Addendum: Cobb has a Charlie Rose interview up with John Burns and Tom Ricks of the Washington Post here. Burns reiterates what he said to Hugh Hewitt and Ricks has further information of various withdrawal scenarios. Well worth viewing, plus a segment on Chinese investment.

In an article in the NY Times entitled A War We Might Just Win Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack report unequivocally military progress in Iraq. Not since Walter Cronkite changed the narrative on the Vietnam war have I seen such a shift coming from an opinion leader in the MSM – particularly one that has been consistently against the Iraq war in its editorial policies. The account is pretty much the same as that being given by the observers in Iraq that I trust to try to get at the truth rather than just push a particular narrative- positive or negative. Chief among them right now is Michael Yon who is in Baqubah and the Times’ own John Burns in Baghdad. Here is Michael Yon’s reaction to the O’Hanlon Pollack article:

In fact, I have had the feeling for more than a month that top U.S. leadership in Iraq has been being cautious not to show too much optimism at this time. However, I have seen changes with my own eyes in Nineveh, Anbar, and Diyala that are more fundamental than just winning battles…..

Skipping past the blow-by-blow and getting to the bottom line: I sense there has been a fundamental shift in Iraq. One officer called it a “change in the seas,” and I believe his words were accurate. Something has changed. The change is fundamental, and for once seems positive. And so, back to the O’Hanlon-Pollack story in the New York Times, “A War We Just Might Win,” I agree.

A commenter on The Belmont Club who calls himself Pangloss reacting to a subsequent Washington Post story that says a positive report from Petraeus could split Democrats gives a wonderfully ironic summary of what may be happening. Note: To follow Pangloss’ point you need to know that an OODA loop stands for ‘Observe Orient Decide Act’ and is a prescription for military strategy formulated by the late John Boyd. It is used here in the sense that if you do it faster than your opponent – ie ‘get inside his OODA loop’, you win. Here is Pangloss’s comment:

One thing in Petraus’ favor is that he is a democrat himself, or so the rumors go. Thus he knows what democrats think like. He knows what matters to them. And he is addressing their needs in his own OODA loops as well as interfering at the political democrats’ Decide, Orient, and Observe points, kinda 4/5GW style. He’s also getting inside the OODA loop of the Badr and Sadr groups and it’s driving Maliki crazy. He’s empowering the Sunni rebels to balance Shiite militias to produce a standoff. In the short run it will cause a lot of internal displacement and heartache in Iraq. In the long run it will create stability by means of dynamic tension, kind of like detente. Shiites don’t like that. Iran doesn’t like that at all at all. Sunnis and Kurds are fine with it.

Yes, Gen Petraeus has to be thinking about what kind of progress he can make in Iraq by September that will make a difference to Congress and the American people and knows that Democrats and Republicans alike will be waiting for him with their own political survival foremost in their minds. He himself has referred to there being ‘three clocks ‘ running in this war:

• the Washington political clock
• the Iraqi political clock
• the Iraqi military clock.

His overall strategy has to take all three into consideration if he is going to prevail. Al Qaeda had given him an opening by alienating the Sunni tribes, but on just a military level he also has to make headway against the Shiite militias and the Iranian agents supplying and assisting them. Politically, he has to deal with an Iraqi government which says that they don’t want the US to leave but do little to meet President Bush’s benchmarks for political progress. When I first read that Petraeus and Maliki were getting into shouting matches over arming Sunni militias against al Qaeda and that Maliki had asked Bush to fire Petraeus, I must say I wondered why Petraeus was handling the situation that way. On reflection I think Petraeus is turning up the heat on the Iraqi government and intentionally trying to create a balance of power between Shiite and Sunni while at the same time frustrating Iran and Saudi Arabia. I don’t think it is coincidental that the US is currently complaining about Saudi failure to prevent their nationals coming to Iraq (ie reinforcing al Qaeda) while agreeing to sell them 20 billion dollars worth of high tech armaments. It looks to me like Petraeus is pushing all three clocks ahead as fast as he can.

