The quote of the day comes from an interview with David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and advisor to Gen. Petraeus:

Our biggest problem during the surge was a hostile American Congress.

Couldn’t that be said of the financial crisis as well?

It reminds me of Sam Clemens’s quip:

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

UPDATE

As, indeed, it has.

President Barack Obama (R) walks with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (L) from the Oval Office to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House February 27, 2009 in Washington, DC. President Obama is traveling to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to announce his plans for eventual removal of troops from Iraq. (Getty Images)

Given that OTB got started during the run-up to the Iraq War and that my commentary on that subject was what first got me noticed by some major blogs, it’s perhaps ironic that I’ve hardly written about the subject lately.  Partly, it’s a function of my now doing most of my foreign policy blogging at New Atlanticist, where Iraq discussion doesn’t really fit.  Mostly, though, it’s because the war has been in status quo mode since shortly after the Surge and there’s not much going on that I’m interested in writing about.

Yesterday, of course, President Obama announced his Iraq withdrawal plan.

For the most part, I agree with Christian Brose ’s analysis.  I especially want to emphasize this:

Obama can say all he wants that he’s “ending the war” by August 2010, but believing that is nutty, and being surprised that by then we’ll still have 30-50,000 troops in Iraq, as some on the left are, is even nuttier. We knew this was coming. From the moment he said during the campaign that he’d pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq in 16 months, Obama has backtracked — first drawing a false distinction between “combat” and “non-combat” troops, and now pretending that a “residual force” of 30-50,000 Americans under arms, many of whom will be fighting al Qaeda, constitutes “ending the war.”

We knew this was coming and, frankly, it was coming in much the same way regardless of whether Obama or McCain won.  Despite all the cute talk about “100 years of war,” the Surge was going to end and a drawdown of forces was going to commence.  Hell, George W. Bush had already signed a status of forces agreement requiring it.

And we’re going to keep a sizable force in theater for the foreseeable future which will be in harm’s way.   Bruce McQuain is right:  That’s not exactly “ending this war.”

But we’ve known since the primaries that Obama wasn’t going to totally remove forces from Iraq and he’s always left wiggle room for “events on the ground” and “the advice of military commanders.”  He appears, in fact, to actually be taking said advice.  And that’s a good thing.

Obama started the process that led to his becoming president as a novice — a bright, charismatic fellow who could inspire progressives hungry for change.  He said some imprudent things in his naive enthusiasm.  Thankfully, since he was elected and will serve as president for at least four years, he demonstrated that he could learn and that his positions could quickly evolve in light of new understanding.

On the matter of Iraq, he started off sounding like one of the Kos Kids but quickly became much more nuanced and thoughtful.  Because he had been an early, forceful opponent of the war, he retained strong credibility on the left.  Because his policy statements evolved, centrists’ fears that he would be rash were mollified.  And because he’s such a disciplined communicator, quite a few people managed to hear what they wanted to hear, emphasizing the parts of his speeches they liked and discounting caveats as “just politics.”

Beyond that, all presidents change upon taking office, adapting to the role of commander-in-chief.  Those who take over ongoing wars tend not to want to “lose” them on their watch.  So, Obama will naturally play out the string carefully.

As to the outcome of the war, quite a few of the blogs on the Right are proclaiming victory.  That’s right only if we define winning as “this is turning out better than anyone would have guessed two years ago.”  Even if we go for something less than “a model Arab democracy that will create a wave of democratic movements in the region,” settling for, say, “a stable, democratic government capable of providing for its own security,” we ain’t there yet.  And, so long as we have tens thousands of American troops there engaged in counter-terrorist operations, it ain’t over.

Chuck Todd and company note that Barack Obama has rebounded in the polls and that we’re now “about where the race was before the conventions.”

The reason why Obama’s up: women. According to the latest New York Times/CBS survey, Obama is ahead overall by five points (48%-43%); a week ago after the GOP convention, CBS had McCain up two points overall (46%-44%) and five points among women (47%-42%). But in the latest poll, Obama once again has the advantage with female voters (54%-38%). The same holds true in a new national Quinnipiac survey, which finds Obama with a four-point lead over McCain (49%-45%) and a 14-point edge among women (54%-40%). Every poll out this week — whether by a good pollster or a mediocre one — has shown the same trend: movement towards Obama.

