The Opinionated Bastard

More then anything, if there's one thing the White House has woefully mismanaged in this war, its been the propaganda campaign.

Instead of cursing the darkness, here's my attempt to light a candle.

The first thing we need to do is clarify the victory conditions in Iraq. If we don't set the expectations of the press, the press will make unreasonable assumptions. The media at this point don't have any reporters who have every been soldiers (or had any sort of real job for that matter). So its up to us, the bloggers to set reasonable expectations, since the Administration doesn't seem to be able to. So here goes:

Peace is Relative

Iraq is never going to be as peaceful as say, Flagstaff Arizona. Yet as Americans, we're going to think somehow in the back of our mind that for us to “win”, Iraq will be at peace.

That is unreasonable. For us to win, Iraq need only be as peaceful as say, Compton (famous for its drive-by shootings). That would make it one of the most peaceful of the nations in the Middle East. This is especially true if you consider, as I do, violence done against peaceful citizens to actually count. By that standard, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia are not at “peace”, and repressive regimes like China and North Korea to not be at “peace”. (See Dhimmi Watch if you'd like to see what the status quo in Arab nations is like towards their own citizens. ) So if we want to consider peace, we should consider true peace. If the US topples a regime that is killing 20,000 of its citizens a month; but incites an insurgency that kills 20,000 civilians a year, that's actually progress.

So victory occurs not when Iraq meets the “Flagstaff, Arizona” definition of peacefulness, but when the violence has dropped to the nuisance level. We will never get to zero violence, there is no place in the world with zero violence. Perhaps that seems obvious to you, but the media will and has amplified every single event in Iraq without any perspective.

Recently, some Al Queda types tried to attack the Palestine Hotel. They were thwarted by the Iraqi Police, without any US aid. This was a huge milestone for the Iraqi Police. To the media of course, this was played as a bad thing. The media no longer has any perspective on what war is like.

The world is, and always has been, a dangerous place. We Americans, we happy few in the world have it pretty good. We can't apply American standards to another country, especially a fledgling democracy.

Agreement is Relative

The Iraqis will never be in complete agreement with each other any more then Americans are in complete agreement with each other. If Iraqis are in the Parliament screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, we have won. At that point we will have turned a violent process into a political process. If Al Sadr runs for Parliament, even if he wins, this means victory for the US.

The media will of course play up every minor squabble like its the end of the world. But I'll point out: ; Democrats and Republicans scream at each other all the time. They're not even very nice about it, nor especially peaceful.

Not all of Iraq's problems or issues will be resolved; 30 years later Americans are still arguing about Roe v. Wade. It is not our job to solve or mediate every dispute in Iraq, even fundamental disputes like Shia v. Shite or Kurd vs. Arab. All we merely need do is get the Iraqis to work together on their problems politically.

Eventually, we will leave

No doubt we left Vietnam prematurely. But at some point we are going to leave Iraq. That does not mean the insurgents have won. Already, there are more Iraqi police then US soldiers in Iraq. In approximately 8 months, we will have met our original goals for Iraqi security forces. At that point, we may very well transition to almost no military role in Iraq.

We cannot let the media paint the withdrawal of troops as another 'Fall of Saigon' moment. For that matter, if Iraq grants us military bases, that doesn't mean we're still occupying Iraq. Are we still occupying Germany?

Not Every Iraqi Will Like Us

It's unrealistic to expect the Iraqis to overwhelmingly like us. We invaded their country. In fact, the amazing thing about the Iraq War is that the Iraqis don't universally hate us. US Presidents never get 100% approval ratings and often have lower numbers then the US does in Iraq. When the US has higher approval ratings then the President, we're winning in Iraq.

Democratic revolutions are slow, painfully incremental miracles

Stolen from an article title by Austin Bay, I think the title says it all. In this 24/7 news cycle world (which frankly, seems to have the same 15 minutes repeated 96 times) it seems like the press expects everything to happen instantly. Some things just take time. Anything that involves people, and especially the perceptions of people can only change so fast. Iraq's progress will be measured in years, not months. The fall of Baghdad was the fastest military campaign in history, yet the press called it a quagmire. Actual accomplishments are the true measure of progress, not speed.

