What They’re Saying About Iraq

Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe:

"Markets without bombs. Hummers without guns. Ice cream after dark. Busy streets without fear." So began Terry McCarthy's report from Iraq for ABC's "World News Sunday" . . . as the war in Iraq reached its sixth anniversary.

In another report two nights later, ABC's correspondent characterized the Iraqi capital as "a city reborn: speed, light, style -- this is Baghdad today. Where car bombs have given way to car racing. Where a once-looted museum has been restored and reopened. And where young women who were forced to cover their heads can again wear the clothes that they like." . . .

For a long time the foes of both the Iraq war and the president who launched it insisted that none of this was possible -- that the war was lost, that there was no military solution to the sectarian slaughter, that the surge would only make the violence worse. Victory was not an option, the critics declared; the only option was to partition Iraq and get out. Time and again it was said that the war would forever be remembered as Bush's folly, if not indeed as the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.

Even now, with a stubbornness born of partisan hostility or political ideology, there are those who cannot bring themselves to utter the words "victory" and "Iraq" in the same sentence. But six years after the war began, it is ending in victory.

. . .

Six years ago, the Bush-Cheney administration took America to war in Iraq using what we now know were false arguments based upon faulty intelligence about Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Ignoring the advice of their own generals and diplomats, Bush and Cheney directed the undermanned U.S. military to pacify and occupy Iraq, giving rise to an insurgency and attracting extremist fighters from around the region . . . .Though violence in Iraq has thankfully declined from the catastrophic levels seen in 2006-07, the country is still plagued by terrorism . . . .More than 4 million Iraqis remain displaced, both within and outside the country, with many afraid to return and others simply unable, having lost their homes in the waves of sectarian cleansing that have transformed many of Iraq's formerly mixed areas.

Though Iraq's provincial elections were judged a legitimate and welcome success, many of the country's most divisive political questions -- the status of Kirkuk, constitutional reform, the distribution of oil revenues -- remain unresolved. And even the most optimistic analysts predict that Iraq will be struggling against a low-level insurgency for years to come.

. . .

[T]he Army will phase out its use of stop-loss. This is great news and is another indication that we are at the beginning of the end of the Iraq war.

Stop-loss came to symbolize the Bush administration's disastrous management of the wars. By invoking stop-loss the Army prevented soldiers who had completed their terms of service from leaving the military. This often meant that soldiers in units who had nearly completed their terms of service would have to serve out the remainder of their units deployments. The policy was blatantly unfair and went against the concept of the all-volunteer military . . . .

Not only did the Army's invocation of stop-loss clearly demonstrate that Iraq had badly overstretched our forces, but it made it irrefutably clear that the Bush administration had bungled the management and planning of the war.

. . .

As part of the SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement], the United States is required to withdraw its military forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and from the country entirely by the end of 2011. Though some critics think this timeline is too fast, there is a good chance that the U.S. may be forced to withdraw even sooner: In order to coax reticent parliamentarians into approving the agreement, the Maliki government has agreed to hold a national referendum in July of this year to ratify the SOFA. If the SOFA fails to pass, the United States would have just one year to withdraw all its military forces from Iraq . . . .

[I]f no significant redeployments occur prior to the national referendum, Iraqi public opinion could very well conclude that Washington is determined to maintain a significant military presence in Iraq regardless of the public pronouncements and treaty obligations to the contrary. Better that the U.S. begin withdrawal now, on its own terms -- and in the process, enhance the chances that the SOFA will not be rejected by the Iraqi people. At the same time, President Obama would project an unmistakable message to the Arab world that the United States is serious in recalibrating the nature of its engagement with the region.

. . .

Fouad Ajami began a piece in The Wall Street Journal [recently] by asserting that, "On its sixth anniversary, the Iraq war has been vindicated."

This reminded me of a rule I had when I was editing newspaper stories: The place where falsehoods most often are stated is when the writer asserts that "it is obvious that . . . " or "every schoolboy knows that . . . " (this used to be a favorite at the old Luce-dominated Time magazine that made Quemoy and Matsu famous). Oddly, this error tends to occur not at the neglected end of articles, but -- as in the Ajami article -- in the "lede," as journalists refer to the opening of an article.

Ajami's bald assertion is arguable at best. What do the troops think? Well, here's a different view from one soldier that I noticed over the weekend on the 10th Mountain Division's snazzy blogsite: "We must focus our attention on Afghanistan, because that is where the real trouble lies. We didn't belong in Iraq to start off with, but now that we're there, we need to clean up our mess and head home."