AMERICAN FUTURE

It’s hard to tell from this editorial:

All of the Republicans want to continue President Bush’s disaster of a war in Iraq, including Mr. McCain.

[ . . . ]

The Democrats are united in their opposition to the war, but none have spelled out a persuasive plan for getting American troops home without setting off a wider conflagration.

What course would the NYT follow? The editorial doesn’t say.

Investors—especially bond investors—don’t like uncertainty. When the perceived level of risk increases, bond prices drop to compensate for the greater chance that the issuer won’t be around to repay the principal when the bonds mature.

It works in the other direction, too. If confidence in the entity that issued the bonds—be it a company or a country— increases, the prices of its bonds will rise.

As Bloomberg recently noted, Iraqi bonds have been doing very well:

Holders of Iraqi bonds are giving President George W. Bush a vote of confidence. The country’s $2.7 billion of 5.8 percent bonds due in 2028 returned 15.2 percent since July, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. index data. Only Ecuador’s debt gained more, rising 18 percent . . . “We’ve had a shift in sentiment,’’ said Gorky Urquieta, who oversees $14 billion of emerging-market debt at ING Investment Management in The Hague. ING started buying the securities last month, and is now among the biggest holders along with San Mateo, California-based Franklin Templeton Investments and Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group Inc., data compiled by Bloomberg show. “There’s optimism the surge is starting to pay off,’’ he said.

Some Americans—Republicans and, even more so, Independents—have become more optimistic in the past month. But not Democrats.

Democratic bloggers like to refer to themselves as the “reality-based” community. A better moniker for a community whose perceptions are so deeply entrenched that they can’t be altered by changing facts is “reality-denial.”

The complete Gallup report is here.

Increasingly, it looks like the Democrats will be better off echoing Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan instead of focusing on Iraq.

From The Politico:

Congressional Democrats are reporting a striking change in districts across the country: Voters are shifting their attention away from the Iraq war.

Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat from Tennessee, said not a single constituent has asked about the war during his nearly two-week long Thanksgiving recess. Rep. Michael Capuano, an anti-war Democrat from Massachusetts, said only three of 64 callers on a town hall teleconference asked about Iraq, a reflection that the war may be losing power as a hot-button issue in his strongly Democratic district.

First-term Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.) – echoing a view shared by many of her colleagues – said illegal immigration and economic unease have trumped the Iraq war as the top-ranking concerns of her constituents.

In an interview with Politico, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) attributed the change to a recent reduction of violence and media coverage of the conflict, saying there is scant evidence that more fundamental problems with the Bush administration’s policy are improving. Even so, he agreed voters are certainly talking less about the war. “People are not as engaged daily with the reality of Iraq,” Hoyer said.

The change in mood perceived by Democratic lawmakers comes as one of Congress’ most vocal war critics, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), returned from a trip to Iraq and told reporters Thursday that “the surge is working” to improve security, even though the central government in Baghdad remains “dysfunctional.”

As the facts on the ground in Iraq change, the words of MSM’s pundits follow suit:

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman

For more on what’s happening on the ground, see this article in The Times of London.

As the situation in Iraq gets better, media coverage gets worse. Says the Pew Research Center:

News coverage of Iraq, like public interest in the situation there, is now significantly less than it was at the start of the year. In January, roughly a quarter of the overall newshole (26%) in newspapers, TV newscasts, websites and radio was devoted to news about Iraq. In October, the war received only half as much coverage on average (13%), according to data compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index.

Good news, of course, is less interesting. The cynics among us might also claim that the drop-off represents the media’s attempt to avoid eating humble pie.

Of the decline in public interest, Pew says this:

. . . public interest in news about the situation in Iraq is now less than it was earlier this year or in 2006. Since June, about 30% of the public, on average, said they have followed news about the situation in Iraq very closely. In 2006 and the first two months of this year, about 40% on average paid very close attention to Iraq news.

Democrats beware.

New York Times editorial, November 17:

It has been two long months since Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, cowed Congressional Democrats into silence, championing President Bush’s misguided course on the war.

New York Times article, November 20:

The security improvements in most neighborhoods [in Baghdad] are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

By the Times’ logic, “President Bush’s misguided course on the war” has produced real “security improvements in most neighborhoods.”

The following makes me wonder whether some kind of quid pro quo has been reached between the U.S. and Iran. If so, is it in any way related to the U.S. position on the Iranian nuclear program and is it a signal that Washington and Tehran may soon be (or already are) negotiating?

From the New York Times:

The Iraqi government on Saturday credited Iran with helping to rein in Shiite militias and stemming the flow of weapons into Iraq, helping to improve the security situation noticeably.

The Iraqi government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, speaking at a lunch for reporters, also said that the Shiite-dominated government was making renewed efforts to bring back Sunni Arab ministers who have been boycotting the government for more than four months.

Speaking about Iran, he said that that government had helped to persuade the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to ask his Mahdi militia to halt attacks. Mr. Sadr ordered his militia to stop using weapons in early September, and officials say that the militia’s relative restraint has helped improve stability. They say it also seems to have helped decrease the frequency of attacks with explosively formed penetrators, a powerful type of bomb that can pierce heavy armor.

Mr. Dabbagh’s comments echoed those of the American military here, who in recent days have gone out of their way to publicly acknowledge Iran’s role in helping to slow the flow of weapons into the country. [My emphasis]

In today’s Washington Post, John Podesta, Lawrence J. Korb and Brian Katulis make this claim:

Rather than push for a realistic end to U.S. engagement, the Bush administration claims doomsday scenarios would become reality if a phased U.S. withdrawal began. Iraq, it says, would become a terrorist sanctuary, incite regional war or be the scene of sectarian genocide. These arguments are as faulty as those that led us into Iraq, and progressive leaders must push back.

Do the authors present a counter-argument to the Bush Administration’s “faulty” arguments? No. Not a word. For them, it is self-evidently true that Iraq would not become a terrorist sanctuary, would not incite regional war, and would not be the scene of sectarian genocide. Unlike Podesta, Korb, and Katulis, I lay no claim to perfect foresight. The only thing I do know is that these events are possibilities. To rule them out is demagoguery.

I first used “turn of the tide” in a post dated October 12. Joe Klein of TIME seems to agree:

The reduction of violence is real. The defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq—sneezed at by some antiwar commentators—is nothing to sneeze at. The bottom-up efforts to reconcile Sunnis and Shi’ites across the scarred Anbar/Karbala provincial border, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, quite possibly reflect an Iraqi exhaustion with violence that has to be taken seriously as well. There is no question that the performance of the US military has improved markedly under the smarter, more flexible and creative leadership provided this year by General Petraeus. And the withdrawal of U.S. troops is beginning.

These developments, says Klein, are undermining the antiwar movement: “The refusal of the antiwar movement—or some sections of it—to recognize these developments isn’t helping its credibility.”

Klein proffers these words of caution for the Democrats:

There are fewer votes now in Congress—and less cause—to cut off funding for the war than there were last Spring. A renewed campaign on the part of the hapless Democratic leadership to cut off the supplemental funds will only increase the public sense of Democratic futility. It will also play into the very real, and growing, public perception that Democrats are too busy wasting time on symbolic measures (like trying to cut off funds for the war) and shoveling pork (the water projects bill) to pass anything substantive for the public good. Too much time, and political capital, has been wasted fighting Bush legislatively on the war. I’m sure the President and the Republican Party are salivating over the prospect that Democrats will waste more time and capital over it this month…especially at a moment, however fleeting, when the situation on the ground seems to have improved in Iraq. Democrats need to think this over very, very carefully before they proceed.

Is it my imagination, or have the Democratic presidential candidates and congressional leaders stopped saying that the surge is a failure and that the war is lost?

Related posts:

“Turn of the Tide in Iraq”
“Declining Casualties in Iraq”
“Turn of the Tide in Iraq”
“Hope”

Many of you have probably already seen this, but it’s worth posting anyway:

The photograph accompanied the following email that Michael Yon sent to Instapundit:

I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome. A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from ‘Chosen’ Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope. The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the people were saying. One man said, ‘Thank you for peace.’ Another man, a Muslim, said ‘All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.’ The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

Thanks to reader Karen for alerting me to this.

From the Associated Press:

In a dramatic turnaround, more than 3,000 Iraqi families driven out of their Baghdad neighborhoods have returned to their homes in the past three months as sectarian violence has dropped, the government said Saturday.

Mahmoud al-Zubaidi, who runs the Iraqi Airways office in Damascus, says the flow of Iraqis has almost reversed:

What were once full flights arriving from Baghdad now touch down virtually empty, he told Al-Sabah, the government funded Iraqi daily newspaper. Now the flights are leaving Damascus with more passengers but the volume of travel is off considerably.

From Harris Interactive:

Whether because of the news from Iraq, or the messages from the White House, Americans are less pessimistic than they were about the future prospects in Iraq. The percentage of those who believe that things are getting better for U.S. troops has increased from 13 percent in March and 20 percent in August to 25 percent now. Those who believe things are getting worse have fallen from 55 percent in January and 51 percent in March to only 32 percent in this new Harris Poll.

In May, only nine percent believed the surge of new troops was working; that has now almost doubled to a (still very modest) 17 percent. However, several other key indicators have not changed significantly. Two in five still believe that the surge is not working – 38 percent in May and 40 percent now.

DO YOU THINK THAT THE SITUATION FOR U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ IS . . . ?

I’ve lost track of the number of times the Democrats have criticized Bush—rightly so in many cases—for being stubborn, ignoring the facts, denying reality, and so forth. Pelosi seems determined to show that these descriptions are as apt for her—and those she speaks for—as they are for the President.

From the New York Times:

On the ABC News program “This Week,” Ms. Pelosi was asked the tough question at the core of the debate over the Armenian Genocide Act: What if forcing a vote on the resolution were to endanger the security of American troops in Iraq?

“Some of the things that are harmful to our troops relate to values — Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, torture,” said Ms. Pelosi, whose San Francisco district includes thousands of Armenian-Americans. “Our troops are well-served when we declare who we are as a country and increase the respect people have for us as a nation.”

Is this what Pelosi and some other Democrats mean when they say they support our troops? Do they believe that our soldiers and marines are better served by declaring “who we are as a country” and “increasing the respect people have for us as a nation” than by not creating needless potential obstacles to the withdrawal they so strongly wish for?

I am thoroughly, absolutely disgusted.

More evidence of a turning of the tide, from an editorial in the Washington Post:

A congressional study and several news stories in September questioned reports by the U.S. military that casualties were down. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), challenging the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, asserted that “civilian deaths have risen” during this year’s surge of American forces.

A month later, there isn’t much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43—down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004. [My emphasis]

During the first 12 days of October the death rates of Iraqis and Americans fell still further. So far during the Muslim month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 13 and ends this weekend, 36 U.S. soldiers have been reported as killed in hostile actions. That is remarkable given that the surge has deployed more American troops in more dangerous places and that in the past al-Qaeda has staged major offensives during Ramadan. [My emphasis] Last year, at least 97 American troops died in combat during Ramadan. Al-Qaeda tried to step up attacks this year, U.S. commanders say—so far, with stunningly little success.

The trend could change quickly and tragically, of course. Casualties have dropped in the past for a few weeks only to spike again. There are, however, plausible reasons for a decrease in violence. Sunni tribes in Anbar province that once fueled the insurgency have switched sides and declared war on al-Qaeda. The radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a cease-fire last month by his Mahdi Army. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top day-to-day commander in Iraq, says al-Qaeda’s sanctuaries have been reduced 60 to 70 percent by the surge.

Obviously, I don’t expect Hillary—or any other Democrat (except Lieberman, of course)—to take note of these positive developments. In the words of Bush Senior, “couldn’t do that, wouldn’t be right good politics.”

Thankfully, at least two Democrats aren’t stupid.

Representative Jane Harmon, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

As one whose own family was decimated by the Holocaust, I respond very personally to charges that I would deny the existence of savage acts of inhumanity against a group of people because of ethnic, religious or racial differences—be they Jews, Darfurians, Rwandans or Armenians.

Yet that’s exactly what I was accused of last week after I sent a letter to Rep. Tom Lantos, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urging him to withdraw HR 106, which I had co-sponsored earlier in the year. Some Armenian Americans, whose passion I appreciate, have misinterpreted my determination that the time is not right to vote on such a resolution as “denial” of the Armenian genocide. Nothing could be further from the truth.

No question: The debate raging in Washington over the Armenian genocide resolution is personal. Similar resolutions have passed the House twice—in 1975 and 1984—and we are poised to pass another before Thanksgiving. Whether it will be brought to a vote in the Senate remains unclear.

I originally co-sponsored the resolution because I was convinced that the terrible crime against the Armenian people should be recognized and condemned. But after a visit in February to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Armenian Orthodox patriarch and colleagues of murdered Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I became convinced that passing this resolution again at this time would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world. [My emphasis]

So I agree with eight former secretaries of State—including Los Angeles’ own Warren Christopher—who said that passing the resolution “could endanger our national security interests in the region, including our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and damage efforts to promote reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.” [My emphasis]

CNN reports that Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton has sent a letter to Pelosi on Thursday opposing the resolution, saying the resulting backlash threatened by Turkey could disrupt “America’s ability to redeploy U.S. military forces from Iraq,” a top Democratic priority. [My emphasis]

Why have the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal still not published an editorial or an op-ed on this fiasco?

For some time and from many sources, we’ve been hearing about the turn of the tide in Anbar province, where Sunnis have decided that al Qaeda in Iraq is their enemy and are cooperating with American forces. Now, the New York Times (of all places) reports that Baghdad’s Shiites are becoming “disillusioned” with the Mahdi Army:

In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

According to the Times, the sectarian landscape has changed, “with Sunni extremists largely defeated in many Shiite neighborhoods, and the war in those places has sunk into a criminality that is often blind to sect.”

One of the Shiites interviewed by the Times put it this way: “We thought they were soldiers defending the Shiites . . . But now we see they are youngster-killers, no more than that. People want to get rid of them.”

The Baghdad Shiites, like the Anbar Sunnis, are increasingly cooperative:

While the Mahdi militia still controls most Shiite neighborhoods, early evidence that Shiites are starting to oppose some parts of the militia is surfacing on American bases. Shiite sheiks, the militia’s traditional base, are beginning to contact Americans, much as Sunni tribes reached out early this year, refocusing one entire front of the war, officials said, and the number of accurate tips flowing into American bases has soared.

Lt. Col. David Oclander says that, in the past month and a half, Shiite leaders have begun to make contact with American forces. Oclander’s brigade is now working with 25 sheiks in the Shiite neighborhoods of Shaab and Ur and is interviewing up to 1,200 candidates for semiofficial neighborhood guard positions.

That this shift in the allegiance of Shiites has been reported in the Times (as opposed to The Weekly Standard, for instance) is especially significant. The newspaper’s frequent and strongly stated opposition to the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war heightens the credibility of this report.

While I’m well aware that, in the past, the situation in Iraq has improved only to deteriorate, I’m willing to take the risk of stating that the tide has been turned in Iraq. Both al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army have overplayed their hands. I’ll let historians decide whether this has been a more or less significant factor than the surge. Either way and for whatever reasons, a growing number of Iraqis on both sides of the sectarian divide are growing sick of violence.

The turning of the tide has obvious domestic implications. As time passes, the Democrats will find it increasingly hard to maintain that Iraq is a lost cause, and it will become ever more difficult for them to advocate an early and quick withdrawal. Their presidential candidates have backed themselves into a corner; they will have to eat their words.

Yes and no, according to Joshua Muravchik, writing in the October issue of Commentary.

My thanks to blogfriend Georg Wolf—whose Atlantic Review blog I read regularly, and who is now working for The Atlantic Community think tank in Germany—for pointing me to a noteworthy post.

Here’s an excerpt:

While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and redeployment, there is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. In contrast to both European media opinion and the prevailing views of American liberals, our respondents supported sustained troop levels. Many consider the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal to be counter-productive and even outright dangerous, saying that lack of American involvement would drive Iraq into further chaos.

Many of those interviewed focused on military strategy as a means to political reconstruction in Iraq, rather than an end in itself. Winning and losing the war, a theme in the American discourse, was not discussed. The US focus on military progress was, in fact, largely viewed as damaging to priorities in rebuilding the country. Dr. Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who also runs the Iraq website Historiae, observed that the main problem [with the current strategy] is the heavy emphasis on security instead of creative political initiatives to encourage national reconciliation. And Dr. Jean Y. Haine of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute warned that the tendency for the Pentagon to control civilian aspects of reconstruction is not a recipe for success.force protection will remain the highest priority. In other words, the game is tipped in favor of the spoilers.

However, the reigning sentiment was for continued military involvement to secure a still tenuous security situation, and against any rushed exit from Iraq for the sake of short-term political goals. For instance, Mark Burgess, Director of the World Security Institute (WSI) in Brussels, argued that the refusal to provide a timetable for withdrawal without fulfillment of specific political achievements “is necessarily flexible and realistic about what is achievable. In the words of Jan Techau, of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), œwithdrawal should be the last resort if the current improvements turn out to be short-lived. Yet most of the analysts we asked did not expect the US to stick around for too long: Etienne de Durand of the Institute Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI) said that while the Bush administration will want to avoid the appearance of, and the blame for, defeat by almost any means.[b]eginning in 2009, I expect what you call Edward’s plan (fast withdrawal) to take place in one way or another, except that it’ll take more than 12 months.

In his email to me, Joerg said this: “In the past, most Europeans have strongly criticized the US policy in Iraq, but now we don’t want you to pull out. Of course, it’s pure self-interest. I find it newsworthy, however, because it indicates that Europeans still believe that the US is able to stabilize Iraq, while more and more Americans doubt whether the US can end the civil war and the insurgency.”

Andrew Kohut, President of the Pew Research Center, was interviewed on last night’s PBS NewsHour. He recounted the results of an opinion poll taken after General Petraeus’ and Ambassador Crocker’s appearances on Capitol Hill. That poll showed that 54 percent of Americans want our troops to leave Iraq as soon as possible, while 39 percent want to “stay the course.”

The exact wording of the question that elicited this response is as follows:

“Do you think the U.S. should keep military troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized, or do you think the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible?”

The wording of this question implicitly assumes that the situation in Iraq has not yet been “stabilized.” According to the General’s and the Ambassador’s testimonies, however, the situation has been stabilized, as the military and political situations are no longer deteriorating. How, then, could a respondent who gives credence to their testimonies answer this question?

Another problem with the question is the phrase “as soon as possible.” Everyone should favor bringing the troops home as soon as possible; the disagreement is over the criteria that need to be met for the possibility to become reality.

The next question in the survey adds to the ambiguity:

“Do you think the U.S. should or should not set a timetable for when troops will be withdrawn from Iraq.”

Only 13 percent of the respondents are in favor of a timetable. This is far smaller than the 39 percent who want our troops to stay in Iraq until stabilization, and far smaller than the 54 percent who prefer a soon-as-possible withdrawal. It means that only a minority of both groups advocate a timetable. Even if all 13 percent fall into the second group, it means that more than three-quarters of those who want a soon-as-possible withdrawal don’t want a timetable.

If this isn’t confusing enough, respondents who want our troops brought home as soon as possible were asked this question:

“Should the U.S. remove all troops from Iraq immediately, or should the withdrawal of troops be gradual over the next year or two?”

Only 18 percent want our troops to be removed immediately. So, for the overwhelming majority, “as soon as possible” doesn’t mean “immediately.” And, as already noted, they also don’t want a timetable. What do they want?