Never mind that increased combat is the natural result of the surge. That's the whole point of surging. Of course attacks on our troops will increase. We have more and we are using them more aggressively. Yet casualties are the entire metric for judging the mission.
We are winning this war. But violence is a metric of war intensity and not war direction. Sadly, we run the risk that the surge will exhaust our willingness to fight.
They've already decided the war is lost and will pick the metric that lets them justify running from enemies we are actually defeating.
From the beginning, I've been worried that the level of violence would be the metric to judge the surge:
Are we really saying that we will define whether our surge is successful based on the number of attacks over the next six months?
This is what I'm worrying about. Certainly, victory in the end will be signalled by the great reduction of enemy violence. Eventually. But in the near term, this is problematic. An enemy determined to fight can pull off spectacular kills even with our troops all over the place. Terrorists need only the will to kill and nearby civilians grouped together.
And if there is little violence, it could mean the enemy is waiting until we leave as much as it means we have won. This metric of levels of violence assumes near-term success can be achieved when a counter-insurgency against a well-financed and fanatical enemy could go on a decade more.
I would rather have a metric of success that judges whether we have prepared Iraqis to fight this decade-long fight. If we have done that, even if the violence in Baghdad is roughly the same, we can call it a victory. But if we truly are judging the surge based on ending violence, unless the enemy suddenly breaks, I fear we are setting ourselves up for a paper defeat. Which in our political environment will quickly be translated into actual defeat.
And General Pace was asked about this metric:
General Pace, last week you said that violence was not the right metric to chase to measure success or failure, that it was the attitude of the Iraqi people, whether they believe in their country, believe in their future. But why isn't violence what determines the attitude of the Iraqi people? You can't be very positive about the future if you get blown up when you go outside your house.
Replied Pace:
Yeah, fair question. And I've said it more than -- last week, I've said it in my congressional testimony: It is certainly a measure. But if you tell the enemy that what's important to you is the number of bombs that go off, guess what the enemy's going to go do? He's going to set off more bombs. So it's a self- defeating approach to tracking results of what you're doing.
What the -- and I'll say it again, what I said last week -- what's most important is, do the Iraqi people feel better about today than they did about yesterday? And do they think tomorrow's going to better than today? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then we're on the right path. If the answer to those two questions is no, then we're not doing it right, and we need to adjust our processes.
There are many, many metrics out there. We submit a 90-page report to the Congress every 90 days. So there's plenty of metrics out there. I was just trying to make it very specific with regard to if you could only pick one, then I would pick the one that talks about how the Iraqi people believe they are today and how they believe they're going to be tomorrow.
The Iraqis have to win this fight in the end. Our job is to help the Iraqis face the Iranian-, Syrian-, and al Qaeda-supported killers who have turned Iraq into their battlefield. General Pace speaks of wanting to measure Iraqi determination to win. I'd narrow it a bit more and focus on whether the Sunni Arabs are ready to finally get with the program and build a new Iraq:
If the movement of Sunni Arabs away from terrorism and toward the government can be sustained, our surge will be a success.
We are winning this war. But the metric that predicts this victory and demonstrates how the Sunni Arabs drifted from hostility to the government to support for the government or neutrality will probably only be obvious to historians years from now.
So the September reports won't settle anything. Each side will pick the metrics that support their view.
Which I guess makes me happy that there will be many reports. As long as the president can justify his choice to persist, he can fight this war to the end of his term even though troop levels will drop by at least 5-6 brigades starting in 2008, and buy the Iraqis time to get good enough to defeat the terrorists and insurgents while also building a democratic government.
To Hell with Republican focus on regaining control of the Congress or retaining the White House. Just because the Democrats have shamefully defined the objective of this war as controlling our government is no reason for Republicans to go along with that game.
This war is more important than either party and we must win it above all other considerations. I pray our president will focus on victory. And funny enough, victory will take care of the political considerations of the Republicans, though increasing numbers of Republicans in Congress seem ignorant of this basic fact.
Victory people. When we declare war, I kind of assume that this implies we fight for victory.