Case in point: Electricity in Iraq. Lead time for ordering giant power plants is measured in years. While I would like to have seen more progress on this front in Iraq, the reality is that we've probably been going as fast as we can: when we ordered new plants, the companies that made them had to start buliding them. Megawatt power plants aren't off the shelf items. Similarly, laying sewer or water pipe means digging trenches, and you can only do that so fast.

Anyways, that's it for the moment. Anyone else have any examples where they think the media is unreasonable?

Then in September.

October:

47%: Right Direction 37%: Wrong Direction 14%: Don't Know

September:

43%: Right Direction 42%: Wrong Direction 14%: Don't Know

Source: Brookings Iraq Index, p 32

From Security Watchtower:

On Monday, a letter to the United Nations from Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jafaari requested that the U.S. led coalition be given a mandate for another year in Iraq. The current mandate is scheduled to expire at the end of this year, and extending it through 2006 will require a Security Council resolution some time in the next eight weeks. The Iraqi government is also pushing for a clause that would allow them to terminate the mandate at any point during 2006.

At 10,000 trained Iraqi Police/month, in 8 months we'll have met the original goal of 240,000 Iraqi Police in Iraq. That would be a good time for us to leave...

See what the Marines have been ordering from Amazon

A reader took issue with my estimate of the Saddam regime causing 20,000 deaths/month in Iraq, so I thought I'd explain my thinking.

Counting the Butcher's Bill can be complicated.

There's the issue of neglect as well when it comes to totalitarian states. During the Oil-For-Palaces program and prior to that, Saddam made choices that lead to the deaths of many Iraqis, so I count those as well. The way I see it, if 1,000 Iraqis starved that year because Uday bought a Ferrari, then Saddam killed 1,000 people plus the 5 or so that Uday ran over directly with his new toy.

That is, I'm counting the indirect deaths as well. Estimates of total direct and indirect deaths for the Saddam regime were 2.5 million people over the last decade, which is 250K/year, or 20K/month.

So that's where I get my 20,000/month.

I could probably argue it even higher:

There are the deaths from the Iran/Iraq war as well. Note that I said citizens, which is actually more inclusive then the numbers reported by IBC which only reports civilians. I would say that Iraqi soldiers killed during the invasion would go to to the US Butcher's bill, but deaths in the Iran/Iraq war go to Saddam, as would deaths to throw him out of Kuwait.

Of course, you can and should count those indirect deaths caused by the coalition actions (i.e. if damage to a hospital causes someone to die), but then you would have to count actions taken by Iraq in Kuwait (the dead Kuwaitis), not to mention people killed by Saddam's funding of terrorism, the Iranian side of the Iran/Iraq war and so on. And of course where do sanctions fit into all that? Or the US aiding both Iran AND Iraq during the war?

The original sanctions caused the Iraqis hardship, leading to the Oil-For-Food program, which Saddam willfully used to subjugate the populace even more. If the UN imposes sanctions, but Saddam keeps building palaces, who pays the butcher's bill?

Here's an article from the NYT saying 1,000,000 at least

Using only direct costs though:

Going over to Iraq body count, they have 30K on the high end for direct deaths. So out of the last 32 months (since March 2003), that's 937.5 deaths/month, or 11,250/year.

But do insurgent caused deaths count towards the Coalition butcher's bill? I don't think you can make that argument, because then it NEVER makes sense to intervene in a civil war or genocide. That is, if the Sudanese genocide is 5,000 deaths/month, and the UN intervened and cut that down to 1,000 deaths/month, it seems to me like the UN should get credit for a 4,000 death decrease. So counting insurgents kills towards the coalition total doesn't make sense either. According to IBC, only 37% of the first 25K were from US-led forces, 36% were from “post-invasion” criminal violence.

Even so, by all accounts Saddam killed more Iraqis towards the end of his regime then the beginning. If I remember correctly it was like 2-1. So if you take the estimates that Saddam killed only 300,000 Iraqis during his Presidency, that's 12,000 year, but probably more like 24,000 towards the end of his reign.

So the 11,250 doesn't seem so bad now.

You know, I think the people who want a deadline for the US to leave Iraq are morons.

It's perfectly clear to me. Just look at this chart.

There you go, Aug 2006. Just in time for the mid-term elections!

In a word, Duh! What other date were you expecting?

