Events in Iraq vs. Back Home 

Events in Iraq vs. Back Home

Josh Marshall links to an interesting piece by Jim Hoagland, usually a defender of the Bush administration.

Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is clearly working hard to reassure the American public that things are going well in Iraq--whether this is true or not.

"Allawi -- and therefore Bush -- also benefits from the honeymoon effect granted to a new Baghdad administration, and from the genuine confusion over who is actually running what is partly sovereign Iraq. The visible failures of the occupation led by Paul Bremer now take place behind a more nebulous smoke screen."

All of this seems to be working. U.S. voters seem to think the "transfer of sovereignty"--or whatever took place--has been a success. It is time once again to praise the Bushies--if only as a political operation. If the original goal of the invasion was to build a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq--regardless of whether this is desired by a lot of Iraqis (although of course continued instability will make some people grateful for the presence of U.S. troops) and regardless of whether things in general are better than they were under Saddam--then this has been altogether a success.

Why is Hoagland worried? Things might not, er, actually be going that well in Iraq. Even then, it may be not so much the Iraqis he worries about....

"Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.

"Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.

"The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies."