Blame creep: Finally, we can already see the first little surge of blame creep out of Baghdad. Petraeus, not even a month in the Iraqi capital, has evidently taken a good hard look around and found things not exactly to his liking. He's just held his first news conference and offered his mantra for saving the capital (or at least his own rep): "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency of Iraq... Military action is necessary to help improve security... but it is not sufficient." Such comments are already getting him headlines like: "U.S. commander says no military solution in Iraq." Think of the general as carefully beginning to signal his future explanation for the failure of the surge plan. (Those dopes in Washington couldn't handle the politics of the situation.) Remember: If you're going to blame someone convincingly, you have to plant your story early. |
There are a number of questionable assumptions in that short paragraph.
(1) Is their Surge of '07 in fact going to "fail"? Come Thanksgiving or Christmas, isn't it likely enough that Dr. Gen. Petræus will really have New Baghdad under his thumb, though perhaps not al-Anbár as well? Shall we then speak harshly of failure, simply because if the thumb goes away, so does the GOP's success, not to mention the physical safety of many of their neo-Iraqi subjects?
(2) Isn't that ambiguous situation especially likely to arise in the absence of a ding-dong confrontation with somebody or another, if not with the Jaysh al-Mahdí (as the Green Zone Officers Club seemed to have in mind before the Dr. Gen. showed up), then at least with "Al-Qá‘ida" (as Crawford tends to call the non-Twelver sort of resistance)? The black hats will still be in existence, lurking around out beyond the Petræan perimeter somewhere, and everybody will be well aware of that fact.
The Surge of '07 will in that case not have gone down to failure, or upwards to some definitive Success and Victory for their Party, but have wriggled off to one side, as it were, leaving Dr. Gen. P. as in effect marshal of Tigris River City or commissioner of the New Baghdad Police Department. In addition to being neither "success" nor "failure," this outcome would be neither political or military, strictly speaking, but rather a matter of administration and law enforcement.
To save appearances, Party apologists might speak of "martial law enforcement," perhaps. It would be a notable propaganda defeat for the militant Republicans if they had to admit that their "global war on terror" had dwindled down to wimpy police action. On the other hand, if they wish to remain in their conquered provinces forever, as I strongly suspect that they do, they might be well advised to swallow their self-esteem a little and accept the modification, and then try to market the notion of Dr. Gen. Petræus continuing to run the NBPD indefinitely, lest anarcholibertarianism or Muqtadá or even the Qommies prevail instead.
(3) I'm not sure exactly what the Dr. Gen. is insinuating when he repeats the tired commonplace about "no military solution," but there is no reason to like Mr. Engelhardt's guess better than others. In fact, that particular guess seems positively unlikely, considering that the Dr. Gen. has specialized in the theology of counterinsurgency, which scarcely permits drawing firm lines between the violence profession and the political profession. Perhaps he really does think of the Party chickenhawks as "those dopes," as certainly anybody with even half a Ph.D. might well do, but in that case I'd expect him to think up some non-dopey political solution of his own and recommend it to his betters' attention, rather than take for granted that the latter are going to lose their neo-Iraq anyway and immediately commence CYA maneuvers for himself and his profession. Doctrine aside, it would not have been honourable of any West Pointer, by my lights, to take the job (and the penultimate star) from the hands of the dope-in-chief with thoughts like those running through his head.
At the same time, imagine what use Napoléon Bonaparte or Douglas MacArthur might, rather dishonourably, have made of Dr. Gen. P.'s opportunities! Mr. Engelhardt takes civilian control of the military for granted, and I'm 90% confident that he is right, but the other ten percent is interesting to reflect upon. For that matter, to bail out a directory of Party dopes and save their faces short term but make it clear that the cleverness is all one's own, not theirs, and then cash in on it politically shortly afterwards need not even violate the letter of civilian control. It is a very high risk strategy, to be sure, and in the present case a high genius strategy as well, for who can guess how Dr. Gen. Petræus of Princeton would pull such a coup off? Still, if he did!
This flashy scenario is not at all likely, of course, but since it is also not absolutely impossible, one may legitimately deploy it against Mr. Engelhardt when he assumes that his own guesswork is the only product available.
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