Liberals and the Iraq Surge

From Peter Wehner, writing in Commentary:

In early January 2007, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was going moderately badly to very badly. Indeed, the war had been unpopular for much of the previous years, at times deeply so. But by this past September, a nationwide Pew survey found “a striking rise in public optimism about the situation in Iraq.” According to the poll, 58 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is going well or very well, and the same percentage now also say that the U.S. will definitely or probably succeed in Iraq.

This news is encouraging—and not terribly surprising. After all, most Americans have assessed the situation in Iraq based on a reasonable interpretation of events on the ground. And since the January 2007 announcement of the “surge”—President Bush’s decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, armed with a fundamentally new counterinsurgency strategy—the situation on the ground has, by every conceivable measure, improved. In some cases, the progress has been stunning.

And yet, no matter what most American believe or what reality tells us is so, leading liberal observers and politicians, long in the vanguard of opposition to the war, have denounced the surge at every point. Even as some, in the face of overwhelming evidence, have been forced to concede a modicum of American progress, they have done so reluctantly and have downplayed the role played by administration policy in achieving that progress. Others have denied that significant progress has been made at all.

Why they have responded in this way is a question worth exploring. But first it may be useful to establish the record.

The formal inauguration of the surge in January 2007—in announcing it, the President said it would “change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror”—was met by liberal commentators with a skepticism bordering on derision.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post mocked Bush’s “fantasy-based escalation . . . which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” At Time, Joe Klein ridiculed “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found “something genuinely bizarre” about those Americans who actually supported the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong. . . . It’s that they are completely detached from reality.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart predicted that, by 2008, American soldiers would “still be dying, and the catastrophe will still be deepening.” In sending more troops to Baghdad, Beinart wrote, “Bush is showing his commitment to win—except that the United States has already lost.”

Liberal politicians were just as certain that the surge was a doomed and irresponsible policy. On the night of the announcement, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Later in the month, Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” Senator Hillary Clinton similarly insisted that “I cannot support [the] proposed escalation of the war in Iraq,” while Senator John Kerry said that sending in additional troops was not an “answer” but “a tragic mistake.”

Throughout the spring, even though the full complement of additional troops had yet to arrive in Iraq, the drumbeat of opposition continued, and so did intimations of American defeat. To Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, “the [American] lives lost in Iraq were wasted.” Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush had embraced a plan that “has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference.” On Capitol Hill, Senator Christopher Dodd asserted that “there is no military solution in Iraq. To insist upon a surge is wrong.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared that “this surge is not accomplishing anything” and in April announced flatly that the Iraq war was “lost.”

Two months later, liberal critics of the war remained of the same mind, and were now demanding that we quit the field altogether. According to a July 8 New York Times editorial, the time had come “for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” (This, despite the paper’s acknowledgment in the same editorial that an American pullout was likely to yield “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” not to mention regional chaos and more terrorism.) James Fallows of the Atlantic, a sharp critic of the surge from the outset, wrote that the expectations “being heaped” on it were “simply laughable.”

In August, Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a mea culpa titled “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment.” Ignatieff wrote:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a President. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the [2003] invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

In fact, however, far from having turned into an “unfolding catastrophe,” the dream was already getting closer to realization. By the summer of 2007, although Iraq was still in many ways a broken nation, evidence was mounting that the surge was working. In almost no time, sectarian violence had been sharply decreased in Baghdad, and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala were being reclaimed. Coalition forces were making huge headway in human intelligence, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the run.

By September, General David Petraeus was reporting substantial progress in Iraq, but the liberals simply refused to believe it.

But none of this mattered to the administration’s liberal critics, who to their earlier prognosis of failure were now adding charges of government cooking of the evidence. Even before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, warned Americans that “by carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” After the hearing, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” To Representative Rahm Emanuel, the general’s written report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”

Paul Krugman, an influential columnist for the New York Times, could not have agreed more. The administration, he flatly asserted, was intentionally misleading the public by “creating the perception that the ‘surge’ is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.” Others were even more reckless. A Democratic Senator complained to the website Politico that no one was willing to call Petraeus “a liar on national TV,” hoping instead that “outside groups will do this for us.” As if in response, MoveOn.org, the left-wing political-action committee, promptly took out a full-page ad in the New York Times proposing, in giant type, a new name for General Petraeus: “General Betray Us.”

It was a pretty sordid performance, and a stunning example of chosed-mindedness.

