"Who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?" Why the Surge Doesn’t Matter

[housewolf]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4245

Why the Surge Doesn’t Matter
By Blake Hounshell

impressive gains have stalled in recent months, as the war’s critics have been quick to point out. Violence is ticking back up, they note, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s recent attempt to regain a footing in Basra suggests that the Iraqi military is not ready for prime time. Truces by Sunni and Shiite militias, not more U.S. troops or new tactics, largely explain the decline in attacks, they say. The few claims of political progress are strained at best.

Such critiques miss the larger point. Surge or no surge, it’s extremely doubtful the U.S. occupation can ultimately produce a successful Iraq—a stable, unitary, democratizing state at peace with its neighbors. The surge is merely the most preliminary precursor to this intended outcome, and even Petraeus admits that it could all come undone overnight. For that matter, Iraq is just one part of a larger strategic picture, as former CENTCOM commander Adm. William J. Fallon tried to impress upon the Bush administration before he resigned. A myopic, irrational focus on Iraq has impaired the United States from making progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict, managing the rise of China, and everything in between. In short, the Iraq war is long past being worth the $120 billion a year being spent to wage it—an amount that exceeds Iraq’s entire annual economic output.

This is hardly the fault of Petraeus, a brilliant general tasked with a nearly impossible mission. Building a decent political order in Iraq has always been something of a fantasy. Even if Petraeus somehow succeeds in bringing violence down to a manageable level, it may be generations before Iraq becomes the “dramatic and inspiring example of freedom” in the Middle East that President Bush has repeatedly invoked. Instead, it will most likely evolve into a country plagued by instability, ethnosectarian violence, weak institutions, and unreliable oil production—if we’re lucky. Few Americans would support spending $12 billion a month in Iraq if they understood that they were buying, at best, another Nigeria, and at worst, Somalia with oil.
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Supporters of the Iraq war, however, should know better. Many of them seem to have forgotten the work of scholars like NYU political scientist Adam Przeworski, who has written extensively about the relationship between wealth and democracy. Above a per capita income of $6,055, Przeworski finds, “democracies last forever.” But below that threshold, democracies are more fragile. Iraq’s GDP per capita today is a paltry $3,600, but even that low figure is misleading. When a country depends so heavily on oil revenues, its GDP per capita says little about its real level of development (Equatorial Guinea, technically speaking, is the 12th-richest country in the world). Przeworski’s research therefore excludes major oil-producers, which have their own set of problems.

In fact, oil tells us nearly everything we need to know about Iraq’s grim future.


Read the rest at
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4245

[Faygo Kid]

1. It's OUR future that's grim, thanks to George W. Bush and his enablers.

There is no "success" on the horizon. All the historians are right: George W. Bush is the worst president in this nation's history. He is the ruin of the world, and he is not done yet.