The two narratives on Iraq

In the days running up to the election, I see two contradictory narratives about how things are going in Iraq. The first one comes the Chicago Boyz (link via Glenn Reynolds):

Now the one thing that strikes me about the military efforts to date is just how incredibly successful they’ve been, and how masterfully planned and executed they turned out to be. Not perfect, of course (You mean there’s terrorists setting off explosives? Against Americans and their supporters? In the Middle East, no less? Say it isn’t so!). But a lot of the toys that John Kerry voted against turned out to be damned useful in the War on Terror. I don’t want to even think about how an Afghanistan operation with Vietnam-era technology and tactics would have gone for us – I think in that case we’d have been wishing for another Vietnam. And if you’ve ever cracked a history book, you’ll realize that only 1200 deaths in a year and a half of invading a dictatorship, overthrowing its dictator, and fighting a chronic insurgency is astoundingly good news, especially when added to the fact that the long-predicted flood of refugees never materialized, the terrorists that Saddam’s regime had nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly got extremely interested in the fate of Iraq (and no, we’re not turning peaceful, simple folk into bloodthirsty terrorists – at worst, we’re forcing them to choose their side a little sooner than they would have on their own, and denying them the option of biding their time until the Great Satan looks sufficiently weak to try their hand at terrorism on their chosen terms), and Iraqis are still signing up to take on the battle for their country against these thugs and getting set to vote in their first-ever real election in a couple of months. And the Commander-in-Chief at the helm during these amazing accomplishments is called incompetent? You’ve got to be kidding me.

For supporting lines of argumentation, check out Greg Djerejian and Arthur Chrenkoff. There is one point in this narrative on which I absolutely agree — the observable costs of the insurgency in Iraq, measured in either men or material, is nowhere near the cost of what transpired in Vietnam. We’re talking about differences by several orders of magnitude. There is, of course, the question of unobservable costs — and read Ambassador Peter Galbraith’s disturbing account in the Boston Globe on that issue. More importantly, there is the question of trend — are things betting better or worse in Iraq over time? And here’s where I part company with the above narrative. According to Newsweek International’s Rod Nordland, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Michael Hirsh, Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks things are getting worse:

For months the American people have heard, from one side, promises to “stay the course” in Iraq (George W. Bush); and from the other side, equally vague plans for gradual withdrawal (John Kerry). Both plans depend heavily on building significant Iraqi forces to take over security. But the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq—which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, NEWSWEEK has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told NEWSWEEK last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents’] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.” A year ago the insurgents were relegated to sabotaging power and gas lines hundreds of miles outside Baghdad. Today they are moving into once safe neighborhoods in the heart of the capital, choking off what remains of “normal” Iraqi society like a creeping jungle. And they are increasingly brazen. At one point in Ramadi last week, while U.S. soldiers were negotiating with the mayor (who declared himself governor after the appointed governor fled), two insurgents rode by shooting AK-47s—from bicycles. Now even Baghdad’s Green Zone, the four-square-mile U.S. compound cordoned off by blast walls and barbed wire, is under nearly daily assault by gunmen, mortars and even suicide bombers…. Just as worrisome, the insurgents have managed to infiltrate Iraqi forces, enabling them to gain key intelligence. “The infiltration is all over, from the top to the bottom, from decision making to the lower levels,” says the senior Iraqi official. In the Kirkush incident, the insurgents almost certainly had inside information about the departure time and route of the buses. Iraqi Ministry of Defense sources told NEWSWEEK the Iraqi recruits had not been allowed to leave the base with their weapons because American trainers were worried that some of them might defect. “The current circumstances oblige us not to give them their weapons when they’re taking vacations, in case they run away with them,” said one Iraqi intelligence officer.

This account is buttressed by Eric Schmitt’s New York Times report:

Commanders voiced fears that many of Iraq’s expanding security forces, soon to be led by largely untested generals, have been penetrated by spies for the insurgents. Reconstruction aid is finally flowing into formerly rebel-held cities like Samarra and other areas, but some officers fear that bureaucratic delays could undermine the aid’s calming effects. They also spoke of new American intelligence assessments that show that the insurgents have significantly more fighters – 8,000 to 12,000 hard-core militants – and far greater financial resources than previously estimated. Perhaps most disturbing, they said, is the militants’ campaign of intimidation to silence thousands of Iraqis and undermine the government through assassinations, kidnappings, beheadings and car bombings. New gangs specializing in hostage-taking are entering Iraq, intelligence reports indicate. “If we can’t stop the intimidation factor, we can’t win,” said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commander of nearly 40,000 marines and soldiers in western and south-central Iraq, who is drawing up battle plans for a possible showdown with more than 3,000 guerrillas in Falluja and Ramadi, with the hope of destroying the leadership of the national insurgency.

The fact is that just about every official sources expresses a lot of concern about the current situation in Iraq. And I don’t see a Rumsfeld-led DoD altering its in-country force levels or its in-country strategy, and I fear that this can lead to disaster. Again, I have my doubts that a Kerry administration will do a great job — this National Journal story by Carl Cannon lists the possibilities in a Kerry administration, and what scares the crap out of me is the overwhelming number of poor managers legislators on that list. But I do think they’ll muddle through better than the current team.