Sure enough, the polls almost all show a slight Obama lead:

And, yes, the trendlines show that we’re pretty close to where we were in August:

Todd’s speculation centers on backlash to a perception that McCain’s ads are too negative or the shrinking of the Palin Effect, both of which are possible.  It strikes me that the far more powerful explanation, though, is a familar one:  Events, dear boys.  Events.

This race has always been the Democrats’ to lose.  The country is tired of Bush, tired of the war in Iraq, and tired of a sagging economy.  Rightly or wrongly, the party of the incumbent president gets blamed for these things.

For a brief moment, it looked like events had turned in McCain’s favor.  Namely, there’s now a widespread sense that the Surge — which he supported, indeed, led the call for, and his opponent fought — was a success and that we’re on the verge of salvaging something close enough to victory in Iraq.

The failure of Lehman Brothers and the bailout of AIG, though, have turned the focus back to the economy.  That’s almost always an advantage for Democrats, since they’re the party that favors governmental intervention.  It’s doubly so in years when Republicans occupy the White House.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  If the election is decided on the economy, Obama wins, perhaps easily.  If it’s decided on national security issues, McCain may pull it off.  It’s looking increasingly likely that it’ll be the former.

Writing for the L.A. Times, Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl have a disturbing report about the ongoing crackdown of Iraq’s Sunni population by the Maliki government.

Much of Iraq’s dramatic security progress can be traced to a series of decisions made by Sunni tribal leaders in late 2006 to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq and cooperate with American forces in Anbar province. These leaders, outraged by Al Qaeda’s brutality against their people, approached the U.S. military with an offer it couldn’t refuse: Enter into an alliance with the tribes, and they would turn their weapons against Al Qaeda rather than American troops.

Throughout 2007, U.S. commanders capitalized on this Sunni movement, the so-called Awakening, to create an expanding network of alliances with Sunni tribes and former insurgents that helped turn the tide and drive Al Qaeda in Iraq to near extinction. There are now about 100,000 armed Sons of Iraq, each paid $300 a month by U.S. forces to provide security in local neighborhoods throughout the country. In recognition of the key role the Awakening played in security improvements, President Bush met with several Sunni tribal leaders during his trip to Anbar last September, and Petraeus, who cites the program as a critical factor explaining the decline in violence, has promised to “not walk away from them.”

But Iraq’s predominantly Shiite central government seems intent on doing precisely that. Maliki and his advisors never really accepted the Sunni Awakening, and they remain convinced that the movement is simply a way for Sunni insurgents to buy time to restart a campaign of violence or to infiltrate the state’s security apparatus. In 2007, with Iraq’s government weak and its military not yet ready to take the lead in operations, the Maliki government acquiesced to the U.S.-led initiative and grudgingly agreed to integrate 20% of the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi security forces. Now, a newly confident Maliki government is edging away from this commitment.

Read the whole thing. This is clearly an act of hubris on the part of Maliki, who is taking advantage of the U.S. presence because he knows that, when push comes to shove, we’re going to back the elected leader of Iraq over the militias who were killing our soldiers two years ago. Without our presence, I have a feeling he’d be much more inclined to work with the Sunnis–the consequences of not doing so for him would pretty much be all-out civil war. Unfortunately, while our military forces do exist in Iraq, we’re likely to get in the middle of that war, because I doubt the Sunnis will go quietly. As the article notes:

We talked to a number of tribal and Sons of Iraq leaders during our trip. When asked what would happen if the Maliki government did not keep its word and integrate or otherwise accommodate their members, one leader was blunt: “There will be trouble.”

It is obvious where this road might end. The last time tens of thousands of armed Sunni men were humiliated in Iraq — by disbanding the Baath Party and Iraqi army in May 2003 — an insurgency began, costing thousands of U.S. lives and throwing Iraq into chaos. Yet Maliki and his advisors risk provoking Iraq’s Sunni community into another round of violence.

I suppose we could try to talk Maliki down, but it’s clear from his actions of the past year that Maliki’s only interest is Maliki getting more power. Here’s hoping that this somehow ends well.

(link via Kevin Drum)

Ezra Klein and his summer intern have compiled ten expert responses to the question “How Important Was the Surge?” Not surprisingly, those from Center for American Progress answered “Not all that important” whereas Michael O’Hanlon and others who supported the Surge to begin with though it was “undoubtedly very important.” Or, as Marc Danziger puts it,

There’s a fairly wide range of opinions there, mostly based on the [preset position] + “but who can say?” view of historical analysis.

He also notes that, in war as in poker, signaling is very important and the mere fact of the United States doubling down on its bet was powerfully important. I agree.

The causes of the decline in violence were manifold; the Surge was among them. Certainly, though, the Surge hasn’t “worked” in the advertised sense. Thus far, at least, it hasn’t led to the political reconciliation for which we were providing breathing room. And most of what good has been accomplished has come from the bottom up and than the top down — and thus given more power to local tribal leaders and warlords, probably making some of our political goals harder to achieve.

The good news is that violence is down and the Iraqi military and security forces show signs of great progress. The bad news is that the Sunnis and Shia don’t seem to be coming together and the Kurds seem to be moving even further toward autonomy. Iraq has had two national elections in the post-Saddam era but pluralism and democracy are far from institutionalized.

The question, then, is whether the first can be sustained long enough to change the second. We could assemble ten times ten Iraqi experts and we won’t get an answer much better than “Who can say?”

John McCain said today that the Middle East would be in far worse shape had we succumbed to Barack Obama’s “audacity of hopelessness.”

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, ridiculing Barack Obama for “the audacity of hopelessness” in his policies on Iraq, said Friday that the entire Middle East could have plunged into war had U.S. troops been withdrawn as his rival advocated.

Speaking to an audience of Hispanic military veterans, McCain stepped up his criticism of Obama while the Illinois senator continued his headline-grabbing tour of the Middle East and Europe. The Arizona Republican contended that Obama’s policies — he opposed sending more troops to Iraq in the “surge” that McCain supported — would have led to defeat there and in Afghanistan.

“We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right,” McCain said, a play on the title of Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.”

Yeah, we got the joke. And it’s actually a pretty decent one. Kudos to his speechwriters.

The problem, though, is that, had we listened to Obama, we wouldn’t be in Iraq to begin with. Given public opinion, it’s going to be a tough sell that McCain’s superior judgment on the Surge trumps that.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Commenting on a recentish NYT report on foreign fighters flooding into Pakistan to support al Qaeda and Taliban militants, Thomas Barnett observes,

Spray one apartment and the bugs move over to the next. Wherever there’s the least resistance or the most opportunity, you find them clustered.

The Anbar awakening ruins al Qaeda’s long-term chances in Iraq, and so the clustering refocuses on Pakistan. With the surge succeeding in Iraq and Bush finally coming around to rapprochement with Iran, our re-direct on Afghanistan/Pakistan seems well underway for the next president.

Of course, they could always re-direct back if we “surge” in Aghanistan/Pakistan and leave Iraq before it is able to sustain the gains in security.

Image: Loftus

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern.

Dave Schuler, Dodd Harris, and (tentatively) Alex Knapp will be joining me tonight to talk about recent events in the news.   Likely topics:

• Obama’s overseas trip

• The Couric interviews with Obama and McCain

• Is the Surge working?  Are we winning?  Can we ever win?

Please join us. We’ll also be taking your calls at (646) 716-7030.

You can play the show, subscribe to its feed, or share it with your friends via the widget below:

(Note: The playback automatically updates to the most recent show available. Older shows can be accessed at the show archives.)

Here’s an interesting Q&A from Katie Couric’s interview with John McCain.

Kate Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn’t make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed. [emphasis added]

In other words, John McCain is making the claim that the “Anbar awakening” occurred as a consequence of the Surge. The problem with this claim is that the awakening clearly preceded it. As Dave Wiegel points out, the “awakening” began around September of 2006, while the Surge did not begin until early 2007. Indeed, as Matthew Yglesias points out, Colonel (now-General) McFarland was out of Anbar before the Surge began. Not only that, while a few hundred extra troops were sent into Anbar in early 2007, the vast majority of extra troops were sent into Baghdad. In Baghdad, it does appear that the Surge did help reduce violence (though not in a very sustainable way), but the Anbar Awakening was well underway before the troop surge began.

This is yet one more incident that causes me to be deeply skeptical about McCain’s Iraq campaigning. Given other mistakes of his–mistaking Sunni and Shi’ite, conflating al-Qaeda with the insurgency, falsely accusing Iran of arming al-Qaeda, and other misstatements–I question his interest in learning more actual details about the Iraq conflict. I am just a part-time political pundit who is, frankly, more interested in domestic and science issues than I am in military matters. John McCain should be much more informed about the facts on the ground than I am. At the very least, he should know exactly who the players are.