But why? Wehner has two hypotheses.

A generous interpretation is that by the end of 2006, many liberals had made a definitive good-faith judgment that the Iraq war was irretrievably lost. This then became the filter through which they viewed all later developments. Once convinced of the impossibility of substantial progress, never mind a decent outcome or an actual victory, they could not help receiving good news as anomalous and/or inherently unsustainable.

But then Wehner suggests this interpretation is too generous.

Enter, ignominiously, politics. For some liberals, hatred of the President was clearly so all-encompassing that they had developed a deep investment in the failure of what they habitually dismissed not as America’s war but as “Bush’s war.”

In short, liberals and leftists were consumed with a hatred of Bush, and could not bear the thought that the war would be a success.

Liberals will claim, if they admit they hate Bush at all, that they hate him because of the policies he has pursued. But the simple fact is that Bush hatred is cultural. Liberals don’t start with liberal policy preferences and hate Bush because he is a conservative. That could not possibly explain the depth of the hatred.

Rather, the hatred is cultural. As we explained to the Associated Press in 2004:

John McAdams, a political scientist at Marquette University, said resentment of Bush is particularly strong among liberals who already hold three things against him: “First, he’s a conservative. Second, he’s a Christian. And third, he’s a Texan. When you add all of those things up, that invokes pretty much every symbol of the cultural wars.”

“It’s particularly galling when somebody who mangles his syntax and doesn’t pronounce words extremely well and is from Texas beats you,” McAdams added.

This cultural hatred of Bush has not merely led to liberals wanting the Bush presidency to fail.

It has led to liberals wanting America to lose the war.

Palin, God and Iraq: Liberals Are Lying

Here is the famous video clip were Sarah Palin supposedly said that the troops in Iraq are engaged in a “task from God.”

YouTube Video
Liberals, of course, never seem to mind when religious types say that God is on their side. They never raised an objection, for example, when a bunch of leftist clerics started an anti-SUV campaign, asking “What Would Jesus Drive.”

In 1964, all the Mainstream Protestant organizations came out in favor of the Civil Rights Act. They took the position that God hates racial prejudice.

Then why should we object to saying that God hates terrorists? That’s just as plausible.

But in fact, Palin never said that the Iraq War is a “task from God.”

She said to pray that it is a task from God.

Here is the quote (go to approximately the 3:35 point):

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.

And further:

That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

Linguistically, this isn’t difficult. She is telling people to “pray . . . that our leaders . . . are sending them out on a task from God.”

Both the Mainstream Media and the elites in the Democratic Party are highly secular, so we might suppose that they don’t know what a prayer request sounds like.

But can’t they read English?

In fact, what we have is secular cultural elites who hate Palin, don’t like Christians, and don’t especially care whether what they say about either is true.

Iraq War Naysayers: Looking Bad in Historical Perspective

From Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.

The prevailing wisdom 18 months or so ago was that invading Iraq had been, in retrospect, a disastrous blunder. It had led to appalling sectarian fratricide and an ever-climbing body count. Iraqi democracy was deemed a naïve pipe dream. Worst of all, it was said, the fighting in Iraq wasn’t advancing the global struggle against Islamist terrorism; by rallying a new generation of jihadists, it was actually impeding it. Opponents of the war clamored loudly for pulling the plug -- even if that meant, as The New York Times acknowledged in a bring-the-troops-home-now editorial last July, “that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.”

But what if we had known then what we know now?

We know now that the overhauled counterinsurgency strategy devised by General David Petraeus -- the “surge” -- would prove spectacularly successful, driving al-Qaeda in Iraq from its strongholds, and killing thousands of its fighters, supporters, and leaders.

We know now that US losses in Iraq would plummet to the lowest levels of the war, with just five Americans killed in combat in July 2008, compared with 66 fatalities in the same month a year ago -- and with 137 in November 2004, the deadliest month of the war.

We know now that the sectarian bloodletting would be dramatically reduced, with numerous Sunni tribal leaders abandoning their former al-Qaeda allies, and Shi’ite radical Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army being thoroughly routed by the Iraqi military.

We know now that by the summer of 2008, the Iraqi government would meet all but three of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress to demonstrate security, economic progress, and political reconciliation.

And we know now that, far from being undermined by the campaign in Iraq, the wider war against Islamist violence would show significant progress, with terrorism outside Iraq’s borders having “in fact gone way down over the past five years,” as Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria noted in May -- and with popular support for jihadist organizations plummeting across the Muslim world.

