WASHINGTON -
After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift
boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard
records, Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front
pages of America's papers, and the news is uniformly
bad.
Consider some of the headlines that have
appeared this week in major newspapers such as the Wall
Street Journal, "Rebel attacks reveal new cooperation:
Officials fear recent rise in Baghdad violence stems
from growing coordination"; the USA Today, "Insurgents
in Iraq appear more powerful than ever"; and The New
York Times, "US intelligence shows pessimism on Iraq's
future".
It's headlines like these that tend to
confirm the conclusion of the latest Newsweek magazine's
Iraq feature: "It's worse than you think."
Against these stories - putting aside the other
headlines detailing deadly suicide and other attacks
that have killed scores of Iraqis in the past week -
President George W Bush's insistence in a campaign
address to a convention of the National Guard on Tuesday
that "our strategy is succeeding" appears awfully
hollow, a point made repeatedly not only by Democratic,
but by some Republican lawmakers at a hearing of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.
"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing,"
noted Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who has
long been skeptical of administration claims that the
Iraq occupation was going well. "It is now in the zone
of dangerous," he said.
Indeed, it is now very
difficult to find any analysts outside of the
administration or the Bush campaign who share the
official optimism.
Consider the case of Michael
O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings
Institution and former National Security Council aide
who has been among the most confident of independent
analysts of the basic soundness of Washington's strategy
in Iraq.
"In my judgment, the administration is
basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is
succeeding," he testified to a Congressional panel just
10 months ago. "By the standards of counterinsurgency
warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear
to be working to our advantage."
This week,
however, O'Hanlon, who has developed a detailed index
periodically published in the New York Times that
measures US progress in post-war Iraq, was singing an
entirely different song at a forum sponsored by
Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS).
"We're in much worse shape than
I thought we'd ever be," he said. "I don't know how you
get it back," he conceded, adding that his last
remaining hope was that somehow the US could train
enough indigenous Iraqi security forces within two to
three years to keep the country "cohesive" and permit an
eventual US withdrawal. "A Lebanonization of Iraq" was
also quite possible, he said.
His conclusion was
echoed by his CSIS co-panelists, Frederick Barton and
Bathsheba Crocker, who direct their own index that
relies heavily on interviews with Iraqis themselves in
measuring progress in reconstruction .
According
to the five general criteria used by them, movement over
the past 13 months has for the most part been
"backward", particularly with respect to security, which
they now consider to be squarely in the "danger" zone.
"Security and economic problems continue to
overshadow and undermine efforts across the board,"
including health care, education and governance,
according to a report their project released last week.
Among other things, it noted that despite a massive
school-building and rehabilitation program, children are
increasingly dropping out to help their families survive
an economy where almost half the working population
remains unemployed.
The growing media chorus of
despair actually began just one week ago, a few days
after the brilliantly staged Republican convention in
New York City had ended, when the US military death toll
in Iraq since last year's invasion topped the 1,000
mark, and the New York Times published a front-page
article entitled "US conceding rebels control regions of
Iraq".
Since then, a number of articles have
featured the increasing violence of the insurgency,
which is now mounting an average of more than 80 attacks
on US targets - four times the number of one year ago
and 25% higher than last spring, when the US faced
serious uprisings in both the Sunni Triangle and in the
south.
Washington officials had predicted that
attacks would increase sharply just before the transfer
of sovereignty from the US-dominated Coalition
Provisional Authority to the interim government headed
by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in late June and would
tail off.
But, as noted by a front-page article
in the Washington Post late last week, more US troops
were killed in July and August than during the initial
invasion in March and April 2003. Injuries suffered by
US troops in August alone were twice what they were
during the invasion.
The escalation in violence
over the summer is now being attributed by
administration officials to the insurgents' efforts to
derail the elections, currently scheduled for January.
The increased violence - particularly in Baghdad
and the so-called "Sunni Triangle", where Fallujah,
Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra, among other towns, are
controlled by insurgents - has created a serious dilemma
for administration strategists who, on the one hand,
reject the notion that there are "no-go" areas for US
troops, and, on the other, want to keep US casualties
down and off US television sets and the front pages of
newspapers, particularly before the November elections
here.
As a result, they appear to have settled
on a strategy - bombing suspected insurgent hideouts
from the air - that further alienates the civilian
population. "I don't believe that you can flatten cities
and expect to win popular support," noted CSIS' Barton.
"This is the classic contradiction of
counterinsurgency," Steven Metz, a strategy specialist
at the US Army War College, told the Inquirer. "In the
long term, winning the people matters more. But it may
be that in the short term, you have to forgo that in
order to crush the insurgents. Right now, we are trying
to decide whether we have reached that point. In
Vietnam, we waited too long."
Meanwhile, both
independent and US military analysts believe that the
insurgency, which the administration still insists is
made up only of Baathist "dead-enders", foreign
"jihadis", and criminals, has grown from an estimated
5,000 people one year ago to at least 20,000, and
possibly significantly more.
"The bottom line
is, at this moment we are losing the war," retired
Colonel Andrew Bacevich of Boston University told USA
Today on Thursday. "That doesn't mean it is lost, but we
are losing, and as an observer it is difficult for me to
see that either the civilian leadership or the military
leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn this
around."
