Ed Kilgore makes a good point here — it’s really not clear why the details of General Petraeus’ presentation on the military state of play in Iraq matter at all. The question of the surge, and of the military presence more generally, is whether or not the presence is creating a situation where the presence will no longer be needed in order to avoid the Potentially Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal. As long as we have a situation where the day after we leave, the Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal will come to pass, then we may as well just leave tomorrow.

Obviously, though, the aspect of the situation in Iraq that makes the CCW frightening isn’t the quantity of last week’s car bombs, but rather the political conflict that led to the car-bombings. If violence declines simply because American troops are patrolling the country, then the troops need to patrol forever. If, by contrast, the decline in violence leads toward a resolution of the political conflict then it’s a different story.

So the question of the surge is fundamentally outside of Petraeus’ domain. And as hard as Ambassador Crocker tried to dodge the point (by for example, trying to relabel the total absence of central government control over the vast majority of the country as an experiment in federalism) the answer here is clearly no. We could, of course, just give it some more time. And then more time. And then yet more time. But by the same token, if we leave and some Catastrophic Consequences break out and then we give that more time, things will eventually calm down.

All of which is to say that there’s no such thing as “military progress” that we can tally up next to absence of political progress and say, “eh, the glass is half full.” The military exists to try to help accomplish political ends. If the military isn’t succeeding in achieving those political ends, then it’s not making progress, and our troops ought to be sent somewhere where they can do something useful.

I first heard rumor of this “General Betray Us” ad plan Friday night and it sounded dumb. And when I saw it this kornng it looked dumb. But not nearly as dumb as the House Republicans look endlessly harping on it at the hearing. This war is serious stuff — literally a matter of life and death — and here they are screwing around like children.

Meanwhile the basic point of the MoveOn ad — that it doesn’t make sense for the public or the congress to make policy on the basis of secret data that’s at odds with publicly available assssments as well as work by the GAO, CIA, and DIA — is eminently sensible. Petraeus’ slides are just random pictures with no sourcing, it’s ridiculous.

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) was just saying that it’s unrealistic to expect Iraq to move swiftly to militia disarmament. After all, look at Northern Ireland where the IRA has just only very recently agreed to lay down arms.

This all seems reasonable to be, except that Smith seems to think this is a data point in favor of his side. It proves, you see, that the GAO scorecard is silly. And maybe so. But peering just a half an inch beneath the analogy is the idea that civil war in Iraq might continue for thirty or forty years before it would be reasonable to expect our policy to start showing results.

General Petraeus is making the point that, contrary to some press reports (including commentary on this blog), the US Army isn’t “arming” any Sunni insurgents in al-Anbar province or elsewhere. If he says so, I’ll take him at his word. Still, we are giving them money. And since you can use money to buy weapons — especially if the US military is smiling on your efforts to do so — I’m not sure I really see the difference here. Moreover, Petraeus and Crocker are both bragging about Anbar Sunnis joining the local police force and presumably we are arming the local police force and given that Shiite militias in Shiite areas find it easy to infiltrate the local police there, it seems like the new, Sunnified Iraqi local police in Sunni areas are just going to be Sunni insurgent groups, but this time with uniforms.

Check out this briefing slide from General Petraeus’ presentation:

Basically, the idea is that about nine months from now, we’ll be back to the number of troops we had in Iraq about nine months ago. After that, more stuff is supposed to change . . . maybe . . . sometime . . . if all goes well . . . maybe . . . at some point.

During his opening statement, Rep. Ike Skelton referenced a poll just released today showing that Iraqis don’t believe the surge is working. It seems that Skelton, like me, made the mistake of reading The Washington Post‘s summary of the poll, rather than the BBC writeup which highlights the much more striking fact that “nearly 60% see attacks on US-led forces as justified.”

This is something we’ve seen several times in polls of Iraqi opinion, but it never seems to penetrate. It seems to me that even 10-25 percent of the population actively approving of attacks on American troops might make our mission there impossible. But when an actual majority support killing our soldiers, then how, exactly, are the soldiers supposed to help Iraq’s population? It just doesn’t make sense, on any level, to think that a giant military deployment can play a constructive role under these circumstances.

I can’t believe Duncan Hunter really just said we shouldn’t question General Petraeus’ credibility because, in fact, he stands in the same tradition as General MacArthur.

Polling Iraqis: “Although the percentage of Anbar residents who have a favorable view of local security has increased to 38 percent from zero in March, 62 percent still rate security negatively overall.”

So, okay, I’ll concede that this counts as progress. Unfortunately, on aspects of the situation that weren’t already at the lowest-possible level, we’re not doing as well: “Meanwhile, the level of satisfaction in other quality-of-life categories — including the availability of jobs, supply of clean water and freedom of movement — has decreased since March.”

I feel like it’s safe to say that now that Michael O’Hanlon is following up last week’s Washington Times op-ed with a column for National Review Online and an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio show that he’s cast himself out of the broad left-of-center community in favor of becoming a conservative movement propagandist whose salary just happens to be paid by Brookings.

This, however, makes the Michael O’Hanlon Primary all the more pressing. The word on the street in 2004 was that O’Hanlon was in line for some kind of job in a John Kerry administration. This time around, in a Fox News appearance O’Hanlon expressed his support for Hillary Clinton. Does Clinton return the admiration?

