Wanted: A Political Strategy

Max Boot has a long piece in the next Commentary that's essentially a critique of every available plan for rapid or semi-rapid withdrawal from Iraq, followed by a brief defense of the surge. He concludes:

Notwithstanding some positive preliminary results, the surge might still fail in the long run if Iraqis prove incapable of reaching political compromises even in a more secure environment. But, for all its faults and weaknesses, the surge is the least bad option we have. Its opponents, by contrast, have been loudly trying to beat something with nothing. If they do not like President Bush’s chosen strategy, the onus is on them to propose a credible alternative that could avert what would in all probability be the most serious military defeat in our history. So far, they have come up empty.

This is not satisfactory. Those of us on the fence about the surge are well aware of the potential consequences of withdrawal, but we are also aware that at some point, unwinnable wars must be given up as lost. As bad as admitting defeat would be, it's preferable to asking thousands more Americans to die for what ends up being judged a mistake. Avoiding that outcome, as Boot and the rest of the surge's proponents acknowledge, requires a political solution that seems, for now at least, to be beyond the grasp of the Iraqi government. So if we are to continue on our current path, we need to have less talk about the dangers of the alternative military approaches, and more talk about our options on the political front. Merely saying that "it's up to the Iraqis" and referencing the ghost of Ngo Dinh Diem as a warning against too-overt American meddling is unsufficient. If we're risking further American casualties on a high-risk military strategy in the hopes of averting defeat, we need to be prepared to consider high-risk political options as well. I don't know what these options might be - moving up the elections? a soft partition? - but if they don't exist, or if Boot and other surge proponents are too cautious to argue in their favor, then the surge's opponents will win the debate by default, and deservedly so.

Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense.

Comments

Forget it. It's over. Whatever wishes and hopes any of you might have had for Iraq will not be requited.

There's a moron in the White House, and he's surrounded by malign thugs and other morons and (worst of all) quivering yes men. And that's the way he likes it. There is simply no chance that this grotesque crew can find it within itself to take any workable steps in Iraq, and they won't go outside to find someone who could, even if that's still possible.

When will cons simply admit that they inflicted the least prepared and least able president of all upon us? I'm guessing never. The 25% will go to their graves grunting idiocies like "Kerry would have been worse," and "Under Gore we'd have been speaking Arabic." Like their Great Leader, cons never make mistakes and it's always someone else's fault.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 15, 2007 1:00 AM

We need reasonable expectations and a bit of perspective. We lost 35,000 soldiers in the Korean war (which probably killed 2 million people overall) when we had no vital interests at stake there. Fifty years later there are still over twenty thousand US combat troops there.

Iraq was, is, and will be an area of vital US interests. "More of the same" isn't sufficient, but neither is a self-administered defeat which would quite likely be our worst defeat ever.

Posted by Robert Powell | August 15, 2007 6:02 AM

Good post, Ross.

The default, as you point out, should be not committing American soldiers to war zones. Not that it should never happen, but it should be the default.

I worry about Gen. Petraeus's track record. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, he has a long history of overoptimistic assessments. Bill Kristol said the other day, I think, that 2005 and 2006 were terrible. Well, what did he say at the time, and what did Petraeus say at the time?

Plus, the same people who are now promising genocide and Armageddon if we withdraw are the same people who promised sunshine and rainbows if we invaded. It's beginning to seem like they don't have the best judgment.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 15, 2007 7:21 AM

Um, it's not just the dreaded evil neocons who are predicting "genocide and Armageddon" - I seem to remember that right-wing rag, the NYT, doing something similar.

It seems to me that Boot here is asking a particular question and one that's largely framed in the terms of those who want to entirely or partially withdraw from Iraq in the near future. They think, like Larry... above, that things are irretrievably lost and that we should cut our losses. His point is to say that picking up and leaving now wouldn't be cutting our losses - it would be making things worse, on all sorts of counts.

Ross is right to say that the pro-surge folks need to talk a "political strategy." (The same could be said of the pro-withdrawal folks as well). But I'd say that Ross's framing it as "avoiding defeat", while consistent with Boot's emphasis, is probably the wrong way to think about it. We need to think more clearly about what winning means and aim toward that - rather than "avoiding defeat" we have to "seek victory" (though I'd define it a good bit more minimally than the Bush administration's rhetoric, something like political stability, reasonably representative government, etc.) The problem, though, with "our" crafting of a political strategy is that, unlike with our military strategy, we're not the "deciders," so to speak. That is, if Iraq is to construct a stable government capable of running the country, *they* have to do it - it's really not something *we* can do, alas. Of course, there may be things we can do to help them along...

Posted by Michael Simpson | August 15, 2007 8:43 AM

I don't believe the NYT opposed the war, Michael, but I could be wrong.

"Avoiding defeat" and "seeking victory" are both inadequate, in my view. What we need-- for the first time since the debate over this war began-- is an honest debate about the cost in American lives and dollars, and the likely results of our actions.

We have never had anything like that debate-- we talked about mushroom clouds and being greeted as liberators before the invasion, and about a caliphate today.

As a person who supported this invasion, on humanitarian and WMD grounds, I hope to be convinced by Gen. Petraeus when he tells us next month that he's made progress and wants more time. But given his track record of overoptimistic assessments, and the administration's track record of focusing on best- or worst-case scenarios instead of planning, I'm not too optimistic.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 15, 2007 11:32 AM

It's a fairly simple proposition. In the absence of political progress, conditions in Iraq may deteriorate badly when we leave. This is true today, and it will be true in 2017. The difference would be an additional decade of carnage, waste, and ill will.

It is thoroughly disingenuous for Boot to describe the "surge" as something and departure as nothing. Escalation just raises the stakes without changing the odds. Withdrawal constitutes an actual change of policy. It is the only option currently on the table that actually amounts to "doing something."

If Boot has any suggestions for steps that might genuinely bring about a political solution to the sectarian conflict in Iraq, I'm willing to listen. Otherwise, it's just more carnage, more waste, and more ill will.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 15, 2007 11:41 AM

So Boot is willing to pour hundreds of billions more unavailable dollars down the toilet until libruls cry defeat? Is that the way for the nutjobs who cheered this debacle to declare victory in Iraq?

The definition of success to Boot is to get the onus off of him and his ilk as the real reason we have been defeated.

Posted by bird | August 15, 2007 11:42 AM

bird, of course - because cons are True Believers, and True Believers never make mistakes. They live in a parallel universe where Jane Fonda lost the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union by sheer force of His Indomitable Will. They're addicted to their myths and they're willing to kill for them. And George Bush isn't an egregious screwup, he's "steadfast."

Medals of Freedom for everyone!

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 15, 2007 12:34 PM

What's needed on the issue of the Iraq War is some hard-headed analysis of American interests. If the war is lost and it is necessary to withdraw the troops, then do it. If realistically this would cause a genocidal civil war between the Shiites and s Sunnis and a worse destabilization of the Middle East, then we need to continue what appears to be a decent military strategy and continue to press Maliki et al towards a decent compromise on the political issues.

As to those fools suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome including MLAJ, forget about their fevered gibberings. Too much is at stake.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | August 15, 2007 1:41 PM

This is not satisfactory. Those of us on the fence about the surge are well aware of the potential consequences of withdrawal, but we are also aware that at some point, unwinnable wars must be given up as lost.

How does one determine what constitutes "unwinnable"? If the status quo is preferable to the likely scenarios if we substantially or totally withdraw, then the status quo is the best option. It's only if the status quo becomes as bad or worse than the withdrawal scenarios that we should favor withdrawal.

The point behind the surge, contra LaFollete's assertion that it is simply an "escalation", is that it is a change in how we are using our forces in Iraq, and a change in goals. We've become much more explicit about trying to crush al Qaeda, deny them sanctuary, and degrade their capacity to inflict mayhem. This is a necessary, though not sufficient, step for creating political stability in Iraq. Another consideration is that we have been training Iraqi Army & Police for 3 years now. Progress is obviously slow and uneven, but it seems pretty clear that these forces are on the whole much more capable than they were 2 years ago. It could be the case that the surge and better trained army & police are not sufficient to stabilize Iraq in less than a decade, but we won't know that for at least another year. It's unfortunate that we did not implement the surge strategy until Jan. 2007, but the reality is that we won't have solid evidence to determine whether it will produce lasting results until at least next spring. The early results in Anbar are promising, though, so there is reason to keep going at least until then, rather than pull the plug 9 months after we started.

