OK, enuff with the Mary Worth stuff. I’m also an expert on foreign policy. Seriously!
In today’s Washington Post, we learn that “Pentagon leaders” want to delay any reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq for at least another Friedman unit—that fabled six months after which “we’ll know a lot more” and our “real but fragile” gains won’t be so damn fragile.
It’s already been so long since “the Surge” was supposed to be over that a lot of people have forgotten that it was supposed to be over. We surged back in 2007 to allow the Iraqis breathing space to get their act together politically and then extended the surge to protect those “real but fragile” gains, which don’t seem to have solidified all that much in the past six months.
Of course, there has been a major decline in the level of violence in Iraq. There’s no denying that achievement on the part of the U.S. military, although it’s come at a cost of several hundred thousand Iraqis dead as a result of sectarian violence, more than two million in exile, “ethnic cleansing” in many areas of Baghdad, not to mention ten-foot steel walls that carve up the city into a variety of safe zones.
I haven’t been to Baghdad myself, but Jeffrey Goldberg speaks with someone who has, Dexter Filkins, “the greatest war correspondent of my generation” (yes, Jeff and Dex are buddies, but that isn’t influencing Jeff in any way), and gets the following testimony:
“The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live—on the Tigris River—was a dead, dying, spooky place. It’s now filled with people—families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They’re voting with their feet. It’s a wonderful thing to see.”
Case closed, right? The Surge worked. Well, not exactly. Things are still, you know, fragile. When Jeff asks Dex if the average Iraqi is better off today than he was six years ago, the voluble, self-confident Dex gets a bit evasive:
“Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.”
Well, today is a moment in time. So was yesterday. But if we’re going to switch from Friedman units to Filkins, we’re going to be in Iraq for many moments to come.
