Pennypack Post

Opinion: “A War We Just Might Win” by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, New York Times, 30 July 2007.

With a NYT OpEd headline like that, lots of politicians and opinion makers are no doubt having a tough time finishing breakfast this morning. Armchair analysts O’Hanlon and Pollack, both media favorites over the past four years, give a positive report based on their week in Iraq. This adds to the mounting evidence that the tide really is turning in important ways in Iraq while the debate in Washington is stuck on “surreal” as the authors describe it.

The two conclude their analysis with lots of caution, yet still recommend continuing the current strategy at least into 2008:

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Analysis: “Showcase and Chimera in the Desert,” by John Burns, New York Times, 8 June 2007.

The always impartial Burns notes the trending too with this Week in Review piece. Key graphs:

The trend has spread to other areas where American and Iraqi troops are fighting extremists, including the Sunni district of Amariya in Baghdad, where former insurgents have been given arms and ammunition to fight Al Qaeda-linked groups. Other areas are in Diyala Province, parts of the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad in Babil Province, and parts of Salahuddin and Nineveh, provinces with large Sunni populations north of Baghdad.

In an interview last week, the overall American commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, described the eagerness of at least some Sunnis in each of the five provinces to fight against Sunni extremists as the “most significant” development in his five months as commander. “Local security is helped incalculably by local support and local involvement, and that’s what’s happened,” he said.

BUT FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?
BAQUBA, IRAQ - JULY 07: General Petraeus departs a Army outpost in a neighborhood recently taken from militant control by US forces. Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Photos: “US-Allied Militants Battle al-Qaeda in Diyala; Sunni Militants Wearing Red Ribbons Hunting Down al-Qaeda Operatives,” by Stringer/AFP-Getty Images, 7 July 2007.
Interview: “Ahmed Chalabi; Survivor,” by Melik Kaylan, Wall Street Journal, 7 July 2007.
Article: “G.I.’s Forge Sunni Tie in Bid to Squeeze Militants,” by Michael Gordon, New York Times, 6 July 2007 (subscription required).
Post: “Baqubah Update: 05 July 2007,” by Michael Yon, at Michael Yon Online Magazine, 5 July 2007.
Post: “Understanding Current Operations in Iraq,” by Dave Kilcullen, Small Wars Journal Blog, 26 June 2007.

As once stalwart Republican senators fall all over themselves running away from the mess they helped create in Iraq (through ineffectual oversight, little if any useful criticism, and failure to increase the real end-strength (size) of the Army and Marine Corps), one wonders why now? Why jump ship now when there just may be some positive trends emerging from the chaos?

Sure there have been glimmers of hope over the past four years. Occasionally, administration officials, commanders, and their dwindling cadre of enablers in Congress have strung a few good news stories into a plausible, “we’re making progress” narrative. Even now, the developments described in the articles above could very well be a chimera. Kilcullen sums up this possibility in the closing graphs of his widely read situation report:

It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way. But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing. The politics of the matter then can be decisive, provided the Iraqis use the time we have bought for them to reach the essential accommodation. The Embassy and MNF-I continue to work on these issues at the highest levels but fundamentally, this is something that only Iraqis can resolve: our role is to provide an environment in which it becomes possible.

All this may change. These are long-term operations: the enemy will adapt and we’ll have to adjust what we’re doing over time. Baq’ubah, Arab Jabour and the western operations are progressing well, and additional security measures in place in Baghdad have successfully tamped down some of the spill-over of violence from other places. The relatively muted response (so far) to the second Samarra bombing is evidence of this. Time will tell, though….

Once again, none of this is intended to tell you “what to think” or “whether it’s working”. We’re all professional adults, and you can work that out for yourself. But this does, I hope, explain some of the thinking behind what we are doing, and it may therefore make it easier for people to come to their own judgment.

Obviously Lugar, Domenici, and the rest have come to their judgments. I’ve been expecting for some time now that Senator Specter would come to a similar judgement and latch onto one of the half-baked exit strategies. All of these strategies amount to focring our men and women in uniform to execute a withdrawal under enemy pressure.

Article: “Residents uniting for children of West Ambler,” by Jillian Bauer, Ambler Gazette, 26 June 2007.

Rightly, the discovery by young children of a gun in the bushes of West Ambler is cause for concern. So too, the impulse to blame racism for a closed park and the perception of a neglected neighborhood deserves attention. These feelings and many more promise to get full hearing should the EPA succeed in organizing a community advisory group (CAG) to weigh in on the issues surrounding the asbestos contaminated BoRit site in Ambler, Upper Dublin, and Whitpain.

