General in denial

General Petraeus defends the U.S. strategy in Iraq but the hardest thing to understand about the occupation is the objectives, since they keep changing.

In Washington, at

AS President George W. Bushs two senior representatives on Iraq, General David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, got ready to sit before the United States Senate to answer questions about the war in that country, my area lost another young man.

Twenty-three-year old Ari Brown-Weeks, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, was killed in Iraq on September 9. Brown-Weeks, a native of the mountain town of Leyden, Massachusetts, was an aficionado of baseball and poetry. His father teaches music at the nearby Academy of Charlemont and his mother is a pastry chef.

Brown-Weeks was one of the seven soldiers killed (along with two Iraqis detained by them) when their truck raced to their base after their night-time raid in western Baghdad, veered off an elevated highway and fell 30 feet (about 9 metres) down, according to the division spokesman Major Tom Earnhardt. The 82nd Airborne has lost an alarming number of soldiers, 145 since 2001, with nine dying this April in a suicide truck attack.

On July 30, two intellectuals close to the Bush administration, Michael E. OHanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the liberal Brookings Institution, wrote a widely circulated defence of the Bush surge strategy in Iraq. Viewed from Iraq, they wrote in The New York Times, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal.

Their government-sponsored tour of Iraq showed these intellectuals that we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. Not only did the op-ed claim that morale is high, but it went ahead and recounted how the soldiers and marines told us they feel that they have a superb commander in General David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

On August 19, seven non-commissioned officers of the 82nd Airborne replied in the same pages with a sharp rejoinder. Mimicking OHanlon and Pollack, they wrote, Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. For them, counter-insurgency amounts to winning the hearts and minds of the population, but the U.S., with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, is in no position to win over a recalcitrant local population.

Yes, they write, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere, notably in building a stable political infrastructure and the reconstruction of Iraqs obliterated social and economic life. It is important, they point out, not to assess security from an American-centred perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security.

Bushs September visit to the Anbar Province, and the visits of all the other U.S. officials who then return with reports of sauntering down laden market-stalls papers over the real test of security in Iraq. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry, write the soldiers.

Their lives are not anywhere near normal, what with two million Iraqis in refugee camps and two million more displaced from their own homes, and with many of the remainder without the basic necessities of everyday life. The McClatchy News Agency reports that in August 2,890 Iraqis were killed in the ongoing battle in Baghdad alone. The seven 82nd Airborne men wrote, we need to recognise that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realise that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are an army of occupation and force our withdrawal.

Through the late spring and summer of 2007, Bush ducked every question with the statement that he would not make any decision about the surge until he heard from Petraeus. Petraeus experience in Iraq started when he led the 101st Airborne Division up the country in 2003 during the invasion.

He then moved into Baghdad, and was part of the team that took the city but failed to provide any security to the population. To the embedded reporters in those days, Petraeus would ask, Tell me where this ends. His division moved into Mosul, where Petraeus ran the city. Attempts to create civil peace through the barrel of the gun ended badly in the 2004 Battle of Mosul five months after his troops withdrew from the city.

Then Petraeus was tasked with the reconstitution of the Iraqi Army, which remains unable or is not allowed to take charge of the countrys security. During this time, Petraeus became a booster of the Bush strategy, with an op-ed in The Washington Post (September 2004) telling the U.S. public that he sees tangible progress being made in Iraq.

No wonder then that Petraeus came to Congress upbeat, with less of a report and more of an acclamation. Acknowledging that the situation in Iraq remains complex, difficult and sometimes downright frustrating, the General went on, I also believe that it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time, although doing so will be neither quick nor easy. The hardest thing with the occupation of Iraq is what those objectives are, since they keep changing.

Once the goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and to seize the weapons of mass destruction; then it was to build a democracy; now it is to overcome what Petraeus repeatedly referred to as Al Qaeda Iraq or ethno-sectarian Iraq. Toward the latest objective, Petraeus offered one more of the unfinished sentences of the Bush administration: The importance of recognising that a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences. What was not mentioned was for whom these consequences would be devastating the Bush agenda, including those who continue to pine for a privatised Iraq, or the Iraqi people? Ryan Crocker, who sat next to Petraeus, was less jubilant in tone, but was certain of victory.

0My level of confidence is under control, he told Senator John McCain, when asked about his views of the current Iraqi government. Crocker built on Petraeus accusations of Iranian influence in Iraq. (The General had said: It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders, that Iran, through the use of the Quds force, seeks to turn the Iraqi special groups into a Hizbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.)

If the U.S. withdraws, Crocker pointed out, it would bring chaos, and this would strengthen the hand of Iran. Iran plays a harmful role in Iraq, he told the Senators. If there is chaos, Iran would be a winner, consolidating its influence over Iraqi resources and possibly territory. The Iranian President has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq.

Playing to some Democrats who are far to the right of the Bush team on Iran (notably Tom Lantos of California), Crocker went on to draw the conclusion that Bush has been plugging for months now, Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse.

The seven men from the 82nd Airborne went at Crockers dilemma in a different way. They wrote that the pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognising the incongruities, would only lead to disaster. U.S. occupation is incompatible with stability in Iraq. During the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, retired Army Colonel Ann Wright rose from the spectator gallery and called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In March 2003, Wright resigned as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, over a disagreement with most of the Bush administrations policies, notably its war on Iraq. Now wearing a T-shirt that said, 3800 dead, how many more? she was escorted out of the room, her question unanswered.