In my last posting, on the day before the release of the Iraq Study Group I wrote that the report “will not offer anything useful.” I was wrong. The report, to my surprise, managed to be worse than not useful. It is, in fact, much worse than useless because, among other things, it offers false hope.

I’ll have more on that in a moment. First, let’s look at some of the more laughable assertions in the report.

Consider this assertion,” There are roughly 5,000 civilian contractors in the country.” (p. 12). A story in the Washington Post the day before the report’s release found that there are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, according to the military’s first census of the growing population of civilians there. So they were off by a factor of 20.

And for a group that was supposed to be getting and studying all sorts of reality based ground truth they managed to avoid talking to certain essential groups.  It does make you wonder exactly what they have been doing since being appointed on March 15, 2006?

In a statement released on Dec. 8 Kurdistan Region President Masoud Barzani said, “The report contradicts the words of Mr. James Baker, who told us by phone that the special nature of the Kurdistan Region had been taken into consideration in the report. Although we communicated the Kurdistan Regional Government’s perspective to the commission in a letter before the report was released, the commission ignored the letter and did not read it.”  

In short, his comments can be taken as confirmation that the Kurds read the report and correctly understood it to mean get screwed. Given that the Kurds are the only reliable US allies in Iraq this not exactly an example of blue ribbon thinking at its finest.

Of course, some information in the report was undeniably fascinating, in a horrific way; like being unable to take your eyes off a car wreck. For example:

* The number of attacks by the Iraqi insurgency may be grossly underreported. On one day in July 2006 93 attacks were reported. However, a review of the data showed 1,100 attacks for that day. (p.95)

* The Defense Intelligence Agency has fewer than ten analysts with more than 2 years experience analyzing the Iraqi insurgency. (p.94).

Do the math. 10 analysts work out to one analyst for every 300 American war dead and 2000 wounded.

* The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has 1000 personnel but only six are fluent in Arabic. (p.92)

And then there is the call on outside powers, meaning especially Iran and Syria to help the US to immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to building an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region. Been there, done that.  .  The states that are going to try have largely already tried. While talking is generally a good idea, pinning a strategy on its probable success is reminiscent of the same reality divorced thinking that caused us to invade Iraq in the beginning.

One can’t help but get the sense that this particular recommendation must have been pushed by Jim “convener of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference” Baker. And history shows us how well that worked out.

Maybe it was too much to expect that a group that contained the likes of Vernon Jordan, Sandra Day O’Connor, Edwin Meese and Leon Panetta, who could only be considered true foreign policy and national security experts in a parallel universe, to come up with something useful. Still, for a group that was heralded as bringing a much-needed dose of reality to the Bush fantasy world where democracy is installed on the point of a bayonet they seem remarkably clueless. If these were the best policy minds the U.S. could bring to bear on Iraq and the larger Persian Gulf/Middle East region we should be afraid, very afraid.

Now, back to that false hope. Consider the first two sentences in the executive summary. “The situation is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved.”  They got the first part right, but on the other hand they aren’t saying anything the rest of the country hasn’t been saying for the past year or two. Are we really supposed to be elated because, as Jim Baker keeps repeating ad nauseam, a “bipartisan” group of five Republicans and five Democrats recognize reality?
But the critical question is whether things can really get better?

Consider what retired Col. Douglas Macgregor (U.S. Army) wrote the day the ISG released its report. He concluded that:

Knowing that nothing with American fingerprints will survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces including Iraq’s corrupt and ineffective government, the most vexing question for the Iraq Study Group is not whether anything can be done to prevent the United States from looking ridiculous when the “Green Zone” is overrun, looted and destroyed by enraged Arabs. It’s how fast we can end the U.S. and British military occupation of Iraq, an occupation that is both an enormous strategic benefit to Iran and a liability to the West and the Arab World.

Still, considering that at least one to two American military personnel die in Iraq every day, as long as the U.S. remains there the ISG’s recommendations are worse than useless. They are tragic.

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