What would the US do if it didn't have its political schedule to determine how we fight wars?

So here's the latest chart (all charts “popup”):

So are things getting worse in Iraq or better? That's the question I keep asking myself, and why I keep reviewing the Iraq Index report from the Brookings Institution.

October was always going to be a tough month. There was increased activity by US forces in clearing out Anbar province, and there was going to be increased activity from the insurgents because of the elections.

So let's look at the graph. A huge jump up in IED deaths this month. Most of them were in the last few days of the month, but still quite a big jump. IED deaths have been trending upwards for awhile now, but I see this as a losing strategy for the insurgents. You can't hold territory with mines.

Meanwhile, although all the other numbers were higher than September, many of them are lower than past months. A big chunk of the deaths this month were from car crashes and other non-hostile causes; this happens whenever there is a troop rotation in Iraq. The hostile file number I find especially interesting as typically when the Coalition is very active, this number rises. In both September and October, this number was lower than expected. So I'm thinking that perhaps the operations of August and September were effective enough to drop the deaths from hostile fire to a lower level.

So in context, all these numbers are lower than I expected, except for IED deaths. Woundings, which I use to indicate the operational tempo of the troops are holding steady, so even though deaths are high this month (92) perhaps that's just luck, or the fact that the Baghdad troops have less experience with IEDs than the Anbar province troops.

Now this is interesting. The number of Iraqi military and police killed keeps falling:

Now realize that there are now many more IP then there used to be, which means that being an Iraqi Policeman is getting dramatically less dangerous even faster then that graph indicates. So day-to-day security may be improving dramatically in Iraq. The next graph kind of hints towards that:

According to this graph, things have been dramatically improving for the Iraqis since August.

In polling, Iraqi's are a little more optimistic:

So bottom line, better or worse?

Hard to say. Getting the constitution passed was definitely a milestone. There are now enough IP on duty that coalition forces are starting to take territory and turn it over to the IP, so that's a big milestone. In fact, I expect we'll be leaving in August 2006. They'll be having a bunch of political campaigning leading up to the December 15th elections, and while that stirs up the insurgents, it calms down the population as they get involved in the political process. The Iraqis themselves are more optimistic, even before the constitution passed they said so in polls. Electricity was down slightly this month, but demand is down more as it gets cooler in Iraq.

So better, slightly. Lots more work to do.

Meanwhile I found yet another report to look at, this one from the Pentagon. You can download it from here.

Technorati Tags: Iraq

These are from the Pentagon's report to Congress, which you can download here

Here's an interesting bit from the end of the report, before I show you all the pretty graphs:

U.S. forces will withdraw from Iraq as their mission is successfully accomplished. As noted in the July report, criteria for withdrawing Coalition Forces from Iraq are conditions-based, not calendar-based. There is not a timeline or milestones that directly tie the drawdown of Coalition forces to increased numbers of capable Iraqi battalions. Drawdown will occur in a phased, gradual manner as Iraqi forces become capable of taking the lead within areas of Iraq and in concert with Iraqi progress in political and economic capabilities.

and

Transfers will be effected on an area-by-area basis and will occur only with the approval of the Iraqi Prime Minister, the U.S. Ambassador, and the Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq.

So we may pull out of 90% of Iraq before we pull out of the last little bit.

But with better coverage...

Bill Roggio is going to Iraq to check things out for himself. Why don't you stop on by and chip in about $25 to help?

Read the whole thing

So there was this big article in the local paper about how the median home price in Flagstaff is now $333,000. Dean even commented on it in his column in the Flagstaff Live.

What the hell did the hippies expect? All this “smart growth” stuff is code for “no growth”, and that means that through the inevitable laws of supply and demand, house prices are going to go up. There's only so much land freely available in Flagstaff. Creating “low income housing” developments won't work, if you really want house prices to go down, encourage land swaps between the State and the Feds so that more acreage is opened up to development.

All that Smart Growth and Slow Growth stuff the Friends of Flagstaff Future guys like to talk about just makes it impossible for the little guys to build houses unless they're politically connected.

