PENTAGON FEEDS CONGRESS-- AND ITSELF-- A PILE OF HORSE MANURE ON IRAQ PROGRESS

Our Baghdad correspondent, "Fred," is back in touch. Yesterday he sent me a 13 page report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and McCain's former National Security Assistant) that has been circulating in the Greed Zone entitled "Still Losing? The June 2007 Edition of 'Measuring Stability in Iraq.'" The short version: Bush's escalation policies are failing and the Pentagon has to tiptoe around admitting it.

Cordesman claims the U.S. in fighting the wrong "wars" (on against al Qaeda is Iraq and one against an element of the Sadr militia. He views the problem in Iraq as a series of civil wars, or as Defense Secretary Gates puts it, "a complex mix of civil conflicts." There are the groups, including al Qaeda, that are eager to provoke a civil war between Sunni and Sh'ia, a broad and age-old struggle within Islam that no one seems to have mentioned to Bush before he decided to invade and occupy Iraq. There is also a general Sunni v Sunni civil "conflict" going on, most in Anbar, some of it-- the only part recognized or even noticed by the U.S.-- being directed against al Qaeda. Then there's the growth of Shi'ite death squads, a good deal of that within nominally government forces. And, of course, the Kurdish autonomy movement which includes a struggle for Iraq's northern oil wealth and a Kurd vs. Arab war. In the South there is also a Shi'ite vs Shi'te power struggle as well as a struggle over the role of religion in politics, a battle that has pushed Iraq's pre-Bush secular core and professional class into exile. And, of course, rampant and accelerating crime, local violence, and anarchy has complicated the whole toxic brew. It's worse than a classic civil war.

Public opinion polls "show that the vast majority of Iraqis do not regard the central government as effective. And see Coalition forces and Iraqi militias as being as much a threat as the Sunni Islamist extremists." On top of that the lack of physical security is accompanied by a nearly complete dearth of economic development and a crippling deterioration of infrastructure.

Without political accommodation, military action-- even with tactical victories-- is fruitless and no "substitute for political success and conciliation, effective governance, economic progress and development, and a rule of law." Cordesman claims that victory in Iraq requires success in what he calls "armed nation-building-- a process that can extend over a decade or more-- not simply the defeat of the most violent elements in an insurgency." He says the surge-- meant to bring local security to Baghdad-- have done more harm than good in terms of national conciliation.

Cordesman claims senior U.S. commanders have been making these points to Iraq's political "leadership," but to no avail and that they are having virtually no impact on the nation's civil conflicts. U.S. political and economic "mistakes" and incompetence, coupled with a complete lack of transparency-- while demanding the Iraqi civil authorities act with that same transparency that is anathema to Bushism-- have greatly exacerbated all of Iraq's problems.

Perhaps most significantly, the US government has never openly discussed or analyzed its failures in not planning for stability operations or conflict termination, in creating an electoral process that polarized Iraqi politics around inexperienced sectarian and ethnic leaders and parties, and in creating a constitution that helped divide the nation without resolving and of the key issues it attempted to address. The same is true of US actions that blocked local and regional elections, allowed de-Ba'athification to remove many of the nation's most competent secular and nationalist leaders and professionals from power, and failed to act on plans to disband the militias before transferring power from the CPA.

In effect, the U.S. has had mixed success in creating an effective Iraqi military force and has utterly failed to even develop plans for economic development, for a national police force or criminal justice institutions [obviously something that wouldn't be high on the priorities list of the Bush Regime]. US aid efforts are in a complete shambles.

The Pentagon report, seeking to give the Bush Regime some cover, spins potential progress into implications that "what will take years of continued and risky effort is already moving towards success." The metrics the Pentagon uses to measure success are meaningless for anything other than propaganda and they don't take basic trends in Iraq-- like the civil conflicts-- into account. The biggest enemy of the US towards making progress in Iraq is... you guessed it: the US government, with its "lack of transparency and integrity and it's shying away from objective self-criticism and unwillingness to tackle in any meaningful or sustained way credible strategies and operation plans.

Today's Wall Street Journal summarizes all this into "Defense Secretary Robert Gates and some allies in the Bush administration are seeking to build bipartisan political support for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq by moving toward withdrawing significant numbers of troops from Iraq by the end of President Bush's term." Bush's "term" should be a prison term and the idea of any sane political leader-- which leaves out virtually the entire GOP and more than a few Inside-the-Beltway Democrats-- buying into the idea that the US can make Iraq a satellite state is patently absurd. The Journal does see a fly in the ointment:

The complicating factor is how long the administration will stick with its "surge" strategy of keeping high levels of troops in Iraq to try to tamp down violence there. On this issue, the administration -- and even the military -- is deeply divided.

The longer the surge lasts, the harder it will be to achieve the longed-for political consensus. Without such agreement, Bush administration officials fear, the U.S. could be forced into a hasty withdrawal that could have dire consequences both for the region and for U.S. stature in the world.

What Mr. Gates and some other high-ranking administration officials have in mind is a modern-day version of President Harry Truman's "Cold War consensus," a bipartisan agreement on the need to contain the Soviet Union. They hope lawmakers from both parties will ultimately agree to make a scaled-back U.S. mission in Iraq a central component of U.S. foreign policy even after Mr. Bush leaves office.

The emerging plan would shift the U.S. mission in Iraq to a more-modest attempt to contain its civil war, rather than the current effort to end the conflict. A smaller force of American troops,
operating out of large bases far from Iraq's major cities, would focus on battling al Qaeda, securing Iraq's borders and training the country's struggling security forces.

A little late for the Decider to start worrying about-- how did he put it?-- "U.S. stature in the world." Gates and the Neocons are now doing all they can to bully and terrorize Americans into thinking that Iraq will be a failed state in the hands of Islamic extremists and that we have to stay there forever to fight that.