The Beat goes On

The Boston Globe ran a story that was picked up and plastered all over the front page of my local paper Saturday morning that screamed 'Defeat!' at me with this headline:

Decisive victory doubtful in Iraq

Military: Diplomacy is only path to peace

Having momentarily fallen under the spell of MSM assessment, I panicked. My mind raced back to stories I instantly recalled from last week about how we've nothing left to win in Iraq and how the Iraqi army is still years away from any sort of effectiveness. Then I took a deep breath, and well...read the story. Some of the highlights:

-Despite significant guerrilla setbacks and optimistic predictions by a host of American commanders earlier this year, the Sunni-backed insurgency remains as strong as ever, forcing U.S. officials and their Iraqi allies to seek a political solution to the bloodshed. Pentagon officials and current members of the military interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity.

-''We are not going to win the unconditional surrender from the insurgents and have no choice but to somehow bring them into society," said retired Army Col. Paul Hughes, an Iraq war veteran who is now at the government-funded U.S. Institute for Peace. ''To think there will be one climactic military event to end this is foolish. Those who cling to that don't understand."

-''The insurgency is still mounting an effort comparable to where they were a year ago," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer and specialist on counterinsurgency operations who directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent think tank in Washington. "We do something we think will change things, but a month or two later, casualties and the level of violence are back to where they were," Krepinevich added. So far this year, nearly 1,000 members of Iraq's police and security forces have been killed in attacks, almost as many as the total for the previous year and a half, according to Pentagon figures.

U.S. military officials have documented more disturbing trends. The number of attacks involving suicide bombers, for example, rose from 25 percent in February to more than 50 percent in April, according to estimates provided by Pentagon officials, who asked not to be identified.

Such insights confirm the MSM assessments of where we are in Iraq: if not beaten by the insurgency, we’re close to it and lacking the ability to win a decisive victory. The Unspoken Truth of the piece is clear: we can’t ‘win’ the fight anywhere near the Administration’s vision, so why try? We ought to be leaving.

So what do we have here, really? A summary that includes the usual anonymous suspects and what positions itself as some sort of revelatory conclusion that a successful political process is all we can hope for.

After that began setting in, I recalled a couple of other things. Things that made me realize, this piece is hardly any sort of new revelation. Rather, it is simply more of the same.

First off, the move towards political resolution of the situation began way back on January 30th, when the insurgents offered up no political alternative and were repudiated by the Iraqi citizenry who successfully elected a parliament. The second thing I remembered was this story, also from last week.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani last week took steps to ensure greater inclusion of the Sunni minority in Iraq’s political process: Iraq's president averted a crisis Thursday by promising Sunni Arabs a big say in drafting the constitution - clearing the way for them to join a Shiite-dominated panel now working around the clock in a cavernous, dusty auditorium.

Sunni Arab support is vital to the lawmakers who gather inside the most heavily fortified area of the capital, trying to ignore assassination attempts, death threats and suicide attacks as they wrangle over sensitive charter details and sometimes give way to shouted arguments.

Iraq's 275-seat parliament has until mid-August to adopt a new constitution that hasn't yet been written, must be acceptable to Iraq's voters, and is expected to deal with the tough issues of role of Islam in public life and the type of electoral system Iraq should have. The document will face a nationwide vote two months later. If adopted, it will provide the basis for a new election to be held by December.

In other words, the very thing that military officials in the Globe’s story are advocating and hallmark as the only possible positive-outcome to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Now, if I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to say this is where we’re already going!