Joe Klein Eats His Wheaties

Joe Klein spanks Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon

What's Missing in this Column? - Swampland - TIME: [Y]ou really can't write a piece about the war in Iraq and devote only two sentences to the political situation, which is disastrous and, as Petraeus has said, will determine the success or failure of the overall effort.

It could be argued that what the U.S. military is now accomplishing is clearing the field of foreigners--i.e. the Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighters--so that the indigenous Sunnis and Shi'ites can go at each other in a full-blown civil war, complete with Srebrenica style massacres. (Although a precursor to that civil war is the internecine Shi'ite battle between the Hakim and Sadr militias that is about to take place in Basrah. If Sadr wins that fight, he will control Baghdad and the southern oil fields--and will be the de facto leader of Shi'ite Iraq.) I see absolutely no evidence that the majority Shi'ites are willing to concede anything to the minority Sunnis, and there are significant signs that Baghdad is being ethnically cleansed.

Yes, progress has been made in the fight against the most extreme jihadis (AQI), but that should not be extrapolated into anything resembling optimism.... And if we manage to put a major hurt on AQI--which is Bush's (current) rationale for us being there--what rationale remains for us staying there if the Iraqis themselves are intent on slaughtering each other?

Take it a step further, Joe: you can't write such a column, but Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon do. What does that tell you about them?

Comments

[Neil B.]

Yes, Joe does show his moJoe from time to time. Now, all this training we are doing for "the Iraqi forces" - if they use it against each other, won't that compound the tragedy?

[howard]

with people like klein and andrew sullivan, we have an interesting problem.

on the one hand, when they are "on," they are capable of insights beyond the standard run of pundit-land.

on the other hand, both have been responsible for an enormous amount of stupidity and offensiveness towards people who, it turned out, were much more "correct" than them.

i don't honestly know whether that means we should ignore them totally, pat their heads when they are good and criticize when they are bad, or accept that they are as good as most of the pundit class gets....

[John Morrison]

"It could be argued that what the U.S. military is now accomplishing is clearing the field of foreigners..."

Ick! I'm reminded of the story of an American serviceman going around Iraqi neighborhoods. He asked a resident if he was aware of any foreign military presence here. The resident answered, "Yes. You."

[bigTom]

The reduction in AQI forces provides one small glimmer of hope. That is that since AQI focused a lot of attacks on stirring up sectarian (and other) strife, that absent these destructive provocations the Sunni & Shia will be able to get along. Its clearly a longshot, but barely plausible longshots are what Friedman Units are made of.

[Ray Rl]

"What does that tell you about them?"
Yes, and what does it say about the newspaper that published them?

[Ray Rl]

"What does that tell you about them?"
Yes, and what does it say about the newspaper that published them?

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/few-foreign-fighters-in-iraq-many-are.html

July 15, 2007

Few Foreign Fighters in Iraq; Many are Saudi
By Juan Cole

Ned Parker of the LA Times reports that of 19,000 "insurgents" held by the US military in Iraq, only 135 are foreigners.

Think about that when you hear Bush say that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq or that "al-Qaeda" would take over Iraq if the US left. The foreigners just are not that important to the guerrilla war. Only .7% of detainees are foreigners, and unless they run faster than Iraqis, that is likely their percentage share in the "insurgency," too.

The US is fighting Iraqis in Iraq, who are nationalists of various stripes, whether religious or secular. They are Sunni. They haven't given fealty to Bin Laden and are not "al-Qaeda."

So you'd think after all the ink spilled on Iranian and Hizbullah contributions to the troubles in Iraq, that they'd be prominent among the foreign fighters, right? Wrong. It is not clear that the US has any Iranians at all in custody. There was a big deal made at the NYT about one Lebanese Hizbullah guy who may have been a freelancer.

So if they aren't from Iran, where are they from? Saudi Arabia--- 45%! ...

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/june-attacks-in-iraq-at-all-time-high.html

July 21, 2007

June Attacks in Iraq at All-Time High
By Juan Cole

Reuters obtained from the US Department of Defense statistics that show there were an average of 177.8 attacks on Iraqi military and civilian and US targets per day in June-- an all-time record for Iraq. The only other month during the past 4 years with such a high rate of attacks was October, 2006, with 176.5 per day. Somehow I don't think these statistics bear out the sunny talk by the Bush administration and US military spokesmen about how much better things are in Iraq now that we have had the surge. If you listen to the American Right, the surge is working, things are "improving," and the US is fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But where the Department of Defense gives us actual statistics, we find that they only have like 135 foreign detainees out of 19,000 suspected insurgents in their custody (with the rest being mostly just Iraqi Sunni Arabs who don't want foreign troops in their country). So al-Qaeda is a tiny part of the insurgency and the US is mostly fighting Iraqi nationalists, whether religious or secular. And now instead of a substantial improvement of the security situation because of the "surge," we discover that there were more attacks in June than ever before during the Iraq War (and probably more than ever before, except during hot conventional wars, in the whole history of Iraq. And that is saying something, since you're going back past Hammurabi)....

