The rush to withdraw continues

There are two articles today which confirm my belief that the U. S. is now committed to withdrawing from Iraq, regardless of consequences.  The first article is by George Will.  In the article he proposes four questions as a guide to withdrawing from Iraq:

  • What are 140,000 U.S. forces achieving in Iraq that could not be achieved by 40,000?
  • If the answer to the first question is “creating Iraqi security forces,” a second question is: Is there an Iraqi government?
  • what limits on U.S. aims are set by the character of the Iraqi people, as we now understand that?
  • Hence, a fourth question: In a perhaps intentionally opaque statement on “The Charlie Rose Show” on Oct. 6, Baker said: “If we are able to promote representative — representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, [Iraq] will have been a success.” Can President Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which Iraq has shredded, be recast by the Study Group’s showing that there is more than semantic sleight of hand in the distinction between democracy and representation?

Perhaps I’m being obtuse or unkind but I can’t see a smidgeon of consideration of U. S. interests in Mr. Will’s column.  I can, however, see more than a smidgeon of a consideration of the political fortunes of Republican legislators.

The second column is by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic Online (get it while it’s hot).  In this article Mr. Kaplan does consider American interests and arrives at the conclusion that just withdrawing isn’t enough.  He proposes serious negotations with Syria and Iran and a regional conference.

The article contains a good, succinct statement of my own views:

An emerging school of thought says that the only real leverage we’re going to have is the threat of withdrawal, which would concentrate the minds of the various groups to seek modalities with each other for governing the country. That’s a bet, not a plan. You could also bet that any timetable for withdrawal will lead to a meltdown of the Iraq Army according to region and sect. Even if we promise that all of our military advisors will stay put, in addition to our air and special operations assets, no one in a culture of rumor and conspiracy theory might believe us.

Will we have more or less ability to influence events if we withdraw our troops from Iraq?

Both articles deserve your consideration.

7 comments… add one
  • Dave:
    The Iraqi army is already in a meltdown. It was pre-melted. You don’t get a competent army without a political regime of some sort — doesn’t have to be a pleasant regime — that shows evidence of stability, that can reward its friends and punish its foes, that can meet payroll, that has some degree of coherence. No one is in charge in Iraq and as long as that’s the case there will be no useful Iraqi army. They’re just militia-in-waiting.

    As you may know, I feared the die was cast on this war a long time ago. Once you announce that you’re going to do a terribly hard thing, but you’re not going to commit fully to it, the end game is foreordained. The Bush administration in effect announced they were going to climb Mount Everest but they were going to do it in t-shirts and shorts. What a surprise: they’re tumbling back down the mountain.

  • I still don’t get it. Maybe I’m just dense. WTF good are we doing there. We aren’t protecting anyone (except maybe the contractors). Iraqi citizens are slaughtered every day. So clearly we aren’t protecting them.
    This whole thing stinks so badly. It reminds me of a veterinary techincian I spoke to tonight who explained how sometimes they had to ‘express the anal glands’ of dogs. Apparently this is supposed to happen naturally when they poop. But sometimes it doesn’t and the glands get swollen with (??). She said when they have to do that procedure the odor is so grotesque, it’s like a combination of shit smell and rotten fish.

  • Dave old man, as I have said many times, Iraq is fucked into a cocked hat and it utterly unwinnable now.

    More than a year ago, if I recall my own whanking on well enough, I noted that Iraq had entered into a “Lebanese logic” – that is the ‘centripetal’ or communitarian (and worse yet, sub-community sectarian and partisan groups) influences are far and away stronger and more self-reinforcing (flight to community or own sub-group for security) than any centralising, security granting force – barring as I said somewhere else, old school Ottoman empire style repression combined with clever deal-making w the domestic centres of power – and thus (to mix metaphors further) Iraq has already reached the stage of a run-a-away reaction/meltdown. US presence at best is like having insufficient control rods that will slow the meltdown, but not stop it. At best.

    So, Iraq has been lost. It will have a bloody civil war a la Lebanon (one hopes, and ot like the Balkans, which would be worse), and that will continue until Iraqi forces get tired of beating the bloody fuck out of each other. Or put it differenlty, as in Lebanon, when a good portion of the war lords hurt more than they feel they gain by pursuing the civil war / security for my group alone strategy, you will stop the chain reaction.

    Until then, Iraq is fucked. Period. Of course, the US might think of abandoning its now completely delusional support of “democracy in Iraq” (and mind you, I do not think admiting that project utterly failed in Iraq means it is not a good long-term strategy for the region; the Iraq fiasco was self-generated by US incompetence combined with the broken nature of the Iraqi political system / society), and back a Saddam style strongman. Unfortunatley the winning combination is not probably palatable: Probably Shia, probably religious, thus close to Iran at some level. Well the US handed Iran a gift, no way to avoid that in some measure. It may be backing someone will reduce beholdenness to Iran.

