'Ugly American' No-Confidence in al-Maliki

Is a no-confidence vote from Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) a blessing or a curse for a head of state? Perhaps the more germane question is, do Iraqis take note of or care what Senator Levin thinks of their government's internal affairs? Over the weekend, Levin visited Iraq with Senator John Warner (R-VA) for the express purpose, as we reported Friday, to shift attention away from news that the upcoming report on the progress of General Petraeus' surge strategy would be positive and increase support for continuance of the war effort. Levin telegraphed his distraction playbook, stating openly that he intended to focus his trip and subsequent media interviews on one topic: the political nature of Iraq's problems and that they can only be solved through political means.

On Monday, Levin wasted no time reporting on the results of his brief "fact-finding" stint in Iraq. In just two days, despite hearing glowing reports of the difference made by the surge strategy in the overall security in Iraq, Senator Levin dismissed all such good news and did what any good Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman who wishes he were Secretary of State would do: he called for the ouster of a government that has worked for years at extreme personal peril for unity and functional democracy in Iraq. Although that description also applies to the Bush administration, which Levin has also worked assiduously to thwart, Levin's no-confidence vote was for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In smug superiority rivaling that of the infamous "Ugly American" of literary renown, Levin made these less than statesmanlike public remarks about the elected leader of a government that is surrounded by mortal enemies and looks to the United States as perhaps its only reliable ally:

I hope that the Iraqi assembly, when it reconvenes in a few weeks, will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and a more unifying prime minister and government," said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

Levin and Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, just completed a two-day visit to Iraq.

The two senior lawmakers issued a joint statement saying that while the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq has given Iraqi politicians some breathing room, they have failed to make the compromises needed to bring peace to that war-torn nation.

"We are not optimistic about the prospects for those compromises," the Levin and Warner said in their joint statement.

Levin in a teleconference with reporters went a step further, suggesting the Iraqi parliament have a vote of no confidence and replace the Maliki government, which he said is built too much upon sectarian allegiances and connections.

We have heard American congressmen express a desire for Fidel Castro's demise. We heard congressmen and presidents declare their hopes for the downfall of oppressive communist governments in the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. Yet we cannot recall having heard a member of congress actively promoting a hope that an allied government, democratically elected, would be voted out with no consideration given to the repercussions of such statements. That Senator Warner, who traveled to Iraq with Levin, did not immediately disavow Levin's meddling in Iraqi electoral politics makes him perhaps equally responsible for whatever may eventually result if al-Maliki's government is crippled by a no-confidence vote.

In his quest to diminish the upcoming surge progress report in September, Levin appears not to care what havoc his misinformation campaign may wreak. Note that Levin and Warner on one hand praise the surge strategy for increasing public safety in Iraq and turning Sunni tribes against al Qaeda, but on the other hand they minimize the overall importance of the surge by dismissing it as merely giving al-Maliki's government "breathing room." We are quite certain that our troops in Iraq and their commanders are not risking their lives daily merely to give, as Levin called it, a "non-functional" Iraqi government a bit of breathing room. Levin may be the most adept senator in the current Democratic Party stable at forecasting storms of doom from the clouds attached to every silver lining reported from Iraq.

Looking down his nose over studious-looking spectacles at squirming victims dragged in front of his Armed Services Committee hearings is Levin's forte. He waxes professorial as he lectures four-star generals on how they should be conducting wars, and one can easily conjure up such mental images when reading Levin's further report of his meetings with Iraqi government officials:

In many meetings with Iraqi political leaders, of all different backgrounds, we told them of the deep impatience of the American people and the Congress with the lack of political progress, impressed upon them that time has run out in that regard, and told them of the urgent need to make the essential compromises.

Somehow we doubt that Iraqis, who have survived bombings of parliament and daily face potential assassination, were overly intimidated by Levin's impatience and impertinence.