[anne]

Nutty Michael O'Hanlon and the Brookings gang of warriors used to publish the figures of electricity use in Baghdad, to show us how much we were finally "winning" the electricity war. Only last week, however, the American ambassador to Iraq told Congress that Baghdad was getting about 1 to 2 hours of electricity a day. Not to worry, because from now on the electricity statistics are not being released. So much for the O'Hanlon electricity indicator. Now what?

[bigTom]

Actually anne, we have those six Iranian "diplomats" that we apprehended(kidnapped) in Kurdistan. Iran is holding several Iranian-American citizens in retaliation. But your general point, that Iranian influence isn't very strong, and that AlQaeda isn't likely to do well in a post occupation Iraq is correct.

[anne]

Tom makes a fine point.

We took 6 Iranian citizens prisoner from the Iranian consulate in Kurdistan. These Iranians had been expressly invited to Iraq by the Kurds, and the Kurds were not informed of the American raid. I am sure at least 1 Iranian was released in the weeks following but do not know of the status of the remaining 5 Iranians.

[anne]

Good grief; a moment ago I happened to here the nuttiness of the electricity index being used by Michael O'Hanlon to show how much we are winning in Iraq. This on public radio. What the Brookings warrior gang is doing is using a national electricity index to replace the now forbidden Baghdad electricity index to show that, yes, somewhere in Iraq there is less electricity than in 2003 but more than, well, more than more.

Deception is truly terrible, but public radio is doing all that can be done to allow for ever more deception. Why am I always surprised?

[anne]

http://www.latimes.com/la-na-iraqpower27jul27,0,3267669,print.story?coll=la-home-center

July 27, 2007

U.S. Drops Baghdad Electricity Reports: The daily length of time that residents have power has dropped. The figure is considered a key indicator of quality of life.
By Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis - Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive....

[Hal]

Bush didn't directly answer whether he planned to pass on the war to the next president, who will take office in January 2009. But he suggested that was likely. "This is going to take a long time in Iraq, just like the ideological struggle is going to take a long time," he said.--news item
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If Bush and Brown think they are going to "defeat" Muslim anti-colonialism you know you have two utter idiots at the helm. I don't think the British ever claimed they were going to defeat Indian demands for freedom (or did they?), but I guess the US thought it could defeat Vietnamese determination to be free of Western imperialism even after the French had thrown in the towel. It couldn't and it didn't but it doesn't seem to have learned the lesson. How long run stupid can you be? Well, ask Bush and Brownoser.

[sglover]

"with people like klein and andrew sullivan, we have an interesting problem....

i don't honestly know whether that means we should ignore them totally, pat their heads when they are good and criticize when they are bad, or accept that they are as good as most of the pundit class gets...."

For my money, *genuiune* conservatives like William Lind and Andrew Bacevich have more wisdom and knowledge than the entire phalanx of Beltway Clausewitzen. It's no coincidence that their writings are much more lucid than anything coming out of the think tanks and the corporate press.

I never read Klein much, but I did slog over to Sullivan's site from time to time. I don't think Hysterical Andy presents any problem at all. He doesn't know very much, but he has no sense at all of how little he actually does know. He's not too quick on the uptake: He finally figured out Iraq was a botch after *years* of evidence -- but he's all set to replay his disgraceful pre-war hysteria over Iran. The guy's professional career is a catalog of train wrecks. He's been bamboozled by every kind of cheap hustler, from plagiarizing stenographers to Man-Child Bush. So the solution to the Sullivan "problem" is simple: Ignore him.

[Kimmitt]

Yay, Joe Klein is just barely capable of writing a response which any informed and sentient being would immediately have upon reading a newspaper.

This is not cause for celebration; it is cause for giving him a cookie and letting him stay up late tonight if he wants to.

[PeterE]

O'Hanlon, Pollock-- and the Brookings Institution as a whole (at least, on the Middle East)-- are an elegant variation on The Weekly Standard. O'Hanlon reminds me of Michael Ledeen.