Category: The Dish

Gaming The Surge

Petraeus_1

One of the fresh tragedies of the Bush Iraq debacle is that the military team now finally preparing to try to calm Baghdad is, by all accounts, superb. I’ve tried to get a variety of experts to say something bad about Petraeus, but to no avail. He has swiftly assembled a team to help him succeed; the new defense secretary is not a flaming asshole, which makes a change from the last six years; the counter-insurgency doctrine championed by Petraeus has already met success in Mosul. If this team had been put together in 2003, we could be looking at a totally different scenario in Iraq today.

But this is not 2003, alas. It isn’t even December 2006, when the advocates of a surge spoke of 80,000 more troops. There is, moreover, no viable national government upon which to premise any serious counter-insurgency effort. Above all, there is no commitment to a serious, indefinite, long-term counter-insurgency effort. Both secretary-of-state Rice and defense secretary Gates have signaled a desire to draw down U.S. troop levels by the late summer; and the Sadr militias can read the papers. As the surge advocates were saying not so long ago: a new push with too few troops and a swift deadline is the worst of all possible options, however talented and well-intentioned the commander.

Petraeus may meet some success, of course, and we should all be praying he does. One perfectly possible scenario is that the violence ebbs in Baghdad in the next few months, as the militias and other insurgents melt away and bide their time in the face of more U.S. troops. Sadr City wil be left largely unmolested. After this lull, the president will declare something that isn’t obvious defeat. And when the U.S. troops depart, we will go back to the chaotic status quo ante. Which is why, I fear, this entire effort is less about the future of Iraq than a short-term domestic political gambit by the president and what’s left of his party. I still want a miracle to happen, of course. But what Bush is devising is the appearance of a miracle, rather than the reality. And he’s using the lives of young Americans to conjure it up.

Defending the Bush Record

State Department lawyer, John Bellinger, engages the blogosphere with a defense of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the war on terror. Money quote:

[W]e found ourselves in an armed conflict in Afghanistan starting in October 2001. In the course of that conflict, we detained members of al Qaida and the Taliban, some of whom are now in Guantanamo. U.S. or allied forces captured the majority of these detainees in late 2001 or early 2002 in or near Afghanistan. One of the most basic precepts in the law of armed conflict is that states may detain enemy combatants until the cessation of hostilities. It cannot reasonably be argued that the United States and its allies had the right to use force in Afghanistan but did not have the right to detain individuals as an incident to the armed conflict that ensued, unless we planned to charge them with a crime. The Supreme Court explicitly has affirmed in Hamdi that the United States had the right to detain enemy combatants in the armed conflict that ensued after our decision to act in self-defense.

Of course, if al Qaeda detainees had actually been treated as "prisoners of war," and not tortured, then this debate would not be occurring at all; or it would be occurring with a minimal level of trust in the decency and good faith of this administration. But we have learned not to give Bush or Cheney even a minimal level of trust. And their brutal, dumb and self-defeating detainee policies are central to that lack of trust.