OP-ED ECSTASY

Slots Bennett, Fats Limbaugh, Sean Insannity and I suppose many other wingnuts went sticky wet today about this op-ed in the New York Times by two members of the Brookings Institution:

A War We Just Might Win
By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
Published: July 30, 2007

The title is pretty much all you need to know here, others have done the analyses of the op-ed and the authors, such as ThinkProgress (1, 2), TPM Election Central, Steve Clemons and, saving the best for last, Glenn Greenwald.

Here I would like to provide a little counterpoint to the op-ed from other sources. The first are Oxfam and NCCI, who just released a report on the conditions in Iraq:

· Four million Iraqis - 15% - regularly cannot buy enough to eat.

· 70% are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% in 2003.

· 28% of children are malnourished, compared to 19% before the 2003 invasion.

· 92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.

· More than two million people - mostly women and children - have been displaced inside Iraq .

·A further two million Iraqis have become refugees, mainly in Syria and Jordan .

Here are some higlights from the July, 2007 Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq:

SIGIR’s findings from the Bechtel audit are emblematic of the many challenges faced by contractors in the Iraq reconstruction program, including insufficient oversight, descoping, project cancellations, cost overruns, and significant delays in completing projects.

SIGIR found that the Government of Iraq (GOI) has failed to accept a single U.S.-constructed project since July 2006. ... The failure of the asset-transfer program raises concerns about the continuing operation and maintenance of U.S.-constructed projects.

In three of the four assessments conducted on sustainability this quarter, SIGIR inspectors found U.S.-funded facilities now under Iraqi control that were not being properly sustained.

The Embassy made progress on several fronts to address the endemic corruption in Iraq, which SIGIR views as a “second insurgency.”

Finally, Huge Ego Hewitt had John Burns of the NYT. Burns is the Baghdad Bureau Chief.

HH: John Burns, that means it’s down, but is there any kind of movement that you can see that would suggest that when, that the Iraqis are coming to their own conclusion that they’ve go to work through other means than violence, is there a lowering of the hatred level there in Baghdad?


JB: Well, of course, that would be what the American military would call the most crucial metric of all. If we could see that, then we would begin to see the end of the war. Now the fact is that the Iraqi people are, of course, exhausted with the violence. The question is at what point does that begin to translate into the kind of stepping up that would make a change in the warfare, specifically the flow of intelligence to the Iraqi and American militaries here ... Up until now, it’s much better, but it’s still, according to the American military, still not nearly enough to make it a crucial difference.

HH: Now another metric is what the political elite of a country says off the record. And you have those conversations with the Maliki government, with the opposition, with the people in parliament, etc. What do you hear from those conversations, John Burns? Are they beginning to think that it is possible to see a functioning government and a multi-party system that relies on other than guns?

JB: No, I would say that’s probably the most depressing or discouraging aspect of the entire situation. I think it’s probably fair to say that the Iraqi political leaders, Sunni, Shiia, Kurd in the main, are somewhat further apart now than they were six months ago. In other words, the Bush administration’s hope that the military surge would be accompanied by what they called a political surge, a movement towards some sort of national reconciliation, uniting around a kind of national compact, that has simply not occurred. Indeed, the gulf between the Shiite and Sunni leaders in the government is probably wider than it has ever been.