Feelings alone though will not reclaim Wissahickon Park nor revitalize the surrounding community. It also seems unlikely, given the sampling results thus far, that the EPA would list the three parcels that make up the BoRit site on the National Priorities List (NPL). Even if it were to be listed, there currently is funding for clean up of only a handful of the 1,547 priority sites.

Sustainable solutions to the lingering asbestos problems in and around Ambler will only be arrived at when local government leaders take some initiative and plan together for them. While the tradition and the reality of home rule in Pennsylvania make such multi-municipal planning difficult, it is not impossible. One recent example of a subregional planning effort that should serve as a model is the Wissahickon Riparian Restoration Trail Link Master Plan. Many of the restoration and connection recommendations contained in that plan have already been successfully implemented.

The WRRTL demonstrates what can happen when responsible stakeholders work together to solve complicated, cross-jurisdictional land use problems. Such cooperation would be well worth the effort. Numerous studies prove that converting brownfields into parkland can be a catalyst for accelerated economic development and a vastly improved quality of life. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal profiled this trend, which is seeing cities across America build new parks at a rate not seen in 100 years. More scholarly articles on the very real economic benefits of land conservation are available here.

Rather than lamenting the challenges of an area segmented by municipal demarcation, scarred by industrial contamination, and now stressed all around by the demands of development, we all need to get on with exploring what our communities might yet find by cleaning up and connecting our valuable open spaces.

Although I haven’t been paying particularly close attention, it remains clear that Senator Specter has no intention of moderating his liberal positions on the major policy issues of the day. Just within the last month or so, Mr. Specter has:

1- Floor managed the Senate shamnesty bill.

2- Voted with the Democrats for card-check.

3- Joined all the Judiciary Committee Democrats in voting to restore habeas corpus rights to captured foreign terrorists.

There are probably more outrages, but these three are the most egregious. Any day now, I fully expect Mr. Specter to join the defeatists and call for a quick withdrawal under enemy pressure from Iraq.

By 2010, Senator Specter will have spent 30 years in Washington. If he persists in his self-aggrandizing pursuit of six more years, who will stand to challenge him?

Article: “Marines volunteer to return to Iraq. In one battalion, 200 members opt to extend their enlistments, for no bonus money. ‘I’m here to teach the younger guys,’ says one.” By Tony Perry, LA Times, 22 May 2007.

The LA Times has an inspiring story today about one of the Marine infantry battalions now in the fight, again in Ramadi. The 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (2/5) motto is “Retreat, Hell!” Those words remain a fitting description of the battalion and its Marines.

Officials say extensions are not uncommon among the Marine Corps’ 24 battalions, even as some return to Iraq for their third combat tour. In fact, they say, few records are kept because they are so common.

But Marine generals who review the manpower of all infantry battalions say the 200 from the Two-Five, the most decorated battalion in the Corps, make up the biggest group.

It can be traced to a meeting in Okinawa, Japan, several months ago when the battalion was finishing a phase of its pre-deployment training.

Lt. Col. Craig Kozeniesky, the battalion commander, and Sgt. Maj. William Jordan, the senior enlisted man, assembled Marines whose enlistments were running short. Marines who were there don’t remember that Kozeniesky or Jordan spent much time speaking of the complexities of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Instead, the two asked the Marines to help the battalion’s younger members.

“I just told them: ‘We’ve been together this long. We need you — the young Marines need you,’ ” Jordan said.

In an infantry battalion, a sergeant major serves as the embodiment of institutional values to younger “grunts.” At 44, Jordan has been in the Marine Corps for 27 years.

“Finally I just told them, ‘Everybody who is with us, move to the right side of the room,’ ” Jordan said. Only a handful stayed put. About 175 moved immediately to the right side.

“I was blown away,” Jordan said. “In all my years in the Marine Corps, I never saw anything like it.”

When 2/5 returned to Camp Pendleton, 25 more Marines, many of whom had not attended the Okinawa meeting, also agreed to extend their enlistments in order to deploy. One of those extending was Corporal Saul Mellado.

Under Marine Corps rules about “short-timers,” Mellado could have skipped this return to Ramadi six weeks ago. But like 200 other members of the battalion — a quarter of its number — he asked to have his enlistment extended. Unlike a reenlistment, the move earns the Marines no bonus money, no promotion and no promise of a job shift or posting to a favored duty station.

“For a lot of the guys, this is their first tour,” Mellado said as his Humvee moved slowly through the rubble-strewn streets. “If anything happened to them, and I could have helped them, I couldn’t stand that.”

