A few items
THE BAGHDAD SECURITY PLAN
No one quizzed Petreaus on the Battle-of-Baghdad. It would have been easy to do:
"General, the military purpose of the surge was to add enough troops to add "hold" to clear-hold-build and also to try a new set of tactics. Can you go through each of the Baghdad neighborhoods for us and tell us what percentage is "clear", in your rough estimate, which are being held and by whom (either all Iraqi or by some mix), and which are being "built" and how. Thank you."
ABOUT ALL OUR YESTERDAYS ...
Amd. Crocker didn't fare well with the question about how to facilitate national reconciliation. In doing so, he lent too much credence to Senator Clinton's assertion that what is in evidence is anecdotal.
The "outreach effort", by which the central government figures work with Provincial leaders, makes it look like the exigencies of "reconciliation" are being pressed under the banner of "good governance". That probably can only go so far, right?
What doesn't emerge for the "reconciliation" effort is a more thorough going approach, even if insisting on one seems a little ahead of yourself, while what "government" there is still struggles to deliver even basic services. Among the elements that suggest themselves:
- -A list of who the key players are that will "reconcile" and how the public at large will participate in such efforts
- -A list of trust-building exercises
- -A sense for trust-failing remedies or stabilizers (guarantees, stop-and-reset actions by third-parties, etc.)
- -A well thought-out series of incentives and penalties
- -Ways to share credit and blame, without dipping into the "revolutionary bin" (as Arafat did so often) while still respecting the ballot box
- -A sense for what neighboring actions were a drag and which were grease on reconciliation
One positive tidbit to emerge from yesterday's talky-talk is that the five main groups seem to have accepted a strategic partnership, that will include US military, as part of a longer-term vision.
One way to read the tea-leaves on this is a way for each group to purchase a 'minority guarantee' against the others trying to dominate it by force and, if one really stretches, as a guarantee of the ballot box.
Update: General Jones has noted that his report has some detail on this topic.
BUILDING THE ARMY IS A BIG, REALLY BIG TASK
Petraeus showed that he can kinda do apologetics to defend his own turf, too, in relation to his involvement in building a new Iraqi Army (IA).
The observation that the IA isn't larger or at fuller readiness because the task is really, really big is just a belly laugh.
It was Rumsfeld's war-plan that left the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to go up in smoke. It's our own doing that there was "scratch" to start with.
And the fault goes up to the CIC, whose latest comments, that he didn't know exactly how the plan to keep the army intact got scuttled, show how much he outsourced the war, while protesting that his government could handle two major fronts in his self-styled "GWOT" and a full domestic agenda at the same time. Humm... the seeds - and cost in lives - of overreach laid bare, eh?
What's more, it's not credible that General Eaton, who is just as much a thinking-man's soldier as is Petraeus, was blinded to the realities and required tasks of building from scratch.
The truth is, that, if there aren't parts lists, and computer systems, and a strategic plan for logistics and lists of who was in the army that could be tapped and what their proverbial phone number is, then it's our own fault. All of these things could have been estimated in the fall of '03 and most of the major steps taken to address them in '04. That we're talking about it still, as a problem in '07, is a joke bordering on national disgrace.
