Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (March 2008)

Over the last two years, I’ve followed a Department of Defense report made regularly to Congress known as “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq”. The most recent version is March 2008 and the report amounts to the Pentagon’s attempt to put the best objective face it can on the war to justify continued funding. In the meantime, it often appears that no one in Congress or the administration actually reads these reports all that carefully. While the administration has made much of the alleged progress of the “surge” citing “dramatic” percentage improvements in the reduction in violence, these can often be a bit misleading when taken out of context. For one thing, if you look carefully at the many graphs in the report all of this alleged improvement in the “security” sector has brought things back to where they were in January of 2006.

Think of it as one of those diet reality shows. Sometimes the competitors are about two hundred and fifty pounds overweight. They go on the show and after drastic and expensive lifestyle changes, the person is now only a hundred and fifty pounds overweight. That’s certainly progress, but the individual still isn’t healthy and he/she is still pretty far from being sleek looking.

Imagine also if no one mentions anymore that the same person started on the show at a hundred and fifty pounds back in 2003. Has it been worth it? Would you advise another ninety thousand dollars in diet interventions when five years later your hundred and fifty pound five foot three inch woman is now 250 pounds?

Okay, maybe the show shouldn’t have put her on that Mallomar diet in the summer of 2006? Also telling her to throw away all the exercise equipment that hadn’t worked in the past wasn’t such a good idea. You can maybe blame it on that horrible neighbor who keeps sabotaging her by slipping into her kitchen with gallons of ice cream. In the meantime, you made her get rid of that mean old husband who used to beat her. That was certainly a good thing.

So what if you told everyone that she was going to be cover model for the next Sports Illustrated swimwear edition? Two hundred and fifty is certainly a lot better than 450 isn’t it? If we kick her off the show now, who knows what’ll happen. She might wind up being 500 pounds in a year and pretty soon all the women in her neighborhood will be 500 pounds. You can’t abandon her now. For the last five years, you’ve been such a big help. There is that minor habit that she consumes an entire chocolate cake every night which has never changed in five years on the show (In Iraq, it’s called the hydrocarbon agreement as in how to share the oil revenues among the different groups that make up Iraq. The report tells us that there’s been no progress). Other than that though, there’s been all this great progress at least since compared to when she got to 450 pounds on the show.

Here are some real measures. Seven months after the surge, Iraqi oil production has flatlined. No section of the country outside the Green Zone has electricity twenty four hours a day. In fact, the average in Baghdad is still nine. Fresh water supplies are more or less the same as they were seven months ago. The official unemployment rate is still eighteen percent and in many areas of the country it’s still fifty percent. The Iraqi government is bizarrely enough still only capable of spending less than fifty percent of the money it allocates for various projects across the country (the report says it’s a problem with corruption). In the meantime, Iraq, the second biggest oil reserve in the world, is importing diesel fuel from Kuwait to get it’s power lines and oil pipelines operational.

Here’s the good news though. In the last six months the average Iraqi’s perception that the country is getting safer has improved by two hundred and fifty percent. Sounds pretty spectacular doesn’t it? In the summer of 2007, eight percent of Iraqis said that the country was “calm”. Today that figure is all the way up to twenty six percent. Even more impressive, nationwide polls indicated that seventy four percent of Iraqis have at least some confidence in the Iraqi army. Imagine that, just one out of four Iraqis has no confidence whatsoever in the supposedly improving Iraqi army. Should I mention that after that poll, the Iraqi army fired 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight against the Mahdi army last month?
In the meantime, the report and General Petraeus have been very big on the 92,000 strong sons of Iraq, former Sunni insurgents in many cases who've decided to help with the security situation. The report doesn't mention that there remain real concerns about which side these guys will be on in six months.

You want something even weirder, Iraqi confidence in the ability of multi-national forces (as in us) to protect them has decreased by 18% in the last six months (page 36). Somehow, the media and our politicians haven’t mentioned that one. The report’s been public for more than a month btw.

One of the measures that I’ve followed for two years is the number of provinces in which the Government of Iraq has taken the “lead” for security. It’s better. Of the eighteen provinces, it’s up to nine. I just need to make a small point. Eighty six percent of the violence has always been in four provinces. None of the four have transitioned. The bulk of the surge effort was dedicated to Baghdad where the idea was to take pressure off the Iraqi parliament. Dark green is good on the DOD’s chart on page 29. Baghdad and the three other provinces remain bright yellow. In the same section, the DOD discusses the progress made by Iraqi forces in Basrah. Guess where they fired the bulk of those 1,300 Iraqi security forces who refused to follow orders? Not too surprising, one of the major factors in the reduction in violence cited in the report was a truce with Al Sadr. Doesn’t it make you wonder how some of these charts are going to look 2 months from now? The US military just had more deaths in Iraq than any week in 2008.

How is the Iraqi army doing? The good news is that we’ve now trained 425,000 Iraqis to serve in their security forces. Measuring Stability likes this number, it’s sort of their version of the sign they used to have outside McDonald’s. Interestingly, two years later there’s still not talk of how that translates into any kind of US troop withdrawal. No one has dared to say that the Iraqi army is ready to stand on its own in any parts of the country where the violence has been extreme. Here’s one measure. The Iraqi military will get its first helicopters in 2009. Mmmm….who mans and supplies the helicopters used over there in the meantime? Back to our Diet Show competitor. She’s done a lot of stuff in the last couple years, but honestly can anyone project how she’ll do once she’s off the show and doesn’t have the network’s resources to help her in her quest? The Pentagon is pointedly refusing to answer that question. The simple answer is that Iraqi forces do not have the lead in any of the four provinces where most of the violence has been nor is there any indication that they will have the lead any time in the near future. In fact, the surge was necessary to make it possible for the 130,000 US forces who were already there to get things back to the way they were in 2006. Let me put this as plainly as I can, the war wasn’t going all that well in January of 2006. No one then was talking about letting the Iraqis take over again or that we’d be able to get out with all our goals accomplished.

Let’s be real for a bit here. The Department of Defense itself, the same people General Petraeus works for, isn’t saying that the surge has gotten us any closer to America’s original objective in Iraq. For the cynical among us gas was a dollar sixty a gallon back then. Iran and Syria seem even more dangerous. Saudi Arabia doesn’t appear any less likely to be overwhelmed by Wahabi influences already in the country. Iraq is nominally now a democracy, but it’s not even remotely stable. The people insisting that the surge has helped to reduce the violence are comparing the figures to the summer of 2007 when our diet show contestant ballooned to 450 pounds after starting the show at 150. Where we once worried about her tyrant of a husband, Al Qaeda of Iraq has moved in with her instead. We’re now afraid that she’ll be seven hundred pounds in a month and that shes’s going to marry this Al Qaeda guy and sign her house and all her oil stocks over to him.

Let’s keep her on tv for another ten years and spend another million dollars or so on diet solutions for her. Look how successful we were in getting her back to two hundred and fifty pounds. Who cares that we put her on the show to be a runway model? Who even remembers that. Now we’re just trying to save the woman’s life. Did I mention that the woman spent so much time on the show that she lost her job and the bank foreclosed on her house in the meantime? Oh year, she lost her health insurance too.

It all makes perfect sense to me. Don’t you see how great these diet shows are for average Americans?



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