Mellado’s wife, Kirsten, is pregnant with their first child, a boy. Mellado has no plans to take leave to see the birth, and it is unclear whether a webcam will be available so he can see the infant.

“I’m here so our sons don’t have to come here and fight someday,” he said

For Mellado, the decision is connected to his status as an immigrant. “I came to America with 10 bucks in my pocket,” he said as he walked through a marketplace. “This is my way of paying back my country for all the good things it has done for me.”

S.1348: ‘‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007’’ by Mr. REID (for himself, Mr. LEAHY, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. MENENDEZ, and Mr. SALAZAR) introduced the following bill; which was read the first time MAY 10, 2007.
Opinion: “Rotten Deal. No matter what you call it, it’s amnesty.” By Rich Lowry, National Review Online, 18 May 2007.

The rush to pass a “comprehensive” immigration bill before the 2008 election season heats up has now turned into a mad dash – at many levels. Proponents, including legacy seekers in the administration and legislative salesmen in congress, are claiming the mega-compromise finalized yesterday is the last best hope. Opponents, both on the right and left, are just beginning to rev up their constituencies. And most importantly, hundreds of thousands of opportunity seekers - perhaps millions on the other side of our still wide-open borders - are deciding if now is the time to make the dash to America before the gates start closing.

Whether this bill represents amnesty or not, and to me it sure sounds like it is (see the comments below from Senators Specter and Demint), is beside the point. Immigration reform must necessarily start with effectively stemming the flow of additional illegal aliens. Until the flow is turned into a trickle and our borders are much more secure then they are now, the enormously complicated machinations necessary for government to address this issue are an immeasurable waste of time and resources.

As someone who patrolled a small patch of the Arizona border in the late 1990’s, I know well the challenges of stemming the flow. My company of Marines and I walked the badlands enough to know that even with fences and barriers, UAVs and cameras, and thousands more on patrol, our nation’s perimeter can never be sealed. Yet all of these measures are essential in defending America’s 1,952 mile perimeter and protecting our sovereignty.

Of all the comments I’ve seen thus far on this draft legislation, Fred Thompson gets it just about right:

With this bill, the American people are going to think they are being sold the same bill of goods as before on border security. We should scrap this bill and the whole debate until we can convince the American people that we have secured the borders or at least have made great headway.

As for whether the bill represents amnesty or not, Senator Specter says it doesn’t :

It has been a prodigious effort over the past three months with two-hour meetings virtually every day consisting of some eight, 10 and 12 senators. Hard to get 10 senators in one room for two-and-a-half hours, but that has been done as we have molded a 380- page document which
provides the core of what we believe will be a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

We have started off with the proposition of securing the borders, with fencing, with additional Border Patrol. We have moved to very strong employer sanctions to stop the magnets and so employers will be able to tell who is legal and who is illegal. You can have tough sanction if they hire illegals.

We have moved for a temporary workers’ program, which is temporary, coming to this country, working and then returning. We have structured a plan to provide for the 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants. We will require that they earn the right to citizenship at the end of the line.

Immigration has become a third rail in American politics. It may be even more of a third rail than Social Security. And no matter what we craft, it’s going to be attacked from both the right and the left. The bill hasn’t even bill presented, and it has already drawn criticism as being amnesty — although the critics don’t know what is in the bill — on one side, and on the other, not sufficiently humanitarian.

We have required that the undocumented immigrants earn their right to citizenship.

It is not amnesty.

This will restore the rule of law. Without legislation, we will have anarchy.

Some 90 cities have tried to legislate to deal with the undocumented immigration problem, and they can’t handle it. It is a national program. We have a point system which is balanced. It is balanced among high-skilled workers, low-skilled workers, and family considerations.

This is the best, I think, that can be done, with an enormous effort, on a bipartisan basis.

And I salute all of my colleagues who have worked so hard, and especially the staffs, which have been up really, around the clock, this past weekend, the weekend before. My chief of staff had an hour’s sleep last night and five hours the night before. And we’re all dragging. But I think we’ve produced a reasonably good product.

Senator Demint says it does:

I hope we don’t take a thousand page bill written in secret and try to ram it through the Senate in a few days. This is a very important issue for America and we need time to debate it.

But the little we do know about the bill is troubling. According to reports, the bill contains a new ‘Z Visa’ that allows those who entered our country illegally to stay here permanently without ever returning home. This rewards people who broke the law with permanent legal status, and puts them ahead of millions of law-abiding immigrants waiting to come to America. I don’t care how you try to spin it, this is amnesty.

