Iraq and Responsibility
posted by Will
Read the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman on the Democrats now that withdrawal is the front-and-center issue. Then read Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and James Fallows in The Atlantic (not free). These brilliant articles address the issues that will complicate the now-inevitable withdrawal of most American forces from Iraq in the next year. Democrats, while right to call for a timely withdrawal (for this reason and this reason, among many others), make themselves vulnerable to some very underhanded but very predictable Republican attacks. A more comprehensive and far-sighted policy proposal, backed by all Democrats, would go a long way toward countering the imminent Republican fecklessness and opprobrium.
cont'd after link
Hersh: Bush has a religious faith that Iraq will work out well, and the “planners” now “plan” on the December 15 elections allowing us to say “job well done, take down the flags, we’re out of here.” Apparently withdrawal, once politically viable, will be conducted on faith, as well. We’ll simply vanish into thin air. Except, of course, for the Air Force. We’ll keep them in the region to provide air support against the insurgency. But wait--how will the Air Force support the Iraqi Security Force (ISF)? Will Iraqis get clearance to call in airstrikes? If they do, the danger is that the simmering ethnic and sectarian conflicts in the country could lead to destructive score-settling and coup attempts. We could have a Sunni-Shiite civil war fought with precision guided American bombs.
This is, of course, only if there is an ISF to give airstrike capability to.
Fallows: From before Day 1 in Iraq, the Pentagon made a series of mistakes and miscalculations. All that hubris has now left our military in the position of trying to train an ISF while also maintaining its own security operations that are necessary for giving that ISF a chance to start functioning on its own. We simply do not have, and never had, enough troops in Iraq to complete both missions. For years, the U.S. military has conducted, essentially, all the counterinsurgency operations, using almost all of its forces in the country to do so. We cannot now divert resources to training without giving too many opportunities to all the little incipient Zarqawis in the desert.
So, we don’t have an ISF trained or even close to trained. If suddenly there were one, it would still be weak, as it will not have any air power. So how do we support it while at the same time avoiding making any contribution to sectarian or ethnic power struggles that should be fought out in elections.
What is the Democratic policy about the inevitable problems with the withdrawal? Critics need to address these issues, because it appears the administration won’t or can’t. The existence of these problems is not support for “staying the course”, by any means, but it will not be enough for Democrats to propose the necessary withdrawal and stop there. I can already see Dick Cheney, on “Meet the Press” next October, blaming everything that goes wrong with his war on “the war critics” and “the cut-and-run Democrats”. It will be un-American rhetoric of the most insidious kind, but we all know it will happen. We need a full Iraq plan to counter that political inevitability.
Democrats must propose a plan for withdrawal, and for what to do in Iraq once we start to leave. This war is the albatross around the Republican’s neck, but now that momentum is gathering for the withdrawal, the Roves and Kristols of the world will try to, somehow, make the whole thing our fault. They can’t handle responsibility for starting the disaster, so they’ll shift it to those who got them, finally, to end it.
cont'd after link
Hersh: Bush has a religious faith that Iraq will work out well, and the “planners” now “plan” on the December 15 elections allowing us to say “job well done, take down the flags, we’re out of here.” Apparently withdrawal, once politically viable, will be conducted on faith, as well. We’ll simply vanish into thin air. Except, of course, for the Air Force. We’ll keep them in the region to provide air support against the insurgency. But wait--how will the Air Force support the Iraqi Security Force (ISF)? Will Iraqis get clearance to call in airstrikes? If they do, the danger is that the simmering ethnic and sectarian conflicts in the country could lead to destructive score-settling and coup attempts. We could have a Sunni-Shiite civil war fought with precision guided American bombs.
This is, of course, only if there is an ISF to give airstrike capability to.
Fallows: From before Day 1 in Iraq, the Pentagon made a series of mistakes and miscalculations. All that hubris has now left our military in the position of trying to train an ISF while also maintaining its own security operations that are necessary for giving that ISF a chance to start functioning on its own. We simply do not have, and never had, enough troops in Iraq to complete both missions. For years, the U.S. military has conducted, essentially, all the counterinsurgency operations, using almost all of its forces in the country to do so. We cannot now divert resources to training without giving too many opportunities to all the little incipient Zarqawis in the desert.
So, we don’t have an ISF trained or even close to trained. If suddenly there were one, it would still be weak, as it will not have any air power. So how do we support it while at the same time avoiding making any contribution to sectarian or ethnic power struggles that should be fought out in elections.
What is the Democratic policy about the inevitable problems with the withdrawal? Critics need to address these issues, because it appears the administration won’t or can’t. The existence of these problems is not support for “staying the course”, by any means, but it will not be enough for Democrats to propose the necessary withdrawal and stop there. I can already see Dick Cheney, on “Meet the Press” next October, blaming everything that goes wrong with his war on “the war critics” and “the cut-and-run Democrats”. It will be un-American rhetoric of the most insidious kind, but we all know it will happen. We need a full Iraq plan to counter that political inevitability.
Democrats must propose a plan for withdrawal, and for what to do in Iraq once we start to leave. This war is the albatross around the Republican’s neck, but now that momentum is gathering for the withdrawal, the Roves and Kristols of the world will try to, somehow, make the whole thing our fault. They can’t handle responsibility for starting the disaster, so they’ll shift it to those who got them, finally, to end it.
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