Wolfowitz

At first I was disappointed to hear of Wolfowitz's appointment to head the World Bank, because I was hoping he'd eventually succeed Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

But then I realized it would be a dramatic coup to have an idealistic neocon warrior at the heart of the banking system, where he could decisively act to open a strong new front against the terrorists and those who fund them (i.e., the Saudis) by hitting them in their vulnerable financing systems. Disrupting the connections between rogue states and the terror groups is key to reducing the threat from a potential existential one to a manageable one that more resembles law enforcement.

And then I go reading stuff like this from Slate:

What to make of Paul Wolfowitz being tapped to run the World Bank?

On the one hand, this is a man who has displayed strikingly poor analytical judgment as deputy secretary of defense. You may recall his smug assurances to congressional skeptics that our troops would be welcomed to Iraq with flowers and that the war's cost would be reimbursed by post-Saddam oil revenues. There was also his dismissive riposte to the prediction by Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, that a few hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed for post-war stabilization. "It's hard to conceive," Wolfowitz testified, "that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to believe."

Oh come on!

You'd think the place were a disaster.

Maybe if you just read the NYTimes and listen to NPR, you'd think that.

But objectively speaking, things have gone and are going in the right direction. Casualties for the entire war are lower than most single major battles, let alone wars. There's just no comparison.

I keep asking myself, by what measure are these pessimists judging this war? The stunning success is an order of magnitude higher than anyone had a right to expect. It is only by the unrealistic and bizarre metric of "zero-cost" that the effort is disappointing!

But this IS the era of "zero-tolerance", isn't it?

It's infantile.

The only "mistake" made was to incorrectly predict the future, which in itself was of little consequence; the big strategic ideas -- to act and to scrap the old doctrines of stability in the Middle East -- were brilliant and effective.

And no, we don't need more troops in Iraq!

The "shocking" thing, apparently, is that there indeed exist evil people determined to continue to kill the innocent in Iraq. But this is not a home-grown popular uprising.

If it were, we'd be totally overwhelmed and incapable of containing it in a nation of millions of people.

No, this war is a success exceeding all historical triumphs by leaps and bounds.
By its nature, war is characterized by a "fog" and by "friction", in which almost everything goes wrong. It has always been so, and always will be. It's even been said, to emphasize the point, that victory goes to the side that makes the next-to-last mistake! The side that adapts to the chaos fastest wins. And the US military learns and adapts faster than any in history.

I've said it before, but people should really read, oh, old newspapers from 1942-1944 or so. Things even looked bleak and lost in 1946 after the defeat of Nazi Germany, when articles appeared in Life Magazine predicting the loss of the Peace due to American bungling. (The authenticity of those linked articles by famed author John Dos Passos has been confirmed).

The Marshal Plan wouldn't kick in until 1948.

And Iraq already has held historic elections!

Iraq will be judged a fantastic success, and Wolfowitz as its chief architect, a great and visionary man.

Yet at Slate, they continue to opine, wishfully:

Some who know Wolfowitz tell me that he wanted to fill the impending vacancy at the bank. He may be, in this sense, a latter-day Robert McNamara—a war-weary Pentagon master seeking refuge to wring the blood from his hands. McNamara suffered something close to a public breakdown when he moved from secretary of defense to president of the World Bank in 1967, as the Vietnam War spiraled out of control. Lyndon Johnson had been complaining to aides for months that McNamara had "gone dovish" on him. It's unlikely that Wolfowitz has exactly turned tail on George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. Still, Wolfowitz is a smart guy, smart enough to know that Iraq has not gone at all as he thought it would, and perhaps he sees McNamara's personal exit strategy as a model to emulate.

Well if it helps you sleep at night to believe that...

There's another dimension to this transfer. Wolfowitz may have wanted to leave the Pentagon, but it's possible that his days there were numbered. (McNamara, too, was never quite sure whether he was fired or he quit.) Are we seeing the opening stages of a second-term shift of power in the Defense Department—a belated (though, if it comes, unacknowledged) reckoning with the first term's grand mistakes?

Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you? Dream on! Like Bush would oust Wolfowitz, when he won't even get rid of Mineta???

