We haven’t got all the details, but promptly after the departure of US combat troops the Iraqi Prime Minister is feuding badly with Sunni political figures, and a bomb blast suggests that Iraq may be escalating into more sectarian conflict.If so, what does this say...
Like the ancient Greco-Buddhist colossi of Bamiyan, the High-Modernist era Kajaki dam is a product of foreign influences and has been a mute witness as well as an occasional victim of domestic...
Dick Cheney's memoir apparently verifies an interesting political point from George W. Bush's memoir. Last November, I noted that the former President claimed that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had...
Last week appeared to be Development Week at Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her long-promised "Development" speech. The next day, Dr. Rajiv Shah was sworn in as the new...
As you might expect, I've had a number of conversations with friends and colleagues about the prospects for the so-called "Afghan surge." Boosters like to point to the alleged success of the Iraq surge, but many of them ignore some salient points.For example, the U.S. also changed its military tactics in Iraq even as it implemented the surge. The military embraced counterinsurgency tactics, something it had been reluctant to do since Vietnam.Moreover, the surge coincided with the so-called Anbar awakening. Sunni tribal sheikhs split from al Qaeda and ended up working with the U.S. military...
I have a longstanding apathy towards State of the Union addresses. If a President says anything important (like declaring states part of an "axis of evil"), then I figure that the text serves just as well. My actions are bipartisan -- I don't watch anyone named Bush give these addresses and I didn't watch Bill Clinton either. And I generally didn't watch Ronald Reagan's efforts. However, there's a case to be made that I should have watched the address this year -- not because of what Bush said, but because of how specific members of the audience reacted.After all, both of the remaining...
Wednesday, in Slate, Phillip Carter looked at what he called the first post-surge offensive by the U.S. military. Roughly 10% of American forces in Iraq are conducting operations in the the Diyala province. However, as Carter cautions, this is "an attempt to clear an area without there being a sizable number of troops available to occupy it afterward."Carter documents that this is a sizable offensive force -- bigger even than what the US employed in November 2004 during the second assault on Fallujah. Unfortunately, the size of the force will not guarantee mission success: One truism about...
In January, I was skeptical about the prospects for the new Iraq strategy, commonly called "the surge." As everyone knows, the strategy was built around securing Baghdad: The Bush administration asserts that the violence in Iraq, "particularly in Baghdad," has reversed the political gains that were reflected in the 2005 elections. By stabilizing the situation in and around the capital, they assert, the U.S. can help the current government control Iraq -- and then presumably prepare to bring American troops home.Here's what I wrote about the prospects for that strategy: In my view, it means...
Dan Drezner calls this piece in today's New York Times "the story that will occupy the blogosphere for today -- Baghdad is safer."Then, Dan excerpts a bit of the story by Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin that makes a point I've been stressing since General Petraeus made his optimistic report in September. Fewer Iraqis are dying because they fled the war zone: About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent...
Bloggers on the right have been trumpeting the apparent decline in Iraqi civilian deaths as a clear sign that the surge is working. Apparently, we do body counts now that we like the numbers.However, I've been arguing since September that civilian deaths may well be down because Iraqis feel insecure and have simply fled their homes. Such self-segregation is a classic response to ethnic war and there's new evidence suggesting this viewpoint is correct. From the AP's Lauren Frayer on November 5:Deadly rivalries have forced Shiite and Sunni Muslims to flee once diverse neighborhoods across...
General Petraeus finished delivering his prepared remarks to the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees not long ago -- and I've already been interviewed about them by the local NPR station (WFPL).Basically, I concluded that his report was not surprising. Most analysts expected an optimistic assessment that would not call for a substantial reduction in American troops. The General is only talking about returning the US troop level to pre-surge levels by mid-July 2008. A modest proposal, eh?I also noted a few points that General Petraeus did not address (though many in the...
How many ways, how many times, can one say that the US is @#$*&% in Iraq?Today, two of the better military correspondents following Iraq (each with a must-read book on Iraq) dispense key insights as to how problematic Iraq is for the United States.Michael Gordon in the NYT reports that:The top American military commander for the Middle East has warned Iraq’s prime minister in a closed-door conversation that the Iraqi government needs to make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.In a Sunday afternoon discussion that mixed...