Victory In Iraq Day*, con't. *(maybe)

Admittedly, I put it up Saturday, traditionally the lowest-traffic day of the week around here, but the Victory In Iraq (maybe) post didn't generate much heat or light.  Kat pretty much just threw up her hands in frustration with my inability to get with the program, and Argent chimed in to say I was wrong, but in a different way, for a different reason -

It's a context distortion to me John. I think you are dead right in your wider context of the war on Terrorism (or whatever the hell they renamed it to) but dead wrong in the context of war in Iraq. I think Iraq is won. John there will be no obvious victory day for you to choose. I chose a date quite some time before now. There will be no surrender signing dates or silencing of the guns. Troops will draw down slowly, probably will be a few there for many years.

I hope it stays won I have good reason to hope but I know it's a bit of a house of cards. The difference is now it's more up to Iraqis to keep winning and less up to the US. It's also become more of a citizen battle than a military one.
 

Argent gets to the heart of part of the problem here - the nature of the war, and how it makes it different from other conflicts and thus harder to fit into the existing templates.  Indeed, a context distortion.

If we were to look back and pick a spot, oh, about a year or so ago, more or less, and decided to call it won - people would have laughed at you - because, except perhaps to some of the guys on the ground, it wasn't that apparent to everyone else.  While the violence has diminished greatly, *especially* in relation to US Forces, there's still a lot of unauthorized explosions going on in Iraq from day to day.  The fact that it is *far* less than before doesn't register that well when there's still enough to make the news.  And, of course, had the President declared victory, he would have been both pilloried in the press and by the Democrats, who would also have then probably demanded an accelerated departure scheme.

And while we're apparently going to get a quicker rate of drawdown now, it wasn't that long ago there was talk of having to slow it down - talk not conducive to visions of victory.

There was simply no way this campaign of the wider war was going to be able to be defined in mostly military terms.  If that was the case, then the war was won in that context in 2003 and we should have left, as Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to.  And we sorta tried to do that, in a sense.  And didn't that look bad (even if the "Mission Accomplished" banner bit is a canard in isolation) and work against subsequent events and provide barrels of poison for our politics.

 As is ever the case with wars, war aims shifted and this war is quintessentially a political conflict with political definitions of victory - however much that may frustrate those of us who want a clearer delineation, with a nice Triumph march down 5th Avenue, prisoners shambling in chains behind our chariots.  Declaring victory now, and then having a bad outcome between now and our mostly final withdrawal, will make it 2003 all over again, with the difference (and it's a big one) of having then President Obama in the driver's seat.  

I expected more activity in the comment section.  Instead, it was in my inbox.  I sent the link out to the usual bloggers and pundits I shill stuff to - and scored nary a link.  But I scored lots of email, most of it along the lines of Steve Schippert:

I'm with you, hoss. Bad idea. What happens when Iran stops playing nice, thinking we're sufficiently out enough to renew the putsch? "You asses said we won!"

But perhaps the most vehement was from Greyhawk:

You won't see my name on the list.

We have achieved military victory in Iraq. That was assured over a year ago. We had ended violence and increased security to the point the oft-mentioned 80/20 ratio solution could be applied. (common version: COIN is 80% political, 20% military). Irony: Pelosi and Reid used that 80/20 as support for their "failure" claims early in the surge.

Through summer 2007 we (I was in Iraq as part of surge) anticipated a massive upswing in violence in conjunction with the September Petraeus congressional testimony. That was scheduled for the start of Ramadan - and that high violence level was expected to last throughout Ramadan. To counter all that, we had conducted ops at an incredible pace throughout the summer. We still expected a "Ramadan spike" in violence, but as it turned out Ramadan 2007 produced only a "shelf" on the ongoing downward curve measuring "violence" in Iraq. (The chart for this is all over the web). Anyhow, that's what led to my "we won the war" post in October 2007.

Fast forward to now. I believe at this time the 80/20 ratio (90/10 might be better) is an effective one for describing the COIN situ in Iraq. But a**holes embedded in that 90% political could indeed still reignite the various fires.

I think John is right in his "years away" measure as applied to a fully functioning Democracy, etc etc. I think I'm right (and proven so by subsequent events) in my assessment of military victory over a year ago. As much as I appreciate the "Victory Day" sentiments, this means that by any reasonable definition they are very late or very early.

I wonder how many participants are also supporting the Valour-IT Project?

For the record, quite a few, but certainly not all, are participating in the on-going fundraiser.  I had other emails along the lines of Schippert's, and no one sent me a blast (of course, I haven't checked blogs yet, I might be getting my butt handed to me there).

I stand by my assessment - we couldn't declare the military victory when it occurred, because too much hinges on the political victory - and we aren't there yet. 

I'll keep my parade flags handy, though.

Update: I was getting whacked with a pugil-stick over at Cannoneer #4's place - as I just discovered his post (referring to earlier versions of this discussion) hanging in the "too many urls, waiting for approval" folder.