So what does hindsight counsel today? That Iraq is a pointless quagmire, from which we can’t get out quickly enough -- or that it is a costly but winnable war, in which patience, tenacity, and smarts have a good chance of succeeding?

All this raises an interesting question.

Are the anti-war liberals to be condemned for bad judgment, or did they draw a reasonable conclusion from the data available, even if time proved them wrong?

Conservatives should at least give some serious consideration to the latter possibility, since it’s the same argument conservatives make about Bush and weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes the world plays tricks. Sometimes the weight of the available evidence is on one side of an issue, and the truth is on the other side.

In this case, however, we think the anti-war liberals have been largely victimized by their own biases.

In the first place, they didn’t want the war to be won, since they detest George Bush, and would love nothing better than massive fiasco on his watch.

In the second place, many of the liberals cut their political teeth in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The cliches they learned then came with the warm glow of self-righteousness, so they were way to happy at the prospect of a rerun of the whole affair.

At any rate, they were wrong about Iraq, and need to be reminded, with some frequency, that they were wrong.

Obama Flip-Flops on Iraq: Devastating Video

From the McCain Campaign: a devastating video about Barack Obama’s flip-flops on Iraq.

Obama Chastized by Washington Post on Iraq

Barack Obama’s pandering to the hard left anti-Iraq War crowd has drawn a sharp rebuke from the liberal Washington Post.

BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: “They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s charge against the Republicans was not entirely fair, since Mr. Bush has overseen the withdrawal of five American brigades from Iraq this year, and Mr. McCain has suggested that he would bring most of the rest of the troops home by early 2013. Mr. Obama’s timeline would end in the summer of 2010, a year or two before the earliest dates proposed recently by members of the Iraqi government. The real difference between the various plans is not the dates but the conditions: Both the Iraqis and Mr. McCain say the withdrawal would be linked to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from U.S. troops, as they have begun to do. Mr. Obama’s strategy allows no such linkage -- his logic is that a timetable unilaterally dictated from Washington is necessary to force Iraqis to take responsibility for the country.

At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war. He conceded that a withdrawal might be accompanied by a “spike” in violence. Now, he describes as “an achievable goal” that “we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future -- a government that prevents sectarian conflict and ensures that the al-Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge.” How will that “true success” be achieved? By the same pullout that Mr. Obama proposed when chaos in Iraq appeared to him inevitable.

“What’s missing in our debate,” Mr. Obama said yesterday, “is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq.” Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome -- that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.

Will he?

Or will he continue to be the leftist that panders to his leftist base? You know -- the people who don’t want America to win the war because they don’t much like America and virulently hate George Bush.

Let’s hope we never have the opportunity to find out.

Another Unsavory Obama Buddy

From FrontPage Magazine:

SHOULD A MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, WHO HAS PLEDGED HIS SUPPORT FOR OUR TROOPS, REJECT THE MONEY AND SUPPORT of an anti-American extremist who thinks Osama bin Laden had a “valid” argument on 9/11 and says she is currently acting “to undermine the war effort”? Barack Obama should be forced to make that decision about the ample funds he has received from Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.

According to Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, Evans has “raised at least $50,000” for the Obama campaign. As long ago as February 2007, the Code Pink co-founder and pampered divorcee co-hosted a Hollywood fundraiser for Obama with her ex-husband (financier Max Palevsky) and Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen of DreamWorks studios.

The article goes on to quote a talk radio interview with Evans in which she, when asked about Osama’s claim that he attacked the U.S. because of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, and whether that was a valid argument said “Sure. Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that, that country. Why do we get to have bases in the Middle East?”

Further:

Evans’ revealing performance could serve as light radio comedy – (e.g., she later blurted out, in earnest, “Why is being a Communist anti-American?”) – if it did not mask a long history of actions designed to demoralize soldiers in harm’s way, vilify the military (and the United States as a whole), provide monetary and military support to jihadists, and popularize the views of Islamic radicals who believe terrorists who kill U.S. troops are “guaranteed Paradise.”

