Good news from Iraq

The problem is, even if Iraq becomes completely stable and democratic tomorrow you would still have to say our mission there has been a screwup. Over 100,000 Iraqi dead, plus over 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees now living in other countries, plus tremendous damage to infrastructure (oil pipelines bombed, power plants unusable because of no maintenance for four years, large areas of cities bombed out, most of the best and brightest now living overseas and unwilling to ever come back).

This isn't what President Bush promised us, or the Iraqis. Even if the violence stays down, which is hardly a sure thing.

Yeah, 70 percent. That would be good. If that number is accurate. If we get some context as to what that 70 percent really means to the reality of the ground. If we can accomplish anything meaningful in this new found "peace." I'm not sure at all what that number actually means for Iraq and our presence there. But I do know what it means on the homefront:

1. Tom Friedman is slightly revising his next "six months is our key to success in Iraq" column, and will continue to ignore that he got everything wrong about Iraq, even though he was an "expert," and still has a job... reporting on Iraq.

2. The dim bulbs at National Review will have their boiling tar and goose down ready for anyone who suggests that this figure does anything less than make G.W. Bush an American Jesus ("and now let's bomb Iran!!!"). This litany will be puncuated by the occasional "Star Trek" reference.

3. The Republican candidates for president will stop molesting the corpse of Reagan and pimping 9/11 at every opportunity, and instead reflect upon... oh, wait, who am I kidding?

4. With a couple of wonderful exceptions (thank you, James Fallows), the media will accept this number at face value and dust off the old "Was Bush Right?" stories that peppered magazine kiosks in 2004/2005 when it appeared that a number of "revolutions" were exploding across the Middle East, and few reporters realize that the goofball occupying the Oval Office has more fantastical delusions than a 13-year-old boy with a copy of the Victoria's Secret catalog.

So forgive me if I refrain from doing back-flips in the street upon hearing of this latest corner turned.

The Interior Ministry is the source. That means you take it with a grain of salt.

Also, to the extent that there is a drop in violence part of the reason is that there's been a lot of successful ethnic cleansing. There is good news in Anbar, but that's a purely internal Iraqi thing--the Sunni tribes who have been shooting at Americans decided they disliked Al Qaeda more. Enemy of my enemy kind of thing. They won't want American troops there one second longer than they think they can be useful shooting at their own enemies.

I'm incredibly conflicted about our place in Iraq.

It is easy, now, to say that we shouldn't be there. But we can't make decisions looking backward, they have to be made looking forward, with the best possible information at hand, and the best possible interpretation of that information. Then, you take the decisions that you make and you make the best of them, for better or for worse. We all have to live like that - it's just that the stakes are generally much lower for each of us in our lives than for the people who have to make these kinds of decisions on behalf of the nation.

All that being said, let us consider what it might cost us to get this thing done in Iraq. It could cost us 10,000 American lives. It could wind up costing 500,000 Iraqi lives.

But, in 50 years, if Iraq is a stable democracy with basic human rights and freedoms (including the free excersize of religion), and does serve as an incubator for similar democratic movements in other parts of the Middle East, then the decision to invade Iraq will be deemed an amazing success and be considered brilliant foresight.

On the other hand, if it costs us 10,000 Americans and 500,000 Iraqis and Iraq is simply ruled by another strong-armed dictator, propped up by religious factionism, then we will see the war on the History Channel as an episode of "Greatest Blunders in History."

In short, the verdict is far, far from being in on Iraq. In the meantime, we should be excited to see that the violence is coming down and determined to correct the fact that the violence is still far beyond acceptable levels. The only question that remains, then, is to what the correct policy is going forward.

If violence has indeed decreased in Iraq, then the "good news" if you will, is that the permanent occupation of Iraq has entered a new, less violent phase. Now we begin the interminable policing of the world's largest reserves of oil.

NOW we begin the policing of the the world's largest reserves of oil? Actually, I think we've been doing that for generations.

Actually, Iraq does not have the largest reserve; it's #4.

Question: What country should do the policing? Venezuela?

Don't get too excited about this. Violence in Iraq drops hugely every summer. You simply cannot hold a war in that heat. And last June was a absurdly violent month, so dropping from it back to normallish levels is not 'progress', it means the 'regress' wasn't as bad as it looked in June.

http://icasualties.org/oif_a/CasualtyTrends.htm
(Note that graph is oddly misleading with the blue line. Ignore it, look at the amount of gray if you want to compare.)

Of course, that's US casualties, and the article is talking about Iraq violence in general, but I think the principle is demonstrated.

Violence is on a constant, somewhat slow, upward spiral in Iraq. Sometimes it zags down and everyone gets happy, sometimes it zigs up and everyone gets upset, but people need to stop thinking month to month, especially as seasonal variations trivially drown out the changes. But the actual fact is that violence is slowly but surely getting worse. Compare almost any 12-month period with an earlier 12-month period and it becomes blindly obvious. Or any month with a year previous.

It's a football game where they're scoring one and half touchdowns for every one of ours. Cheering our touchdowns and booing theirs isn't going to change the fact we're behind by seventy points and the game is almost over.

And, incidentally, it is almost over. The question isn't really what people think it is. It's not 'Can we justify leaving them?', it's 'Can we actually accomplish anything before our military snaps in half?', which will happen somewhere about a year from now.