Déjà voodoo

I know you've seen or at least read about the Washington Post article from Sunday saying that, despite its public happy face, the

[t]he Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq....

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

The article mentions some painful "realities of daily life," including the fact that electricity supply, the judicial system, unemployment, and overall security are all worse than before the war began.

Daily violence surrounds ordinary Iraqis: roadside bomb ambushes; drive-by hijackings and ambushes; kidnappings; mortar and rocket bombardments; suicide car bombings; sabotage of infrastructure, notably oil pipelines; assassinations of government officials and political and religious figures; the list goes on.

Oh, but wait: That actually didn't come from the Post article, it came from a post of mine more than a year ago. It's easy to understand the confusion, though, since this is what the article did say:

Many of Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.

Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. ... Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent. ...

Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 2.5 million. Iraq's pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day. ...

"State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. ...

Killings of members of the Iraqi security force have tripled since January. Iraq's ministry of health estimates that bombings and other attacks have killed 4,000 civilians in Baghdad since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's interim government took office April 28.

So yeah, I think the confusion was easy to understand. Especially given that -

Now:

[T]he administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The surprising scope of the insurgency and influx of foreign fighters has forced Washington to repeatedly lower expectations....

Then:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz ... said Tuesday that the Pentagon had underestimated the violent tenacity of an insurgency that formed after Baghdad fell, and he acknowledged that the United States may be forced to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come.

It seems we are still "learning the lessons" and "lowering the expectations" that we were learning and lowering more than a year ago.

STDD/GTHO

Footnote: The Post also reported that

U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. ...

"We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude," said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.

At least when it comes to the Kurds, if US intelligence really was surprised at their stubbornness, they truly have not been paying attention.

A federation is what the Kurds have been insisting on all along. As far back as January, 2004 I said that the Kurds "seem in no mood to compromise," a notion I repeated as recently as last month. Coming on all "gee, we didn't think they actually meant it" now displays nothing short of willful ignorance.

I remember some years ago learning that a reason why the US was caught off guard by the Islamic revolution in Iran was that the CIA had for some time been operating under instructions to avoid contacting any opposition groups for fear of "embarrassing" the Shah, who denied any such opposition existed. I can't help but wonder, if indeed the ignorance was that deep, if there was something of that sort going on here, some sort of "we don't want to know" occurring.