Sigh. You know, it really bugs me that these big developers are coming to Flagstaff and building all these gated communities. But it's an inevitable result of the stuff the hippies are always whining about. All this smart growth, environmental impact reports, blocking land swaps, etc. leads inevitably to this sort of thing happening. Once you squeeze the little guys out of the market, and you make building new homes more expensive, then you end up with big developers building expensive developments.

Meanwhile, they're selling homes in Bellemont 5 miles from Flagstaff as fast as they can make them. I paid $250K for my house 8 years ago, the guy down the street is asking $869K for his (though he's probably delusional).

So the Opinionated Wife and I were discussing the riots in France. A few years ago she had a friend who lived in France for awhile who married a Frenchman and moved back to America. Since the Blogosphere is starting to realize that this riots had little to do with Muslims, and more to do with fundamental problems in the structure of French society, I’ll offer up a point she made.

Underemployment. France enforces that the employer provide a number of benefits to employees after a year of employment. The vaunted shorter work week and month long vacation in the summer for instance. This has produced the unintended consequence that if you’re young and unestablished, your jobs last 10-11 months; after which you need to get a new job. Evedentially, the benefits are so onourus that French companies have instituionalized a cycle of hiring and firing.

So young French people are forced to have multiple jobs so that they can survive when one job lets them go to avoid the governmental restrictions. This makes it very difficult for young people to establish themselves, because in essence they must have two employers at all times for 20-30 hours a week each; then every 5 months they have to look for another job to replace one of those jobs.

Is your work week really shorter if it consists of 2 20-30 hour per week jobs? That sounds like 40-60 hours a week to me.

This is interesting because when I was in Germany a few years ago I was talking to one of the young Germans. If he wanted to work overtime, he had to go to the labor board and get permission each time. The end result was that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Instead, he moonlighted as a bouncer in a local nightclub instead. He bypassed the labor board by being paid in cash under the table.

I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone that France and Germany have dismal economies. The more I here about their countries, the more they remind me of Atlas Shrugged.

My wife’s friend loved France, but moved back to America because despite all their social programs, it was finanically impossible for her to finance her education, and therebe advance herself.

So last night, my wife and I went to this slide show by Martin Gray. It was very interesting, and annoying at the same time. It was very interesting because Martin Gray has spent most of his life traveling to and taking pictures of the world’s sacred sites.

It was annoying because he talked non-stop, and it was a mixture of interesting information about the pictures and rants about all kinds of things (like he dislikes much of the new age movement, despite being a member of same).

One of the things he ranted about was the proposal to use reclaimed water for snowmaking at the Snow Bowl. According to him, if this went through, then the people of Sedona would end up drinking the people of Flagstaff’s pee. He also likened having the ski area up there in the first place to be like “having a WalMart in the vatican”.

Well, I’ve been to the Vatican. I bought a plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus from a nun for $.25. Come to think of it, the Chapel in Sedona has a really nice gift shop downstairs. If theres one thing the Catholic Church knows, it’s the correct quote; it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil. So its too late, there already is a WalMart in the Vatican, and its run by nuns.

The argument about Sedonans drinking pee was just funny to me, because I live at the base of the mountain and I have a septic tank, so residents of both Sedona and Flagstaff have been drinking my pee for 7 years now. In fact, since about 10 neighbors live upstream of me, I’ve been drinking my neighbors pee for about that long.

In fact, the people of Sedona already drink the people of Flagstaff’s pee, because what Flagstaff does right now with that reclaimed water is let it flow downstream…to Sedona. All this snowmaking on the peaks thing would do is move the output north about 8 miles. So what would happen is that the people of Flagstaff would start drinking their own pee. Similarly, I guess that means that I would have to be drinking Flagstaff pee, instead of just my neighbors.

Of course, some people think that “recycling” your pee is a good thing.

Of course the real issue is that the mountain is sacred to the Navajo and the Hopi. They have a point; I wouldn’t like it if they went into christian churches and peed on the altar. But it’s kind of too late; my wife and I go hiking on the mountain multiple times a week, and there aren’t any bathrooms on the mountain if you get my drift. Somehow I don’t think that the Navajo hold it until they get home when they go hiking on the mountain either…

So if you live in Sedona, you’re already drinking my pee, and the pee of everyone in Flagstaff. If you don’t like it, well, I guess you’ll have to move upstream. I hear there’s lots of room in Alaska. As the joke goes, you don’t buy beer, you just rent it.

