Iraq, winning, lies and action....

Last week (just a few posts down) I argued that violence in Iraq is bad enough in any context and we better figure out a way to control it. I stand by that, but want to clarify :

Gateway Pundit posts today about the relative calm in the majority of Iraq and specifically about Sunnis and Shiites living side by side in Basra, rebuilding infrastructure and in general enjoying a peaceful existence that would likely shock a lot of Americans and Europeans.

Over the past few days Flopping Aces has developed, in a great bit of investigative journalism, that Associated Press and The Los Angeles Times are reporting false or exaggerated stories about military operations and sectarian violence. NBC News proudly declared a Civil War in Iraq:

On "Today," Lauer said NBC News consulted with many experts and carefully deliberated before making the call. He said there are two clearly defined groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites, using violence to gain political supremacy, and there's a government in place that's unable to protect people.

Carefully Deliberated. Sounds Familiar.

Now the problem: While some reports are surely exaggerated or outright falsehoods and while the provinces are quiet, Rome is burning.

As I pointed out on Friday, there is more than enough real violence and mayhem to go around in Baghdad and nearby provinces and cities. Peoples with deep and dogged hatreds, thirsts for power and needs to control are in fact killing one another at what any sane observer would call an alarming rate. Our forces perform bravely and brilliantly on a regular basis in Iraq under sometimes nearly impossible circumstances, including trying to serve, save a people who (even when not warring against one another) may not want the magic of western style democracy.

Rich Lowry in his column and Stanley Kurtz in a Corner post at NRO raises two themes in dire need of serious discussion among all conservatives, and indeed anyone who does not want to see Iraq fall into chaos or under Iranian-Syrian control.

First and foremost, Leadership. No war goes according to the game plan; every war from Iraq back to Caesar's war to put down the Gallic revolt led by Versingetorix finds itself careening off course in unexpected ways, including colossal blunders by Kings, Presidents and Generals. (Victor Davis Hanson in a piece both tongue in cheek and deadly serious catalogues the mistakes of World War Two and how they would be reported today.) It is exactly when things go wrong that leaders rise while others fall or fail.

Right now we have a Commander in Chief who in 2004 seemed to know where he stood and had an air of decisiveness that garnered him a record number of votes over a challenger who gave him everything he could handle - it was no cakewalk. I believe now as I did then that President Bush made enough Americans believe he had the plan to bring stability to Iraq without falling into the kind of indiscernible policy citizens feared and remembered from Vietnam, one where we were not losing but did not have the political will from our leaders OR the electorate to do what was required to win.

Fast forward to now and our Commander in Chief now meets with Nancy Pelosi who has described President Bush as incompetent, a liar and dangerous; he awaits the report of the Iraq study group in a manner that is evocative of someone looking for marching orders. On the military front, if his commanders in the field told him anything from the beginning except destroying Muqtada al-Sadr on the summer of 2004 was exactly the right thing to do, he took bad advice. If they did tell him that and he allowed anyone to override their advice it was a huge mistake. Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi Interim Prime Minister at the time, thought taking out al-Sadr was precisely what needed to be done.

Second, following up on the Kurtz post at NRO, were we (we go to war as a nation) more than a little naive in thinking that elections in an inherently unstable situation were going to pull the various factions together enough to have political and not (often) violence driven solutions to their differences? Also, to backtrack a moment, was the awful decision to enter into yet another truce with al-Sadr made simply in order to not delay the January 2005 elections? I agree that wars cannot have timetables as a rule of thumb; did we make the mistake of thinking democracies can?

Do we have the will now to support "going strong" if President Bush decides that is the game plan? I don't think there is enough support among Americans for "go long" and to go home at this point would be a larger failure than what any democrat or fatalist thinks we currently face.
We have the military resources to take out those like al-Sadr who are a brick wall on the road to an Iraq that can survive on its own. It will cost dear lives on both sides. But we must act decisively soon, both politically and militarily.

It's not defeatism to ask the questions and hope for action, but circumstances sometimes drive a nation at war to hard options. Those who think we are not at that point or very, very near it, are try to put lipstick on a pig.