To return to the report referenced below on “Salvaging the Possible” in Iraq, I have sharply mixed feelings. Pollack and Pascual do a lot of analyzing of this and that, but there baseline conclusion is this:

The more time passes and as violence escalates, the harder it will be to achieve a political settlement. The United States must cooperate with regional players,
the UN and other international partners in order to create leverage over Iraqis who might rein in the militias and reach a political compromise. The chances for success are low, but this is one of the few options that has not been tried, despite the imperative suggested by international experience with civil wars. And failing to try essentially amounts to accepting civil war in Iraq.

The report goes into more detail about what they’re proposing, but it’s similar to Toby Dodge’s implausible scenario. And reading Pollack & Pascual write about it, on some level I agree with them. As they say, probably if we made a big push for a UN-sponsored diplomatic settlement of Iraq’s internal conflicts and related regional ones, etc., etc., our push would fail. On the other hand, if such a push succeeded, that would be very good. And the costs of trying for such a settlement and then failing would be low.

At the end of the day, though, the whole premise of a discussion like this is that Bush might read a Brookings Institution report and agree to a radical change in direction. That, of course, isn’t going to happen. At the present day, the set of options that might plausibly occur between today and January 2009 are:

1. Bush gets his way.
2. Enough Republicans get freaked out that congress is able to force Bush to start withdrawing troops.

Under the circumstances, the political impact of things like this Pollack/Pascual report seem to me to be mostly pernicious. It mostly serves to obscure the real issues and choices in play. It lets people continue with the delusion that they’re floating off on some worthy path between Bush and Bush’s opponents. This nicely serves various people’s sense of vanity and desire to avoid undue association with dirty fucking hippies, but it’s every bit as detached from realities on the ground in America as Bush’s policies are from realities in Iraq. Either the Bush steamroller is going to plow forward for 18 more months, or else congress is going to muster the votes to shut it down.

That said, in gossipy terms it’s interesting that Pollack and O’Hanlon have responded so differently to the criticisms of their “War We Just Might Win” op-ed. O’Hanlon’s basically double-down as a hawk, whereas Pollack’s gone back to the relatively sensible views of his Things Fall Apart era.

From Kenneth Pollack and Carlos Pascual, Salvaging the Possible: Policy Options in Iraq — “In contrast to the 150,000 troops that will be in Iraq, there are only about 7,500 Foreign Service Officers posted everywhere in the world.” It’s not directly relevant to the Iraq issue, which is too pressing and acute to wait for big picture changes, but this imbalance between the military and non-military aspects of the American foreign policy apparatus is really absurd.

Leila Fadel from McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau provides yet another independent press account calling into question the administration’s claims of improved security thanks to the surge in Iraq. Fadel notes that when the surge was announced, Bush “said that Iraqi and American troops would improve security while the Iraqi government improved services.” He promised that “Responsibility for security in most of Iraq would be turned over to Iraqi security forces by November.” And, of course, he forecast political reconcilation.

As Fadel reports, “With less than a week to go before the White House delivers a congressionally mandated report on that plan, none of this has happened.”

On the flipside we have the news that the reason no outside journalists have been able to scrutinize, evaluate, or verify the administration’s claims of security gains is that both the numbers and the methodology used to generate them are classified. I think we need to put our credence in the idea that the White House has some super-convincing data in support of its policies that it’s got hidden away and can’t release at around zero. If Bush had solid numbers, we’d be seeing them. Heck, we’d see non-solid numbers if Bush thought he might be able to bamboozle people into believing some screwy ones.

It’s what the surge is achieving, according to the surge’s architects and supporters. But what is it? What does it mean? The Center for American Progress’ Brian Katulis asks some good questions about this strategy, and so does Ilan Goldenberg from the National Security Network.

Via Atrios, a reader actually got The Washington Post‘s Shailagh Murray to offer a definition of “precipitous withdrawal,” perhaps the Beltway’s most pernicious meaningless term. She came up with:

Precipitous in this case would be more quickly than military leaders believe is sensible, based on their mission and the situation on the ground. Believe it or not, a lot of Democrats are concerned about withdrawing too many troops too quickly. You can be against the war, but also against mucking it up.

Obviously, though, “military leaders” disagree. The Joint Chiefs didn’t like the surge plan when Bush floated it. And this big multi-byline Washington Post feature on the surge leads with General Petraeus fighting with Admiral Fallon, his commanding officer, over surge-related issues. Part of the Petraeus/Fallon debate involved the CENTCOM CINC wanting more troops to be available for contingencies outside of Iraq. Part of the Joint Chiefs’ objection to the surge was its massively deleterious impact on long-term military preparedness.

Which is to say that military leaders disagree in part because people are just bound to disagree. But they disagree in part because they have different perspectives and different priorities. Ultimately, it’s the job of political leaders — of the president and the congress — to make these kind of decisions about priorities. It’s up to them to set national policy, to decide where the nation’s interests lie, and to ultimately decide what to do. Politicians should, obviously, listen to what officers have to say, but the fact that some particular commander wants to have more resources dedicated to his particular mission doesn’t have a great deal of probative value.