Of course, all of the water in the world was originally part of the ocean, and fish don’t have toilets either…

No matter how you slice it, I see lots of pee drinking in your future.

Even the Washington Post has noticed

This is interesting because I was talking with Fester about this a couple of weeks back, and he was quoting some old articles saying it had gotten really bad. But two months is a long time in Iraq, especially lately.

Interesting piece at the Fourth Rail about how they are using sniper teams on insurgents as they deploy IEDs.

Also very interesting is the comments saying that a year ago, the soldiers weren't allowed to engage insurgents...

I don't know if this was big picture planning (wait until there were more Iraqi troops available), or the US trying to conduct a war with one hand tied behind our back, but I could see how the sniper teams would be very effective.

I wonder if this is the “big picture” reason for using just a few routes now? They're bait?

Good to Know

So there's this press release from DOD announcing Iraq troop rotations: here. Only 92,000 though, and scheduled to begin mid 2006. Does that mean we're drawing down the troops? Any military types know the answer?

Remember my theory on when we start pulling out of Iraq is here.

From Cafe Hayek:

Of course, the whole thing was a live version of the West Wing.  But what I found interesting was how little they chose to caricature the Republican's views, at least in the part I saw.  He wasn't a “compassionate conservative.”  And he wasn't a heartless monster.  He was about as Jeffersonian as you could imagine.  Whoever gets the Republican nomination the next time around ought to hire whoever wrote Alda's lines.  It would be even nicer to have a candidate to choose from who actually believed those lines as well.

The funny thing about West Wing is that both the liberals and conservatives on the show are actually reasonable, unlike in real life...

In fact, the liberals on the show often sound like conservatives...“Yeah, it would be nice to do that, but it would be too expensive, and it wouldn't work...”

Report from a Soldier in Iraq

For those of you who don't know, Ground Truth is where I post items that directly talk about what is going on Iraq without the filter of the mainstream media. If you really want to know what's going on there, its the best way to find out, IMHO, by going directly to the source. Sometimes the pieces are negative, sometimes they are positive, sometimes they're just coverage by informed people like Bill Roggio

You can read past items here.

Iran Protests U.S. Aerial Drones

When the New York Times, which hates Arnold, endorses 3 out of 4 of his propositions, and they still get defeated, you have to realize that all the people in California with any brains moved to Arizona about, say, 10 years ago...

Idiots. They should have at least passed the redistricting measure.

Here's his blog entry.

Here's an interesting quote:

A note on civilians. I didn’t see one civilian hurt or mistreated while I was with the Marines of the 2/1. For one, there aren’t many there. Huseybah, normally about 30,000 people, is almost abandoned. I made it halfway through the city, and found maybe 10 houses with families in them. Best estimate is that about 5,000 civilians remain.

Secondly, I never saw a Marine shoot first. They never fired a round unless fired upon, which is in keeping with their rules of engagement. Now, when they were fire upon, even if it was just some guy taking potshots, the entire company would open up. If they brought the tanks in, it was all over.

In a different post relating to his article on Fallujah, he gives it to a troll:

Now, as for me being a shameful excuse for a human being — and I’m talking to you, “Susan” — get over yourself. My story was hardly cheerleading and I’m sick and tired of people who think any coverage of the military is somehow being complicit with war crimes. The Marines I met committed no crimes, wanted to get home and realized they were doing an often pointless task, a feeling I tried to convey in my story. If my reporting doesn’t fit your preconceived notions of what’s happening, tough. I’m right and you’re not. Referencing Dahr Jamal, who came over here with an agenda to “document atrocities,” is not journalism — it’s activism. And if that’s what you want, go to another damn blog.

Want a chance to see what the Iraqis think? I found this discussion board. Interesting how much they sound like us, they have some of the same divisions about the war...

On this forum the Sports section has the most posts...

The UN approved our stay in Iraq through 2006, with a review after 8 months. Read here.

Like I said, we start pulling out in Aug 2006.

Saudi Woman Turns 25

In the end, the story of the run-up to the Iraq war is about intelligence, but not in the way most people think. Intelligence is always flawed and imprecise, even more so when you're dealing with a closed, paranoid and authoritarian regime like Hussein's. It's foolish to suggest Bush should have bucked consensus estimates on Iraq WMD built from more than a decade of intel, and it's even worse to suggest he lied for not doing so.

