Don’t miss Lawrence Kaplan’s gripping and indelibly depressing first-hand account of the war now with a momentum of its own in Iraq. Money quote:
A conventional wisdom has emerged in Washington, arguing that U.S. forces have been "hunkering down" – the title of a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly – and patrolling less. Indeed, the president himself has pledged "less U.S. patrols, less U.S. presence." But this does not make it true. After the February bombing of the Shia mosque in Samarra, the number of U.S. patrols quadrupled in Baghdad. On a recent week, the Army sent 1,100 of them into the capital. It did so for a simple reason: Letting go has become the whole point of American policy, but officers know that, every time they let go of a sector, it comes apart at the seams.
Lawrence is close to despair at the barbarism that seems to be slowly engulfing the entire country. He alternates between wanting to up the ante, and fearing that the pathologies of Iraqi culture and society are just too powerful at this point to resist. His recent Plank post is harrowing to read:
Would more U.S. troops alter Iraq’s homicidal dynamic? Not really, given that, on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point. True, U.S. troops can be–and have been–a vital buffer between Iraq’s warring sects. But they cannot reprogram their coarsened and brittle cultures. Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot. The Iraqis, after all, still would have had the final say.
I guess he can be criticized for this ambivalence. Josh puts the boot in here. But it is honest – more honest than some other dead-enders on the right. And he has been there. Iraq may be turning several neocons into realists. It has certainly been a chastening experience for me. I don’t believe, with Lawrence, that there is nothing we could have done to prevent the current blood-bath and slide toward civil war. I still think it was doable under the right conditions. I hold Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush accountable for being unserious about a deadly serious business (and my own gullibility in not seeing their faults soon enough and in not being skeptical enough about cultural difference in the Middle East). We will never know what we might have achieved if we had had a halfway competent president and defense secretary. But we are where we are. And hope is currently a difficult thing to feel.
(Photo: Franco Pagetti for Time.)
The Dish 