Iraq Study Group Report
The report from the Iraq Study Group is available in PDF here (1.3MB). This is part of the executive summary:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. […] Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency, Shiite militias and death squads, al Qaeda, and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability. […] If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread. Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory and expand its base of operations. The global standing of the United States could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.
Not to be excessively snarky, but haven’t some of those things already happened?
The ISG’s list of seventy-nine recommendations
In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals. (pp. 94-5, emphasis added)
That’s quite different from the administration’s persistent whine that the media focuses too much on the bad news from Iraq.
MediaMatters has a nice summary of the ISG Report, covering—as usual—the information left largely unmentioned by the media. The lack of analysts and fluent Arabic speakers is probably the most shocking indication of the administration’s poor planning.
Amid the many right-wing criticisms—such as the New York Post “Surrender Monkeys” cover —the award for the most out-of-touch comment about the ISG report goes to Bill Bennett, Our nation’s premiere virtuecrat had this to say about the ISG’s report (h/t: Andrew Sullivan):
“In all my time in Washington I've never seen such smugness, arrogance, or such insufferable moral superiority. Self-congratulatory. Full of itself. Horrible.”
That’s actually kind of amusing, considering its source. Bennett approvingly quotes an attack against critics of the Iraq quagmire who “never made it out of the Green Zone.” While it is obvious that such limited experience should be accorded limited significance, is it not more important to make the larger observation that Iraq can’t be in very good shape if it’s not safe to step outside the US military compound?