I always feel a bit guilty for subscribing to the New York Review of Books.  Pulling it out of the mailbox, impressed by its authoritative headlines, I step inside and put it on the front left corner of my desk, confident that I’ll tackle it in a day or two and finally become a smart, thoughtful person with unassailable knowledge and intellectual confidence.  A month later, when my desktop copy is half-covered with bills and other unread magazines and the cover has taken on a slightly yellowed tinge, I realize that I may not be fated to be a true member of the intelligentsia. 

But I keep the Review around, not just to see colorful ads for all the amazing books I’ll never get to read, but also because it has reporting that is different from so much else we all consume in one form or another.  Take a look at Michael Massing’s excellent travelogue from today’s Iraq (with most stops inside the Green Zone) and you’ll realize how much we don’t know about our government’s continuing failures in Iraq — the country we’ve been occupying for five years.  You’ll also realize just how difficult it will be to extricate ourselves in the next five.

Massing gets himself embedded with the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, and in a thirteen-hour tour, receives both the official spiel of the assigned Army spokesman and, after a while, that same spokesman’s unvarnished view, enhanced by conversations with captains and sergeants.  The officers make it clear that they are getting out of the service as soon as they can; Massing notes the "crushing effect the war is having on the troops," one of whom says "it’s almost as if we’re fighting a perpetual war."

Massing has no problem acknowledging that the surge, "together with the Sunni awakening," has made Iraq a safer place.  But the Army can show him only  show pieces — a working school, a marketplace sheltered by blast walls, a sewage repair effort by Iraqi local government.  There’s very little evidence of homegrown economic activity.  It appears that the informal infusions of cash that the U.S. military has used to bolster Iraqi confidence and spark economic activity are economic bandaids for a country that still cannot produce (or at least distribute) its own wealth.

The country Massing sees is a place where nearly all Iraqis live in much greater squalor, fear, and physical danger than they ever did under Saddam, where even in Baghdad there is electricity for two hours a day, no basic medicines, food shortages, and "wretched tents and shacks" that have become home for many of the more than two million internal refugees in Iraq.  

It’s also a country where, unbeknownst to most Americans, the United States has continued to engage in hyperactive and ultimately useless nation-building, sending over what one State Department adviser called "a bunch of random people sent over [from various U.S. agencies] with widely varying skills who can’t speak the language, who’ve never worked in this type of environment, and whom the Iraqis didn’t even ask for."  This is the "Joint Campaign Plan" that has been U.S. policy since summer 2007, though it sounds like 2004 all over again.  It’s getting tough to be shocked at the State Department’s inability to do anything but throw people and money (a billion here, a billion there…) at the problem of Iraq.

The painful reality is that America is not getting out of Iraq anytime soon, no matter who becomes our next president.  There’s nothing new under the Iraqi sun, and as Massing writes, a hasty U.S. withdrawal is likely to lead to either civil war or Iran filling the vacuum left behind.  The only possible way out is straight talk with all the Iraqi factions, the Iranians, and the American people.  So we have to hope that one presidential candidate doesn’t have the only seat on the straight talk express.

Ned Hodgman

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