To return to the O’Hanlon-Pollack article, the emergence of a new narrative from the US left is important. I believe the Democrats were painting themselves into a corner and making it look like they were quite prepared to allow Iraq to descend into chaos and be completely at the mercy of its neighbors. Therefore, I don’t think the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece is as big a shift in narrative as Cronkite’s was but rather a nicely timed bit of hedging. I have never believed that the Democrats will force a pullout where they can be blamed for the consequences or that either Obama or Hillary would just walk away because it is so plainly against US interests. I think they will blame Bush and pretend they can make things go back to the way they were just as the Baker Report did from the Republican side. But the truth, to paraphrase Hilary, is they have to deal with the Iraq they have in January 2009, not the Iraq they wish they had. And that is just as true for any Republican that might become the next president.

I believe this surprising shift in narrative also makes it possible to see the real dilemmas facing both political parties below the level of political maneuvering and competing narratives. Here is John Burns of the NY Times in an interview with Hugh Hewitt giving his view of how a fixed deadline for withdrawal would motivate the Iraqis to come to an accommodation.

JB: Well, you would think it would be so, wouldn’t you, that the threat of withdrawal of American troops, and the risk of a slide into catastrophic levels of violence, much higher than we’ve already seen, would impel the Iraqi leadership to move forward. But there’s a conundrum here. There’s a paradox. That’s to say the more that the Democrats in the Congress lead the push for an early withdrawal, the more Iraqi political leaders, particularly the Shiite political leaders, but the Sunnis as well, and the Kurds, are inclined to think that this is going to be settled, eventually, in an outright civil war, in consequence of which they are very, very unlikely or reluctant, at present, to make major concessions. They’re much more inclined to kind of hunker down.

Then asked about the effect of giving the Iraqis more time Burns replies:

They [Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker] understand that there has to be something of a fire lit under the feet of the Iraqi leaders. It’s a paradox, it’s a conundrum, which is almost impossible to resolve. Now I think the last thing that you need is an Iraqi leadership which is already inclined to passivity on the matters, the questions that seem to matter most in terms of a national reconciliation here, the last thing they need is to be told, in effect, the deadline has been moved back three years.

Asked bluntly if he thinks the war is lost Burns replies:

No, I don’t, actually. I think the war is close to lost, but I don’t think that all hope is extinguished, and I do think, as do many of my colleagues in the media here, that an accelerated early withdrawal, something which reduced American troops, even if they were placed in large bases out in the desert to, say, something like 60-80,000 over a period of six to nine months, and in effect, leaving the fighting in the cities and the approaches to the cities to the Iraqis, I think the result of that would, in effect, be a rapid, a rapid progress towards an all-out civil war. And the people who are urging that kind of a drawdown, I think, have to take that into account. That’s not to say, I have to say, that that should be enough to inhibit those politicians who make that argument, because they could very well ask if that’s true, can those who argue for a continued high level of American military involvement here assure us that we wouldn’t come to the same point three or four years, and perhaps four or five thousand American soldiers killed later? In other words, we might only be putting off the evil day. It seems to me that’s where this discussion really has to focus. Can those who argue for staying here, can they offer any reasonable hope that three, two, three, four years out, the risk of a decline into cataclysmic civil war would be any less? If the answer is no they can’t, then it seems to me that strengthens the argument of those who say well, we might as well withdraw fairly quickly now.

I don’t think John Burns’ opinion is just calculated ‘narrative’ – that is, what you tell the kiddies. While it is just his opinion, he is in Iraq and has been pretty continuously since Saddam’s time and has demonstrated that he is an astute and honest observer. (He refused Saddam’s minders and unlike CNN did not trade his integrity for access and has since consistently reported the war evenhandedly and a variance with the view of his own newspaper.) So I think his appreciation of the situation makes it clearer how Gen Petraeus is trying to influence both the Iraqi and US political clocks. It is actually good he is getting in shouting matches with President Maliki because it demonstrates that he is lighting the needed fire under him or ‘getting inside his OODA loop’. And the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece shows that Petraeus is making enough military progress to move the NY Times and by extension the anti war Democrats to hedge their bets. Still, as Burns clearly indicates the inaction of the Iraqi government remains the most likely reason we may lose this war. Michael Yon’s latest dispatch sheds light on what Gen. Petraeus is doing to circumvent that central government. It details how American officers are constantly pressuring, and at the same time enabling, local government to get the job done from the bottom up.