The headline of this story in today’s New York Times pretty much sums up the debate that we will be having over the next week as we wait for Gen. David Petraeus to tell us next week taht that we can’t leave Iraq:
“Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq“
“Shifts terms.” Perhaps, moving the goal posts would be a better way of explaining the president’s approach:
With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.
As the piece points out — though, too subtly for my tastes — this is one in what has been a succession of changed bench marks and measuring sticks that the president has used to justify what has always been an unjustifiable policy.
The current approach, according to the paper, will be to focus on “ground-up relationships” with tribal and other local groups in an effort to extinguish the smoldering ash of Iraqi rebellion. Administration officials paint the new approach as an “augmentation” of earlier efforts and say it is part of a “dual strategy” in which the administration plans to work with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and local agents.
The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.
“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a
while.”
While the focus on local leaders may seem a move in the right direction to some, it really is nothing more than a way to avoid doing what has to be done — which is to begin bringing American troops home and turn the mess over to the United Nations. Americans would likely have to work with U.N. troops under such a scenario, and we’d probably have to foot most of the bill, but then we created this mess in the first place.
Enough is enough. No matter how many times the president redefines the rules, the game is still the same. And so is the outcome. Bring ’em home.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Hank Kalet 