The cacophony on Iraq

I’m not particularly interested in Saddam’s verdict so I won’t be posting about it.

I am, however, interested in U. S. policy with respect to Iraq. I hear a cacophony of voices these days, with different plans, different views, different goals.

I just finished listening to Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on ABC’s This Week. In response to George Stephanopolous’s question about the apparently conflicting plans for Iraq being advocated by various Democratic leaders, Dr. Dean denied that there was a conflict and characterized the unified Democratic plan as something he called “phased re-deployment”. Presumably, this is the same as Kerry-Feingold which I see has the support of a number of prominent Democrats. The plan calls for the removal of the majority of U. S. forces from Iraq no later than July 1, 2007 variously bringing them home and re-deploying some to Afghanistan, some to a neighboring country. It’s unclear to me what neighboring country would want to play host to a large number of American soldiers, especially after the model of Iraq. It’s further unclear to me what use more troops in Afghanistan will be other than providing more targets there rather than in Iraq.
Prior to Dr. Dean’s appearance Mr. Stephanapolous interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney largely re-stated the Administration’s position: keep training Iraq forces and pursuing insurgents.

I’ve had an excellent email correspondence over the last couple of days with John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia. I won’t share the details of the correspondence with you other than to say that John and I are largely in agreement. The key point I wanted mention was that John characterized the position of leaders from the countries that neighbor Iraq (which he heard while attending the NCUSAR conference) that U. S. forces leaving Iraq while there’s still the present (or greater) degree of disorder there would be disastrous.

You might want to take a look at the article that John cites in his most recent post:

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed throws some cold water on those who think that if the US leaves Iraq everything will just settle down in three separate mini-states. He notes that the Iraqis need to solve their problems, but they aren’t anywhere near serious enough yet to do so.

Orson Scott Card has posted an extremely interesting column on the implications a Democratic takeover of Congress next week on Iraq policy. Here’s a fairly succinct summary of his views:

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case — if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

I agree with some things Card has to say, disagree on others. In particular I think that several of the objectives in the War on Terror are in direct conflict with one another: I don’t believe we can simultaneously promote democracy and remove regimes that promote terrorism much as we didn’t attempt to establish promote democracy in Okinawa once we’d occupied the island but while the Japanese mainland was still hostile.

UPDATE

Details on Howard Dean’s “phased re-deployment plan ” are reported here by ABC News.