Absent in these encounters were rebuttals and chastisements from the State Department for Levin's intrusion into diplomatic issues constitutionally assigned to the executive branch. Ordinarily State objects rather publicly when congressmen journey into realms of statecraft and issues of consequence such as ousting elected governments. Nancy Pelosi's 2007 Syrian Odyssey was loudly condemned by Secretary of State Rice for protocol reasons, but more substantively because of its potential for disrupting Middle Eastern relations. It is baffling that despite the fact that Levin and Warner were entitled to such brief fact-finding trips to Iraq, Levin's proclaimed hope for the removal of the sitting Iraqi Prime Minister during an ongoing war were not decried by State aggressively and decisively.

The fact that this appeared to be a bi-partisan (thanks to Warner's presence) knife in al-Maliki's back surely will not lessen the pain of the wound. Levin and Warner clearly had come to their conclusions about the al-Maliki government prior to their two-day visit to Iraq, raising the question of why they made the trip in the first place. What information did the pair obtain by meeting with and talking down to Iraqis that they did not already possess through military and intelligence reports? A two-day stay is hardly enough for anyone to become an expert on complex issues like nation-building or the consequences of no-confidence votes, unless perhaps Levin and Warner stayed in a Holiday Inn Express. Levin's verbal attack on al-Maliki was merely the opening salvo of an expected full-scale bombardment that will intensify as the surge progress report date nears.

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Carl Levin, John Warner, Armed Services Committee, Iraq, Al-Maliki, No-Confidence Vote, Ugly American, Surge Strategy, Surge Report, General Petraeus, Iraqi Government

Levin is Surge Report Misinformation Minister

When war news is good, it stands to reason that the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee should be pleased. After all, there should be no question that a senator holding such an important and influential position would want America’s military to win any war it enters. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), who currently chairs the Armed Services Committee is embarking on another “fact finding” trip to Iraq, but he is not going there to be supportive of the troops or to witness firsthand the widely-reported successes of the surge strategy led by General David Petraeus. On the contrary, Levin’s latest trip to Iraq serves, as explained in his own words, only one purpose:

I'm going to try to see if we can't shift the attention of the American people from the report on the military situation to a report on the political situation since everybody acknowledges that it's the failure of the political arena and the political areas that are the cause of the ongoing violence in Iraq.

That was a revealing and disturbing statement. Rarely does a politician so bluntly state that he is engaging in an intentional misinformation campaign designed to “shift the attention of the American people” away from a detailed military report that proves we are making significant progress and can win a war we committed troops to fight. Clearly senior Democrats do not want Americans to read the Petraeus report due in September, and Americans should pause for a moment to ponder the motive behind Levin’s Iraq trip as Minister of Misinformation.

Congressional Democrats are in an unenviable political position: having voted almost unanimously to send troops into Iraq; shifting to a virulent anti-war position; demanding a timetable for troop withdrawals; opposing the surge strategy; and now facing the release of a positive analysis of the surge’s effectiveness and optimism for eventual troop withdrawals under more favorable security and political conditions in Iraq.

During his presidency, media figures and congressional Democrats have insulted President Bush with labels such as “inept,” “incompetent,” “mentally unstable,” and of course “stupid.” Yet no such labels are applied by the media to the Democratic Party as a whole for its remarkable blunder of putting itself in position to profit politically only from military failure. Our troops lose, Democrats win. In that respect at least, the grim and incessant media comparisons between the Vietnam and Iraq wars are appropriate. There is an Iraq quagmire. Democrats stepped in it by investing their political futures in defeat in Iraq, but now they cannot seem to scrape the pesky quagmire ooze from their patent-leather shoes.

It is no wonder that on July 30th House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) stated that such a report from the military would be “a real big problem for us.” In other words, good news from the front lines in Iraq would be harmful to the Democrats’ political ambitions. To prevent such a “disaster” from occurring, Minister of Misinformation Levin will be working overtime shifting attention away from Petraeus’ report, which is already being dismissed in the media as merely an instrument for communicating what the Bush administration wants. Liberal bloggers have already attacked the report, which none of them have seen even a portion of, as a “fantasy evaluation” and just another Bush “sandbagging” of the American people.

