Drum Beat Grows

In consuming casual media today, I heard three different casual references to the same thing. The drum beat is growing ......

TPM:

"Even some critics of President Bush's Iraq war policies are conceding there is evidence of recent improvements from a military standpoint," the piece tells us. But here's the funny thing, though: All the evidence offered in the article in support of this thesis -- with the possible exception of one very dubious piece of info -- is thoroughly bogus.

Let's get the easy one out of the way. With tedious and depressing predictability, the chief piece of evidence cited for the piece is -- yup -- the O'Hanlon and Pollack Op ed. You already know the drill on this one.

Nevermind all the refutations of O'Hanlon/Pollacks op-ed piece, including those by the authors themselves. When Paul Harvey starts citing these idiots, you know it's bullshit (he did today). Now we have Anthony Cordesman, who was traveling with the two saying that he doesn't have the faintest idea what they're talking about:

I did not see any dramatic change in our position in Iraq during this trip. Many of the points, the problems which exist there are problems which have existed really since late 2004, if not earlier. I didn’t see a dramatic shift in the ability of the Iraqi’s to reach the kind of compromise that is almost the foundation of moving forward. […]

But I also want to stress another thing. I did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced in January.

While O’Hanlon and Pollack claimed “many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the [security] force have been removed,” Cordesman observed the opposite. “The security forces are more divided, facing more problems in terms of alignment with Shi’ite factions than I had expected to see, even for the army.”

Later in the briefing, Cordesman slammed O’Hanlon’s plan calling for a “soft-partition” of Iraq into three distinct regions, stating that such an effort would be “brutal, it is repressive, it kills people, it injures them, it drives them out of their homes, and it drives them out of their country. To talk about this as if it was something that is gentle or nonviolent is simply dishonest.”

Cordesman added: “It is clear, that in some ways our intervention in Iraq has allowed the Sadr militia and Shi’ite extremist groups to operate in terms of sectarian cleansing with more freedom than they had in the past.”

I'm telling ya. By September the administration will be feeding the American public, via a all-too-willing media, that Iraq is the new Switzerland, a land of peace and security.