The public relations campaign to prove that the surge is succeeding is already in high gear, as a recent report by long time Iraq war supporters Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon demonstrates. And apparently it has scared more than a few Democrats into adopting a wait and see attitude regarding whatever General Petraeus will say to Congress in September. But amid all the happy talk about less sectarian killing, Al Qaeda on the run, reporters walking down streets without body armor, yadda-yadda, I keep reminding myself to ask one simple question, one that has yet to be truly answered by the Bush administration or the war supporters of whatever stripe: What is winning?
Is this what winning in Iraq looks like to you?
Poverty, hunger and public health continue to worsen in Iraq, according to a report released today from Oxfam International, which demands more humanitarian aid from abroad and calls on the Iraqi government to immediately decentralize the distribution of food and medical supplies. […]
The report states that as many as four million Iraqis are in dire need of help getting food, many of them children; 70 percent of the country now lacks access to adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003, and 90 percent of the country’s hospitals lack basic medical and surgical supplies.
One survey cited in the report, completed in May by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, found that 43 percent of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty,” on less than $1 a day.
Unemployment and hunger are particularly acute among the estimated two million people displaced from their homes by violence — those who “have no incomes and are running out of coping mechanisms,” the report says.
What about this?
(cont.)
Supplies and medicine in strife-torn Baghdad’s overcrowded hospitals have been siphoned off and sold elsewhere for profit because of “untouchable” corruption in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, according to a draft U.S. government report obtained by NBC News.
The report, written by U.S. advisers to Iraq’s anti-corruption agency, analyzes corruption in 12 ministries and finds devastating and grim problems. “Corruption protected by senior members of the Iraqi government remains untouchable,” the report sad.
An entire battalion of Iraqi police “was found to be nonexistent” and corruption in the army is “widespread,” with ghost employees and a shortage of supplies, according to the report. […]
The top Iraqi anti-corruption investigator, Judge Rahdi al Rahdi, told NBC that “in many important cases, ministers did not give us the permission to take their employees to court, the prime minister’s office did not give us permission to take ministers to court.”
Rahdi said the total amount of missing money involved in his investigations into government misconduct is $11 billion.
Corruption is so serious that it is difficult for the government to function, according to Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi government minister.
And is this evidence of winning?
The US government continues to share the blame and must better scrutinize the billions of dollars it is spending to erect power stations, build water-treatment plants, and other facilities, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released Monday. […]
“The failure of the asset-transfer program raises concerns about the continuing operation and maintenance of US-constructed projects,” the report said. “In some cases, the United States has continued to pay for maintaining completed projects that have not been accepted by the [government of Iraq].”
The Iraqi government took control of more than 400 facilities completed by the US between April and June of 2006, but it has not taken over any facilities since then. As of May 2007, there have been 2,362 US-built projects completed, valued at about $5.3 billion that are awaiting transfer to the Iraqi government, the report said. This is a problem for the US because the Iraqi government cannot leverage those facilities to borrow money it needs to maintain other facilities for which it is already responsible, the report added.
Nearly $100 billion is being spent on Iraq reconstruction, and the Inspector General has completed more than a dozen quarterly reports analyzing reconstruction efforts that began in Iraq in the summer of 2003. […]
The Inspector General’s report also included the first of a new series of investigations on major US defense contractors working in Iraq, including Bechtel National. The report concluded that oversight of the contract between Bechtel and the US Agency for International Development was insufficient. In one case, only two people were in charge of accounting for more than $1 billion worth of contracts with Bechtel. According to a provision within the contract, that small staff had only 10 days to pay all bills presented by Bechtel.
“This decision was troubling because only two officials were assigned to review these invoices, raising concerns from an oversight perspective about the reliability of the receipt review process,” the report said.
Of 24 job orders completed under the phase two contract with Bechtel, 10 did not achieve their original objectives, according to the original scope of work for each job. Investigators for the SIGIR were unable to assess three other jobs, the report said, because the objectives of the contract or the work completed was unclear. Eleven other jobs were completed satisfactorily, the report said.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, for once. No matter how many generals we send, no matter how many new counter-insurgency strategies our soldiers implement, no matter how many “Al Qaeda fighters” are reported to be killed by the Pentagon, the simple truth is that we cannot win if, at the end of the day, we have not made the lives of the Iraqi people safer, their economic situation more stable, and their mere day to day existence less hopeless than they are today. Using those “metrics” we are failing miserably.
Two million estimated Iraqi refugees now live in the countries that border Iraq. Two million more are internally displaced, and are living hand to mouth. Millions of children suffer from malnutrition and disease. Turkey is massing troops at its border with Kurdish Iraq because we have no control over the PKK terrorist/militant organization which is using Iraq as a base for cross-border attacks on Turkish soldiers and civilians. The diminished British troop contingent is getting ready to leave as soon as Prime Minister Gordon Brown gives the word, having already effectively abandoned any attempt to control Basra and the largely Shi’ite southern regions of Iraq. The Maliki government cannot control its own ministers. The Iraqi Parliament is effectively deadlocked. And the Iraqi people collectively are suffering to a degree not seen since World War II.
Yet these are mere numbers and figures. The scope of the problem is so large that it is difficult to get a feel for what exactly the Iraqi people are enduring while we are allegedly “winning” the war. So let me leave you with something more than mere statistics and official reports, even though the statistics and reports roughly sketch out a broad picture that is horrible beyond our experience. Sometimes we can only make sense of a catastrophe when we view it on a more human scale. Therefore, please read this story of one family’s tragic struggle to survive, and then ask yourself if whatever we are doing in Iraq should be considered “winning” in any real sense of the word.
BAGHDAD, Housekeeper and mother of three Anisah Kaseb, 58, says the relentless violence in Iraq has damaged her family psychologically: Her younger son committed suicide and her daughter now requires psychological help. […]
“My son Muhammad, who was only 28 years old, was desperate: He had no job for the past two years and couldn’t marry because we didn’t have enough money. He was out on the streets one day looking for a job when a car bomb exploded near him. The incident affected him badly and he committed suicide, leaving us a letter saying that he couldn’t bear life in Iraq any more and felt useless because he could not help his family economically.
“It was the most terrible day in my life. He killed himself on the day of his sister’s birthday on 14 May and since than my daughter Alia’a, 32, has tried to commit suicide twice, firstly by cutting her wrists and then by jumping in front of a car – which left her with a broken leg that required hours of surgery. […]
“I thought many times of taking poison after my son died, and I prayed to God for hours to dispel these thoughts.
“My sister-in-law got desperate after my brother was killed in an explosion: She poisoned her two children and then herself, leaving a letter saying she wasn’t able to support them and that she would rather they all died together than see them killed like her husband.
If this is winning …