Iraq – The War, The Underwar
and The Long Way Home
1. War
Can we win in Iraq? No. Not according to the shifting nature of the publicly stated goals of the administration and the way in which it has gone about trying to achieve them. Yet, in actuality, according to what the American people were initially told, the American military has long ago won the war we originally went there to fight. We effectively disarmed Iraq, deposed its leadership, successfully achieved regime change and then provided the Iraqis a decent chance at a new representative government. This war was sold as a preemptive, defensive war to protect ourselves. This was untrue, of course, but by anyone’s assessment we succeeded at it and now unlike Viet Nam, we actually could and could have for several years now, proclaim victory and go home.
Our problems in Iraq arise with perception, deception and definition, not with military failure. The war in Iraq has fallen victim to a deadly mission creep. The military has admirably held to their end of the bargain but the politicians have not kept to theirs. From the very beginning this has been a political war, entirely unnecessary, in search of its own domestic political justification.
Quickly all the reasons initially put forward to steamroll us into this war, one by one, were proven to be untrue. Once the administration realized that the public had discovered that in Iraq we were sacrificing for nothing it became incumbent on the Incumbents to kick the scam down the road by inventing another set of goals to superimpose atop the original reason we went to war in Iraq. From that moment, when the administration replaced the wholly dishonest goals used to lure us into Iraq with a set of completely unattainable goals to keep us there, the war was irretrievably lost.
That’s why, having already easily won the war militarily, from the perspective of history looking back, it will seem the United States was determined to go out of its way to lose the war politically. Why? Because it is always easier in life to lose than win and the path of least moral insistence is always easier to follow and more likely to lead to certain defeat than victory. Being too cowardly to answer to the American people for the fact that every rationale advanced for the necessity of the war was erroneous, instead of honestly admitting their mistakes to correct them the political class decided to dishonestly perpetuate them to cover them up and hope no one would notice the misdirection.
Partially this bait and switch confusion was made possible by the fact that the administration never had the faintest idea what it was after in Iraq or the many layered complications it could face there. Therefore they lacked the tough mindedness, the moral and mental fiber and durability and discipline of purpose and drive to focus on strictly achievable aims. It seems there was never any coherent strategy coordinated inter-departmentally in the White House. The Secretary of Defense and his aides, the Vice-President’s office and the President and his political handlers were each reading from different playbooks as to the nature of this war and its goals.
Since this war was never properly or honestly engaged in in the first place this enabled them to give themselves wide latitude with the truth when they explained their self-protecting rationales for continuing to fight it. Your public statements can’t conflict with your private strategies when no public policy has ever been agreed upon and your secret policies and beliefs have never been shared with the public.
It‘s never virtuous for a bureaucrat to “stay the course” when the course entered onto was wrongly charted from the outset. Yet the politicians are still attempting to portray their intellectual torpor, unbridled fears and congenital political dishonesty as bravery and steadfastness while accusing far wiser Americans who knew better than to get into this war in the first place and are gamely trying to craft remedies to extricate us from it as defeatist and unpatriotic. This is a plural loss for the country, for instead of making just a few wrong decisions, for their own selfish political rationales and lack of personal accountability they have chosen to continue and compound them. It’s as if they are willfully determined to squeeze every ounce of wrong and loss and cost out of their original mistake as they possibly can. Along the way they have stubbornly prohibited any and all course corrections which might have either salvaged the policy or ended it sooner.
2. Underwar
What should we have done better? Immediately following the fall of Saddam the President should have addressed the Iraqi people. He should have stressed our partnership with the Iraqi people and offered to help them establish a new democratic government from the chains of tyranny from which they had just been freed. This is how liberators behave. He should have stressed that the patience of the American people was not endless and our commitment would not be open ended. He should have said that the American people wanted our troops back home safely and back home soon. He should have emphasized this voluntary partnership of the American people with the people of Iraq.
What would this have accomplished? First, it would have encouraged the Iraqis who desired good government to act expeditiously and cooperatively to work together with us to achieve it. Second, it would have undercut the terrorists’ ability to convince suicide bombers that we were occupiers. Why blow yourself up to drive someone away who is anxious to leave anyway? Third, it would have been the truth. The patience of the American people is not endless. Finally, the President should have stressed to the Iraqi people that the American military is not intimidated by threats and do not respond well to acts of violence or demands made on it at the point of a gun. In fact, if you dislike the American presence in Iraq the best way to ensure its swift conclusion would be for peace to break out.
From the start he should have emphasized not our willingness to stay indefinitely but stressed how anxious we were to leave. This would have given our policy maximum flexibility to stay or not as the circumstances necessitated. The proper diplomatic psychology may also have encouraged prominent Iraqis and other nations in the region to publicly urge us to stay which would have helped validate our mission, increased our leverage, and made the participation of other nations easier to enroll.
Obviously these things would not have alone ensured success and “won” the peace but at least they would have aligned the incentives of the desires of the Iraqi and American people properly together and given the policy a better hope of success. It would have also kept control of our own policy firmly under our own control. By guaranteeing we were going to stay until Iraq had learned democracy we effectively ceded complete control of our policy into the hands of a lot of people who don’t necessarily mean well by us and then were forced to plead with them to help us. By enunciating a self-serving policy and then daring our enemies to try to stop us has made us beggars in Iraq. This was not a sign of strength but of weakness and a perfect prescription for disaster.
It was on this narrow hinge of perception between liberation and cooperation or occupation and opposition that our tenuous hope for success in Iraq swung. When the administration chose the path it did it permanently shut the door on all potentiality of success and vindication in Iraq.
