The victory lap of the neocons

Now that the surge has worked and everything is fine in Iraq, we are beginning to see the first tentative signs of gloating from previously much-maligned war cheerleaders such as David Brooks, William Kristol and other members of the brave commentariat who have fearlessly encouraged, from the safety of their air-conditioned Manhattan offices, our "brave troops" to keep up the good fight. They were in a terrible dilemma for several years there. Their entire ethos, their whole Weltanschauung, is premised on the idea of sounding like tough realists who are willing to pay the price, to do the hard thing even if it's not pleasant, and to risk everything, even the deaths of anyone but themselves. They also put on the line their most precious commodity: the perception of others that they're always right. Or, in Kristol's case, the illusion that he's ever right. Take this latest from David Brooks, for example:

"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one."

Here's a question which you might find difficult to answer right now because of the virtual black-out on war coverage by major media. In the first two months of the war, during the actual invasion of Iraq and just before George W. Bush, our astute leader, declared Mission Accomplished, how many American soldiers died? And while you're thinking about that, here's another question: during a period when we can all completely agree that the surge has been a triumph, say during the first six months of 2008 (with about a week to go), how many American soldiers have died?

These are the answers: in the invasion of Iraq, the actual subduing of the country and conquering of Baghdad, the U.S. sustained 119 fatalities (during the latter part of March and all of April, 2003). In the first six months of 2008, 130 American soldiers have died (so far). This seems to be a point that Brooks and other brave, laptop-totin' journalist-soldiers don't necessarily take into account while they extol Bush's astute escalation of his endless war of occupation. Guys are still getting shot and blown up on a very regular basis.

It's also noteworthy that during the recent uprising in southern Iraq in April, when Muqtada al-Sadr ceased his cease-fire, American deaths rose to 52 for the month, a number very typical of pre-surge mayhem. Close to two body-bags per diem, two flag-draped coffins secreted aboard a cargo plane for the clandestine off-load in Dover, Delaware, every single day. That was a couple of months ago.

This is the triumph that David Brooks and William Kristol are celebrating, and I admit that it could be worse and it has been worse. But here's another question: I have never understood how the calculus of win/lose in Iraq degenerated into a consideration of whether there is more or less violence on the streets of Baghdad. The consciousness of the nation is centered on this far-off conflict, it dictates and constrains so many choices, the opportunity costs are sky-high -- and yet the question remains: what are we doing there? It isn't like a basketball game which is played solely to see who scores more points. We aren't in Iraq, I hope, to find out whether the people who used the word "civil war" were right versus those who said it wasn't a civil war.

And yet I think that's exactly what it's degenerated into. After all his screw-ups, and leaving the United States of America in much worse shape than he found it, George W. Bush was not going to admit that Iraq was also a total fiasco. Conditions in Iraq were going to improve, dammit, no matter what it took. So they sent in Petraeus. And Petraeus built blast walls to carve Baghdad into sectarian enclaves and installed checkpoints everywhere to thwart the movement of suicide bombers. These ideas, obviously, were borrowed from Israeli practices in the West Bank, which have had similar successes in decreasing random explosions. Yet there's a critical difference: everyone acknowledges the de facto separation of the Palestinian state from Israel, which awaits a de jure treaty. Iraq is supposed to be one country. Gimmicks such as dividing Shia from Sunni with blast walls, and flooding the streets of Baghdad with occupying troops, and metering the movement of Iraqis from one neighborhood to another with harassing checkpoints, appears to produce a "win" for George W. Bush, because he's ahead in the game of reducing violence in Iraq. So he can leave office with the situation "under control."

Yet what good does that do? Note the careful use of the words "tenuous" and "fragile" in the David Brooks column. It's tenuous and fragile because unless we're willing to go bankrupt by maintaining an occupying force for one hundred years, as McCain urges, as soon as we leave Iraq is going to dissolve into chaos. There's no serious doubt about that. If Iraq can't really get it together politically while we're patrolling the streets with 150,000 soldiers, what are the odds things will hold together as we withdraw?

It's nice to see an American oil company (Exxon) join BNP, Total and Shell in securing no-bid contracts for oil exploration and development in Iraq. Now maybe Bush can harrumph about pushing the Russians aside in the great Iraqi oil rush. Maybe he'll feel vindicated enough to give up the rest of the violence up/down game. Would it help if we say he was right all along? Just tell us what to say so he'll end this thing.