No Way Forward Except The Exit

By Cernig

The Government Accountability Office has a critical new report on Iraqi glad-talk of "progress and success" from other gorvernment departments out. Here's the summary and here's the PDF of the whole thing. It says, bluntly, that the administration has been cooking the books to show that a drop in violence occassioned by the Sunni awakening, Sadrist ceasefire and the Surge of US troops has led to any great progress in reconstruction or reconcilliation.The GAO also said that "the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration's goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines."

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times cover the GAO's report today - but the WaPo hands the job off to a staff writer who underplays the report's significance while the NYT gives it to star reporter James Glanz. The latter "gets" that this report, from an organisation that is supposed to police other government departments, is more than just a disagreement about metrics. He quotes Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the accountability office.

“A strategic plan should be a plan that takes you not only through the short term,”...“If the New Way Forward only takes you through July 2008, then you don’t have any guidance for achieving an Iraq that can do everything on its own,” including dealing with the threat of terrorism and defending its own borders, Mr. Christoff said.

And there's the rub - because neither the Bush administration nor the Maliki government are all that interested in an Iraq that can do everything on its own. The Bush administration are driven by neocon wishes for a permanent US satrapy in the region from which to base operations and an energy lobby that proceeds from "we broke it, we own it" thinking to regard Iraq as the US' strategic oil reserve. The Iraqi central government is driven by a wish to have their American bodyguards stick around their Green Zone haven so that they themselves can stay in power. Thus even the GAO makes the mistake of assuming that the US should be telling common Iraqis what is best for them.

As The New Way Forward and the military surge end in July 2008, and given weaknesses in current DOD and State plans, an updated strategy is needed for how the United States will help Iraq achieve key security, legislative, and economic goals. Accordingly, we recommend that DOD and State, in conjunction with relevant U.S. agencies, develop an updated strategy for Iraq that defines U.S. goals and objectives after July 2008 and addresses the long-term goal of achieving an Iraq that can govern, defend, and sustain itself. This strategy should build on recent security and legislative gains, address the remaining unmet goals and challenges for the near and long term, clearly articulate goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities, and the resources needed and address prior GAO recommendations.

The difficulties of any such strategy are set out well by an anonymous Iraq expert guest-blogging for Marc Lynch, who notes that the primary power divide in Iraq now is between the Powers That Be (the Kurdish parties, most of PM Maliki's Da'wa, the Shiite ISCI and the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party) and the Powers That Aren't (everyone else, but especially the Sadrists and the Awakening Councils).

Despite having far more power than their representation among the populace should mean:

The PTB are unified and organized as individual parties and don't break ranks when it comes to the central government.  As a coalition of groups, they have so much in common and so much to lose that they have a great deal of incentive to work together and shut everyone else out.  This is what makes them more than a coalition of factions.  That they have captured the apparatus of state and are working hard to strengthen it, especially on the security level--with the US fighting and dying to help them do just that--and that they are swimming in money gives them much to lose.

...The PTA all have a superficial commitment to nationalism and unity, but they are so Iraqi in the Ali al-Wardi, "for every two Iraqis you have three factions" sense, that there is very little hope they will actually be unified. You can talk about undoing de-Ba'thification, you can talk about integrating the Sahwa, you can talk about provincial elections--but what the PTA want is IN.  They want in.  As Abu Rumman makes clear, the resistance/insurgency is so dead and pathetic that even they want in.   PTA want a piece of the massive, kick-back laden, contract-dispensing honey pot and extortion ring that is the GOI and, increasingly, the provincial governments.  And the PTB don't want to let them in.  Why would they?

So where does the US stand in this?   They're at least apparently working hard for provincial elections and thus to give the PTA and the popular forces they represent some power.  But at the same time, their main priority appears to be buttressing the state security apparatus that belongs to the PTB, the very one that's being used to crack down on the PTA in the south ("JAM") and, if Abu Rumman is right, the PTA in the form of the Awakenings ("thank you very much, we'll take it from here!  that will be all!")  The more this process goes on and the more they drag their feet on provincial elections, by the time these elections do happen, if they do, the PTA will be so weakened and fragmented, the system likely so rigged in favor of the unified PTB parties, that they'll hardly matter.

The US is, by staying and offering their protection to the Green Zone elites, backing those with the least amount of popular support and enabling their repression of those political groups who have most. There is no amount of leverage, short of leaving entirely, that can convince Maliki and his co-conspirators to end their ever-evolving litany of excuses, punts and pretences of reconcilliation between the PTB and the PTA. But that's OK, because neither Bush nor McCain, nor even Obama, seriously want to convince them to do so in any case.

Comments

[Hypatia]

You wrote:

But that's OK, because neither Bush nor McCain, nor even Obama, seriously want to convince them to do so in any case.

Care to say this in a comment over at Balloon-Juice?

[Steve Hynd]

Heh? Ok.