What President Bush did instead was put an end to the decade-long guessing game and place the burden squarely on Saddam Hussein by saying in front of the world: “This is what we think you have. It's now your responsibility to prove us wrong.” In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in the history of America, it was absolutely the right thing to do.

From Real Clear Politics, via Blogs for Bush

Mass Graves

Hat Tip: My Co-Worker Matt who really gives it to the Democrats in the piece I just linked to.

Follow the Link

Previously: What if the Tin Foil Hat Brigade is right?

Update: Here's a rebuttal

I like the fact that the rebuttal caught the original post in a lie, they're using Chef's Pride Aluminum foil instead of Reynold's as they state in their article. I also think its pretty funny that they tied the MIT Media lab into the whole mind control conspiracy thing:

Most relevant here, a Media Lab research group called “Society of the Mind” (secret societies have long been involved in mind control) is involved in the DARPA funded CHIP: Comprehensive Human Intelligence Project, which “aims to develop a 'Cognitive Architecture' inspired by the observed structure and dynamics of the human brain/mind system” and is part of a larger DARPA program called Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture. DARPA gave Media Lab US$1,032,627 for this black project, about which no information can be found.

Also interesting was this:

Aluminum was originally named “alumium” by Sir Humphry Davy, who later changed it to “aluminum” (perhaps in an attempt to make it more Latinized since alumen is Latin for alum, the aluminum compound that the name is derived from). The British (and allied English speakers) shortly thereafter changed the name once more, this time to “aluminium” so that it would again match the pattern of most other elements (helium, sodium, etc.), while the North Americans eventually decided to keep the second, slightly more traditional name. I predict that North Americans will adopt the more regular “-ium” spelling by the year 2050, prompting the British to start calling it “alumininium”. At that point debate can begin on changing “platinum” to “platinium”

From this page. I love the internet.

So the entire blogosphere missed the biggest story of the week, as did all of the newspapers, and both Senators Kerry and McCain: The Pentagon announced on November 8th that they would be reducing the number of American troops in 2006 down to about 92,000.

I more or less expected the papers to miss this. They've never quite gotten the war on terror, or understood exactly how the “rotation plan” works; the Pentagon was able to slip a troop increase of about 30,000 troops past them this quarter. But two of the most famous Senators spent the week arguing back and forth about what troop levels should be. Much ado about nothing? No, much ado about ignorance! I've always assumed that Senators had access to better (classified) information then me. I guess I was wrong...

Kerry said we should cut troop levels by 30,000 troops in Iraq by the end of the year. Um, Senator, there are currently 170,000 troops in Iraq, up from 140,000 prior to September. The Pentagon quietly raised the number of troops in Iraq for the October and December elections by overlapping the OIF-4 rotations against the OIF-3 rotations. That overlap ends in the first quarter of 2006, so the US was already going to reduce forces by 30,000 troops. This is so typical of Kerry. I think he has CEO disease; he gets a briefing and thinks it is his idea. “Bush should be doing exactly what he..er..is doing”, he'll thunder.

Meanwhile, McCain gave a speech to counter Kerry, saying we needed more troops in Iraq. Well, I agree with that, I just don't think they should be US troops, they should be Iraqi troops. We're training 7-10,000 new troops a month in Iraqi. Those troops are about 3-4 times more effective then our own troops; after all, its their country. So by the end of the year, when we rotate those 30,000 troops home, there will be more then enough Iraqi troops to replace them. By August, we'll have 270,000 Iraqi troops in Iraq, which compares well to the previous regime which had more troops, but they were inadequately trained. Saddam didn't even provide food or uniforms for half of them.

As for how I caught this when the press missed it, remember how I suspected that we were planning on reducing forces in Iraq in 2006? Then there was this announcement by the DOD of the new troop rotations? And then I noticed that the UN mandate has been extended through 2006, but that the Iraqis have the ability to cut it short if they want?

At first, I thought maybe I was getting it wrong, so I talked to a couple of people and they just sort of shrugged. Then I watched a newsreport by the internal DOD news channel saying it and I thought “aha!”. Finally, I asked the DOD directly and they confirmed it:

The story about the 92,000 troop rotation for 2006 seems to be implying that we'll be drawing down our troops in 2006.