Article: “G.O.P. Moderates Warn Bush Iraq Must Show Gains,” by Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times, 10 May 2007.
Article: “Cheney Visits Baghdad and Presses Leaders on Political Progress,” by John Burns, New York Times, 10 May 2007.

Let’s see, moderate House Republicans (including Messrs. Gerlach and Dent) are finally having a “tough meeting” with the President on his conduct of operations in Iraq:

Participants in the Tuesday meeting between Mr. Bush, senior administration officials and 11 members of a moderate bloc of House Republicans said the lawmakers were unusually candid with the president, telling him that public support for the war was crumbling in their swing districts.

One told Mr. Bush that voters back home favored a withdrawal even if it meant the war was judged a loss. Representative Tom Davis told Mr. Bush that the president’s approval rating was at 5 percent in one section of his northern Virginia district.

“It was a tough meeting in terms of people being as frank as they possibly could about their districts and their feelings about where the American people are on the war,” said Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois, who took part in the session, which lasted more than an hour in the residential section of the White House. “It was a no-holds-barred meeting.”

Several of the Republican moderates who visited the White House have already come under political attack at home for their support of Mr. Bush and survived serious Democratic challenges in November.

Representative Charles W. Dent of Pennsylvania, a co-chairman of the Tuesday Group, an alliance of about 30 moderate Republican lawmakers, helped arrange the meeting. He said lawmakers wanted to convey the frustration and impatience with the war they are hearing from voters. “We had a very frank conversation about the situation in Iraq,” he said. Even so, the Republicans who attended the White House session indicated that they would maintain solidarity with Mr. Bush for now by opposing the latest Democratic proposal for two-stage financing of war, which is scheduled for a vote on Thursday in the House.

And the Vice President is knocking heads in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East this week:

“I do believe that there is a greater sense of urgency now than I’d seen previously,” Mr. Cheney told reporters after separate meetings with Mr. Maliki, President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, and with Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni leader who had led the threatened pullout. In other meetings, he talked with the Iraqi ministers of oil, finance, interior and foreign affairs; with Lt. Gen. Aboud al-Maliki, the Iraqi military commander in Baghdad; and with the leader of a powerful Shiite religious bloc who is both a political ally and rival of Mr. Maliki’s, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

So why weren’t “frank” discussions like this happening, oh I don’t know, two or three years ago?

Article: “Tragedy forges bond between families,” by Marion Callahan, Intelligencer, 5 May 2007.
Post: “From Col. Marc, Inside The Green Zone, On War Weariness,” by Hugh Hewitt at HughHewitt.com, 6 May 2007.

In what surely must be one of the sadder and more tragic coincidences of the war against the jihadists, two stunningly similar officers from Doylestown, Pennsylvania were killed this past week while leading Americans in combat. Colby Umbrell and Travis Manion were both 26-year-old lieutenants who seem in every sense the epitome of all that is right and good about our warrior class. Comments from their parents describe men who “saw the ‘big picture’ and wanted to help bring democracy to Iraq.”

Lieutenant Umbrell died and two of his soldiers were wounded when an IED was caused to detonate near his vehicle in Musayyib, a town some 40 miles south of Baghdad. Last year, Umbrell explained his area of responsibility in this way:

In a December interview for an Army press release, Umbrell described Musayyib as “a pretty stable town. One of the biggest problems here is the poor economic standards of the town.”

Umbrell took it upon himself to collect school supplies for children near his base. In partnership with his former Lenape Middle School guidance counselor, Ann Kuntzmann, and the National Junior Honor Society, students collected boxes of paper and pencils. His father mailed them to Iraq last month.

“He wanted to help, he didn’t just want to be there” in his military capacity, said his father, Mark Umbrell. “He said kids love to learn, but they don’t have the basic tools to do it.”

Umbrell’s sister said of her brother:

“My brother was 110 percent behind what we are doing over there, and he was so proud of the mission and the soldiers he served with,” said Casey, who still does not know the details of her brother’s death. Casey’s boyfriend is scheduled to leave for Iraq this week.

“It may take a while, but people will realize the good that’s happening over there,” she added.

Lieutenant Manion’s father gave this account of his son’s final hours:

… Travis was out on patrol with the Iraqi team and some Marines, and they were searching for a sniper who had been out in the area. … Someone led them to believe there were some insurgents in a building. They went in to clear the building. When they came out and walked back to their vehicles, a corpsman was shot by a sniper. Travis and the major pulled the corpsman to safety. As they were doing that, one Marine from another vehicle jumped out to run to help, and he was shot as well. And Travis went out to pull him back to safety.