Four years ago the Baker-Hamilton Commission warned us that Iraq would devolve into sectarian violence as soon as U.S. troops left. Guess what?
OK, now the evidence is irrefutable. Not only was the Iraq invasion a complete failure, but so was Bush's "Surge," launched to stabilize the country until he left office.
The timing could not be more obvious. As soon as U.S. troops left Iraq, the sectarian power struggles picked up where the left off. As Tony Karon writes in Time:
It might seem that the dust had hardly settled on the tracks of the last U.S. convoy that rolled out of Iraq on Saturday before Shi’ite and Sunni politicians were at one another’s throats. That would be a misleading impression, of course, but only because it presupposes — mistakenly — that the ethnic and sectarian factions competing for power in Iraq had achieved some sort of consensus during the almost nine years that U.S. troops had been present. On the contrary, all the major Iraqi factions have simply used the nine-year presence of the world’s largest army to better position themselves for the next phase of a power struggle that had raged on even as the U.S. had 140,000 troops in the country.
It's worth remembering what was written almost four years ago:
The surge is playing out exactly as the Baker-Hamilton Commission said it would. The "progess" in Iraq is ephemeral, if not cosmetic. As the Commission, also known as the Iraq Study Group, warned us:
"Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation. A senior American general told us that adding U.S. troops might temporarily help limit violence in a highly localized area. However, past experience indicates that the violence would simply rekindle as soon as U.S. forces are moved to another area. As another American general told us, if the Iraqi government does not make political progress, 'all the troops in the world will not provide security.' Meanwhile, America's military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence. Increased deployments to Iraq would also necessarily hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or respond to crises around the world."
McCain, who rejected the recommendations of the the Iraq Study Group in favor of Bush's surge, continues to conflate the different warring factions into a single "enemy" acting on behalf of Iran. As his mouthpiece, Lindsay Graham, said yesterday on Fox News:
"I applaud the Maliki government for taking on Iranian-backed militia... The Iranians are killing Americans. They've aligned themselves with the Shia Mahdi army. The Badr Brigade is not the problem."
The Badr Brigade dominates Iraqi security forces so, in Graham's oversimplified view of things, the Badr Brigade is acting on behalf of the government, backed up by U.S. forces, so the Badr Brigade is not the problem.
And again, the Iraq Study Group offered a reality check which McCain and the mainstream media chose to ignore:
"The Badr Brigade is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The Badr Brigade has long-standing ties with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Many Badr members have become integrated into the Iraqi police, and others play policing roles in southern Iraqi cities. While wearing the uniform of the security services, Badr fighters have targeted Sunni Arab civilians. Badr fighters have also clashed with the Mahdi Army, particularly in southern Iraq."
What lessons have Graham, McCain, Graham, Bush and all the other neocon apologists learned after all these years in Iraq? Almost none.