A Recap that Lays It Out Mercilessly

The New York Review of Books comes out twice monthly and its essays are of a longer form by uniformly excellent writers. Most of them are posted on line. The latest edition has an essay by Peter Galbraith, son of the famous economist and presidential adviser John Kenneth Galbraith (of Ontario). Galbraith the younger has a deep background in foreign policy with most of his expertise being in the Balkans and Iraq. In recent years, he has been advising the Kurds in Iraq and has advocated the splitting up of Iraq into three autonomous regions based on ethnicity.

This essay stands back, looks at the Bush "Surge" strategy, and calmly and rationally takes it apart leaving no doubt that it is doomed to fail. Take away the magical thinking and there is nothing left. I can't believe General Petraeus, supposedly the brightest general the military has (per Tom Ricks in his book Fiasco), allowed himself to become the seal of approval for this plan -- an example of selling your soul to the devil if there ever was one. Petraeus was a hero in Fiasco for his enlightened strategies for combating insurgents. No more heroic status for him.

President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

Bush's strategy assumes that Iraq's Shiite-led government can become a force for national unity and that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush administration's inability to grasp the realities of Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.

As everyone except Bush seems to understand, Iraq's Shiite-led government has no intention of transforming itself into an inclusive government of national unity. The party that lead Iraq define themselves—and the state they now control—by their Shiite identity For them, Saddam's overthrow and their electoral victory is a triumph for Islam's minority sect that has been 1,300 years in the making and a matter of historic justice. They are no going to abandon this achievement for the sake of a particular Iraqi identity urged by a American president.

One likes to think there is more information at the White house that one just doesn't see that would explain their decisions and actions. No, they just don't see what is plainly in front of them. Barbara Tuchman called it Folly, and we are seeing it and suffering from it again.