The American people want to be strictly finished with this affair, now!

[Bravo Zulu]

Progress in Iraq: As usual, there is more to it than meets the eye
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At the beginning of the week the American authorities in Iraq announced that the United States was handing over control of Iraq's Anbar province to the occupation government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki.

Apparently timed to coincide with the opening of the Republican Party convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the event was significant in the flow of the Iraq war because Anbar has been during the war at times a scene of ferocious fighting and killing between U.S. forces and Iraqi insurgents. Its capital, Ramadi, is almost synonymous with violence. It is estimated that a quarter of the more than 4,100 U.S. deaths that have occurred in Iraq took place in Anbar.

Anbar is Iraq's largest province and home to many of the country's Sunnis. For the time being the Sunnis are cooperating with U.S. occupation forces to some degree, first, because the Americans pay them to, and, second, because they are looking for help to arm and organize themselves for the time when U.S. forces will eventually be gone and they will be left to defend themselves against the predominantly Shiite central government of Iraq, led by Mr. Maliki, and the security forces under its command.

Anbar is considered to be the most anti-foreign of the Iraqi provinces. Perhaps to their credit, its people don't like foreign al-Qaida fighters much. Nor do they like Americans.

The theoretical handover of difficult Anbar should be seen as a generally positive development, the moral equivalent of one's ex-spouse remarrying. On the other hand, as usual, there is more to it than meets the eye. Anbar is the eleventh of the 18 Iraqi provinces to be handed over to the Maliki government. It could equally well be noted that after more than five years of U.S. occupation only 11 of the 18 provinces are quiet enough to hand over.

First of all, it isn't done. Those who have come home have presumably done so at the end of the "surge," the earlier increase of some 30,000 in the U.S. troop level in Iraq. The withdrawal of the 140,000 remaining there is dependent on many factors, including which candidate wins on Nov. 4. To date the war has cost America thousands dead and an estimated $550 billion so far in money that could have been not borrowed or used otherwise at home.

Sort of handing over Anbar and tentative agreement with the Iraqi occupation government on a withdrawal timetable by 2011 do not constitute victory, nor is it the rational, stated decision required at this point that we have done as much in Iraq as we are going to do and are now leaving.

What exactly the Obama campaign wordsmiths mean by their new "responsible" withdrawal from Iraq would also benefit from sharp examination and interrogation. The American people want to be strictly finished with this affair, now.


http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08248/909228-192.stm