Here’s the thing…

Barring unforeseen eventualities it looks as though the news of the week (all week) will be the proposed “surge” of American forces in Iraq that seems to be in the offing:

As the contours emerge of President Bush’s expected plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, Congressional Democrats, who now hold the power to restrain military spending for the war, sharpened their opposition today — and revealed their internal divisions.

Although the Democrats still appear unlikely to attempt to block a troop increase by withholding money, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the new House speaker, said today that any additional spending requests for Iraq would face “the harshest scrutiny.”

The president’s new strategy, American officials have said, will call for a rapid influx of up to 20,000 combat troops to Baghdad and a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis who now face widespread unemployment. Mr. Bush is expected to describe his plan in a prime-time speech on Wednesday or Thursday.

The Democrats plan to open extensive hearings on the Iraq war in coming weeks.

I welcome the Congressional Democrats’ involvement and, honestly, I wish that there had been more Congressional involvement in 2002 and 2003. I continue to hope that wiser heads will prevail. I’m usually disappointed in that hope but I continue to hope it nonetheless.

It’s possible for intelligent, well-intentioned people to differ on what we should do going forward in Iraq. Pat Lang, one of the folks most knowledgeable on the Middle East that our military has produced, thinks that the surge is ill-conceived:

The Surge military operations will not produce the desired outcome and the Political thingy will not either for the same reason that has be-deviled our efforts in Iraq from the time we started listening to the INC and the OSP boys. (Bless Them!)

That reason is simple. We do not have “politics” in Iraq. We have tribal warfare expressed through; elections, constitutions, militias, the Shia partisan nature of the “security” forces, the Maliki government, terrorism, oil allocations, tribal fury at executions.

There is no Iraqi People. There once were the beginnings of such a people, but that is gone now, swept away, “Gone With the Wind.”

Now there is only tribal warfare among the Shia Arabs and the Sunni Arabs while the Kurds wait to see if we are going to screw them as we (I) have so many others.

Since compromise is viewed by the tribal contestants as weakness, dangerous weakness by the “tribes,” there will be little of that.

So, forget the political reconciliation. What a silly idea.

Armchair Generalist, on the other hand, no friend of the Bush Administration or, indeed the war in Iraq sees it a little differently:

There are no good options left, just those which are worse than others. I’m very pessimistic that Iraq won’t fracture into three federalist states, and at best, Baghdad is going to be like 1980s Beruit for a long time. We don’t belong in the middle of that. The best we can hope for is to give them a military and police force that they can use to maintain order – whatever that means – and that their leaders will get tired of the bloodshed and agree with getting US economic aid and protection for the future. We’re not going to get out without dealing with Iran or Syria either, and those countries’ leaders know that.

He sees a surge as a sadly necessary precondition to withdrawing our troops from Iraq.

My take on the surge is that, like so many political judgments, this is a compromise.

These days I find myself sounding more and more like Adrian Monk. Here’s the thing. Whether we surge, stay the course, or bring the troops home by July of 2006 we’ll continue to have interests in the region. They’re not going to go away in the foreseeable future.

We have only a limited number of alternatives to choose from and none of them is in the least palatable.

We can maintain a sizeable troop commitment to Iraq for the foreseeable future, keeping what peace we can, denying Islamist radicals an Afghanistan-like base, and trying to prevent the conflict in Iraq from spilling over into the surrounding countries. We’ll continue to take casualties. Spend bushels of money.  Lots of Iraqis will continue to die.

We can withdraw our troops from Iraq and let the chips fall where they may. In my view this is likely to have quite serious economic and diplomatic consequences. Recall, also, that those who would do us harm probably won’t be assuaged by this.

We can re-deploy our forces into other countries in the region hoping to be able to contain the violence in Iraq from there. I wonder which countries in the region will be willing to host this number of American guests especially considering the experience in Iraq?

I don’t believe that the “withdraw into Iraqi Kurdistan” alternative is nearly as practical, rosy, or problem-free as its advocates seem to believe. I reject it out-of-hand. Bear with me: I’m gathering information on this subject and it’s darned hard to do.

I suspect there’s going to be an enormous push in the next year or so to get Iraq out of the headlines (spearheaded by Congressional Republicans).

So I say “investigate away!” The more consideration given to the subject by Congress the more they’ll be likely to take ownership of whatever it is we end up doing however unpalatable it may be.