However, on August 21, Crocker said reconciliation is not occurring. As an August 21 McClatchy Newspapers article reported, Crocker said: "The progress on the national level issues has been extremely disappointing and frustrating to all concerned -- to us, to Iraqis, to the Iraqi leadership itself." During his August 5 appearance on Meet the Press, Gates said the political aspect is "a disappointing picture for the central government right now, but there are some positive things happening at the local level." After returning from a trip to Iraq in mid-August, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) noted that "[t]he purpose of the surge, by its own terms, was to have the -- give the opportunity to the Iraqi leaders to reach some political settlements. They have failed to do that. They have totally and utterly failed." In addition, the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated that national political reconciliation has not occurred. The NIE, portions of which were released on August 23, stated that "to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively" and concluded that "the Iraqi Government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months." According to the NIE: "Broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments."
Further, a report released by the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) on September 4 found that the national Iraqi government was making little political progress. The GAO concluded that the Iraqi government had met only one of eight legislative benchmarks and partially met one other. GAO noted that six of the legislative benchmarks had not been met: "a review committee has not completed work on important revisions to Iraq's constitution" and "the government has not enacted legislation on de-Ba'athification, oil revenue sharing, provincial elections, amnesty, or militia disarmament."
- O'Hanlon and Pollack -- critics of administration handling of the war -- agree the surge is working
On July 30, Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack published an op-ed in The New York Times in which they described themselves as "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq" and argued that "significant changes were taking place," which justified continuing the Bush administration's surge strategy "at least into 2008." The op-ed received widespread media attention, and supporters of the administration's policy in Iraq touted the op-ed, saying that Pollack's and O'Hanlon's findings of progress were particularly credible, given their purported criticism of the war. Indeed, the weblog Think Progress noted that O'Hanlon and Pollack "appeared on at least nine major mainstream media outlets in" the 24 hours after their op-ed appeared.
In fact, O'Hanlon and Pollack are not "critics of the war"; as Media Matters has noted, both O'Hanlon and Pollack were influential proponents of the Iraq war before the invasion. Pollack wrote a book in 2002 titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House). Furthermore, O'Hanlon publicly supported the surge policy and wrote a January 2007 column in support of President Bush's troop escalation, claiming that it was "the right thing to try." Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald documented the litany of O'Hanlon and Pollack's support for the Iraq war, including the fact that O'Hanlon was one of the signatories to the Project for New American Century's Iraq policy letter issued in 2003, and had, as recently as February 2007, written a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that Democrats were wrong to oppose the war and that the surge should continue.
Media reports routinely failed to mention Pollack and O'Hanlon's support for the invasion:
- On the August 20 edition of Fox News' Special Report, national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John Warner (R-VA), after returning from Iraq, were "sounding a bit like Brookings Institution war critics Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who changed their views after seeing some of the military successes first hand."
- On the July 31 edition of CNN's Larry King Live, host Larry King failed to challenge Vice President Dick Cheney, who described O'Hanlon and Pollack as "strong critics of the war."
- In a June 30 post on The New Yorker's website, George Packer wrote that "'Hanlon and Pollack have long been critics of the war."
On Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace described O'Hanlon and Pollack as "two critics of the way the Bush administration has conducted the war." On the CBS Evening News, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin falsely described O'Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now believes it should be continued." And on CNN Newsroom, anchor Heidi Collins introduced Pollack by saying that he "has been a vocal critic of the administration's handling of the [Iraq] war, but he says that an eight-day visit has changed his outlook a bit."
Myth: "The Surge has Reduced Violence in Iraq"
On the August 28 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry uncritically aired President Bush's assertion from his August 28 speech to the American Legion that "[s]ectarian violence has sharply decreased in Baghdad. The momentum is now on our side." Henry gave no indication that he had attempted to verify Bush's assertion. Further, The Washington Post printed an August 28 op-ed by O'Hanlon defending the New York Times op-ed he co-authored in which, relying on data supplied by the U.S. military, he repeated his previous claim that "Iraqi civilian fatality rates are down." During a report containing an interview with Petraeus, on the September 4 CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric did not challenge Petraeus' assertion that "if you look at the country as a whole ... the number of ethnosectarian deaths, you name it, the number of incidents has been reduced dramatically."
By contrast, an August 25 Associated Press article reported that while violence is down in Baghdad "from peak levels ... the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago." Moreover, McClatchy Newspapers reported on August 15 that while U.S. officials have said civilian casualties have decreased in Baghdad, they have "declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim."
On September 1, the Los Angeles Times reported that "[b]ombings, sectarian slayings and other violence related to the war killed at least 1,773 Iraqi civilians in August, the second month in a row that civilian deaths have risen." The article added: "The statistics appear to indicate that the increase in troops ordered by President Bush this year has done little to curb civilian bloodshed, despite U.S. military statements to the contrary." Further, an article in the September 10 edition of Newsweek reported that "[t]he surge of U.S. troops -- meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital -- has hardly stemmed the problem." The report quoted Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, who said that "the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually 'has increased the IDPs [internally displaced persons] to some extent."
In fact, the GAO, the latest NIE, the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq report, and a recent op-ed by a group of seven soldiers in Iraq all suggest that the surge has not significantly improved the security situation and that violence in Iraq has not decreased. Moreover, a September 6 Washington Post article reported challenges to the U.S. military's recent assertions -- and scrutiny of a specific claim Petraeus is expected to make in his testimony to Congress -- that sectarian violence in Iraq is declining:
- According to the GAO in its report issued September 4, the goal of "[r]educing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security" was "not met," meaning that "there was no clear and reliable evidence that the level of sectarian violence was reduced and that militia control of local security was eliminated." The GAO further noted: "While it is not clear if sectarian violence has been reduced, militia control over security forces has not been eliminated and remains a serious problem in Baghdad and other areas of Iraq." Further, during testimony on September 4 in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Comptroller General David Walker, the top official at the GAO, discussed data surrounding sectarian violence and asserted that "there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree" and that "part of the problem that we had in reaching a conclusion about sectarian violence is there are multiple sources showing different levels of violence with different trends."
