Foreign Policy Magazine conducted a survey, along with the Center for American Progress, of top U.S. foreign policy experts. This is from the article in Reuters by David Morgan, Monday, August 20, 2007.
Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the experts polled on May 23 to June 26 included former government officials in senior positions including secretary of state, White House national security adviser and top military commanders.
The findings were published in the form of a Terrorism Index in the magazine's September/October issue, to be released on Monday. The magazine published similar indices in July 2006 and in February.
The survey of 108 experts, including Republicans and Democrats, showed opposition to the so-called "surge" across the political spectrum, with about two-thirds of conservatives saying it has been ineffective or made things worse in Iraq.
Two-thirds of conservative experts said the "surge" was ineffective or made things worse. I am sure that the report from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker due out next month will not mention this survey. Instead the report will tout all the successes that the military has accomplished in the neighborhoods and with local politicians and tribal leaders. I suspect that none of that group of conservative experts polled will be questioned by the media pundits after the report is released. If any experts are questioned, it will be the other thirty-three percent who believe the "surge" is the greatest idea since peanut butter. Is the media that biased? You bet!
I think that the redeeming value of the report that is supposedly from Gen. Petraeus, but written by the White House staff, lies in the details that they will present. These will be success stories from Anbar and other provinces and neighborhoods in Baghdad. I sincerely believe that whenever we can diplomatically rather than militarily solve a problem between factions down on the street corner level, then the occupation of Iraq is progressing forward. Talk between the warring factions, which is the definition of diplomacy, is not the Army’s job but if it works, what the hell. These minor victories collectively can be a major justification for troop withdrawal. But we must be wary and look for ourselves at the facts presented by Bush/Petraeus.
Here are some more facts from the Foreign Policy survey as presented by Reuters.
Experts have increasingly cited the war as the root cause of what they believe to be U.S. failure to win in its war on terrorism.
Foreign Policy said seven of 10 experts supported the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq. Experts have increasingly cited the war as the root cause of what they believe to be U.S. failure to win in its war on terrorism.
Ninety-one percent of those polled said the world has grown more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percent from February.
Only 3 percent believed the United States will achieve its goal of rebuilding Iraq into a beacon of democracy within the next 10 years.
Conversely, don’t expect any of these numbers to be in the report. I suffer whenever the administration condescendingly and arrogantly delivers reports as being the truth when we know that they are either sexed up or just plain false. They act as though we haven’t a brain. They want to tell us what we should think even though their policies fail over and over.
Bush/Petraeus will certainly ask for more time, even though our military is past the breaking point, and millions of Iraqis are in refugee camps in neighboring countries, even though our national treasure is spent, and even though we loose our lives needlessly. They will ask that we stay the course.