One of the stupidest things you'll read about Iraq this week

Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress has a post up at the WonkRoom blog about how the Iraq drawdown actually validates CAP's 2005 proposals for a rapid and agressive end to American involvement in that war. No, seriously. The post is actually entitled "Obama Implemented CAP's Progressive Plan For Ending Iraq War -- Chaos Didn't Ensue." What incredible balls, right?

So let's talk about why this is so dumb. First, the most glaring reason: CAP's 2005 report "Strategic Reengagement," authored by Larry Korb and Brian Katulis (who happily echo Bergmann's insistence of their centrality to the war's end in their own op-ed on Foreign Policy), called for the withdrawal of 80,000 U.S. troops... IN 2006! That's prior to the Surge; prior to the Sahwa; prior to the JAM stand-down; prior to the Samarra mosque bombing; prior to the conclusion of ethno-sectarian cleansing across the neighborhoods of Baghdad; prior to the formation of the Maliki government; prior to the Iraqi offensive against Shia militias; prior to the conclusion of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA); and so on and so on. All of this seems so obvious as to not even need saying. In short, it's patently absurd to suggest that a massive troop withdrawal in 2006 would have gone as smoothly and produced similar results to the one currently taking place without the change in the security situation that took place in the intervening four years.

Bergmann argues that the real importance of the CAP report was the suggestion "that the US should set a date certain to prompt Iraqis to take control of their security and should withdraw its forces deliberately but responsibly in that period." Katulis and Korb echo this point:

Deadlines for a strategic redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq -- initially proposed in 2005 by leaders like former Representative Jack Murtha, championed by Democrats in Congress and candidates in the 2006 midterm elections, and outlined by the 2006 bipartisan Iraq Study Group ["and by US!", they modestly avoid noting] -- all sent the important signal that Iraqis needed to take greater responsibility and ownership of their own affairs. The message that America's commitment to Iraq was not open-ended motivated forces such as the Sunni Awakenings in Anbar province to partner with the U.S. to combat Al Qaeda in 2006, a movement that began long before the 2007 surge of U.S. forces.

The message that Americans were leaving also motivated Iraqis to sign up for the country's security forces in record numbers. The "surge" of U.S. troops to Iraq was only a modest increase of about 15 percent -- and smaller if one takes into account the reduced number of other foreign troops, which fell from 15,000 in 2006 to 5,000 by 2008. In Anbar province, the most violent area, only 2,000 troops were added.

This argument rests on the specious contention that promises of sustained American commitment to Iraq had a suppressive effect on Iraqis' enthusiasm to end the war that wracked their country. In a less charitable interpretation, one could conclude that Katulis and Korb think that sectarian violence and civil war drug out in Iraq simply because Iraqis weren't trying hard enough. (What else is there to believe, really, when you read the assertion that ISF recruiting numbers are causally related to vague assertions by opposition politicians and obscure think-tankers that the U.S. would not remain forever?)

Here's the thing, though: the U.S. was never going to "remain forever." You know how I know this? A SOFA mandating the removal of U.S. forces from Iraqi cities by July 2009 and from the entire country by the end of 2011 was NEGOTIATED AND SIGNED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. That's right: the "Obama plan" is basically the Bush plan, with the addition of a couple of mid-course deadlines for the "removal of combat forces," an almost entirely meaningless milestone. Bergmann's claims that "there was no conservative withdrawal plan" seems a bit silly in light of this fact.

The WonkRoom post also takes a few shots at CNAS, suggesting that the perceived success of CAP's competitor in the so-called "think tank wars" was more attributable to good PR than substantive policy differences. "The CNAS approach was essentially an effort to find a centrist withdrawal strategy," Bergmann writes, so they concluded that redeployment should happen on a slower timeline, and with a more substantial residual force for advise and assist and counterterrorism missions. Uh, doesn't this sound a lot like what happened in 2008 and 2009?

And so here's the almost literally unbelievable conclusion:

There is little doubt that the Obama plan to set a date certain and to withdraw more than 120,000 troops in 16 months was essentially what CAP had been arguing for since the fall of 2005. In other words, Obama went with the progressive plan on Iraq. . . The reason there are just over 40,000 troops [in Iraq] is not because of the surge, it is because Obama decided to withdraw more than 100,000 troops.

When you look closely, Bergmann's argument should really go something more like this: U.S. strategy in Iraq in 2011 is basically exactly like what CAP advocated in 2005... except that the country executed a combination of the CNAS approach and the AEI approach in the meantime in order to make "CAP's progressive plan for ending [the] Iraq war" even remotely plausible.

If you didn't understand my post the other day about how partisan national security politics is destroying my will to live, hopefully now it makes a little more sense. "Think tank experts" shamelessly shilling for one side or another and engaging in embarrassing self-gratification over their imagined success in impacting policy just intensify my disaffection.

Larry Korb: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

"Generals should be guided by truth, not politics," he tells us. (Well, actually, the headline writers at the Washington Post came up with that, but I'm pretty sure that's how he feels.) The op-ed probably should've been titled "Hey Mullen, you're an asshole!", but I'm not sure he could get that past the editors.

In his Dec. 27 column, ["An admiral who found the center," op-ed], David Ignatius distorts the proper role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He glosses over Adm. Mike Mullen's professional failures, particularly on Afghanistan and his handling of the firing of Gen. David McKiernan.