This briefing makes it more explicit.

Can I have confirmation that this is true? This seems like pretty big news.

We can confirm that the plan is, in fact, to reduce the size of Coalition Forces in country in 2006. It's big news inasmuch as the Iraqis are increasing the size and strength of their footprint and, by the same token, we're reducing ours.

As we've stated in the past, rotation planning is flexible, conditions-based and operationally focused; it is not based on timetables or political pressures. The coalition is committed to assisting Iraq while Iraq works to achieve political stability and the maintenance of a secure environment.

How was I able to read the tea leaves that the New York Times and the Washington Post missed? Simple. I've always understood the war plan.

The war plan, for good or ill has never been to occupy the country. It's always been the plan for the Iraqis to provide security in their own country. In other words, do the exact opposite of what we did in Vietnam:

• Instead of installing a puppet government, we've spent 2.5 years building up an Iraqi one.
• Instead of having 500,000 troops and 60,000 casualties from trying to take over Vietnam, we've 170,000 troops but only 2,000 casualties because we weren't trying to take over.

In other words, instead of going into Iraq and trying to run the country like we did in Vietnam (Step 1 install a Christian leader in a Buddhist country? What idiot thought up that one?), we've done the minimal amount of work to keep Iraq in a holding pattern until the Iraqis could run it.

It's pretty simple really, and it's actually not a bad plan. I think the US has learned the lessons of Vietnam and Somalia; let people run their own countries. The main mistake we made in this whole war was thinking that it wouldn't take most of 2004 to train the Iraqi Police and Army. It just takes time to do that kind of thing.

Once you understand the war plan, the minute the number of Iraqi Police started to pass the number of US troops, it was obvious we were going to be able to draw our own troops down. With the 210,000 Iraqis, plus the 170,000 US troops, there are 380,000 troops working towards security in Iraq, the most we've ever had. So I was looking for troop reductions, and I found it. By August, with 270,000 Iraqi troops and 92,000 US troops, 3/4 of the troops in Iraq will be Iraqis, and the US may not be needed at all. Hence the provision in the 2006 mandate to end the presence of coalition forces early if need be.

So there you go, spread the word. Be sure to read Defining the Victory Conditions so you can realize that our pulling out troops is a sure sign of success in Iraq, and you can read: Route Irish has Improved if you want to see how much more effective the Iraqis are then our own troops. For one thing, not only do all Iraqis speak the language, but they can recognize someone who doesn't belong the same way a Flagstaff resident can see a Phoenician a mile away. (Phoenician being a tourist from Phoenix.)

Update:

Welcome Instapundit readers. As you can see, I originally noticed this on the 12th of November, so its been a weird week for me listening to the debates about all this. Looks like the media has caught up though. Here's an interesting interview with the Marine commander in Fallujah, he says the Iraqis could take over there in 6 months.

Update #2: Wow, Glenn linked me twice. Mudville Gazette has looked at the same stuff here. Like me, he concludes that troop reductions may be coming but they may not be down to 92,000.

For new readers to my blog if you like what you see, you may be interested in:

Brookings which is all my coverage of the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index reports.

Debunking Iraq Myths where I lay out a moderate position on Iraq.

Friction where I discuss “Why Iraq?”

Bush Lied, People Died, Er, Kinda where I talk about that meme.

Ground Truth are pieces that provide information on how the war in Iraq is going from either soldiers or Iraqis.

Warning, I do consider myself a moderate on the war. I don't think Bush was totally straightforward, I don't think he could be. I do think Iraq was necessary. All my foreign policy pieces are here.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, puppy

I wrote this long piece called Beliefs, which is one of my favorite pieces so far.

My co-worker Matt found this great quote that sums up the problem in two sentences:

Rather than blame the terrorists; rather than admiting they have to take action against them; their fear is transformed to anger and displaced onto President Bush. If everything is his fault, then the reality of what happened does not have to be faced (this also explains the intense psychological denial that these same individuals tend to have about 9/11).

Damn. If I wasn't having so much fun scooping the New York Times, I might have to stop blogging. (Yes, I'm gloating. Wouldn't you?)

Read the link

via Defense Tech