Monday, August 27, 2007

Michael Gordon on Meet   [Rich Lowry]

We criticize the New York Times a lot around here, but it has some incredibly high-powered journalists covering the Iraq war. One of them is Michael Gordon, who is always worth listening to. Here are some (somewhat disjointed) excerpts of what he said on Meet the Press yesterday:

MR. MICHAEL GORDON: Well, I spent most of the summer in Iraq in Diyala province and then south of Baghdad, and really a lot has changed on the security front in Iraq. And there’s been a very important development which has been the enabling of the Sunni tribes and some of the former insurgents. This is not just in Anbar. And there’s a very delicate political game under way right now to try to find a way to connect these disparate Sunni groups who are working with the American military, with the Maliki government, and that’s a work in progress. It’s really just in the early phases.

MR. RUSSERT: If we, in fact, are arming the Sunnis and we’ve already armed the Shiites, are we arming both factions in a civil war?

MR. GORDON: Well, we’re not arming these groups. They’re not being given arms by the Americans, but you’re pointing to one of the very real risks. I mean, the potential here is by organizing these Sunni groups in Baquba and...(unintelligible)...and...(unintelligible)...and all sorts of places in Iraq, we do have a mechanism to provide local security and really to drive out al-Qaeda of Iraq. The downside is unless this becomes institutionalized and these people become either Iraqi police or somehow approved by the Iraqi government, we might be setting the stage for more intensified civil war...

MR. GORDON: Well, the natural life of the surge, if you were to do nothing and just let it run its course, would be around March or April. Because at that point the troop levels in Iraq need to—will decrease unless they extend the tours further, which they’re—have already ruled out doing, going beyond 15 months. So force levels will begin to recede, and indeed, that’s anticipated by General Petraeus’ two-year campaign plan which he’s projected out for the summer.

But there’s really—in the latest N.I.E., people are focused on the message that there’s not political reconciliation at the national level. But there was a second message in the N.I.E., and the N.I.E. said that a large-scale withdrawal of American forces and a change of the mission from fighting counterinsurgency to advising the Iraqis and just going after al-Qaeda would erase the security gains that were made over the summer so far. So that’s something that also has to be taken into account in this upcoming congressional debate...

MR. GORDON: Just going back to my original point. The most important initiative going on in Iraq now is this effort to build reconciliation, as it were, from the ground up, instead of the top down, to enable these Sunni groups and try to get them to work with the government. That’s become really, I think, the centerpiece of the plan, more so than these benchmarks, which are more discussed in Washington than in Baghdad. And I think the success or failure of that over the next three or four months will determine the shape of the war in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Can a prime minister, Maliki or his successor, work with those Sunni groups that you’re describing and still maintain an allegiance or rapport with the Shiite militia leader Sadr?

MR. GORDON: Well, they already are working with these groups, because there’s a government of Iraq reconciliation committee that’s working with a panel established by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, and they’ve sort of accepted these groups in Anbar, they’ve approved some names for the Abu Ghraib region. The question is, the closer this comes to Baghdad, the more nervous the government becomes about these Sunni groups, and they see them not only as a means of proposing security, but as a potential threat to a Shiite-dominated government. So there’s institutions to work with these groups. The question is will this really be a general alliance, a genuine alliance between the government and these groups?...

Read the whole transcript here.

08/27 03:45 PMShare