Iraq: Police Blotter Vs Big Pic

[Annie]

Austin Bay:

http://austinbay.net/blog/index.php?p=79

2/19/2005
Iraqi Elections As The Defining Moment: Now Hillary Clinton Says Saddam’s Cronies Have Failed
Filed under: General— site admin @ 5:17 pm
Early July 2004, a week or so after the CPA left Baghdad and Iyad Allawi’s interim Iraqi government took over: I was sitting in the Corps’ Joint Operations Center(JOC) in Al Faw Palace, Baghdad, drinking a big cup of tea. The JOC had a huge screen covering an entire wall, like a movie theater screen divided into ceiling-high panels capable of displaying multiple computer images and projections. A viewer could visually hopscotch from news to weather to war. In the upper right-hand corner of one panel Fox News flickered silently–and for the record, occasionally CNN or Al Jazeera would flicker there as well. Beneath Fox ran my favorite channel, live imagery from a Predator UAV circling somewhere over Iraq. That July day the Predator appeared to be flying above an irrigation canal.

The biggest display, that morning and every morning, was a spooling date-time list describing scores of military and police actions undertaken over the last dozen hours, Examples: “0331: 1/5 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division, arrests two suspects after Iraqi police stop car"; “0335 USMC patrol vicinity Fallujah engaged by RPG, returned fire. No casualties.”

The spool went on and on and on, and I remember thinking : “I know we’re winning. We’re winning because –in the big picture– all the opposition has to offer is the past. But the drop-by-drop police blotter perspective obscures that.”

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, wide-spread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression. Every day coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq, and if the “insurgents” were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one diesel rig on CNN and “oh my God, America can’t stop these guys” is the impression left in Boston, Boise, and Beijing.

Saddam’s buddies and Zarqawi’s klan were actually weak enemies –"brittle” is the word I used to describe them at a senior planning meeting. Their local power was based on intimidation–killing by car bomb, murdering in the street. Their strategic power was based solely on selling the false impression of nation-wide instability– selling post-Saddam Iraq as a dysfunctional failed-state rather than an emerging democracy .

Only July 19 I attended a meeting in Najaf where the governors of Najaf and Diwaniya told the corps commander that they needed clean water and better sewer systems. Citizens in the city of Najaf wanted Marines in the area to start spending money. As I said, we were winning. Were their severe security issues? Absolutely– in August Najaf was the scene of a most curious battle. The Mahdi militia took over the Imam Ali Mosque–but were slowly chewed to bits by US troops and forced to leave the mosque by the political efforts of Ayatollah Sistani and the local populace.

In World War Two forcing Nazi divisions to retreat and taking islands from the Japanese provided hard yardsticks to determine military success. Irregular warfare rarely offers such a clarifying quantitative measure. Over the summer of 2004, I had the benefit of anecdotal measures. Iraqis I talked to would tell me they intended to vote in the January elections.

The January elections would be “the big island,” the defining moment in the post-Saddam political struggle, and it would be the Iraqi people providing the public yardstick.

In the past three weeks I’ve seen a number of foreign policy editorialists become sudden fathers– success has many fathers, But track back on their columns you’ll find many of them they had the police blotter perspective, usually offered with a “quagmire” chaser and disdain for President Bush.

Don’t expect Jacques Chirac and Ted Kennedy to apologize for their defeatism– Chirac’s a crook, Kennedy a perpetual cad. But do take note that Senator Hillary Clinton now thinks Iraq is “functioning quite well.”

Today’s statement from Senator Hillary Clinton, on tour with John McCain and the Senate Armed Services Committee (here’s a link to the full AP story):

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - As 55 people died in Iraq on Saturday, the holiest day on the Shiite Muslim religious calendar, Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was “functioning quite well” and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing.

Clinton, a New York Democrat, said insurgents intent on destabilizing the country had failed to disrupt Iraq’s landmark Jan. 30 elections.

“The concerted effort to disrupt the elections was an abject failure. Not one polling place was shut down or overrun,” Clinton told reporters inside the U.S.-protected Green Zone, a sprawling complex of sandbagged buildings surrounded by blast walls and tanks. The zone is home to the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy…

…The fact that you have these suicide bombers now, wreaking such hatred and violence while people pray, is to me, an indication of their failure,” Clinton said.

When I returned from Iraq last September I concluded many Americans were suffering a failure of faith. Perhaps the emerging success in Iraq will restore their spirit.