War Isn't Over, Even If You Want It

Sorry for that riff on an old John Lennon song, but it's July 4th and a good day to catch up on my Iraq war reading. May I recommend this essay in the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing, who recently returned from Iraq after "embedding" with U.S. troops on patrol in several neighborhoods in Baghdad.

He did a masterful job of narrating how his U.S. military minders attempted to stage manage his tour -- a fact of life for any foreign correspondent made exponentially more perverse when traveling through a war zone. But he deftly got his soldier-minders to open up, and his reporting reveals some startling truths about what is going on, especially among the middle-ranked officers:

As I'd expected, my embed had provided little opportunity to hear the Iraqi point of view. Rather, it offered a look at the war through the eyes of the US military, and in that respect it had been very revealing. On the one hand, it had left me with little doubt about the very real gains the surge had brought about, and about the effectiveness of the Petraeus-led counterinsurgency strategy. The situation in Dora had obviously improved, and the combination of aggressive raids, large-scale detentions, and mixing with the community (together with the Sunni Awakening) had had a big hand in achieving that.

At the same time, I'd gotten a look at the crushing effect the war is having on the troops. The breakdown in the Army has advanced so far that in a mere thirteen hours, I could see the rising dissatisfaction, anger, and rebellion within it. The message from the soldiers themselves was that keeping so large a force in the field over the long term seemed unsustainable.

That fact, more than the situation on the ground, will dictate the next president's options in Iraq.

There's also some juicy tidbits about Iran's growing influence in Iraq, the corruption of U.S. private contractors, the squandering and plundering of Iraq's oil wealth, and, unbelievably, the ongoing incompetence and lack of coordination among U.S government agencies trying to sort out the mess.

If you are turned off thinking and reading about the war, as I am on most days, Massing's essay is definitely worth fifteen minutes of your time. It is bracing to be reminded of the magnitude of the disaster that President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers will bequeath to his successor, whomever that will be.