Iraq – Page 7 – Hank Kalet

No surprises from The Wshington Post

No one should be surprised that the Post is critical of the surge, but remains in the president’s corner. Consider that the paper is one of the war’s original supporters.

It’s impossible not to be skeptical that the necessary political deals and improvements in Iraqi security forces will take place. Unless there is progress that justifies withdrawals going well beyond those he announced last night, Mr. Bush is unlikely to achieve the agreement in Washington on Iraq he said he now aims for. Still, there are no easy alternatives to the present policy. In the past we have looked favorably on bipartisan proposals that would change the U.S. mission so as to focus on counterterrorism and training of the Iraqi army, while withdrawing most U.S. combat units. Mr. Bush said he would begin a transition to that reduced posture in December. But according to Gen. Petraeus, Mr. Crocker and the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies, if the U.S. counterinsurgency mission were abandoned in the near future, the result would be massive civilian casualties and still-greater turmoil that could spread to neighboring countries.

Mr. Bush’s plan offers, at least, the prospect of extending recent gains against al-Qaeda in Iraq, preventing full-scale sectarian war and allowing Iraqis more time to begin moving toward a new political order. For that reason, it is preferable to a more rapid withdrawal. It’s not necessary to believe the president’s promise that U.S. troops will “return on success” in order to accept the judgment of Mr. Crocker: “Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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No surprises here

Who’d a thunk it? President George W. Bush’s man in Iraq reviews the situation over there, in particular the president’s own policy, and offers an assessment that essentially says we should continue with the president’s policy. I’m shocked, as they say.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Shifting sands in the Iraqi desert

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
The Blog of South Brunswick

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History lessons

As Ronald Reagan might say, there he goes again.

President George W. Bush has once again shifted rhetorical course in Iraq, finally acknowledging this ugly war’s connections to a past American debacle, but doing so with a selective approach to history that reduces the United States’ 20-year history in Southeast Asia.

Our exit from Vietnam led to defeat and violence, he said, during a speech yesterday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ”

This, of course, is an absurd reduction of the historical record, which included nearly a million American soldiers losing their lives in an unwinnable and unpopular civil war that fractured this nation and poisoned our politics for more than a generation.

Matthew Yglesias, blogging for The Atlantic magazine, offers this analysis:

He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.

But this is too nuanced an explanation of history (for a fuller explanation of what happened and what went wrong, I’d suggest reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) and, besides, the president wasn’t interested in a history lesson anyway. The president (or at least his advisors and chief speech writers) was attempting to tap into this poisoned legacy of division with his speech, hoping to marginalize his opponents by reminding Americans of the nation’s loss in that war. That’s been a longstanding GOP tactic — to use U.S. failures in Vietnam to question the patriotism of war opponents and the competency of Democrats on national defense matters.
It’s a cheap shot from a man who has lost all credibility — and one that is likely to backfire, I think, because acknowledging the connections between the two wars can only underscore the futility of our remaining in Iraq. Staying will not lead to stability there, anymore than remaining in Vietnam until the mid-1970s led to stability in Southeast Asia.

More than anything, the speech underscores how deluded this president has become.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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