Here's the real story of what's going in Iraq, from a "lessons learned" briefing of the 1st Cav Division, as related at NRO's The Corner:

1. While units of the Cav served all over Iraq, he spoke mostly of Baghdad and more specifically Sadr City, the big slum on the eastern side of the Tigris River. He pointed out that Baghdad is, in geography, is about the size of Austin. Aus tin has 600,000 to 700,000 people. Baghdad has 6 to7 million people.

2. The Cav lost 28 main battle tanks. He said one of the big lessons learned is that, contrary to docterine going in, M1-A2s and Bradleys are needed, preferred and devastating in urban combat and he is going to make that point to the JCS next week while they are considering downsizing armor.

3. He showed a graph of attacks in Sadr City by month. Last Aug-Sep they were getting up to 160 attacks per week. During the last three months, the graph had flatlined at below 5 to zero per week.

4. His big point was not that they were "winning battles" to do this but that cleaning the place up, electricity, sewage, water were the key factors. He said yes they fought but after they started delivering services that the Iraqis in Sadr City had never had, the terrorist recruiting of 15 and 16 year olds came up empty.

5. The electrical "grid" is a bad, deadly joke. Said that driving down the street in a Hummv with an antenna would short out a whole block of apt. buildings. People do their own wiring and it was not uncommon for early morning patrols would find one or two people lying dead in the street, having been electrocuted trying to re-wire their own homes.

6. Said that not tending to a dead body in the Muslim culture never happens. On election day, after suicide bombers blew themselves up trying to take out polling places, voters would step up to the body lying there, spit on it, and move up in the line to vote.

7. Pointed out that we all heard from the media about the 100 Iraqis killed as they were lined up to enlist in the police and security service. What the media didn't point out was that the next day there 300 lined up in the same place.

8. Said bin Laden and Zarqawi made a HUGE mistake when bin laden went public with naming Zarqawi the "prince" of al Qaeda in Iraq. Said that what the Iraqis saw and heard was a Saudi telling a Jordanian that his job was to kill Iraqis. HUGE mistake. It was one of the biggest factors in getting Iraqis who were on the "fence" to jump off on the side of the coalition and the new gov't.

9. Said the MSM was making a big, and wrong, deal out of the religious sects. Said Iraqis are incredibly nationalistic. They are Iraqis first and then say they are Muslim but the Shi'a - Sunni thing is just not that big a deal to them.

10. After the election the Mayor of Baghdad told him that the people of the region (Middle East) are joyous and the governments are nervous.

11. Said that he did not lose a single tanker truck carrying oil and gas over the roads of Iraq. Think about that. All the attacks we saw on TV with IEDs hitting trucks but he didn't lose one. Why? Army Aviation. Praised his air units and said they made the decision early on that every convoy would have helicopter air cover. Said aviators in that unit were hitting the 1,000 hour mark (sound familiar?). Said a convoy was supposed to head out but stopped at the gates of a compound on the command of an E6. He asked the SSG what the hold up was. E6 said, "Air , sir." He wondered what was wrong with the air, not realizing what the kid was talking about. Then the AH-64s showed up and the E6 said, "That air sir." And then moved out.

12. Said one of the biggest problems was money and regs. There was a $77 million gap between the supplemental budget and what he needed in cash on the ground to get projects started. Said he spent most of his time trying to get money. Said he didn't do much as a "combat commander" because the war he was fighting was a war at the squad and platoon level. Said that his NCOs were winning the war and it was a sight to behold.

13. Said that of all the money appropriated for Iraq, not a cent was earmarked for agriculture. Said that Iraq could feed itself completely and still have food for export but no one thought about it. Said the Cav started working with Texas A&M on ag projects and had special hybrid seeds sent to them through Jordan. TAM analyzed soil samples and worked out how and what to plant. Said he had an E7 from Belton, TX (just down the road from Ft. Hood) who was almost single-handedly rebuilding the ag industry in the Baghdad area.

14. Said he could hire hundreds of Iraqis daily for $7 to $10 a day to work on sewer, electric, water projects, etc. but that the contracting rules from CONUS applied so he had to have $500,000 insurance policies in place in case the workers got hurt. Not kidding. The CONUS peacetime regs slowed everything down, even if they could eventually get waivers for the regs.