The Measure of Progress

In another war, all this progress would be cause for bipartisan rejoicing.

Friday, September 7, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Progress toward a more secure Iraq has now reached a point where the President of the United States and his Secretaries of State and Defense can make a visit to Anbar province and meet with Sunni tribal chieftains once allied with al Qaeda. So what better time to trot out a Congressional report that suggests, in effect, that no progress is being made at all?

We'll get to that report in a moment. What's more important is to note the changes that have taken place in Iraq, all of which indicate that the "surge" is working and that we are at last on our way toward a positive military outcome. As General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker prepare their testimony to Congress later this month, it's worth pointing to a few indicators:

• There were 30 "multiple fatality" (usually suicide) bombings in August 2007. In August 2006 there were 52.

• There were 120 daily attacks by insurgents and militias last month, down from 160 in August 2006.

• 60,000 prisoners were being held by the U.S. and Iraq as of last month, up from 27,000 a year earlier.

• Iraqi security forces currently number 360,000, up from 298,000 a year ago.

Lest one suspect the figures cited above are Bush Administration propaganda, we hasten to add they were assembled by Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the liberal-oriented Brookings Institution and published Tuesday on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Nor are these the only positive indicators. According to General Petraeus, the number of weapons caches seized by coalition forces rose to 4,141 in August from 1,977 in January. At the same time, he says, the incidence of sectarian violence is down by 75%.

In Anbar province--which last year the U.S. military judged "lost" to the insurgents--tens of thousands of Sunni men are joining local, U.S.-allied security forces as well as the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Security Forces. It turns out al Qaeda overstayed its welcome. The ring of cities and towns around Baghdad, which for years had provided sanctuary for the insurgents, are being cleared out by U.S. and Iraqi military forces. Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has unilaterally called a halt to attacks by his militia on coalition and Iraqi forces. Sadr is reportedly hiding out in Iran.


None of this is to say that we are out of the woods in Iraq, nor that there aren't risks associated with the alliances the U.S. military is now forming with Sunni sheiks who were previously allied with the insurgents. But neither would the gains that have plainly been made been possible without a new commander, a new strategy, a heightened tempo of operations and the military resources needed to sustain them.

In some other war, under some other Administration, all this would be cause for bipartisan rejoicing. So leave it to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to pounce on the Congressional report, written by the Government Accountability Office, to salvage the bad news from the good. "We can't continue to sacrifice American lives, deplete our treasure and weaken our national security in pursuit of a goal that the Iraqi people themselves show no interest in achieving," said the Nevada Democrat on Tuesday.

The GAO "report"--which boils down to a one-page checklist--scores the Iraqi government for meeting (or partially meeting) only seven of 18 predetermined benchmarks, most of them legislative. These range from "ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected" (a goal that was met), to "enacting and implementing legislation on de-Ba'athification" (unmet).

Leave to one side that the novice Iraqi parliamentarians are dealing with fundamental questions of state that Americans last reckoned with when Daniel Webster was in the Senate. Leave to one side, too, that some of the conclusions of the GAO assessment--particularly the suggestion that there has been no measurable decrease in sectarian violence--fly in the face of both U.S. military assessments and independent media reportage.

The important question is the extent to which these benchmarks (some of them set earlier this year by the Bush Administration, others by the Iraqi government) are really decisive, at least in the short term, for a good outcome in Iraq. We hear a lot about the need for "reconciliation" between Shiites and Sunnis, but that never was going to happen at a political level while the Sunnis thought they had a fighting chance of dominating the country as they had under Saddam. Through a combination of U.S. military pressure, al Qaeda's excesses and the realization by Sunni tribal leaders that Shiite governance was going to be a fact of life, the Sunnis may at last be prepared to make realistic accommodations to their new status.

By the same token, reconciliation also depends on the kinds of leaders Shiites choose for themselves. We have no particular brief for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (about whom there is now so much bellyaching), having argued last year against the Administration's decision to force out former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in favor of Mr. Maliki. But whatever his flaws, Mr. Maliki--along with figures like politician Ahmed Chalabi and the Ayatollah Sistani--is at least a moderate figure who wants Iraq to retain its sovereignty rather than become an extension of Iran. That's more than can be said for Sadr and his ilk, and the Administration would do Iraq no favors by pushing for the fifth Iraqi government in as many years.


The larger danger lies in focusing too much on the lack of political progress or allowing it to become an alibi for withdrawal. The Iraqi leaders whom Mr. Reid so cheaply denigrates in his speeches have all risked their lives for the sake of a free country. The U.S. can help them best by providing a more secure environment in which tough political decisions can be made.

That's why Mr. Bush was right when he said he would only begin to withdraw troops "from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure." Nobody wants U.S. troops to remain in Iraq forever, but neither is it in anyone's interests to see another humiliating American withdrawal. Given the evidence of the last six months, that need not happen, and Washington's wavering politicians have no higher responsibility than to ensure it does not.