Spencer Ackerman provides a thorough - and thoroughly depressing - take on the latest news out of Iraq. Ackerman spent part of yesterday listening to a presentation by Tom Ricks, one of the most well respected military affairs / Iraq war journalists in the world. Ricks was just back from a trip to Iraq, part of his effort to write a follow-on to Fiasco, one of the most important and widely read books inside the US military about the war. Here's his bottom line:
"The surge is working, tactically. The surge is failing, strategically." In early 2008, Baghdad was "better than it was, but it was still hell."
And here's Spackerman's summary of his presentation:
This will be the decisive year of the war, according to Ricks. (Retiring Army Lt. Colonel John Nagl, a counterinsurgency luminary who was in the audience, contends it was 2007.) The end of the surge forces a "make or break" time: diminished security capability correlates with diminished political influence for the U.S., and many more things can go wrong than can go right. Ricks pointed to a few. The return of Sunni displaced-persons to their homes in ethnically cleansed Baghdad will mean they will ask Shiite police to kick Shiites out of what used to be Sunni homes. Both al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army and the U.S.-aligned Sons of Iraq militias will adjust to the reduction in combat brigades and observe whether diminished capabilities leads to changing U.S. tactics--and respond accordingly. The U.S. election hovers over everything: Iraqi sheikhs can recite the positions of the major presidential candidates.
Left in the mix is that the war itself--with all its myriad political and security actors--hasn't been sorted out. Ricks contends that U.S. troops will be in Iraq in a diminished combat role and in diminished numbers for at many years to come. "You call it a permanent quagmire," he told CNAS's Colin Kahl. "I call it the Petraeus Plan: a long-term presence." That's the "best-case scenario." Indeed, Ricks said, a U.S. military officer recently told him, "The things for which the Iraq war will be remembered for have not yet happened."Ricks helpfully complicated something that I've reported: that the system in place for determining whether the Sons of Iraq are really going after the U.S.'s enemies isn't, as Rear Admiral Greg Smith told me last month, just "trust." There's evidence on the ground, he said: Whether or not the IEDs remain on the streets after the U.S.-allied militiamen sweep through an area. The caveat is whether the people they're going after really are al-Qaeda. There the evidence is murky. al-Qaeda, Ricks said, "is more an attitude than an organization."
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