daily scenes of death and destruction are heartbreaking and infuriating. But there is no better strategic and moral alternative for America than standing with the moderate Iraqis until the country is stable and they can take over their security. Rather than engaging in hand-wringing, carping or calls for withdrawal, we must summon the vision, will and courage to take the difficult and decisive steps needed for success and, yes, victory in Iraq. That will greatly advance the cause of moderation and freedom throughout the Middle East and protect our security at home.
Stay the course.
