A War We Might Just Win?

This op/ed's been making the rounds, and our added question mark to the title is intentional. We've been a fan of O'Hanlon's ideas for soft partition in the face of events already taking place, but the vibe around town lately definitely has not been that we are winning in Iraq. The standard rebuttal to reports that Iraqis are uniting to fight al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (a group that gained noteriety only after the US invasion in 2003, we underscore, lest statements about "fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq" be misconstrued as having to do with fighting the group that carried out the attacks on Sept. 11) is that once the Qaeda enemy in Anbar province is defeated, might we not expect the Iraqis to resume attacks against coalition troops in the classic enemy-of-my-enemy formation?

According to Matt Ygelsias

Submitted by on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 7:16pm.

According to Matt Ygelsias O'Hanlon completely backed off his op-ed at a congressional hearing today.

Totally backed down. Said the progress has only been against aqi, that sectarian violence and the civil war is as bad as ever, and that the current strategy will probably fail. He thinks we should partition the country. Why the turnabout from the optimistic op-ed? He didn't say.

Odd...

One noteworthy oddity about

Submitted by on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 3:52pm.

One noteworthy oddity about the O'Hanlon piece is that it seems to contradict the assessment by the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index which O'Hanlon oversees.

Greg Sargent noticed this and quotes from the July 24th report:

From a security standpoint, having the full allotment of surge troops in theater has allowed for intensified coalition operations in and around Baghdad aimed at rooting out militants from their sanctuaries. Initial reports indicate that these have led to a decrease in the levels of violence in these areas. However, violence nationwide has failed to improve measurably over the past 2-plus months, with a resilient enemy increasingly turning its focus to softer targets outside the scope of the surge. And while the number of internally displaced persons has declined, it has done so not as a result of security improvements but because there are fewer places for Iraqis to run with a number of provinces unable to accept any more refugees. In assessing the overall sentiment of the Iraqi people recently, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker summed it up in one word: fear.

I went to check the document myself, and it appears there's been another update.

After a trip of 8 days one of us (O'Hanlon) took to Iraq this July, revisions are needed in some key numbers in the Iraq Index. This is in part because fresh data have recently become available, and in part because the U.S. military and Bush administration have not done a sufficient job getting data into the American public debate. It required a trip to Iraq to get access to some information that really should be widely available on this side of the Atlantic.

A more thorough accounting will follow in the coming days, but in short, civilian fatality levels in Iraq now seem to have declined substantially more than previous Pentagon reports or data had indicated. In particular, the monthly civilian fatality rate from sectarian violence appears about one-third lower than in the pre-surge months. That is still far too high, and remains comparable to violence levels of the 2004-2005 period, but it nonetheless reflects progress.

The follow up should be interesting. I'm rather curious why the administration would be suppressing such a large decline in the civilian death toll.

Via Via Andrew Sullivan