It’s not quite “last throes,” but Rumsfeld’s Pentagon wants the public to believe that tremendous progress is underway in Iraq. When the Defense Secretary isn’t telling those with questions about the war to “back off,” he’s telling them that conditions in Iraq, including security, are “improving.”
Behind closed doors, U.S. Central Command knows better.
A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.
A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.
In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.
The image is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s pretty clear we’re not moving towards the green part (“peace”); we’re already in the red part (“chaos”).
An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide, obtained by the NYT, reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year.
Have Bush and Rumsfeld seen this slide? Of course they have.
Indeed, right around the time the president saw this very-easy-to-understand image, he began to hem and haw about whether he’d ever uttered the words “stay the course.”
Look, we’ve reached a point in which even Bush should be able to understand the situation. His National Intelligence Estimate says that Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown. His Central Command officials show easy-to-read arrows moving towards the “bad” part of a chart measuring peace vs. chaos.
Maybe now’s a good time for Dick Cheney to remind us that conditions in Iraq are going “remarkably well“?
I suppose, if you’re a conservative today, the problem isn’t the disaster in Iraq, it’s the chart measuring the disaster in Iraq. Matt Yglesias noted, for example, how the National Review considers the landscape.
[I]n yesterday’s editorial making the case for the GOP, National Review argued it was vital to keep the Democrats out of power, because only a Republican majority can protect the American public from accurate information about Iraq: “their victory would undoubtedly strengthen the forces who want to declare Iraq a defeat and come home. Partisan oversight hearings will politicize every military miscalculation, every dime misspent, and every abuse by our allies (real or imagined). The effect will be to sap what public support remains for seeing the job done in Iraq. The doomsday clock on our commitment in Iraq will have lurched a few minutes closer to midnight.”
Vote GOP: We’ll maintain a cocoon of denial!
Given the nonsense we’re hearing from Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s going to have to be a very big cocoon.