Dirge for the Surge

The numbers belie the administration's lies.

by David Faris

With Philadelphia's eyes riveted on Michael Nutter's primary victory, you might have missed the latest attempt to rebrand the Iraq war as an ongoing success. What war supporters don't realize is that labeling up as down is, like, so 2004. The truth of the matter is that the vaunted "surge" has done very little except provide talking points for conservatives who seem to enjoy the feel of sand around their ears. According to things like statistics � which matter very little to the neoconservatives � April was the worst month for coalition troops since November 2004. One hundred seventeen were killed, and May has barely been better. To make matters worse for the optimists, incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has promised to pull his country's troops out of Iraq within two years.

And yet the Right keeps trotting out the few people still committed to this increasingly doomed project. Neocon stalwart Fouad Ajami's recent and widely circulated Wall Street Journal article, "Iraq in the Balance," is a case in point. In it, he argues that the insurgency has lost (the metric he uses to come to this conclusion is never revealed) and that in his very scientific sample of his own bodyguards, Iraqi hangers-on and terrified members of the elite, no one wants the Americans to leave.

Ajami also clings to the idea that a democratic Iraq can be the engine for political change in the Middle East, arguing that it "can go a long way toward changing the region's terrible habits and expectations of authority and command." It seems doubtful that the Syrians, for instance, would want to trade in their "terrible habit" of not being embroiled in a ruinous civil war or that the Saudis wish to exchange their easy prosperity for an experiment in violent, Iraq-style democracy. The reality is that Iraq has given even committed advocates of democratization pause, because no one wants to see such a hellish cataclysm inflicted on any of the other fragile multiethnic societies of the region.

Poor Ajami and his fellow travelers don't realize that even the Dear Leader has turned against this vision, fearing that democratic states might bring to power people who are unfriendly to U.S. interests. Hence the administration's volte face in democratization promotion in the region. Whereas three years ago elites in Cairo, Amman and Riyadh had good reason to be nervous that the U.S. might press for further reforms, the specter of Iraq-style violence or Hamas-style Islamist ascension has quieted the demand for democracy.

But Ajami, who should at least be commended for being one of the few Loveseat Warriors to actually go to Iraq, sees what he wants to see. There is a subset of American elites who want and need Iraq to be a success so that they can avoid moral culpability for the fiendish terror that their support for the war helped unleash in Iraq.

The best you can say about such people is that they are well-intentioned and still believe in happy endings. The worst could probably be detailed by prosecutors during closing arguments at The Hague.

Not long ago, the vice president was trotting (or more accurately, ponderously lumbering) around Iraq trying to distract people from the very real evidence that Iraq remains as broken as ever. Ironically, as Dr. Evil was blabbing about "fairly dramatic" reductions in sectarian violence, mortars were landing in the Green Zone and bombs continued their detonations all over the country.

Meanwhile, the tragic misallocation of military and financial resources has come back to bite us in our collective rear ends once again, as Kansas learned the hard way when it got slammed by tornadoes and flooding earlier this month and realized in horror that 15 of its 19 National Guard helicopters were over in Iraq avoiding the insurgents. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius had asked the administration on at least five prior occasions for more equipment for the National Guard.

I'm sure the good citizens of the Midwest will understand that their needs will always come second to the blind face-saving of the Bush administration and the endless needs of Operation Enduring Calamity.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.