Bill Roggio has a good post over on The Fourth Rail that I wanted to comment on at slightly greater length than I like to in my (nearly) daily “Catching My Eye” feature. Bill isn’t happy with the mass media coverage of the war in Iraq:
“The media’s portrayal of Iraq as a miserable failure proceeds apace.”
He continues with a litany of recent articles from major media outlets: the insurgency is strenghthening, the strength of the insurgency is such that the conflict is overflowing into Europe, it’s a civil war, Fallujah is becoming a terrorist haven again.
“The common thread among these articles is the ‘militants’ of al Qaeda and the insurgency have grown in strength while the Coalition is unable to stop their rise in power. But the facts do not support these assertions.”
Much of the rest of the post is a strong analysis of Coalition activities concentrating on activities in Anbar province.
It appears to me that Bill and the Press that he’s criticizing are talking at
cross-purposes. They have different objectives and different metrics for success. As Bill points out the favored metric in the press is the number of casualties among ordinary Iraqis (particularly in Baghdad) due to terrorist attack while Bill’s metric for success is effective resistance to Coalition movement in Anbar province:
“If the claims the insurgency is growing in strength [ed. are true], then why are Coalition forces moving deeper into Anbar, with what in military terms are essentially little resistance? If what the Sunday Herald claims is true, why would Zarqawi redeploy his foot soldiers when his rear area is in danger of slipping from his grasp? The advance of US forces in Western Anbar would only provide Zarqawi with a target rich environment – more US infidel solders to kill and a greater opportunity to humiliate the Great Satan. Like much of the media’s flawed analysis of the situation in Iraq, the reasons to believe Zarqawi is shifting forces from Iraq as his area of operations decrease and his targets of opportunity increase are bourn out of a failure in logic, the need to proclaim failure, or both.”
I think it’s quite possible for both Bill and the Press he’s criticizing to be right i.e. effective resistance in Anbar province is crumbling and the civilian casualty count in Baghdad is rising and may continue to rise.
For the purposes of this discussion I’d like to suggest a somewhat different definition of victory: we’ve been victorious when we’ve eliminated whatever opposition there is in Iraq which by the utilization of force threatens the nascent Iraqi government (this would not be my definition of overall victory in Iraq, just a definition I’m suggesting for the purposes of this post). This definition would include resistance by Al-Qaeda or Ba’athist remnants in Anbar province, actions by genuine insurgents, terrorist cells in Mosul, Baghdad, or elsewhere that are carrying off the mass casualty terrorist attacks that we’re reading so much about, and other groups not often mentioned but potentially threatening to maintaining the Iraqi government e.g. local sheikhs re-asserting power and state-level or regional groups doing the same. I doubt that there’s any central command structure for these different groups but that doesn’t make them any the less troublesome. I think that another group that’s causing quite a bit of the misery in Baghdad are just plain street criminals but I don’t think they’re a threat to the existence of the Iraqi government.
When we use this definition I think it’s pretty clear that we’re making progress in pacifying Anbar province but there’s still a lot to do. Are we winning or losing? I think it’s still too early to tell.
Hi Dave,
Sorry the trackback isn’t going through…
Only a minor clarification: I agree 100% the civilain casualties are increasing (I am not one to argue with facts), but I don’t view this a measure of success for the insurgency. It’s an act of desperation that alienates the Iraqi public.
Bill, I hope I didn’t convey the impression that I thought you didn’t believe that civilian casualties were rising. I certainly didn’t mean that. What I meant was that I gathered that you didn’t consider that fact a significant metric for success or failure there (which you appear to have verified in your comment).
I think that the level of security that the Iraqi people feel is a significant metric for success or failure (although not the only metric) and that the number of civilian casualties are an adequate proxy for measuring that level of security. If the Iraqi people feel insecure enough, I suspect that they’ll turn against the government and then the best we’ll be able to settle for will be “Saddam-Lite”.
Fair enough, Dave, and no apologies needed. My complain is the focusing on the casualties exclusively, not that they are mentioned.
As an aside, the Iraqi government still has a wide range of options before going to the Saddam Lite model: stricter laws, less restrictions of police/military actions, curfews, martial law, etc. before they opt for a dictator.
The resistance gets beaten wherever the US concentrates its forces. However, the US clearly does not have enough forces to concentrate them everywhere at once. So the resistance sees US forces concentrating in one place and lots of them leave and go wherever the US isn’t.
This pattern has repeated itself with Fallujah and Ramadi. Insurgents have shifted into Baghdad.
I’ve lost track of how many times US forces have taken Tal Afar and left and the insurgents came back and took control again. What, are we supposed to believe that this is the time that we will take Tal Afar for good and keep it? The last time we took it we were supposed to leave behind Iraqi military forces that would keep it in friendly hands. But, hey, people are fleeing Tal Afar to escape the fighting there. So the Iraqi military didn’t manage to keep it. But oh next time we capture it the Iraqi military will keep control of it. Oh yes, just one more time.
Hope springs eternal. Every time I read someone saying the US military is kicking ass in Fallujah or Tal Afar I wish they’d take off their rose-colored glasses.