While the President and the First Lady cheerfully presided over the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) cheerfully celebrated the alleged success of the “surge,” and one of its co-authors, Fred Kagan, announced: “The civil war is over.”
Just at that time, however, in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, heavy fighting was breaking out between Shi’ite militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi government troops ordered into the fray by Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The ferocity of the militia attacks soon necessitated U.S. ground and air support.
In Baghdad, two American officials and two Iraqi guards of Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi died when the “highly fortified Green Zone” was attacked by insurgents’ mortar and rocket attacks. The four square mile compound which houses the Iraqi government and the US embassy, is surrounded by high concrete blast walls, T-walls, and barbed wire. Nevertheless, in April 2007, a bomb went off in the parliament’s cafeteria, killing a member of the Sunni National Dialogue Front and injuring 22 including one of the vice presidents. Most recently the Green Zone was shelled daily for the 10 days following Easter. On April 6, 2008, 3 US soldiers were killed and 17 more wounded when a rocket or mortar attack struck inside the Green Zone..
In the meantime, the White House spin machine and presidential candidate McCain are continuing to speak of the surge as a great success. One has to wonder if Condi Rice has been giving the President realistic briefings about the daily ongoing struggle against the hidden resistance to the foreign occupation. When inquisitive reporters point to the unwelcome facts, the defenders of the surge are quick to blame “Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets,” even if they have little hard proof.
In December 2006, Kagan authored the AEI’s "real Iraq Study Group" report in opposition to the original Iraqi Study Group’s report chaired by Republican James Baker III and Democrat Lee Hamilton. In January, the AEI issued another report in defense of the surge, entitled “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” Regrettably, the AEI and the White House continue to ignore or downplay the troublesome facts and make up their own reality. Vice President Dick Cheney even went so far as to interpret increased insurgents’ attacks as signs that the enemy is in its “last throes.”
Already in June 2005, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska told U.S. News & World Report: “The White House is completely disconnected from reality…it’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.” No lesser man than the late William F. Buckley, Jr., eminent conservative and libertarian author, wrote about the Iraq war in the National Review on Feb. 24, 2006: “Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.”
I would not go so far because neither the U.S. nor the insurgents have lost or won. In a war against underground resistance or terrorists, it is impossible to pronounce victory with certainty because being out of sight the insurgents may strike again any time any place, unless they openly agree to an enforceable and verifiable peace.
If the President, the Vice President, Senator McCain, and their supporters would stop staying in denial, they would greatly gain in the respect in which many Americans would like to hold them. Maybe that is asking too much of persons so convinced of their own competence.