Considering the recent foreign policy and military counterterrorism strategy gaffes by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, it appeared that no Democratic senator could be equally as naïve as Obama on those issues. Yet Levin’s explanation of why American’s should pay no attention to the upcoming Iraq progress report by General Petraeus demonstrated a fundamental ignorance or intentional obfuscation of what is causing the current level of violence in Iraq. Is there internal strife within the Iraqi Parliament? Of course there is strife there, just as there is bitter partisan strife within our own Congress. In Iraq, Sunni legislative blocs occasionally withdraw from the government in anger over real or perceived slights and injustices. In our Congress there are filibusters, blocked votes on judicial confirmations or cabinet appointments, and leaks of classified information to embarrass or destroy political rivals. In many respects, our Congress is more dysfunctional than the Iraqi parliament, yet our nation is not awash in suicide bombings, IEDs, and foreign-inspired terrorist groups infesting entire cities, which are all too common in Iraq.

As Iraqi parliamentarians are not detonating themselves in protest or killing each other over political disputes, the explanation for the violence in Iraq must go beyond mere politics. Failure by the Iraqi government to achieve rapid political unity and success, as Levin and his colleagues demand, may cause political discord, but to assert that the war in Iraq centers on political issues is far too simplistic. Religious disputes, more than politics, fan the flames of disunity, but without the violent interference of terrorists pouring in from neighboring nations, Iraqis would be in a much better position to engage in political discourse. That is what we are trying to achieve in Iraq: Remove foreign influences and provide sufficient security and public safety to allow Iraqis to resolve their differences and govern themselves unhindered by neighboring nations.

The Iraqi people have already achieved something Americans have not yet accomplished. Iraqis have united in recognizing that their enemy is al Qaeda rather than each other. Sunni and Shiite Iraqis have joined together in driving al Qaeda out of entire provinces. In contrast, nearly thirty percent of Americans believe that the Bush administration rather than al Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center towers with pre-placed demolition charges. If recognizing who our real enemies are is a sign of national survival instinct, America is woefully lacking, while Iraqis appear capable of uniting when self-preservation is at stake.

Leave it to a career politician like Levin to overestimate politics as the solution to all of Iraq’s current ills while ignoring the critical need for public safety and security in what clearly is a military confrontation with terrorist groups funded, trained, and equipped outside of Iraq and inserted into that nation as a destabilizing influence. The Iraqi government will never succeed in its political duties or live up to Levin’s benchmarks for success until al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist insurgents are decisively defeated, disbanded, and their demise displayed to the world as a deterrent from further foreign treachery in Iraq.

That will only happen through victory by our troops there and continued strengthening of the Iraqi military. General Petraeus’s September report will demonstrate that the surge strategy is working, which should be received as welcome news by all Americans. All Americans that is, except for those who, like Harry Reid and his fellow party leaders, have already declared the surge a failure and the war lost. In Reid’s case, he has already determined that he will not believe anything Petraeus reports if it includes good news about the surge . There is an ironic oxymoron in the nation’s highest ranking liberal being so decidedly close-minded. Democratic abandonment of Petraeus and the surge was an abrupt and hypocritical change in Democratic “support” for both considering the fact that earlier this year the senate voted 81-0 to confirm him as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq knowing precisely what his intended plan of action would be.

Over the next several weeks while congress enjoys its summer recess away from Washington, Americans will be bombarded by media reports of Levin’s “findings” from his current trip to Iraq. We will witness a carefully calculated misinformation campaign that Levin himself admits is meant to distract people from the substance of General Petraeus’ pending war report. When politicians work so hard to discredit a military report or minimize the attention given to it, it should peak our interest in what is reported and why one party’s anti-war base considers it “a big problem.”

Americans should respond by rejecting the misinformation ploys and reading every word of the report, making their own decisions as to its veracity and impact on public support for the war effort.

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General Petraeus, Carl Levin, James Clyburn, Surge Strategy, Iraq War, Misinformation, Surge Progress Report, Iraqi Government, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Anti-War Democrats

Times Surge of Truth Refreshing

Stop the presses! The New York Times, far and away the most virulent anti-Bush, anti-war news organization in America, today published an Op/Ed piece that actually debunked that paper’s own daily headlines of doom and gloom news from Iraq.

In a contribution co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, Brookings Institution fellows and no fans of the Bush administration, the pair presented a region by region analysis of the results so far of General Petraeus’ surge strategy, which finally reached full operational strength in June. Congressional Democrats and defecting (perhaps defective?) Republicans call for troop withdrawals and insist that defeat is inevitable, but O’Hanlon and Pollack, who spent eight days meeting with troops, military leaders, and Iraqi leaders, came to a far different conclusion about progress in Iraq than Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and presidential candidate Barack Obama.

I recommend reading the Op/Ed piece in its entirety, as it contains descriptions of progress that never garner any attention from major media outlets bent on reporting only suicide bombings or IED incidents that add to the death toll. The cynical nature of Iraq War news reporting offered by the traditional networks belies the truth of what is actually occurring in Iraq’s cities and villages: The country is becoming more secure, and the U.S. military has been infused with high morale. The following analysis of conditions in Iraq will surprise the “impeach Bush” crowd, much as it did the authors themselves:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul…. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside.

The authors rightfully conclude from their observations in Iraq that while Iraq’s government must achieve solidarity and work with more urgency for its own survival, the undeniable fact is that General Petraeus’ surge strategy is working, and working impressively. They further credit Petraeus for ending the “whack-a-mole” security situation in many parts of Iraq that existed previously. The “Whack-a-mole” issue has been a complaint of U.S. soldiers through much of the war, because regions were formerly only temporarily secured by minimum force levels, and once American troops moved on to other more intense fighting, insurgents and al-Qaeda recruits would pop up again in the previously secure areas. This usually meant that our troops would be forced to return and re-secure those areas. Under Petraeus’ leadership, regions are held until they are actually secure before troops move on to clear other regions of insurgents and terrorists.

Bush administration critics should consider that the results observed by these two Brookings fellows have occurred in a relatively short period, and are increasing in momentum now that the surge force has reached full staffing levels. War opponents were looking with eager anticipation for Petraeus’ surge report due in September. They were certain there would be ample evidence in the report to justify their advocacy of troop withdrawals by April 2008, however this early report of surge success, coming as it did from two consistent critics of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, should throw some much needed water on the “impeach Bush” bonfire.

The Times deserves praise for providing its readers with O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s Op/Ed report of the successes of the surge thus far. Although the pair included a mild disclaimer that “victory” may not be possible, they clearly saw potential for a “sustainable stability.” Such an achievement of stability would indeed constitute victory, as stability would permit the Iraqis to solidify their democratically elected government and develop the resources needed to defend themselves from foreign influences with ulterior motives for Iraq’s future. A “sustained stability” would further alleviate the need for full U.S. troop deployment in Iraq, as our soldiers could eventually assume an advisory/training role rather than performing actual regional security sweeps.

Surge critics will find it increasingly difficult to justify their opposition to Petraeus and the Bush administration when similar reports of success become available in the media. Americans are confident of our armed forces and know that good news is always just around the corner when our soldiers are committed to action. The surge strategy appears to have helped the Iraqis turn some important corners, and they are now more actively engaged in their own security and counterterrorism operations than ever before. That is good news for America, Iraq, and the free world. Hopefully the Times will continue to search for and publish the successes of the surge strategy with fervor equal to its reports of perceived Bush administration failures.

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David Petraeus, Surge Strategy, Iraq War, Brookings Institution, Anbar Province, Surge Progress