The point is that when making the decision, one needs a clear understanding of both what the actual status quo is, and what the actual consequences of withdrawal are. It is too facile to weigh Iraqi genocide on the one hand, against U.S. blood & treasure on the other. The US will suffer long-term negative consequences if we withdrawal, not just the Iraqis.

The Belmont Club describes the stakes involved in the smaller decision about what to do with Iraqi interpreters who worked with the British in Basra:

A second set of costs might be how much intelligence and propaganda mileage Britain's potential enemies will gain from torturing information from the abandoned interpreters, putting them on display before the media or forcing them into counterintelligence tasks. In this case the loss is must be counted more than once. Not only must money be found to pay for a replacement interpreter network but counter-intel assets must be emplaced to protect against fluent English speakers, familiar with the ways of the British Army now in the enemy employ. It's a little bit like demolition and cleanup costs that must be incurred before building a new house to replace the old one that was freshly constructed before it was abandoned.

link

Posted by Mike S. | August 15, 2007 1:46 PM

Once upon a time we had conservatives and republicans with real guts. After overseeing the betrayal and massacre of tens of thousands of Kurds, Henry Kissenger tossed off a great right-wing sentiment: "Covert action should not be mistaken for missionary work."

Those guys were sons of bitches, but they could accept responsibility for what they did. We knew who invaded and bombed Cambodia because they stood in front to the camera and said so. Hell, they weren't afraid to call it by it's right name: Escalation.

With the current crop of pansy-conservatives, nothing is their fault. The invasion? Saddam made them do it. The Insurrection? Iran is to blame. The inevitable and predictable carnage that they lead us into? The liberals won't let them win.

What a sorry crew. Boot is one of the sorriest.

Posted by JohnMc | August 15, 2007 2:38 PM

Excellent post, Ross. It seems to me that the US needs to prepare a political solution for implementation if the Iraqi authorities cannot settle on one themselves. One of the advantages of the successes of the surge is an increased credibility for an imposed solution. Obviously an Iraqi-made solution is to be greatly preferred- but something is better than nothing.

Posted by gabriel | August 15, 2007 8:27 PM

Bush has tarnish the reputations of Americans around the world with Abu Gareb, missing WMD's, introducing Al Quida to Iraq, and all his moronic cowboy "bring it on" statements.

It is impossible to recover from his blunders while entrenched in 4 wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Shia/Suni civil war, and the war on "Terror") We now lack the political, military, and economic clout to end the war in Iraq the way we want to and we will be running out of troops anyway mid next year (you can't extend forever).

We could easily wean ourselves off foreign oil (like Brazil did) but the powers that got us into this war (those energy companies that joined Cheney in secret meetings) want to keep exploiting Iraq’s oil as well as “Americas Addiction”.

The only answer I see is a measured pull out with multi party talks including Iran, Syria, Turkey, as well as other parties. The Joe Biden plan looks good except WE MUST ALLOW IRAQ TO NATIONALIZE THEIR OIL. This will give all regions a reason to remain a cohesive State devoid of both secratarian and oil company influences.

Our role should be relegated to diplomacy and nothing more. We have no right to continue military endeavors that are and always have been based on lies.

The truth is if we continue to rampage through the middle east we will only serve to bring Bin Laudins Plan (which Bush followed completely) to fruition.

We had no reason or right to go onto Iraq in the first place. Besides one very important fact that no one is addressing is, what would a successful conclusion look like? Secular democracy, an ally in the war on “terror”, flowing oil, ….all these hopes are unrealistic as well as imposing. Iraqi’s are not Americans and we can’t expect them to want to be anything like us. Especially after the example we have set in the middle east.

Posted by Dj_Dialogic | August 15, 2007 8:35 PM

Peter Leavitt writes: "As to those fools suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome including MLAJ, forget about their fevered gibberings. Too much is at stake."

The fools are the nitwits who still think George Bush could run a laundromat. He's certainly not up to running 2 wars and a massive diplomatic effort. I think even he knows that at this point.

But you keep on believing in your Great Leader, Peter. It's kind of cute, like a 5 year old kid who thinks the Tooth Fairy is real. It's just not rational.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 16, 2007 12:30 PM