Where’s the Beef?

If you don’t read the non-Council submissions to the Watcher’s Council nominations during the week, you’re really missing out on a bet. There’s consistently a fine selection of posts there. This week one of the nominations from a Delaware blog called kavips caught my attention.

With all of the rhetoric and guerrilla theater going on in the Congress for the last several weeks, you’d think that the Democratic leadership was preparing to withdraw our troops from Iraq immediately. As kavips ably shows, it ain’t necessarily so.

“It is time to begin ending this war…. Start bringing home America’s troops…. within 90 days ” says Hillary Clinton. Excuse me but did anyone hear the word “all”? It seems to have been casually omitted. Previously she said this: “We have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq…. What we can do is to almost take a line sort of north of, between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region” One reporter admits that Clinton expects U.S. troops to be in Iraq when she ends her second term in 2017. She wants 80,000 more troops with an emphasis on special forces.

Obama is not pulling all the troops out either…..To control everything and everyone, he wants “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.… A 21st century military to stay on the offense.” That, he says, will take at least 92,000 more soldiers and Marines. Like Hillary, Barack would remove all “combat brigades” from Iraq, but keep U.S. troops there “for a more extended period of time” — even “redeploy additional troops to Northern Iraq” — to support the Kurds, train Iraqi forces, fight al Qaeda, “reassure allies in the Gulf,” “send a clear message to hostile countries like Iran and Syria,” and “prevent chaos in the wider region.” “Most importantly, some of these troops could be redeployed to Afghanistan…. to stop Afghanistan from backsliding toward instability.”

Obama plans to use redeployment as a carrot. The redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining certain troop levels.

Edwards goes further than either Obama or Clinton in spelling out that we “will also need some presence in Baghdad, inside the Green Zone, to protect the American Embassy and other personnel”. Edwards continues: : “I would put stabilization first.” “Stabilization” is yet another establishment code word for insuring U.S. control, as Edwards certainly knows. His ultimate aim, he says, is to ensure that the U.S. will “lead and shape the world.”

The top Democrats agree that we must leave significant numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq. This is remarkably similar to the Republican position. However,…..both sides politely seem to dismiss any mention of the number of Iraqis and/or servicemen killed during our lengthy stay………..

Neither Giuliani, McCain, nor Romney are likely to withdraw our troops from Iraq for the foreseeable future. Circumstances dictate that “the surge” will end, possibly in September but certainly by the end of the year, and we’ll draw our troop levels back down. Whether it’s to 130,000 or 100,000 or 80,000, who know?

So, none of the Democrats likely to win the White House nor the Republicans likely to win the White House favor withdrawing our troops from Iraq for the foreseeable future. There are differences to be sure: the Democrats favor declaring defeat and leaving troops in Iraq, the Republicans favor pursuing ever-elusive victory in Iraq and leaving our troops there. So why all the handwringing? Where’s the beef?

The answer is that this is a near-perfect issue for Democrats to run on in 2008. The Congress is not going to do anything. They have plenty of excuses: the Democratic majority isn’t large enough, the Republicans are obstructionist, the President is stubborn. So long as those remain the case they won’t have to take any responsibility if the rosy scenarios that those who do favor immediate withdrawal are clinging do don’t pan out. And Democratic presidential aspirants can campaign against the war in Iraq while they plan to do…about the same thing as their Republican counterparts plan to do. It’s really perfect.

The only thing they have to worry about is the eventuality that Iraq might actually some reasonable level of security and, at least at this point, it looks like they’re playing a winning hand there.

6 comments… add one
  • It’s quite amazing few on the left seem to have figured this out. Even the plan the Democrats in Congress call a “withdrawal” plan (that they’ve favored to the point of blocking all other Iraq proposals) is actually only a reduction in forces to somewhere between 50 and 100 thousand. Ironically, if the measure passed and Bush signed it, it would be a bipartisan validation of a long-term commitment in Iraq – exactly the opposite of the Democrat’s rhetoric.

    The capacity for partisans and the American people in general to blindly absorb such propaganda never ceases to amaze me.

  • I’ve got a sidebet going with the blogger at Joshuapundit that on December 31, 2007 we’ll have 80,000 or more troops in Iraq. I feel very safe.

  • I don’t think it will be logistically possible to draw down to 80k troops by the end of this year (unless the decision to do is is made very soon), but I’d agree that a political decision to do so is more than likely.

  • I didn’t pick the number 80,000 arbitrarily. I think that there are solid political reasons to think about reducing the troop strength to that level. As to what sort of mission could be tackled with that large a reduction I have no idea.

    I seem to recall some recent talk of the most practical pace being about 10,000 per month.

  • At that rate we’d only be down to about 110k by the end of the year, assuming we started August 1st.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Earlier this year Clinton was associated with a proposal by Dov S. Zakheim to keep up to 75,000 troops with the goal “to minimize American casualties, discourage Iranian, Syrian and Turkish intervention, and forestall the Kurds’ declaring independence” and apparantly anti-terrorism activities.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/washington/15clinton.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=5fb23776ba644bc2&ex=1331611200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

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