George W Bu$h says we’re winning the war in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton report says we’re neither winning nor losing the war. Colin Powell says that if we’re not winning then we’re losing. They can’t all be right, can they? Can they all be wrong? How can something be described at the same time by two opposing words? Is it merely a case of semantics? The use of specific words as political spin or some vague mental attitude defined by a single word? (A LATE UPDATE on this below)
Not winning and not losing – at any moment, a snapshot in time if you like - so it’s possible to be "Not winning" and "not losing." But as an ongoing process over a period of time, that situation cannot be sustained.
Maybe it all depends on what data you select to support your argument. Mr Bu$h has never defined what "winning" means, although we can perhaps infer what he means by considering his stated intentions at the time he launched his illegal war of aggression. Leaving aside all the many claims that have been thoroughly debunked by tons of newsprint and skazillions of excited electrons, a reasonable man might infer that what Mr Bu$h wanted was a tame ally in a client state in the Middle East operated as sort of market forces political and social experiment. Basically, a successful corporate state run on all the business-friendly idealizations of the American Enterprise Institute: a Corporate run infrastructure, with the major profit centers owned and operated by Transnational corporations, principally American, and unfettered by the inconvenient regulation by government, with little or no state-run operations other than military and police enforcement and possibly medical services like hospitals, unless it was seen they could be assumed as further profitable enterprises. Those state operated items would be supported by a flat tax. More about this later.
It has to be mentioned that Mr Bu$h’s belief that we’re winning is required by the rules of politics as well as his own personality, which is incapable of ever admitting error or failure.
It seems that the US military and Baker-Hamilton define "winning" slightly differently, perhaps because they are looking not at that snapshot moment in time, but rather at something resembling a film strip, in which numbers of attacks, and fatalities of both Iraqis and US forces, are rising slowly but dramatically over a period of over three years. The numbers of attacks, by the way, were deliberately hidden by the Pentagon for the months of September, October, and November, and not released until the appropriate smoke and mirrors report hade been carefully hand-crafted to disguise the bad news. You can read a bit about that here.
Colin Powell, whatever his other flaws and failings, knows from his military service how to define winning and losing. No longer involved in military or diplomatic activities, he might have the most balanced view of the subject by virtue of non-involvement in the judging process. Now, it's true that many would object, citing him as a dishonest judge because of his behavior in supporting Bu$hCo's specious arguments for war in the first place. But because of those actions he has been dismissed by Mr Bu$h (some say comtemptuously kicked to the curb) and seems comfortabl as an outsider.
Today [Sunday, 12/17] on CBS’s Face the Nation, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he agreed with the Iraq Study Group that the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating." He disagreed with incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ assessment that the U.S. is neither winning nor losing in Iraq. "We are losing," Powell said.
Fred Kagan wrote a rally round the flag report for the American Enterprise Institute in which he urgently played military strategist and Mr Bu$h has eagerly seized upon this report to justify his subconscious need to never be held accountable for any of his actions.
People living in the here-and-now world of reality understand that this plan will be temporary at best, since it will entail retaining many troops in Iraq past their scheduled rotation dates, and speeding up replacement deployments of troops, which means they will redeploy before they are fully prepared. It will give us a short-term numerical increase of somewhere between 20,000 and 55,000, figures speculated upon by various observers.
It appears that the dramatic troop increase is needed for a quick campaign to decrease internal dissent in Baghdad and Anbar province. In Baghdad, one can presume that means defanging the Mahdi Army which is loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, which probably means a nasty urban combat situation in Sadr City by the Iraqi Army, National Police, and US troops, which will allegedly be used as stiffeners or backup. The fact that the army and police are believed to be heavily infiltrated by members of Shiite militias, including the Mahdi Army, will complicate the campaign. It is estimated that some 2,000,000 people live in the suburb of Sadr City, among them somewhere around 70,000 fighters loyal to al-Sadr.
There’s a reason that while the 1968 Tet offensive lasted only a few days throughout Viet Nam, it took a month for US Marines to pacify Hue, and that reason is the hard cruel nature of urban combat. It can be a room-by-room, house-by-house battle of attrition. If your enemy is ideologically committed, he will try to bleed you dry with suicidal determination. The way to win such a battle is to either destroy entire blocks by the heavy firepower if artillery and air assets, or to fight them out, room by room, hoping you’ve got more men and bullets than they have. I’ve never done it, thank some deity, but I’ve spoken with veterans of Hue and some of the vicious battles in Western Europe, and it sounded more terrifying than fighting ambushes in the Highlands.
The question that must be asked is what will happen when the dynamic of this surge counter-attack peters out, as it surely must, at some point. Will Baghdad be fully "pacified" and will it remain so when the troops are shifted to Anbar province as they must be, since a recent Marine Corps report has counted that region as effectively lost to the Sunni insurgency and al-Quaeda?
Yes, it will probably be militarily pacified even if the entire quarter of the city is leveled by the fighting. We can reasonably expect heavy casualties among defenders, attackers, and helpless residents caught in the middle. The Iraqi mortuaries and medical services, which are not equal to the burden placed them now, will be overwhelmed, because it’s pretty certain that the everyday violence that is going on now will continue even as Sadr City is pacified.
I know I’ll be interested in how CENTCOM manage the news during this fight, since they are very artful abut denying and disguising facts now.
Since the Marines say that Anbar has been lost, logically it must be calmed down after combat in Baghdad is calmed down. More about Anbar later.
LATE UPDATE: Mr Bu$h has modified his opinion on Iraq in an interview carried this morning in a WaPo interview (no link - find it yourself.) He now maintains we are neither winning nor losing. He apparently plans to increase the size of the US miltary by some as-yet-unknown figure in order to meet the demands of the expected decades-long "war against terror." The full effect of any such increases will of course not be felt for up to two years after their joining the colors, unless he simply authorizes "full access" to the 5000,000-odd US Reserves and National Guard.