With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.
That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.
It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.
It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.
[snip]
The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.
“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a while.”
As he flew from Iraq to Australia on Monday, Mr. Bush cast the Sunni leaders he had met in the deserts of Anbar in the most positive light possible.
“They were profuse in their praise for America,” he told reporters on Air Force One, according to a pool report. He said they “had made the decision that they don’t want to live under Al Qaeda,” adding that “they got sick of them.”
Mr. Bush, of course, has had similar public praise for just about every Iraqi leader he has met, even a few leaders now disparaged by White House officials as unreliable, powerless or two-faced.
I wonder how the families of the soldiers killed by the insurgency feel about the Commander-in-Chief's sudden embrace of the very tribes that killed their sons and daughters.
Mark Benjamin in Salon:
The handshake truces between U.S. commanders and former Sunni insurgent groups started in Iraq's western Anbar province in late 2005, and similar initiatives are now spreading east toward Baghdad. Former insurgents agree to halt attacks on U.S. troops and instead, with U.S. backing, fight against forces associated with al-Qaida in Iraq. In return, U.S. forces are also helping Sunnis establish their own local security forces and sign up in predominantly Sunni units of the Iraqi army and police.
This new concept, known as "bottom-up reconciliation," has increasingly crept into White House and Pentagon talking points -- reframing a plan that was originally supposed to tamp down sectarian conflict and pave the way for deal making by securing Baghdad and creating a stable national government.
But while security conditions have improved in some areas of Baghdad and elsewhere in the country, some experts say that the shift toward backing Sunni groups isn't likely to help reduce sectarian strife -- and may well be setting the stage for a greater civil war.
Coming as it does on the heels of Keith Olbermann's devastating indictment of Bush's lies and dissembling to the troops and to Americans to their faces while telling the author of his biography that he's just playing for time to strongarm the Republican candidates who would succeed him into accepting permanent war in Iraq, it's tempting to believe that this represents a sea change in the way the press is treating the Administration's pursuit of whatever the hell it's trying to pursue in Iraq.
At one time they gave lip service to democracy, and even in the Robert Draper book, Bush talks about his "fantastic Freedom Institute", presumably devoted to spreading democracy throughout the world (presumably while coming up with new ways to thwart it here at home). But between persistent rumors of Administration support of a coup by Iyad Allawi to topple the al-Maliki government, and Bush's now-revealed plan to stay in Iraq as long as it takes to gain control of the country's oil revenues and shovel taxpayer cash into the pockets of defense contractors in perpetuity at an ever-increasing rate, it's hard to imagine that anyone outside of the 28-percent crowd is going to buy it.
It's clear that the Bush Administration has no idea what it's doing in Iraq. They have no idea whom to support, so they are arming both sides of a sectarian conflict. And as it always is with this bunch, it's not about democracy in Iraq. It's not about al-Qaeda. It's not about "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here." It's about sending American kids to die for George W. Bush's ego, for his so-called legacy, for his sociopathology.
And if the Democrats continue to fund a war with no end, a war with no mission, a war with no strategy, a war with no point, the blood of these kids will be on their hands too.
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