With the White House’s “surge” policy in full swing for months now, the president frequently talks about “progress.” Dick Cheney sees “progress.” Joe Lieberman and Senate Republicans insist there’s all kinds of “progress.”
But the Pentagon, which didn’t exactly think the surge was a good idea in the first place, sees “little progress.”
Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.
The report — the first comprehensive statistical overview of the new U.S. military strategy in Iraq — coincided with renewed fears of sectarian violence after the bombing yesterday of the same Shiite shrine north of Baghdad that was attacked in February 2006, unleashing a spiral of retaliatory bloodshed. Iraq’s government imposed an immediate curfew in Baghdad yesterday to prevent an outbreak of revenge killings. […]
Iraq’s government, for its part, has proven “uneven” in delivering on its commitments under the strategy, the report said, stating that public pledges by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have in many cases produced no concrete results. Iraqi leaders have made “little progress” on the overarching political goals that the stepped-up security operations are intended to help advance, the report said, calling reconciliation between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions “a serious unfulfilled objective.”
Violence is up, sectarian conflict is worse, and none of the political benchmarks have been met. If there’s “progress,” it’s hiding well.
Indeed, the LA Times emphasizes that there have been “increased attacks in cities and provinces that had been relatively peaceful before the Bush administration’s troop buildup.” In other words, it’s like squeezing the proverbial water-filled balloon — U.S. focus on Baghdad and western Iraq hasn’t stopped violence; it’s pushed insurgents elsewhere.
Back in January, when the “surge” was unveiled, war supporters in the administration said we’d be able to see the success of the policy “fairly quickly.” Apparently, that’s no longer operative.
Of course, with September coming right up, and the surge failing as a strategy, the White House has a new problem: convincing the nation to disregard everything they’ve already heard about September.
A September progress report on the U.S. troop increase in Iraq that President George W. Bush called an important moment for his war strategy is unlikely to be a “pivotal” assessment, officials now say.
Amid unrelenting bloodshed in Iraq and scant signs of progress by the Iraqi government in meeting political benchmarks, the White House sought to temper expectations of rapid strides resulting from a security crackdown begun at the start of this year.
“I have warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September,” White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters on Wednesday.