Her statement that “you can’t go to war if you don’t have any soldiers,” dovetails with her work to break the morale of soldiers fighting in Iraq. In July 2003, Jodie Evans joined the Advisory Board of Iraq Occupation Watch (IOW) as a founding member. Castroites Medea Benjamin and Leslie Cagan established IOW in Baghdad to convince American soldiers serving in Iraq to obtain “conscientious objector” status and get sent home. As part of this process, they recycled anti-American news stories to the troops in Iraq, and spread “first-hand” accounts of mythical U.S. “atrocities” back home. At least one fellow Advisory Board member called for the murder of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Tiring of rhetoric, Code Pink tended to the material needs of those who killed U.S. troops or tended to the “insurgents.” In December 2004, Evans and Code Pink delivered $600,000 in cash and supplies to “the other side” in Fallujah, a recent battlefield and terrorist stronghold infamous for killing American soldiers.

In another statement, Evans made it clear that she viewed terrorist death squads as morally superior to American troops.

We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. The Iraqi people are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies.

Will Obama return the money she has raised for him?

If he wants to distance himself from this kind of anti-American fanaticism, he will.

But unfortunately for him, Evans views about the war don’t seem too much different from his own. Obama’s judgment and his patriotism are already questionable. If this particular association breaks into the media, they will be a big problem for him.

Down the Media Memory Hole: The Mythical “Haditha Massacre”

“Haditha” was, liberals hoped, to the Iraq War what My Lai was to the Vietnam War: an example of the brutality of American soldiers that would help turn public opinion against the war.

But unfortunately for them (but fortunately for the country) that narrative has collapsed. From FrontPage Magazine:

THIS WEEK YET AGAIN PROVED THE PARTY OF DEFEAT’S KING WEARS NO CLOTHES. On Wednesday, a jury found Lieutenant Andrew Grayson “not guilty” of covering up the (un)massacre at Haditha. The 27-year-old had been accused of multiple counts of making false official statements and one count of attempting to deceive by making false statements. A charge of “obstruction of justice” had been thrown out the day before.

More than simply another exoneration of those accused of wrongdoing in Haditha – the sixth of eight accused – this verdict will go a long way to redefining Haditha and refuting those who insist on slurring “baby-killer” Marines and the United States herself.

In the atrocity story churned out by left-wingers and “mainstream media” newscasters (but then, I repeat myself), four U.S. Marines murdered 24 blameless Iraqi civilians on November 19, 2005, as their victims cowered, some “as if in prayer.” The then-ascendant face of American surrender, John Murtha, made this story his own in a dramatic press conference in May 2006, insisting his fellow Marines acted “in cold blood” even as an internal investigation was taking place.

The story at once illumined the Left’s imagination like nothing since Abu Ghraib. More than a massacre, its obsessive observers saw in Haditha a “cover-up,” a conspiracy. The official press release stated these civilians had died during an explosion, rather than by gunfire, yet investigators understand they were killed by ammunition fired at close-range. The narrative became set: the Bush White House ordered American soldiers to slaughter innocent civilians every opportunity they got (My Lai by the dozen); the service covered up the story; and a compliant media hid it all from the American people. The fact that Time magazine broke the story gave them little pause. They became keepers of the dirty secret: America, a genocidal nation since 1492, is at it again.

This is a necessary corollary of the fact that there was no such “massacre.” The defendants – who are, it is too infrequently pointed out, U.S. Marines who pledged to give their lives if necessary to keep America safe from terrorists – have maintained the “insurgents” initiated the firefight; hid among civilians (as terrorists often do); and the Marines heard rifles cocking in the smoke-filled room when they inadvertently killed the Iraqis (whom they also pledged to protect from terrorists at the cost of their lives).

Photographs of the scene revealed the curtains and walls were riddled with bullet holes – indicating a two-way firefight. And these “cold blood”-ed killers have broken down in tears at the remembrance of their actions.

Of course, the mainstream media, which incessently reported on the original charges against the Marines, have had little to say about their vindication.

It doesn’t fit the narrative.

Students Collect Soccer Balls For Iraqi Kids

From an e-mail sent to all Arts & Sciences faculty:

The College of Arts and Sciences Student Council is collecting used soccer balls in support of the “Kick For Nick” project. The balls collected will be sent to the children of Iraq in honor of Pfc. Nick Madaras, a soldier who was killed while serving there. While alive, Nick realized what a travesty it was that children in Iraq were literally playing soccer with bags of rocks, so he started a drive to collect soccer balls for the Iraq children in his hometown. Although he is now gone, the drive continues to go on, and, to date, thousands of balls have been sent to Iraq in his name.