UPDATE: Writing on this topic for Slate, Christopher Beam points out that the Anbar Awakening was actualy used by President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address to justify the Surge:

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops.

Now, it may well be that the extra troops helped sustain the Awakening (though I suspect that the bribes arms and resources we supplied to the Sunni tribes had a bigger effect). However, there’s really not much of a factual basis to say that the Surge caused the Awakening.

In anticipation of Sen. Barack Obama’s visit to Afghanistan I thought it might be appropriate to consider the situation there. Both Sens. McCain and Obama have called for achieving victory in Afghanistan. Sen. Obama has characterized the conflict there as “the war we need to win” and has called for

…taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Sen. McCain recently called for an Iraq-like “surge” in Afghanistan:

It is by applying the tried and true principles of counter-insurgency used in the surge — which Senator Obama opposed — that we will win in Afghanistan. With the right strategy and the right forces, we can succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory.

But victory in Afghanistan, however defined, is far from a sure thing. Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern history and America’s preeminent expert on Shi’ism, recently expressed pretty serious skepticism:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq.

ISAF Commander Dan McNeill in Der Spiegel estimated the requirements for pacifying Afghanistan:

ISAF Commander McNeill has said himself that according to the current counterterrorism doctrine, it would take 400,000 troops to pacify Afghanistan in the long term. But the reality is that he has only 47,000 soldiers under his command, together with another 18,000 troops fighting at their sides as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, and possibly another 75,000 reasonably well-trained soldiers in the Afghan army by the end of the year. All told, there is still a shortfall of 260,000 men.

A year and a half ago, Col. Pat Lang, formerly an intelligence and special forces officer and the first professor of Arabic at the U. S. Military Academy, expressed optimism with respect to Afghanistan at a Middle East Policy Council forum:

In fact, if you had more troops and more people who were skilled at doing the kind of work that I’m familiar with and the right kind of diplomats and more foreign assistance and things of that kind, I think you could really still make something of Afghanistan. And it probably wouldn’t take a whole lot more in the way of troops.

Since then the following was written by a guest blogger at Col. Lang’s blog:

The US is in a bind. It has to deny the Pakhtun insurgency (the Taliban are only one part of it) the use of the tribal areas as a base. With Pakistan showing no will to control these areas, it is threatening to take unilateral military action there. This will obviously be through air strikes and Special Forces raids, both notorious for their inevitable “collateral damage”. This will add fuel to the fire of militancy, pushing more recruits into the ranks of the jihad, especially the deadly suicide bombers. An insurgency cannot be defeated by a few successful decapitation strikes, or even by turning a rugged mountainous base area into a free-fire zone. The more perceptive US commanders probably know this, but they have to be seen to do something about the continuous guerrilla attacks. How long will the NATO allies stick around fighting an unwinnable war? How long will the US public put up with it?

But that is not the worst of it. Believing Pakistan to be complicit in the US strikes on their people, the tribal militants will turn on it; they have already seen the deadly effect of their suicide bombs in the teeming cities. An already fragile governmental and societal structure will face severe stress; anything could happen. One thing is certain : the religious fundamentalists in the country will take full advantage of this turmoil. For the US, the first impact will be on their supply line through Pakistan. Then, Pakistan itself, as an ally, will be at risk.

One of the most difficult things for both statesman and soldier is to recognize a war as unwinnable before it is proven in the field.

Some Afghans have expressed substantial skepticism about the value of increased foreign troop strength in the country:

Kabul, July 20 (DPA) Ahead of Senator Barack Obama’s expected visit to Afghanistan, the US presidential hopeful’s plans to increase US troops in the country was being met with both hope and scepticism from Afghans.

“Increasing troops doesn’t help Afghanistan at all,” warned Kabeer Ranjbar, a member of the lower house of the Afghan National Assembly. “Afghanistan’s governmental institutions need to be reformed. The problem is the Afghanistan government itself.”

“Afghanistan government needs to gain people’s support,” he said. “If the government doesn’t have people’s support, increasing of forces doesn’t help Afghanistan.”

I’ve long been a skeptic about our efforts in Afghanistan. The logistics of supplying a larger force than we have there now is truly daunting, complicated by the reality that everything we bring into the country must be brought by air or overland through Pakistan. That increases the cost of operations there.

The operations are quite dangerous, too. Our casualty rate per 1,000 troops has been higher in Afghanistan than it is in Iraq for some time.

Since our invasion in 2001 we have successfully overthrown the Taliban and introduced a new government in the country. Unfortunately, that government doesn’t have a great deal of influence outside the capital city. We have been partially successful at expelling Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the country but are unable to completely secure the country as long as Al Qaeda and the Taliban remnants are able to flee across the border into Pakistan. The Pakistani government has either been unable or unwilling to prevent this and, understandably, is reluctant to allow our forces free rein in their country.

There are a number of questions we might consider. What would victory in Afghanistan look like? Given present constraints how can it be achieved? What will the cost of achieving it be? How long will it take? Are the costs and timeframe politically acceptable?

Michael J. Totten weighs in on the  Iraq War is Over and We Won argument and decides that, while he’s “reluctant” to answer that question in the affirmative, “The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. ”

[Michael] Yon is braver than the rest of us for declaring the war over, but it’s important to understand that there are no final battles in counterinsurgencies and it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact dates when wars like this end. The anti-Iraqi insurgency – a war-within-a-war – really is effectively over. As long as another such war-within-a-war doesn’t break out, Yon will appear more perceptive than the rest of us in hindsight when the currently low levels of violence finally do taper off into relative insignificance.

The problem, which I noted in my post on the subject, is that, given the possibility that the Mahdi Army could end its ceasefire at any moment or another spectucular event could reignite sectarian fighting (Totten notes that there have been zero such fatalities since April), there’s no way to distinguish a lull from closure.  He observes that NATO has not fully secured Kosovo nine years after the end of major combat operations there, and that conflicts in Lebanon, Algeria, and Palestine have an on again, off again nature that’s almost wholly unpredictable.

What most of us still think of as “war” in Iraq is, at this point, a rough and unfinished peacekeeping mission. Whether it is officially over or not, it has certainly been downgraded to something else, and it’s about time more analysts and observers are willing to say so.

The problems with that are manifold.  While there’s relative peace at the moment, there has been no cessation of hostilities.  Terrorist attacks continue, obviously.  More importantly, it’s not even clear who the parties are who would have the ability to negotiate and sign an armistice.  It simply doesn’t feel like a peacekeeping mission.  Until we’ve got a better handle on Muqtada al-Sadr and company, it’s just too early  to break out the blue berets.

Moreover, we haven’t achieved our mission.   Once Saddam’s regime was toppled and it was clear that his WMD program was more notional than real, the tangible goals of the war were achieved.  We’ve remained in the last four plus years, and took the lion’s share of our casualties, fighting for something more abstract and elusive: a stable democracy capable of governing a unified Iraq without our assistance.

Security is a precondition for that goal, which was the impetus behind the Surge.  But, thus far, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that the Maliki government has built much sectarian consensus.   Elections are scheduled for October 1st that could conceivably be a major step in that direction but, alas, they can’t even agree on the rules for said election.  Of course, there’s only so much that the United States can do to move that process along.  Horses, water, and all that.  There’s even less that the United States military can do.

If  the primary purpose of American combat troops at this stage is simply continuing to give the Iraqi politicians breathing room to build consensus, then Totten’s right: it is mostly a stability and security operation at this point more than a traditional counterinsurgency.

Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said this yesterday:

“I won’t go so far as to say that progress in Iraq from a military perspective has reached a tipping point or is reversible — it has not, and it is not,” Mullen told a Pentagon press conference.  “But security is unquestionably and remarkably better. Indeed, if these trends continue I expect to be able early this fall to recommend to the secretary and the president further troop reductions,” he said.

At the same time, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was warning against the militarization of foreign policy and stressing the need for civilian leadership under the State Department and moving the military to a support role.

So maybe, just maybe, we’re making the transition from Thomas Barnett’s Leviathan force to the SysAdmin force.  Time will tell whether we’ll need to switch back into kinetic mode.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Timothy Kingston

William Arkin contends that recent political maneuvering has put Barack Obama and President Bush in almost identical positions vis-à-vis Iraq:

The Bush administration’s potential Iraq withdrawal plan, floated in The New York Times over the weekend, to draw down brigades further before September of this year and to accelerate withdrawals in 2009, has collided with Barack Obama’s own 16-month plan, which the candidate recently said needed “refinement.” (It got some clarification today, including his plea to end America’s “single-minded” focus on Iraq.)

Cynics might dismiss the maneuvering as “just politics,”  but in fact both men are struggling with the same objective and reality: how to end the Iraq war favorably and without admitting defeat, and how to preserve the honor of the American military.

Scanning summaries of the speeches made today by John McCain and Barack Obama on the Iraq War, I had the same thought.  Both are calling for more troops in Afghanistan, for example, extolling the virtues of the Surge, and talking about how to get our troops out of Iraq.

Reading deeper, though, the differences remain stark.  While I believe a President McCain would be less be less bellicose than Candidate McCain and a President Obama less diplomatic and accommodating that Candidate Obama — and that we’ll still have a significant but diminished military presence sixteen months into the administration of which ever man wins, they have fundamentally different views of the strategic picture.

The main sound byte from Obama’s speech, “A New Strategy for a New World,” sounded eerily like what I was getting at this morning in my Iraq War Over?  We Won? post.

Iraq is not going to be a perfect place, and we don’t have unlimited resources to try to make it one. We are not going to kill every al Qaeda sympathizer, eliminate every trace of Iranian influence, or stand up a flawless democracy before we leave

Reading through the  full transcript, however, one sees a very different view.  Some excerpts:

[W]e have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats – all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Our men and women in uniform have accomplished every mission we have given them. What’s missing in our debate about Iraq – what has been missing since before the war began – is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy. This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.

[...]

In the 18 months since the surge began, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. June was our highest casualty month of the war. The Taliban has been on the offensive, even launching a brazen attack on one of our bases. Al Qaeda has a growing sanctuary in Pakistan. That is a consequence of our current strategy.

In the 18 months since the surge began, as I warned at the outset – Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the purpose of the surge. They have not invested tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues to rebuild their country. They have not resolved their differences or shaped a new political compact.

To be sure, these points are made in the midst of a foreign policy speech with which John McCain would likely agree on most of the goals.  But the two men have a fundamentally different view on the value of the Iraq War.

Let’s turn to McCain’s speech, which announced his “Comprehensive Strategy for Victory in Afghanistan.”

Today we know Senator Obama was wrong. The surge has succeeded. And because of its success, the next President will inherit a situation in Iraq in which America’s enemies are on the run, and our soldiers are beginning to come home. Senator Obama is departing soon on a trip abroad that will include a fact-finding mission to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: first you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy.

[...]

Senator Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan. It is by applying the tried and true principles of counter-insurgency used in the surge — which Senator Obama opposed — that we will win in Afghanistan. With the right strategy and the right forces, we can succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory.

The two candidate’s strategies for Afghanistan, similarly, are only superficially similar.  Both want to increase troop strength by taking forces freed up from drawing down in Iraq.  Both think the solution involves more help from our Allies, getting tough with Pakistan, establishing rule of law, and more non-military means.   But McCain argues that it’ll take more than that:

But sending more forces, by itself, is not enough to prevail. In the 18 months that Senator Obama has been campaigning for the presidency, the number of NATO forces in Afghanistan has already almost doubled — from 33,000 in January 2007 to about 53,000 today. Yet security has still deteriorated. What we need in Afghanistan is exactly what Gen. Petraeus brought to Iraq: a nationwide civil-military campaign plan that is focused on providing security for the population. Today no such integrated plan exists. When I am commander-in-chief, it will.

Along those lines he makes a very critical point:

One of the reasons there is no comprehensive campaign plan for Afghanistan is because we have violated one of the cardinal rules of any military operation: unity of command. Today there are no less than three different American military combatant commands operating in Afghanistan, as well as NATO, some of whose members have national restrictions on where their troops can go and what they can do. This is no way to run a war. The top commander in Afghanistan needs to be just that: the supreme commander of all coalition forces. As commander-in-chief, I will work with our allies to ensure unity of command.

An important point, indeed.

Photo credit:  Getty Images – Reuters – ABC News

Barack Obama has taken things off his campaign site that might be used by opponents to embarrass him, James Gordon Meek reports in the NY Daily News under the headline “Obama Purges Web Critique of Surge.”  Why, it’s our Outrage of the Day!

Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a “problem” that had barely reduced violence. “The surge is not working,” Obama’s old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks – not U.S. military muscle – for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

The News reported Sunday that insurgent attacks have fallen to the fewest since March 2004.

Obama’s campaign posted a new Iraq plan Sunday night, which cites an “improved security situation” paid for with the blood of U.S. troops since the surge began in February 2007. It praises G.I.s’ “hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics and enormous sacrifice.”

Campaign aide Wendy Morigi said Obama is “not softening his criticism of the surge. We regularly update the Web site to reflect changes in current events.”

I question the timing. It’s awfully convenient that the Daily News published something on Sunday and the Obama campaign just happened to take that into account in a speech he gave on Monday, let alone that he just so happened to put that speech up on his Iraq page over the weekend!

Jim Hoft has screen caps proving the perfidy.  He also gets in a perfectly clever CHANGE you can believe in… quip.

Ed Morrissey believes that “the Obama campaign has yet to acknowledge that the changes came from a strategy he opposed and that he predicted would fail. “   Obama’s Monday NYT op-ed, “My Plan for Iraq,” does that, though:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge,  our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.

One can reasonably disagree with his plan; indeed, I do.  But he acknowledges the successes of the Surge while still arguing that it’s time to start drawing down our forces.

Scott Johnson says it’s 1984 and this is Obama’s version of the Ministry of Truth.  Matt Lewis thinks it’s “sinister” and “secretive.” But campaign websites are marketing vehicles, not permanent document repositories.  Nor do they operate on the ethical premises of the blogosphere, where purging old posts is considered unsporting.

Pamela Geller thinks that, “when he denies with a straight face that he’s changing anything, Obama gives new meaning to chutzpah.”  But he’s not changing anything!  He still supports withdrawal 16 months after he takes office, albeit with some caveats that he didn’t emphasize during the primaries.  And he says right there in the NYT op-ed — published yesterday — that he opposed the Surge.  If he’s trying to hide that fact, he’s going to need to be a mite more clever about it.

Dan Riehl gets to a much more productive debating point: “Obama claims to have judgment you can trust. I have to assume he’s talking to our enemies in the Middle-East given the judgment he displayed on the surge.”

More reactions at memeorandum: American Power, Blue Girl, Red State, www.redstate.com, American Spectator, JustOneMinute, Media Blog, The New Republic, TalkLeft, Marc Ambinder, Think Progress, The Swamp, Matthew Yglesias, The Strata-Sphere, democracyarsenal.org, Lawyers, Guns and Money, TPM Election Central, Behind the Numbers, Buck Naked Politics, Political Machine, Raw Story, On Deadline, American Power, Booman Tribune and The Fix

Barack Obama takes to the op-ed pages of the NYT to present his new plan for Iraq which is conveniently his old plan for Iraq.   He sees Nuri al-Maliki’s proposal for a a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq as “an enormous opportunity.”

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

Bush and McCain have both said, repeatedly, that we’d accede to the wishes of the Iraqi government.  They merely think a too-rapid withdrawal would be a bad idea and undo the recent gains that even Obama admits were achieved by the Surge which he opposed.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

The problem with a timetable remains the same:  It ignores facts on the ground. In recent months, Iraq has been much more stable and American casualties are now lower than they are in Afghanistan despite many more troops engaged.  It may well be that we can remove most of our forces in two years.   But we simply have no way of knowing that now.  Indeed, Obama admits as much:

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Fair enough. Indeed, all this sounds sensible.  But why, then, continue to hammer the “sixteen months” theme if it’s not set in stone?  Sheer political pandering?

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

He didn’t quite say that.  But, sure, our heavy commitment in Iraq limits our options elsewhere.  Then again, Afghanistan is a NATO mission and Iraq is not.  Why not continue to press our NATO Allies to pick up their fair share of a burden they committed themselves to?  After all, isn’t Obama going to have some magic diplomatic mojo?

The bizarre thing is that, as enticing as declaring victory and going home sounded a few months ago, it appears that things are finally on the right track in Iraq.  While calling Obama’s plan “surrender” is demagogic, it could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

UPDATE (Dodd): Maliki’s statements misreported:

US presidential contender Barack Obama has repeatedly seized on statements attributed to Iraqi leaders to support his call for a troop withdrawal deadline….

The prime minister was widely quoted as saying that in the negotiations with the Americans on a Status of Forces Agreement to regulate the US troop presence from next year, “the direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on a timetable for their withdrawal”. … There is only one problem. It is not what Mr Maliki actually said.

In an audio recording of his remarks, heard by the BBC, the prime minister did not use the word “withdrawal”. What he actually said was: “The direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on programming their presence.”

Mr Maliki’s own office had inserted the word “withdrawal” in the written version, replacing the word “presence”.

The piece goes on to note some disagreement within the Iraqi government on this point, including some very Obama-esque rolling back on some points. Obviously Obama can’t be blamed for relying on Maliki’s own office as to the Prime Minister’s position. But it does tend to underscore the broader point: Making firm plans right now for the withdrawal our troops is an exercise in political pandering, not rational policymaking.

Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] is all but defeated, Marie Colvin reports for The Sunday Times.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.  Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects. The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

[...]

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.  Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

In a sidebar companion piece, Colvin explains how we got here:

The reversal of fortunes is attributed to the “surge” strategy of General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces, who targeted Al-Qaeda in Iraq above all else after securing an extra 30,000 troops last year. His officers exploited local resentment of the terrorists and promised to protect those who resisted them. Under Petraeus’s plan, they established awakening councils, or groups calling themselves concerned local citizens. These Sunni groups helped to drive Al-Qaeda from many of its bastions.

US and Iraqi forces were then able to retake large swathes of the country and complete the “clearing” of cities such as Ramadi and Falluja and large areas of Baghdad. The overall number of attacks in Iraq has fallen by 80% in the past year alone.

Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has gone on in recent months to reassert control over Basra in the south and Baghdad’s Sadr City, the two main strongholds of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army.

TigerHawk observes, “Notwithstanding the operation against the jihadis in Mosul, we have now gone nine consecutive days without an American KIA (which, if memory serves, is the longest stretch without a single KIA since [May 2003]). The implication is obvious: Iraqis, not Americans, are now at the tip of the spear. That is evidence of a successful counterinsurgency.”

Indeed it is.  It is not, however, sufficient evidence that the counterinsurgency is a success.

Most obviously, AQI and other foreign fighters have always constituted a tiny fraction of the anti-government forces.  Indeed, AQI barely existed when the insurgency started.  They were, however, the most violent and ruthless element.  Further, well-timed terrorist attacks such as the bombings of the Askariya shrine in Samarra escalated a relatively minor insurgency into a major sectarian conflict.

Even if AQI stays on the mat and the tide of replacements coming in from Syria and elsewhere remains stemmed, there’s still the domestic elements with which to contend.  Most significantly, does the Mahdi Army continue its cease fire?  If Muqtada al-Sadr and company decide to make another stand, violence could escalate dramatically.

Turning to US domestic politics, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays.  One could argue that this is good news for John McCain, one of the earliest and staunchest advocates of the Surge.  His argument that the war would have been far more successful if his calls for a larger force had been heeded years ago are buttressed. At the same time, however, Barack Obama can reasonably argue that, if AQI is defeated, the already tenuous relationship between the Iraq War and the global war on terrorism is ended.  These positive developments actually undermine the argument that his calls for rapid withdrawal amount to surrender to the terrorists and acceptance of American defeat.  If AQI is no more, then we’re left with a simple “nation building” operation.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan summarizes the “We’re winning, Vote Obama” position nicely:

[I]f someone had told me a year ago that fifteen of eighteen benchmarks had been reached, that all the parties were in negotiation over future politics, that al Qaeda was close to dead at the hands of the US and the Iraqis, and that oil contracts were being handed out amid four-year lows in violence, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Of course, this all makes Obama’s 16 month withdrawal timetable more and more feasible.

TigerHawk retorts, “If we are, as Andrew says, to judge the judgment of the two candidates, then the answer is clear. Eighteen months ago John McCain argued that the safest way out of Iraq was to win, then withdraw. Barack Obama, parroting the received wisdom of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, said that victory in any meaningful sense was not only unlikely, but that the presence of large numbers of American soldiers actually fed the insurgency and decreased the prospects for stability.”

Jim Hoft believes that this is “a huge blow to Democrats,” especially Obama, “Who was wrong about the surge, wrong about the US military, and wrong about turning Iraq over to its dangerous neighbors, and still flip-flopping like a wet noodle on where he stands.”

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: “If you have to go to The Belmont Club to find out how it’s going, then it’s a success. Failure, the NYT has no trouble covering.”