Ignatius is wrong to argue that any military officer, especially a member of the Joint Chiefs, is supposed to find the center of the political spectrum. An officer has a responsibility to give the president and Congress his or her best military advice, whether that is embraced by the right or the left, whether it is popular or unpopular.

Ok, he's on reasonably safe ground so far. "Best military advice," free of ideological bias, etc etc. Agree with that, sure, but you're crazy if you think that four-stars can avoid politics all together: they'd cease to be effective if they didn't know how to handle Congress, the media, and the public. But yeah, the CJCS ought not be tailoring his military advice based on the ideology of the president, so we can generally agree here.

Things get dicey when Korb starts talking about Mullen specifically (and by "get dicey," I mean the op-ed turns into a hit-job):

What about Mullen? In late 2007, when Congress asked him about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, Mullen shrugged it off. "In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must," he told the House Armed Services Committee. Was that his professional opinion, or was it the policy of President George W. Bush, who gave short shrift to Afghanistan because of his obsession with Iraq? Is that what the combatant commanders were telling him? The answer is no.

About the same time, according to reports, Gen. Dan McNeill, then U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told President Bush in a videoconference that he needed at least 30,000 more troops to stem the advance of the Taliban, particularly in the south. This position was endorsed by Adm. William Fallon, chief of U.S. Central Command. Did Mullen support this? In fact, when the White House told McNeill not to go public with the request, Mullen did not complain, nor did he tell Congress. We learned about this because journalist David Sanger interviewed McNeill for his book "The Inheritance."

Ignatius wrote that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended replacing David McKiernan as U.S. commander in Afghanistan because McKiernan did not answer an important question during a video briefing for the secretary of defense. Really? What was the question? According to The Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran," front page, Aug. 17, 2009], the questions concerned reconstruction and counternarcotics, and they were asked before the Obama White House completed its first review of the war in Afghanistan. How could McKiernan answer the question satisfactorily when he did not know whether he would receive the 30,000 additional troops he had first requested in April 2008 and did not know where President Obama was going to come down on the issue? Mullen wanted McKiernan replaced because he wanted someone to take the fall for the fact that he and Gates had been derelict in their duty on the situation in Afghanistan for several years.

Can we take a second to parse Korb's argument here? This seems to be the framework:

1. Generals should avoid being political and/or tailoring military advice to political trends
2. Adm. Mullen's "best military advice" should have included recommendations to shift resources from the Iraq campaign to Afghanistan
3. The relevant combatant commander (Adm. Fallon and then GEN Petraeus at CENTCOM) would have prioritized Afghanistan over Iraq
4. GEN McKiernan's "best military advice" was dependent on political decisions by the president in a way that Adm. Mullen's was not or should not have been
5. McKiernan was fired because Mullen was trying to cover for his own failures and those of Secretary Gates

This is roughly it, right? Well, it looks pretty stupid when it's laid out like that, doesn't it? Just in case it doesn't, let me elaborate.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense serve at the pleasure of the president, which is to say that they are responsible for formulating the plans and policies necessary to execute the president's overall foreign and security policy vision. The Constitution created a system of checks and balances on presidential power, but let's be clear about something: the Chairman is not meant to be a competing power base. He is not meant to be a check on the president. He's around to provide technical expertise in assisting the president in policy formulation. (If you don't want to take my word for it, go check out Title 10, Section 153 of the U.S. Code: functions of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Who's "distort[ing] the proper role of the chairman" now?)

The CJCS does provide an assessment of the risks associated with the current National Military Strategy, but this hardly seems like an opportunity (or especially a requirement) to say "Iraq is a bad idea, shift these troops to Afghanistan!"

It's also entirely possible that Adm. Mullen viewed successful prosecution of the war in Iraq as a higher priority than escalation in Afghanistan, difficult as that may be for Lawrence Korb to imagine! LTG McNeill may have wanted more troops -- as the commander of the Afghan theater, I have little doubt that he believed this was the most important mission and the best possible use for those soldiers. Adm. Fallon may even have agreed. But Mullen's job was not to transmit directly the opinions of COCOM or theater commanders -- lord knows those guys had plenty of access to the president -- but rather to provide his best military advice. Why should we believe that he didn't?

Meanwhile, Korb rips Mullen and the Secretary for being impatient with McKiernan's failure to address questions they asked about his plans for Afghanistan because a resource request had not been answered yet. So the theater commander is permitted to base his plans on the strategic decisions of the president (or, perhaps, only this president) but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense must offer advice that is willfully ignorant of or indifferent to that presidential guidance? That's pretty absurd.

And finally, Korb just goes balls-out and slanders Adm. Mullen: the latter was covering, Korb tells us, for "the fact that he and Gates had been derelict in their duty on the situation in Afghanistan for several years." Well, I think I've shown you that Mullen was not, in fact, "derelict in his duty" as prescribed by law. It seems manifestly irresponsible to accuse the president's senior military advisor of scheming and dishonesty, firing a respected 30-year veteran to distract from his personal failings. Seems like a dick move to me, not to mention being entirely groundless.

P.S. This is the same Lawrence Korb who I heard on NPR a few months ago ("now we bring you foreign policy expert..."!) repeatedly referring to the Iranian president as "Ah-ma-dee-ne-di-jad." That's one too many syllables, slick.