The soccer balls will be collected in the College of Arts and Sciences office after spring break from March 25 - April 4th. For more information, please contact muartsandsciencescouncil@gmail.com, or check out http://www.kickfornick.com/.

Somebody might tend to denigrate this effort as small potatoes. After all, groups of Marquette students have been trying to bring socialized medicine to America, or close down the School of the Americas, or fight the evils of rape, racism and coffee that is not “fair traded.”

We, on the other hand, are impressed.

A good motto for students who want to make the world better might be “do something small, but do something that unequivocally will make the world better, even if just a little bit.”

The “social justice” crowd at Marquette, in contrast, is likely to do things that either will have no effect (because the lack the political power to get what they want) or make the world worse (because they are promoting things they don’t understand, but which make them feel good).

Is this campaign an endorsement of the Iraq War? Logically no, one can try to improve the lot of Iraqi kids while still wanting U.S. troops out of that country.

But honoring a fallen American soldier puts a huge distance between these students and the leftists who want ROTC off the Marquette campus. Moral clarity on issues like this must start with an appreciation of the honor and patriotism of the troops.

Al-Qaeda on Ropes in Iraq

From the Times of London.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”

Assuming the two documents are authentic — and the US military insists that they are — they provide a rare insight into an organisation thrown into turmoil by the rise of the [anti-terrorist] Awakening movement. More than 80,000 Sunnis have joined the tribal groups of “concerned local citizens” [CLCs] that have helped to eject al-Qaeda from swaths of western and northern Iraq, including much of Baghdad.

US intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the documents were snapshots of two small areas and that al-Qaeda was far from a spent force.

The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” — Americans — had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces. Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar”, the unnamed emir admitted.

In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.”

He said of the loss of Anbar province: “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight. The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.” The emir complained that the supply of foreign fighters had dwindled and that they found it increasingly hard to operate inside Iraq because they could not blend in. Foreign suicide bombers determined to kill “not less than 20 or 30 infidels” grew disillusioned because they were kept hanging about and only given small operations. Some gave up and went home.

Finally the emir recommended rewards for killing apostates, using doctors to kill infidels and offering gifts to tribal leaders. He said al-Qaeda’s fighters should be sent to more promising areas such as Diyala province or Baghdad — which is exactly what happened.

Most of the first battalion’s fighters “betrayed us and joined al-Sahwah [the Awakening]”, he says. The leader of the second ran away and all but two of its 300 fighters joined the Awakening. The activities of the third were “frozen due to their present conditions”. Of the fourth he writes: “Most of its members are scoundrels, sectarians, non-believers”.

He lists 38 people still working for him but beside five names he has written comments like “We have not seen him for twenty days” or “left us a week ago”. He concludes, wistfully: “And that is the number of fighters left in my sector.”

‘WE WERE MISTREATED AND CHEATED’

Extracts from letters

Abu-Tariq, al-Qaeda leader

“There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the tribes changed course 360 degrees . . . Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters . . . As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less.”

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers who used to be part of the Jihadi movement, therefore we must not have mercy on those traitors until they come back to the right side or get eliminated completely.”

Unnamed emir, Anbar province

“The Islamic State of Iraq [al-Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al-Qaeda’s expulsion from Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

“The morale of the fighters went down and they wanted to be transferred to administrative positions rather than be fighters. There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.”

Lancet and Iraq Deaths: Propaganda Masquerades as Science

From Jeff Jacoby, an example of how a supposedly reputable medical journal can be used for proprganda purposes:

Few medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister’s principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead. If The Lancet’s number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the 2½ years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: “I don’t consider it a credible report.” Tony Blair’s spokesman also brushed it off as “not . . . anywhere near accurate.”

But the media played it up, for the most part unquestioningly. “One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion,” blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com’s story began: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports.” The CBS Evening News announced “a new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq. . . . 655,000 Iraqis -- 2.5 percent of the entire population -- have died as a consequence of the war.”

Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” -- that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

“They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication,” Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study’s methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

• Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, “spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.”
• Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election. Roberts, a self-described “advocate” committed to “ending the war,” even sought the Democratic nomination for New York’s 24th Congressional District. “It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top,” he told National Journal.
• Lancet editor Richard Horton “also makes no secret of his leftist politics,” Munro and Cannon write. At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced “this axis of Anglo-American imperialism” for causing “millions of people . . . to die in poverty and disease.” Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism. In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton’s “desperate headline-seeking” and charged him with running “badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories.”

