Add Jabala to Fallujah and Mosul as the
third city against which the U.S., er, coalition forces (is that a Brits over there?) have launched a counter-attack against insurgent strongholds in less than a month. We've lost 106 American servicemen and women
thus far this month, almost five per day, which puts November on pace to eclipse last April as the deadliest month of the war (and, in terms of the daily fatality rate, second-deadliest only to the opening partial month of March 2003 during the invasion).
Though I opposed going to Iraq, given that we are there now, overall I believe these three operations are exactly what was needed in Iraq. Ah, but the emphasis here is decidedly on was. Better late than never, sure; but these offensives would have been better (and more easily) conducted when they were initially necessary and appropriate, instead of waiting. Indeed, these offensives are tougher now precisely because the insurgents have been left to fester, to become emboldened, for months.
And yet, I hear almost no tough questions and few, if any, criticisms from the Big Media. Any reasonable member of the national chattering class who praises these November offensives should rightly pause, even for a moment or two, to ask the president, his Defense Department, or their spokespersons, the following questions:
- If these insurgent strongholds needed to be defused/suppressed, why were these offensives not conducted much, much earlier? Bush's balk in Fallujah last April permitted these insurgent strongholds to take root and grow. So why the wait? The uncomfortable answer that will never be uttered, of course, is that November 2 loomed. Can it be a coincidence that the troops started moving there within a week of the votes being counted here?
- Which brings us to a second question: Using April 2004 as the cut-point, what do we say to the 387 Americans who died and the 4,066 Americans who were wounded during the months between May and October 2004? For all of Krauthammer's blather about Bush's courage in spending political capital, when lives were on the line the past six months to a year, Bush dared not spend a nickel of his election-year capital to ratchet up the counter-offensives to save American lives in the longer term for fear it might cost more lives in the shorter (i.e., election-year) term. Many of the attacks against our troops and civilians were planned and coordinated in places like Fallujah and Jalaba.
- Looking ahead, are there any circumstances under which elections should not be held on January 30? The rush to hold elections is, in my view, a diversionary and exculpatory tactic. If Iraq goes ahead with scrambled elections while millions remain displaced from their homes, and unemployment is about 70 percent nationwide, that means the results have far less meaning in terms of democratic transition than they do in terms of phony global public relations. And Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld seem far more interested in the latter than the former. These will not be akin to the Afghanistan elections, which were far from perfect despite being conducted under far safer, far more stable conditions.
- Though there are signs that we will increase troop counts in Iraq for the short term, will troop counts be reduced after January 30 -- regardless of the outcome of those elections? If Bob Novak is right, Bush is going to use elections as justification for bailing on Iraq, leaving it to becoming Afghanized, as Matt Yglesias worries, while claiming credit for turning a dictatorship into a democracy. I want our straight-talkin' stay-the-course president on the record prior to January 30 saying he will stay the course in Iraq after January 30.
Maybe, amid all the post-election hype about values voters and Bush's second honeymoon and Tom Delay's antics, I'm overlooking an entire national conversation underway. But there are major military operations happening on the ground in Iraq, and it seems to me that nobody is asking questions about what they signify, past or present or future.