Good deeds from the Associated Press:

This year’s U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.

Obviously, someone forgot to tell the AP that Michael O’Hanlon has seen some secret data the Pentagon put together which proves them wrong. They did get this:

However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq “has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006.”

He offered no statistics to back his claim, but in a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday he warned insurgents might try intensify attacks in Iraq to coincide with three milestones: the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the beginning of Ramadan and the report to Congress.

But who needs statistics to back up a claim like that when unsupported assertions made by interested parties can do just as well?

Rep. Jan Shakowsky took a trip to Iraq:

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus’s words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. ” ‘We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,’ ” Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: “Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.”

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”

It really is striking how un-optimistic the more optimistic views of Iraq are when you get down to it. Michael O’Hanlon thinks our strategy “probably can’t succeed” unless the political situation in Iraq magically alters. General Petraeus thinks he’s making so much progress that the war will need to continue twice as long again as it’s already gone on. More to the point, once you’re looking at that kind of time frame, all forecasts are nonsensical. We could leave tomorrow and ten years might be plenty of time for Iraq to descend deeper into civil war, for the civil war to end, and then for stability to emerge. There’s just no telling. Petraeus is saying that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

Someone at The Washington Post editorial pages decided that despite the fact that Michael O’Hanlon (PDF) “has appeared on the major television networks more than 150 times since September 11, 2001 and has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and FOX some 300 times over that same period” that what the world needs is more media exposure for Michael O’Hanlon. Thus, they gave him the chance to respond to his critics.

Now, were I an editor I might well have done the same thing. Certainly, at this point it’s a newsworthy exercise. So, yeah, I would have given him the space. Given it to him, that is, were he inclined to actually address the substance of the criticisms that have been raised. But we don’t get that. On the much-disputed issue of Iraqi civilian casualties he simply reiterates that “the Pentagon showed us data illustrating that overall death tallies from all forms of sectarian violence were down about one-third from last winter’s average.” People have suggested that this should be seasonally adjusted. O’Hanlon has no response. What’s more, while O’Hanlon says he’s seen the data, the Pentagon hasn’t released it to the public for scrutiny. Leila Fadel reported earlier this month for McClatchey that “U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don’t support the claim.”

Does it seem plausible that the Department of Defense has really solid, favorable data about its own activities that it’s keeping hidden from public scrutiny? Not to me.

And it’s on like that. Thousands of words have been spilled criticizing his New York Times op-ed and he hasn’t responded to a single one of them. He’s just re-iterating his views in a new venue, and though he says this “would be a sad time to conclude we have been defeated,” he also concedes that “our strategy for Iraq probably cannot work absent major national political cooperation across sectarian lines.” But if our strategy probably can’t succeed, then this seems like an ideal time to conclude that we should abandon our strategy. There’s no such thing as a non-sad time to admit you’ve failed, after all.

I’m just going to quote Jim Henley a bit:

Deborah Hastings of Associated Press explains what happens to people who blow the whistle on corruption in Iraqi contracting: very bad things. One man was detained for 97 days and subjected to “fear up” interrogation. One woman was demoted and ostracized after a blameless 20-year civilian career with the Pentagon. A KBR contractor who blew the whistle on invoice-padding and diversion of resources was kept under guard until she could be ejected from Iraq. The federal government, which has happily joined Federal False Claims act suits for Medicare/Medicaid and domestic contracting fraud, has declined to sign onto even a single lawsuit against contractors in Iraq.

Financial improprieties aside, I would further note that insofar as the rationale for our continued presence in Iraq is humanitarian, unleashing on the country a body of thousands of mercenaries who are subject to neither Iraqi nor American law seems like an odd way of going about that.

Here’s Michael O’Hanlon in the winter 2003 issue of The National Interest assessing the situation in Iraq about six months after the invasion:

A third category of effort in any counterinsurgency, politics is harder to track using quantitative data. That is especially true because Iraq has local governments throughout almost all of the country at present, in addition to a national Governing Council. Hence, future progress will be dependent more on how well Iraqi leaders do their jobs and how quickly they establish legitimacy among the population than on increases in their ranks. An imperfect proxy for this is polling data showing how the Iraqi population feels about the foreign presence in its country and about the general direction of political life within the country. Here the verdict remains mixed. Recent Gallup polls show that a clear majority of Iraqis want coalition forces to stay and believe that life will gradually improve in the post-Saddam era. But the majority also feels frustrated and worried about internal political trends, and, as should be quite obvious, a sizeable minority with the potential to do great harm opposes the entire course of events.

At the time, this seemed very wise to me. Why end an “occupation” in Iraq if the occupied people wanted our troops to say? Over the past two or three years, however, Iraqi public opinion has magically vanished from the debate in Washington. The Global Policy Forum does, however, have a nice compilation.

We learn in this report that a whopping 6 percent of Iraqis have “a great deal” of confidence in US and British forces. An additional 12 percent have “quite a lot.” 30 Percent say they have “not very much.” And 52 percent say “none at all.” The Iraqi police, the Iraqi army, local political leaders, the national government, and the local militia are all more popular than the American military. A clear majority thinks the US government, rather than the Iraqi government, is controlling the country. 46 percent of Iraqis “strongly oppose” the presence of American troops in Iraq and 32 percent are somewhat opposed. 69 percent say the American presence is making things worse. More Iraqis see Iran as having a positive influence on their country than see the US that way. For that matter, more Iraqis see Saudi Arabia as having a positive influence. More Iraqis see Russia as having a positive influence. 51 percent say attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. More people blame US forces (31 percent) or President Bush (9 percent) for violence in Iraq than blame al-Qaeda (18 percent) or Iran (7 pecent).

I don’t say, of course, that the Iraqi public is correct about all of this, but that’s what they think. Under the circumstances, I just don’t see how a counterinsurgency mission could possibly succeed. If we had just recently invaded the country and were facing initial skepticism then, sure, maybe better policies would win people over. But we’re talking about the reverse. The initial reception we got was open-minded. That was years ago. Now the US military is very, very, very much disliked in Iraq and it ought to leave and go places (home, Kuwait, Germany, Turkey) where it’s welcome.

I wasn’t super-optimistic that the 2006 midterms were going to cause us to adopt a sound Iraq policy, but I did think it would result in a less unsound one. Instead, we got the “surge” — our policy actually got worse. I never believed that the infamous September reports were going to make policy more rational, but now it seems to me that they’re getting worse. Greg Djerejian looks at the longer version of Pollack & O’Hanlon’s trip and it turns out to be not more nuanced than their op-ed, but more unhinged.

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer is now O’Pollahan’s best friend and leverages their findings into further support for the burgeoning Iyad Allawi boom. And here’s more on that from Spencer Ackerman. And here as well.

I find it hard to find words to describe what a disaster it may be if the US ends up engineering the return to power of a grossly unpopular ex-Baathist ex-Prime Minister. It’s as if people are trying their hardest to come up with policies designed to end with Muqtada al-Sadr marching at the head of a crowd shouting “Death to America” into the rapidly abandoned Green Zone sometime in 2010.

DoD photo by Sgt. Class Robert C. Brogan