The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism. But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. “In our view,” the Baltimore Sun editorialized, “the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down.”

Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don’t hold your breath.

Drumbeat of Good News: The Surge is Working

Just one article, typical of many others:

Violence in Iraq has fallen at a rate that has surprised military commanders and even one of the architects of the “surge” that boosted US troop numbers in the country this year, according to figures gathered by the US.

The figures show the numbers of suicide attacks, roadside bombings, mortar and other attacks on US forces and on the Iraqi population have more than halved since 30,000 extra troops in June.

Jack Keane, the former army general who helped persuade George W. Bush, US president, to increase troop numbers in Iraq, said the decrease in violence was “phenomenal” and had occurred far faster than he had expected.

“When you understand you are dealing with the complexity of a counter-insurgency operation which can take years to resolve, to have this dramatic a success in a short period of time, it’s unprecedented,” he said.

The US military says the number of civilian deaths has also fallen 60 per cent since the surge took effect, with a drop of 75 per cent in Baghdad. According to icasualties.org, the average monthly US death toll dropped from 96 for the first half of 2007 to 66 in the past four months. The average monthly death toll for Iraqi civilians and security forces has dropped from 2,157 to 1,223 in the same period.

Stephen Biddle, former adviser to General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, said the most important factor was the spread of ceasefire agreements. He said the “key challenge” now was to make sure they could be adequately policed.

It’s Veterans Day

Even the Mainstream Media Admit: Things are Better in Iraq

Via Boots & Sabers, even MSNBC sees progress in Iraq.

BAGHDAD - In a dramatic turnaround, more than 3,000 Iraqi families driven out of their Baghdad neighborhoods have returned to their homes in the past three months as sectarian violence has dropped, the government said Saturday.

Saad al-Azawi, his wife and four children are among them. They fled to Syria six months ago, leaving behind what had become one of the capital’s more dangerous districts — west Baghdad’s largely Sunni Khadra region.

The family had been living inside a vicious and bloody turf battle between al-Qaida in Iraq and Mahdi Army militiamen. But Azawi said things began changing, becoming more peaceful, in August when radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army fighters to stand down nationwide.

About the same time, the Khadra neighborhood Awakening Council rose up against brutal al-Qaida control — the imposition of its austere interpretation of Islam, along with the murder and torture of those who would not comply.

The uprising originated in Iraq’s west and flowed into the capital. Earlier this year, the Sunni tribes and clans in the vast Anbar province began their own revolt and have successfully rid the largely desert region of al-Qaida control.

At one point the terrorist group virtually controlled Anbar, often with the complicity of the vast Sunni majority who welcomed the outsiders in their fight against American forces.

But, U.S. officials say, al-Qaida overplayed its hand with Iraq’s Sunnis, who practice a moderate version of Islam. American forces were quick to capitalize on the upheaval, welcoming former Sunni enemies as colleagues in securing what was once the most dangerous region of the country.

Leftist Bigotry Toward American Soldiers

Via Sykes Writes, an obsurdly nasty and offensive cartoon about American soldiers serving in Iraq.

You can click on the image to see a larger version.

Over the Edge

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Ineffective

Three Viewpoints On Iraq

Ignore It

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Marquette Alum, Iraq Soldier: What the Media Ignores

From the Racine Journal Times, an interview with Lt. Col. Robert Kaiser, a Marquette alumnus who has served his country all over the world, including Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq and Germany.

Some excerpts:

Journal Times -- What do you see there that we don’t get to see?

Kaiser -- As the division engineer for the 3rd Infantry Division, I actually get to see a lot that doesn’t make the daily headlines back home, especially in the area of reconstruction. We spend a lot of effort in the Marine Division working reconstruction projects in support of the Iraqi people. Our division works in the area south of Baghdad, which is predominately rural and has a mix of Sunni and Shia populations. Their needs are no different from ours back home — they need clean drinking water, electricity for their neighborhoods, schools for their children and health clinics for the people.

These are the kind of projects we have assisted the Iraqi people with, as are all of the coalition forces throughout Iraq. These projects are essential and really make a difference at the local level, but they just don’t make the headlines. A great example of this is the Mahmoudiyah Market Rebuild project that was supported by the Commando Brigade, which is the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y. Mahmoudiyah is a city with approximately 120,000 Iraqis, and the market area was severely damaged by a vehicle-borne IED.

