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November 16, 2006

No Middle Ground

Robert Kagan has done an excellent job of explaining why pulling back from Iraq with the ability to return forces to help the Iraqis as needed is a pipe dream. Read the whole thing, but I'll provide a synopsis here: moving troops into Iraq from either Kuwait or Kurdistan would take between hours and days, and those troops would be highly vulnerable to attack while en route.

Which means that hopes of a middle ground in Iraq are similarly futile. We are in a difficult situation in Iraq: if we stay, our hopes of improving things are probably pretty slim. But if we go, Iraq will dissolve into a bloodbath well beyond the current problems it faces. The proposed plan to bump troop levels by 20,000 is unlikely to work, as it's just not enough bodies to get the job done, and any attempt to put that number of bodies on the ground would be politically impossible (and far from certain of success). While we can tinker a little at the margins, the end results remain the same: stay indefinitely and hope things get better, or leave and try to ignore the screams.

But politicians don't like admitting that kind of thing. For the Republicans to admit that their strategy is nothing more than keeping a lid on worse violence at the cost of the ongoing deaths of American soldiers is to admit that their intervention in Iraq has failed. No matter how obvious that may be, no politician is likely to admit to it. Conversely, for the Democrats to admit that withdrawal from Iraq will result in a bloodbath for Iraqis is rather ticklish as well, particularly for those Democrats who voted in favor of the war back in 2002. Sure, they can claim it's all the Republicans' fault, and that they're just salvaging what they can, but that isn't going to change the fact a lot of people are going to see the aftermath in Iraq as a disaster for the United States and, perhaps, further proof that the Democrats aren't serious about national security. Is that silly? Sure, but the Democrats make that outcome all the more likely when they refuse to engage the likely results of their policy. Claims that the Iraqi government will step up once they know we're leaving sound good, but they're based on the hope that the Iraqi government actually has the ability to solve the problems it faces, and there's precious little evidence of that.

So, the odds are pretty good we'll continue to muddle along for at least another 6-12 months. The Iraqi Survey Group will offer a 'solution,' we'll attempt it, it will probably fail, and we'll be right back where we started, except that we'll have lost a few hundred more American soldiers while we waited.

I dislike not offering anything positive to the discussion. I would very much like to leave Iraq better than we found it; certainly we owe the Iraqi people that much, given the amount of suffering we've inflicted on them through our meddling. But I cannot see any realistic way to accomplish that mission. And if our national leadership can't offer anything better than hope, then they need to start acknowledging that.