What Should We Be Concerned With In Iraq?

[Annie]

Winning? Seems we are. Getting out? Seems there's a plan there too, though for good reasons, no time tables will be given? Replaying Vietnam, where the politics overcame the winning? Perhaps.

We seem more worried about Gitmo hunger strikes than how the troops feel about what they are seeing from the likes of Durbin and others. The good news is reported in less than drops, while the mistakes are reported as a flood. IMHO, Got to limit the politics involved, serious folks only-not the loudest-should be consulted by DOD and administration.

Great reading on what's happening here and there:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/838lfyxk.asp?pg=2

Nervous in Baghdad
From the July 25, 2005 issue: Do Americans have the will to stay the course?
by Austin Bay
07/25/2005, Volume 010, Issue 42

...Less implacable critics of the Bush administration recognize two negative metrics implying a degree of success in the war on terror: (1) There's been no use of weapons of mass destruction by al Qaeda and its allies and (2) no second 9/11 has occurred on U.S. soil. More careful and generous analysts remember the Afghan elections of October 2004, then an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, then an election in Palestine, then the ink-stained vote in Iraq.

The truth is, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Southeast Asia, and Pakistan are all arguably successes in the making--slow, incremental, 1.01-steps-forward-one-step-back successes, where the enemies are tough, determined, and often well-financed. To call them snakes insults reptiles, but they die slowly, and they are vicious in their agony....

...I did get to hear Abizaid on June 16, while waiting at the East Gate of the U.S. Marine base at Falluja. I was in Iraq again, this time with a note pad and camera instead of a pistol. My flak vest was a black police SWAT jacket, more svelte than the heavy, plated monster I wore last year while racing along Baghdad's Route Irish (see "The Millennium War," The Weekly Standard, January 3 / January 10, 2005). The temperature was approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which didn't bother me so much. Last year I'd humped Baghdad at 130. The dust, however, irritated me. Abizaid--wearing desert camouflage, a flak vest, and his 1st Ranger Battalion combat patch--looked thoroughly composed, displaying the earned gravitas of the superior combat commander who knows dust, gripes, mistakes, direct fire, and writers come with the job.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. I had no idea what was coming. Then, I swear, I knew.

"The mood of how this war is going in Baghdad and Arab capitals is better than in Washington and London," Abizaid said. Déjà vu all over again, though with dust this time, and no roll: It's the conversation with the naval officer.

Why? I asked. Why is that? Why the rank negativism? We were standing under a camou net, waiting for the Iraqi police brigadier now charged with directing Iraqi security operations in Falluja. Abizaid had taken off his helmet, and passed it to one of his aides. "Here's how I answer that. The Arabs see the Iraqis taking control of their own lives. And I see that. I see that every day. The fact is you have Iraqi leaders and soldiers who go out and face it [the insurgency] every day. The Iraqis have been fighting and dying at a rate three to four times greater than ours, so I wouldn't sell them short."

But what do you say to someone who says nothing has changed?...

...For the strategic good of the United States, and global liberty in general, however, this poisoned White House-press relationship may prove to be a huge problem. Al Qaeda's jihadists plotted a multigenerational war. In the early 1990s our enemies began proselytizing London and New York mosques and in doing so began planting cadres throughout the world. Even if Washington leads a successful global counterterror war, many of these cadres will unfortunately turn gray before it's over. That means a multiadministration war, which means bridging what my friend Sam Palmer (a genuine liberal warrior, God bless him) identified as the whipsaw of the U.S. political cycle.

The Bush administration has not done that--at least not in any focused and sustained fashion. My mother predicted this. December 2001: Mom phoned and said she remembered being a teenager in late 1942 and tossing a tin can on a wagon that rolled past the train station in her hometown of Plainview, Texas--a World War II scrap metal drive. She knew that the can she tossed didn't add much to the war effort, but she felt that in some small, token, but very real way, she was contributing to the battle.

"The Bush administration is going to make a terrible mistake if it does not let the American people get involved in this war. Austin, we need a war bond drive. This matters, because this is what it will take."

She was right then, and she's right now. Early on the Bush administration failed to tap the great reservoir of political willingness 9/11 generated. Would the national press and academic left have called a "Democracy Bond" or a "Security and Development Bond" drive corny? Of course they would have--but so what? Clothing drives for Afghan refugees? Maureen Dowd might have snarked at that, but again, so what?

Administration officials did preach a bit, but the sermon was too cheery: America needed to maintain a strong economy to sustain the war effort. That was tied to tax cut programs to fight recession. It should have been tied to an optional check-off on the IRS 1040: "Buy a Security Bond with $50 of your tax money." The money would have been better spent than the optional bucks dedicated to federal elections.

The White House has also soft-pedaled the paradox in America's Middle East strategy: Political and economic success in the Middle East inevitably attracts terrorists. You can almost hear the flummoxed questions in the White House briefing room: "You mean you're going to go there to build a new country but also attract bad guys?"

Well, yes. The bad guys aren't stupid. They know wheat and elections are their death knell. Al Qaeda's biggest recruiting tool was--and is--the political failure of the Arab world. In this dysfunctional world, tyranny and terror reinforce one another, with the people the inevitable victims. If this war is going to be won it must be fought in the heart of the Middle East.

Abu Musab al Zarqawi believes it. Z-Man said as much in his captured message to al Qaeda in February 2004. After Iraqis run their own government, U.S. troops will remain, Zarqawi's message said, "but the sons of this land will be the authority. . . . This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts." Iraq's new army and police will link with the people "by lineage, blood and appearance."

Al Qaeda still fears an American and Iraqi strategic victory--a democracy defending itself against terrorists. This would be a huge victory, not only for the United States but for Arab and Muslim prestige.

Strategy is always about applying one's own strength to an opponent's weakness. Al Qaeda's historical pattern is to wait patiently, for years if necessary, and carefully prepare a terror operation until it's certain of success. Prior to 9/11, with little pressure on its hidden network (succored by the Taliban, Wahhabi petrodollars, worldwide fundraising, and, yes, Iraq), al Qaeda could take its time to spring a vicious surprise attack--surprise and visionary viciousness being its strengths and the gist of its "asymmetric" challenge to America's "symmetric" power. "Fear us, America," was the message, "because al Qaeda chooses the time and place of battle, and when we do you are defenseless."

The strategic ambush of 9/11 sought to force America to fight on al Qaeda's terms, to suck the United States into a no-win Afghan war, to bait the United States into launching a "crusade against Islam." Osama bin Laden believed he possessed an edge in ideological appeal, "faith-based" strength against what he perceived as U.S. decadence. U.S. failure in Afghanistan would ignite a global "clash of civilizations" pitting all Muslims against America.

Bin Laden's strategy flopped, for a slew of reasons. Chief among them, liberty remains an ideologically powerful idea. The United States also pulled an "asymmetric" military move of sorts, using Green Beret-guided Afghan allies and high-tech airpower to topple the Taliban....

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

Given the vicious enemy we face, five years, perhaps fifteen years from now, occasional bullets and bombs will disrupt the political and economic building. That is the way it will be if we are successful. "There is so much to do," Jdhooshi said, "so much still to do."

Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and U.S. Army Reserve officer who served in Iraq from May through September 2004. His most recent novel is The Wrong Side of Brightness.