Markets are central to the Iraqi way of life, and this market also served as a primary economic development area for the town. The Commando Brigade supported the rebuilding project in conjunction with the local government, and now the Mahmoudiyah Market is up and running. Stories like this happen all the time, but you just don’t hear about them compared to the car bombings. . . .

Another area I see that you really don’t hear much about is the change in cooperation between the locals and coalition forces now that we have a more sustained presence in Iraqi population centers. This is just from my perspective, but there seems to be an increase in the amount and the quality of help local Iraqis are now providing U.S. forces in our area. There is a link between cooperation between coalition forces and the local population and the number of projects we assist them with, and we have had a noticeable increase in the number of reconstruction projects pass through my office in the past several weeks.

The Iraqis want the same things that you and I want: a safe and secure place to live where they can raise their families. This is from my personal view, but it looks like we are doing better at providing that safe and secure environment with the surge, but only time will tell. Having said that, nothing is easy in this country!

Indeed!

But we are more inclined to believe what we hear from a soldier on the ground than what we hear from the media.

Academics: Unlikely Bush Supporters on Iraq

From Newsday, an article that appeared in the Journal-Sentinel on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON -- Experts on Iraq, who were mostly cold-shouldered by the Bush administration in planning the war, tend not to be among the president’s greatest admirers.

But today, some are surprised to find themselves agreeing with George W. Bush that a quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could lead to “mass killings on a horrific scale,” as the president put it in a news conference this month.

“In spite of the fact that this man is the worst president of my lifetime, occasionally he says something correct and I’m afraid this is correct,” said Peter Sluglett, an Iraq expert at the University of Utah. “While it is superficially attractive to say yes, let’s get out of there, since it was America’s responsibility for getting this mess into Iraq in the first place, it has some responsibility that the thing does not degenerate even further.”

Joost Hiltermann, author of “A Poisonous Affair,” a new book about the Iraqi gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, and a long-standing critic of U.S. policy in Iraq, said he “absolutely” agrees with Bush about withdrawing troops.

“A premature or precipitous withdrawal is very dangerous,” Hiltermann said. “American forces have been the glue to keep together Iraqi security forces. The security forces would totally fall apart, fracture along ethnic and sectarian lines.

“It can get much, much worse. Heavy weapons can be brought in. It’s not scare-mongering to say a precipitous U.S. troop withdrawal would lead to total mayhem that will exceed anything that we’ve seen so far.”

Not all the experts agree. Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan and perhaps the most outspoken liberal critic of Bush among Iraq specialists, said “the U.S. troop presence in some areas of the country is probably stirring people up and doing more harm than good. And the foreign military occupation may be prolonging and deepening the eventual conflict.”

But even Cole calls for more political progress before withdrawal, specifically holding local elections in the provinces that were supposed to take place in January 2006.

Amatzia Baram, an Israeli professor at the University of Haifa and one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq, said the Iraqi government would collapse if the United States withdraws before there is a political settlement in Baghdad allowing former followers of Saddam Hussein to return to government jobs and giving Sunnis their fair share of oil revenues.

“If there is a complete evacuation within a year, the government will not be able to stand on its own,” Baram said.

He said the Kurds probably would grab the oil-rich city of Kirkuk by force, which some think would lead to a Turkish invasion of Iraq; the Shia South could split in two, with the southernmost region grabbing 75 percent of Iraq’s oil for itself; fighting probably would break out between Shia factions throughout the South; and the Sunnis would be forced to continue their civil war and possibly -- as Bush predicted -- join forces again with al-Qaida to attack the Shia.

That would lead to the danger of a Shia massacre of Sunnis that would draw Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and Jordan into the civil war directly, Baram said.

“So I see the gradual Somaliazation of Iraq and the growing involvement of regional powers in the struggles,” he said, referring to Somalia, where there has been no real central government for most of the past 16 years.

Baram and other experts said the United States must focus on slowly replacing U.S. troops with Iraqi troops. He suggested the U.S. could “begin a year from now a slow reduction of American forces and the very gradual introduction of Iraqi forces. Over two to three years, American forces can go down to half of what they are now.”

Democrats are unlikely to heed such warnings. They are simply too invested in an American defeat, and they hate George Bush too much.

Let me make an offer to those folks. Say that we should have never gone into Iraq if you want. Say that Bush lied if you want (although it’s not true). Hate Bush if you want.

But don’t do something that will result in the killing of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis.