The editors of the New York Times claim that the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” is “almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything’s going just fine.”
That’s not the picture painted by John Burns (the chief of the Times’ Baghdad bureau and, in my view, the best reporter there is) and Dexter Filkins in “For Once, President and His Generals See the Same War.”
For anyone who has spent time in the field with American officers here, President Bush’s speech on Wednesday was a watershed: for the first time in the two years since the conflict here turned brutal, the war Mr. Bush described sounded much like the one his generals grapple with every day.
The president acknowledged problems that have hobbled the American enterprise since the 2003 invasion: An American effort to build up Iraqi forces that went through a top-to-bottom makeover after early deployments of Iraqi troops saw them “running from the fight.” Iraqi units that are “still uneven,” despite the new American effort to train and equip them that has cost more than $10 billion. A Sunni Arab community that remains largely unyielding, despite months of efforts by Americans seeking to draw them back into the corridors of power.
[ . . . ] Mr. Bush, in some passages of his speech, came much closer than he has before to matching the hard-nosed assessments of the war that have long been made by American commanders here . . . The war strategy that Mr. Bush outlined is one that the current group of top generals here developed in the wake of crisis in the spring of 2004.
Enter General Casey:
Shortly after formal Iraqi sovereignty was restored in June last year, a new American commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., joined with a new American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, to order a complete review of the way the Iraq war was being fought. At that point, officers involved in the review have acknowledged, the war on the ground, with insurgents running rampant in Falluja and elsewhere, bore little relationship to what one senior commander called the “illusionist” version put out by the American occupation authority, or by Mr. Bush and other top officials in Washington.
The revised strategy:
[American commanders] have concentrated American forces for a series of offensives aimed at regaining control of strategic cities like Falluja . . . and denying insurgent infiltrators safe havens in towns along the Syrian border. In Baghdad and other major cities, they have mounted a relentless campaign to track down, kill and capture Islamic militants whose bombing campaigns were killing as many as 600 Iraqis a month – and making headlines in the United States that eroded public support for the war.
Most important, the American commanders have poured resources into building up the Iraqi forces, with results Mr. Bush laid out Wednesday. [emphasis added] From the single Iraqi battalion trained in the summer of 2004, there are nearly 120 army and police combat battalions deployed now. All major American-led offensives involve Iraqi troops, and more than 20 American bases, including Saddam Hussein’s 1,000-acre palace complex in Tikrit, have been handed back to the Iraqis. The process of withdrawing American troops from the cities to more remote bases where they are less visible to Iraqis, but still available for rapid deployment when needed, has begun.
American generals have been telling field commanders to hasten the process of transferring the main burden of the war to Iraqi troops by withholding American firepower, forcing Iraqi commanders to get accustomed to the idea that they will ultimately have to win the war. [emphasis added]
In another article, Elisabeth Bumiller also contradicts the assertions of the editors:
Between the lines, the document offers an unusually candid assessment of what the administration still faces in Iraq. For example, it says that “it is not realistic to expect a fully functioning democracy, able to defeat its enemies and peacefully reconcile generational grievances, to be in place less than three years after Saddam was finally removed from power.” The words stand in dramatic contrast to what the administration was saying less than three years ago.
It would be nice to think that the editors will pay attention to what their reporters have to say. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
