Changed Debate

Charles Krauthammer devotes his column this week to the sudden change in the tone about Iraq coming out of Washington. He calls it the beginning of a rational debate on the war. (I don't know if I would personally go that far just yet.) He notes the sudden veering of many war critics away from the precipice the leftward marching Congressional Democratic leadership has been marching toward.

WASHINGTON — After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.

In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.

The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong Iraq War critic. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird, D-Wash.: Al-Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.

The song from the Washington politicians has changed. Now there appears to be a growing choir singing the praises of American troops making real progress while simultaneously damning the Maliki government for "doing nothing". (I point out, yet again, that I think that is a really foolish tack for the Congress – either party – to take given their bleak track record of accomplishments.) That appears to be the "rational discourse" that has been settled on. Taking that as a starting point, various people are flogging that in various directions. I suppose it is at least a start. But Krauthammer also points out one undeniable fact:

Serious people like Levin argue that with a nonfunctional and sectarian Baghdad government, we can never achieve national reconciliation. Thus the current military successes will prove ephemeral.

The problem with this argument is that it confuses long term and short term. In the longer run, there must be a national unity government. But in the shorter term, our assumption that a national unity government is required to pacify the Sunni insurgency turned out to be false. The Sunnis have turned against al-Qaeda and are gradually switching sides in the absence of any oil, federalism or de-Baathification deal coming out of Baghdad.

In the interim, the surge is advancing our two immediate objectives in Iraq: (a) to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq and prevent the emergence of an al-Qaeda mini-state, and (b) to pacify the Sunni insurgency, which began the post-liberation downward spiral of sectarian bloodshed, economic stagnation and aborted reconstruction.

The surge is working despite the lack of progress on the political side. That's an important point to remember when you hear all the pontificating and spin from the politicians. There will be a lot of very serious pronouncements and firm positions taken, but that fact really matters.