Bottom-Up Progress

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Petraeus believes it means a lot. He told Congress that the goals of the troop surge are “in large measure being met.” He reported that violent incidents in Iraq have declined in the past eight of 12 months; that overall civilian deaths in Iraq are down 45 percent since last December, and down 80 percent in Baghdad; and that while last December saw 1,350 violent incidents per month in Anbar province, by August the number was down to 200. He called these statistics “quite significant.” He provided a concise narrative, buttressed by charts, of the disruption of networks of al-Qaeda in Iraq, of Shia extremist groups, and of other Iranian-supported terror cells. He chronicled the spread of the Anbar tribal movement opposed to al-Qaeda to other provinces and spoke of how the United States military has worked many angles to facilitate this.

This progress, he believes, suggests that by next summer the U.S. military can draw down to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops without negative consequences. Beyond next summer, he refused to speculate.

Probably the two most interesting statements in Petraeus’s report will get little coverage. First, that the data analysis he used to brief Congress was found by two intelligence agencies to be the best available on the Iraq war, and that reenlistment rates of troops in Iraq are above average: 130 percent among younger enlistees and 115 percent among those in mid-career. Those statistics constitute telling evidence that the troops themselves continue to find great meaning in their work, suggesting that they certainly don’t believe the cause is lost.

Of course, there is a basic contradiction in the analyses of Petraeus and Crocker. If Iraq has made all the progress they show in their charts and yet would fall apart if we left, then how relevant is that progress in the first place? The editorial writers at The New York Times remind us that military progress is meaningless without political progress. By that logic, since there has been no tangible national reconciliation at the top levels of government in Baghdad, there has been no meaningful progress at all. But that may be too neat an equation. If the surge has helped fortify political progress on the ground at the tribal level in Anbar and other regions of the country—by solidifying the Sunni alliance against al-Qaeda—then perhaps we should not rush toward the exit gates. Just because we can’t engineer change at the top does not mean that we can’t engineer change at the bottom in a way that will gradually and organically affect the top. As Crocker said, “The current course is hard; the alternatives are far worse.” Indeed, as Petraeus indicated, a rapid withdrawal would unleash centrifugal forces in Iraq that would tear the country further apart, whereas a slow and gradual withdrawal over time will improve the situation.

Alas, a series of dictators, culminating in Saddam Hussein, built a state out of a multiconfessional and multiethnic hodgepodge. Because that hodgepodge was so unwieldy—a Frankenstein monster of a polity—the force required to control it was, by necessity, tyrannical in the extreme. With that extreme tyranny now dismantled, rebuilding the Iraqi state must begin from scratch. It may be no accident that the progress we have seen is at the bottom, since that might be the only place where such progress can even begin to take hold.

Bottom line: I suspect we will be stuck in Iraq with tens of thousands of troops for years to come. The results we obtain may be meager, but they’ll still be better than if we suddenly withdrew.

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Robert D. Kaplan is national correspondent for The Atlantic and a visiting professor at the U. S. Naval Academy. He is the author of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground.