{"id":11428,"date":"2007-07-12T16:45:24","date_gmt":"2007-07-12T20:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11428.html"},"modified":"2007-07-12T16:45:24","modified_gmt":"2007-07-12T20:45:24","slug":"who-are-we-fighting-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/who-are-we-fighting-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are we fighting again?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll have more tomorrow morning on the Iraq Benchmark Report after I have a chance to read it in more detail overnight, but in the meantime, I think this portion of James Joyner’s summary<\/a> is just about right.<\/p>\n

So, essentially, despite [al Qaeda in Iraq] comprising something like five percent of the insurgency, we have diverted most of our resources to combating it. And we’re failing. Not only is AQI stronger but, as another report being released today suggests, al Qaeda in general is enjoying a resurgence.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the [Iraqi Security Forces] continues to be an undependable, lackluster fighting force four years into the game. That, despite their training having been headed up by the counterinsurgency guru who’s now in charge of the whole shebang.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kevin Drum, who noted the same summary (and whose post I’m basically stealing<\/strike> borrowing here), summed up<\/a> exactly what I was thinking.<\/p>\n

Despite what the White House says, we’re fighting AQI not because they’re “high profile” or because they’re actually a genuine branch of al-Qaeda, we’re fighting them because we don’t have any choice. Who else are we going to fight? The Badr Organization? The Mahdi Army? The Sunni insurgents? The Iraqi Security Forces themselves? Hell, we’re allied<\/i> with the Sunni tribes these days. We’re training<\/i> the Iraqi Security Forces, making them into an ever more efficient sectarian killing machine. We’re supporting<\/i> a government that supports the Badr Organization and we’ve apparently got back channel negotiations taking place with Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army too. This leaves us with distinctly limited options.<\/p>\n

We’re not fighting AQI because they’re the real problem in Iraq. We’re like the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp. And we’re doing about as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’re in a war that’s gone tragically awry, surrounded by a variety of other wars that are also going tragically awry. With our war in its fifth year, that there’s still some question about who we’re fighting speaks volumes about the extent of the catastrophe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll have more tomorrow morning on the Iraq Benchmark Report after I have a chance to read it in more detail overnight, but in the meantime, I think this portion of James Joyner’s summary is just about right. So, essentially, despite [al Qaeda in Iraq] comprising something like five percent of the insurgency, we have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}