Surging toward a bitter end
WASHINGTON Before Gen. David Petraeus' report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was the fact that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus' standards of success.
Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Abercrombie Fitch Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America's hands.
The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time "breathing space," the president says for Iraqi political reconciliation. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.
The progress that Petraeus is reporting in improving security in portions of Iraq is real. It might, however, have two sinister aspects.
First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Washington Post Polo Shirts Perth reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian Cheap Nike High Heels Australia violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. forces may Cheap Air Max 1 bear poisonous fruit in a full blown civil war. forces. But these alliances of convenience might be inconvenient when Shiites again become the Sunnis' principal enemy. forces will Women Polo T Shirts be in Iraq when the next president is inaugurated. forces.
To declare Fake Nike High Heels this a substantial victory won by them requires Democrats to do two things. They must make a mountain out of Nike Air Max Australia Online a molehill (Petraeus suggests withdrawal of only a few thousand troops). And they must spuriously claim credit for the mountain. Actually, senior military officers have been saying that a large drawdown is inevitable, given the toll taken on the forces by the tempo of operations for more than four years.
A democracy, wrote the diplomat and scholar George Kennan, "fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. goal in World War II, and why Americans were so uncomfortable with three "wars of choice" since then in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction was fictitious. That is one reason why this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for Cheap Nike Heels For Women the war the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.
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