    In any case, realism about achievability is necessary, not repeating “we can’t afford to lose” – France could not ‘afford’ to lose Algeria but it did, etc.

  • Lounsbury, I’ve thought of your “Lebanese logic” observation many times over the months. As you know, I opposed the invasion and have been skeptical about victory, promoting democracy (at least by the means used in Iraq), and so on on from the very start. I’m not seeking victory or even breaking even.

    US presence at best is like having insufficient control rods that will slow the meltdown, but not stop it. At best.

    Yes, that’s a pretty good statement of what I believe. The question to me is whether slowing the meltdown is better than an explosion. I continue to think that it is.

  • Chris Link

    Perhaps I’m being obtuse or unkind but I can’t see a smidgeon of consideration of U. S. interests in Mr. Will’s column.

    Er.. isn’t concern about the US losing dozens of soldiers and billions of dollars each month “consideration of U.S. interests”? You can make the argument that the US has other security interests that aren’t well served by Will’s argument, but it’s dishonest to say he has no concern for the US.

  • Why the attitude and insults, Chris? “You’re mistaken” would have been enough rather than calling me a liar.

    Presumably this is the passage you’re referring to:

    Today the policy of “staying the course” means Americans dying to prevent Shiites and Sunnis from killing each other.

    I read this comment of Mr. Will’s as simultaneously a red herring and a strawman argument—both fallacious.

    It’s a strawman because “stay the course” means no such thing. It means, more generally, maintaining a U. S. presence to prevent the entire region from degenerating into open warfare. It may mean, as one of my commenters put it:

    US presence at best is like having insufficient control rods that will slow the meltdown, but not stop it. At best.

    It’s a red herring because to believe that Mr. Will is sincere in his concern for American dying in Iraq you must believe that he believes that even the very low level of casualties in Iraq is too much to bear. I have seen nothing in his writing to lead me to believe that.

    Further the only way that one could achieve zero casualties in Iraq is by removing our troops altogether. Even if there were no insurgency in a force of that size more than 100 fatalities per year would be expected from accidents and other causes. That’s the experience stateside.

    Indeed, the only way one can absolutely prevent casualties in our military is by eliminating it altogether. But force protection, while an important mission, isn’t the only mission or even the most important one.

    So, perhaps I should have written “Mr. Will’s concern is disingenuous”. I’ll confess to exaggeration rather than lying.

  • Chris Link

    Why the attitude and insults, Chris? “You’re mistaken” would have been enough rather than calling me a liar.

    No attitude intended – although I’m not sure how much attitude can be conveyed through a two sentence reply, at any rate. And I didn’t call you a liar, I said your implication about Will’s true concerns was dishonest. There are many ways to be dishonest without lying, and “lying” tends to have a much more negative connotation about the intentions of the person doing it than mere dishonesty does.

    And I wasn’t referring to anything specific from Will’s column; rather I was speaking as someone who’s read Will for over a decade, and while I disagree with his politics strongly, and occasionally question his judgement and his intellectual honesty, I have no doubt that he’s extremely committed to the interests of the US.

    It’s a red herring because to believe that Mr. Will is sincere in his concern for American dying in Iraq you must believe that he believes that even the very low level of casualties in Iraq is too much to bear. I have seen nothing in his writing to lead me to believe that.

    I think we need to distinguish between two lines of argument here. I’m fairly convinced that Will’s position on Iraq is that he believes the sum total of all we’re spending in Iraq – not just the blood, but the manpower, the money, and the opportunity costs – just aren’t balanced out by the actual results we’re seeing. Now, you can certainly disagree with him on this point, and fault him for not directly addressing whether the tradeoffs are worth keeping the monthly Iraqi body count in the thousands, rather than the tens of thousands.

    But what you’re doing is arguing that Will somehow has to prove his concern for Americans dying in Iraq, something I rather strongly disagree with – things get really ugly really fast when you make anyone prove their patriotic bona fides.

    You’re also making this argument by way of a strawman, ignoring the numerous concerns someone could have with our Iraq deployment beyond US casualty figures and arbitrarily pegging those numbers as “very low.” (Yes, they’re low compared to the Civil War, WW2, Vietnam, etc. No, they’re not necessarily low given the nature of the mission in Iraq, our technological superiority, and the modern media environment, where the appearance of us getting hurt is actually worse than us getting hurt.) And judging someone’s intent based on them failing to defend an argument they never made in the first place seems… well, dishonest, to me.

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