The biggest issue facing the nation right now is Iraq, plain and simple. The simmering war continues to cost us lives and money, continues to kill Iraqis and continues to erode our credibility in the Muslim world.
It makes it nearly impossible to deal with Iran or the crisis in Pakistan. And it is bankrupting the budget, making it difficult to meet other priorities.
And yet, the chattering class has consigned Iraq to the second tier — at best.
But, as Tom Hayden points out, “the number of Iraqis in prison doubled in 2007, the number of US air strikes increased seven-fold, and the segregation of Iraqis into sectarian fiefs increased” and the “number of Americans killed last year was nearly 1,000, but that news went largely unreported.”
“Someone needs to restore Iraq to the center of the Democratic debate,” he writes, rather than leaving it up to prowar Republicans to bring it back to the table on their terms.
As I wrote nearly one year ago, the military surge in Iraq would bolster the possibilities of a McCain (and Joe Lieberman) ticket in 2008; and it has. Gen. Petraeus has succeeded in his strategic goal of “setting back the clock” in Washington and buying time for the US occupation to survive the political debates of 2008.
If Obama wants to win, he needs to sharpen his differences with Clinton immediately, going beyond style to substance, especially on Iraq. He needs to point out the differences that everyone in the political and media worlds, and therefore the voters, are missing. Under the five-year Clinton plan, while the good news is that US combat troops would be withdrawn gradually, tens of thousands of “advisers” and counter-terrorism forces would stay in Iraq to fight a counterinsurgency war like Central America in the 1970s. That is a plan to lessen American casualties and wind down the war on television, while still authorizing a nasty low-visibility one. It is impossible to criticize the CIA’s secret torture methods and turn a blind eye to what happens every day in Iraq’s detention centers complete with their US trainers and funding. With the Clinton plan, American advisers and special forces are likely to be filling those detention centers through 2013. As one expert says, “Detain thousands more Iraqis as security threats, and the potential for violence inevitably declines.”
Obama could, if he wished, say that a plan to have Americans fighting in Iraq through the next President’s first term is not a peace plan but a five-year war plan filled with risk for American soldiers. He could make the comparisons to Central America. He could point out the impossibility of funding Iraq, Afghanistan and national health care.
The argument could be a winner, tying together all the issues that Americans have told pollsters they care about while undercutting the foolish arguments being offered by Mitt Romney, John McCain and the rest of the crew.
And, perhaps most importantly, it would keep the pressure on policy makers to actually end the deadly debacle.
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Hank Kalet 