The date by which we are supposed to judge whether the “surge” is working keeps getting pushed back, but even slippier than the timeline is the total absence of any administration yardstick for success.
In theory, you’d think that the goal of escalating the war is to reduce the violence. Right there we’re already in topsy-turvyland of the “destroy the village in order to save it” variety. But it only gets more illogical. The administration warned that we should expect a rise in casualties as the surge works its magic, because we’re putting more boots on the ground and in harm’s way, and we’re fighting the bad guys, so there’s likely to be more violence, not less, for some indeterminate time.
Now we’re hearing the next level of this Catch-22: Once we really do start achieving some effective “stabilization” of parts of Baghdad or Anbar or wherever, this will only enrage the insurgents and make them more desperate, so they’re going to attack harder. In other words: we can tell we’re achieving stability because of all the instability our success is provoking!
This may sound insane, but here it is, on Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page. Owen West, a Marine major and veteran of two tours in Iraq, tells us that the Democratic effort to set a withdrawal date will undermine the progress that’s visible to him on the ground:
The Iraqi battalion I lived with is stationed outside of Habbaniya, a small city in violent Anbar Province. Together with a fledgling police force and a Marine battalion, these Iraqi troops made Habbaniya a relatively secure place: it has a souk where Iraqi soldiers can shop outside their armored Humvees, public generators that don’t mysteriously explode, children who walk to school on their own. The area became so stable, in fact, that it attracted the attention of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In late February, the Sunni insurgents blew up the mosque, killing 36.
Huh? Look, the bad guys blew up the mosque — that’s how you can tell how stable the area had become!
The value of this mad rhetoric is obvious: Any way things go, the administration wins. If violence decreases, the surge is working, and if violence continues or increases, the surge is working, too. The only losers are the American soldiers and Iraquis who keep dying, abandoned in a game of run-out-the-clock.
[tags]iraq, surge, new york times op-ed[/tags]
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