Are We Closer to “Victory”?

Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicity agents. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best—or, as he put it, progress on the ground is “uneven,” “fragile and reversible,” with “innumerable challenges” remaining to be addressed.

His caveats cannot dampen the enthusiasm of the politicians and pundits who would maintain the occupation of Iraq and even expand our aggressive presence in the Middle East. Selling that policy requires propaganda proving that the surge is succeeding and that if we only stay long enough, spend enough money and sacrifice enough young men and women, then someday we will achieve a great victory. “We are closer,” says the general, carefully.

Yes, everything is getting better and better every day in Iraq—and it will always be getting better and better, even if we have to stay for a hundred or a thousand years. To promote these illusions, John McCain and his sidekicks, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, repeatedly cite statistics showing that violence has fallen since last summer, a trend that was real, while neglecting to mention the ominous recent toll, which is equally real. Both American and Iraqi casualties have been rising since the low point in December 2007 and with greater velocity over the past several weeks. A dozen American troops died within the few days before Gen. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared on Capitol Hill to report, an average that harks back to the war’s most lethal months.

The worsening casualties reflect the Iraqi government’s blundering assault on the militias and strongholds of Moktada al-Sadr, which exposed its own military deficiencies just in time for the Petraeus-Crocker show. To Sen. McCain and his cohort, the aborted battle of Basra showed the “progress made by the Iraqi security forces,” as he wrote in the rightwing weekly Human Events, blithely ignoring mass desertions by thousands of Iraqi officers and troops.

With that kind of progress, victory must be only decades away.

Those persistent divisions—and the irresistible impulse of every faction to manipulate us to their advantage— have blocked the political reconciliation that was supposed to be the ultimate objective of the surge. Sens. Lieberman and Graham praise “benchmark legislation” passed by the Iraqi parliament on amnesty, provincial elections and other issues. But a recent report issued by the United States Institute of Peace, an official nonpartisan institution funded by Congress, disparaged the supposed advances by the Iraqi government, which it described as “tactical horse-trading’’ designed to acknowledge those benchmarks as minimally as possible.

The proponents of war and occupation gladly accept this benchmarks charade along with all the other deceptions and corruption because their eyes are fixed on the eastern horizon. Sen. McCain and his friends constantly proclaim that “our fight in Iraq cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.” In other words, their remedy for the destructive consequences of this war is a wider and even more dangerous conflict.

2008 Creators Syndicate Inc. What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www.expressmilwaukee.com.

Photo by Sgt. Jason L. Austin, USA