Does The Military Matter?

The apparent drop in civilian deaths in Iraq is very good news. And not because it means our Iraq strategy is working. Indeed, the forces behind this have little to nothing to do with American forces. The so-called Anbar Awakening is a Sunni operation, while the unilateral ceasefire of the Mahdi Army was Sadr's decision. The pacification of Baghdad, meanwhile, has a lot to do with the fact that Baghdad's effectively been ethnically cleaned, converting from a majority Sunni city to a 70% Shiite city -- they're running out of people to kill. Our troops aren't terribly involved in this change, and that's a good thing: Any changes brought about by American forces will be temporary. Changes that reflect shifts in the underlying dynamics of the country may endure.

I was talking to an Iraq expert yesterday and asked him whether it was correct to say that the military questions -- how many troops we have deployed, what their strategy is, etc -- are increasingly beside the point. He said yes, and then continued on to say that he forgets how different the conversation in the country is from the conversation among Iraq experts. Among those folks, he said, it was taken for granted that the military issues were largely a distraction, and the only questions worth asking were political and regional in nature. Some think the military's doing harm, others think it's offering a bit of benefit, but no one thinks the troops are making much of a difference one way or the other, or that their strategy has anything to do with the long-term success of Iraq. And the focus on what the military is doing, rather than on a diplomatic surge and Iran's involvement and all the rest, is actually quite harmful.