By trying to sound strong the President weakened us by allowing his dictatorial propensities to overwhelm his democratic ones. He arrogantly proclaimed himself the great and sole “decider” of American policy and said that only he and he alone would decide American policy. This could not have left a worse impression for the successful completion of our policy aims and couldn’t have been more wrong about the role of the president of a democracy in a time of war. Instead of emphasizing that peace would cause us to leave he actually dared the terrorists to try to drive us out by war as if we were determined to stay forever. It is hard to imagine a more astonishingly self-destructive posture than this.
Instead, the President should have simply told the truth not only to the American people but to the people of Iraq. The American people ultimately decide policy. This is a lesson he and his supporters will soon learn. Yet because the President doesn’t or pretends not to know this, he was the chief underminer of hope for success in Iraq. Why was the administration then and still unwilling to commit to a plan to get us out of Iraq? Why were they willing to keep us mired in Iraq indefinitely and lie to Congress and the people of the United States as to their true intentions?
Clearly the war in Iraq was entered into disingenuously and sold to the American people as a jingoistic necessity of fear mongering, hurt pride, easy victory and seminal vengeance. None of these reasons amount to a proper foundation for a legitimate war even if true wholly or in part. But these were not true at all. This was a war of political convenience, arrogance, misperception and opportunism, not of necessity.
This is the key to the underwar, because unlike what we were told, the administration always considered the war in Iraq not a defensive war of principle but an offensive war of greed, empire building and imperialism. A long term occupation of Iraq foreign to our history, the lessons of the last century and current logic in the Middle East was their goal all along.
Like archeologists working backwards, it is just possible to excavate and interpret their original intentions from the remaining ruins of their failed policy despite the astonishing dishonesty and ineptitude of its execution. Of course the victory over a poor and unarmed nation was not militarily difficult. But now we see that the end of the war in Iraq and the resulting occupation were destroyed by the political and ideological baggage we carried in with us from the beginning. Taken all in all, the war in Iraq happens to very much resemble a typical British Colonial War of the late 19th century.
Look at the record. We invaded Iraq, deposed its entrenched dictator and his Baathist party and dismantled its means of power, its military and its police. In so doing we completely shifted the structure of power in Iraq and intruded ourselves too deeply into the debate over its future. We imagined our military would take over the day to day security in the nation even though in such a turbulent country, the disparate micro and macro responsibilities of the military and the police respectively, represent an impossible contradiction in duties for a unitary military command. Unfortunately, in this dual and contradictory mission, given the size of the country, the administration never devoted enough troops on the ground to achieve security in either arena.
Next we brought in our own governor (Garner then Bremer) and even tried to ship in a would-be puppet (Chalabi). Though how we expected to get a puppet elected in a democracy without corrupting the democracy we were allegedly there to establish has never been explained. Especially given the fact that the puppet was thoroughly disreputable and untrustworthy, a fact everyone outside of the Defense Department seemed to be uncomfortably aware of.
So far so Colonial. Here’s where it gets interesting. There was an entity called the British East India Company in the British Empire. It was one of several purely commercial enterprises which would set up shop in countries on the periphery of the British Empire, impose and expand upon them, get in trouble with the locals and then call on the British army to bail them out. The resulting war generally resulted in more land colonized for the British Empire. The net result was that these parasitic commercial operations consistently pushed British policy where it wouldn’t have otherwise logically gone. These wars invariably led to public money being spent in pursuit of private profits with little real benefit to the British taxpayer in return and slowly exhausted the credibility and resources of British Empire from inside out.
Ultimately this was a major part of what the Iraq war was about. It is the real reason, the underwar, at the root of the invasion of Iraq. Working in the reverse sequence to the way East India Company operated, the Bush administration fought this war with thought of the establishment of commercial interests in Iraq uppermost in its mind. So even while the President was insisting that no decision had been made concerning this “defensive” war, no-bid contracts were already being let by his administration to guarantee that corporations with close, even incestuous, ties to his administration would profit inordinately and exclusively from it.
Showing the true priorities that motivated their interests, the administration actually placed commercial interests in position before it had finalized drawing up the military plans for the invasion. What kind of government divvy’s up the anticipated spoils prior to planning the military campaign designed to secure them? One destined to fail. This is a symptom of the lack of discipline and comprehension in this administration which doomed this operation from the outset. No war in history has been successfully fought this way. Most of the retired military men and defense analysts who spoke out rabidly and publicly in favor of the necessity of the war and were present at its genesis held opinions that were fatally blindered by their own conflicts of interest.
Iraq was a textbook British colonial enterprise a hundred and twenty years too late. The idea of huge public expenditures for private and personal profits, some of which would flow directly back into the very pockets of those who fostered the war fever - and in the process strengthen their friends’ stranglehold on political power - was what drove their entirely contrived war.
This is why the President could never speak of prematurely leaving Iraq because he never intended that we would. The authors of this war intended that these Americans companies would run the economy of Iraq, along with all the private security businesses, buttressed by our military and funded by our taxes. All the risks were to be born by American soldiers and taxpayers while all the benefits would go solely to close promoters of the President’s party. Along the way, incidentally and ironically, they would profit by helping rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq which our military had just destroyed. And naturally the biggest prize, the one they really had their eyes on, was to become the indispensable men in the middle of the Iraqi oil business.
Even if the scheme of public expenditure for private profits was not entirely what they intended it is precisely what has come to pass. To this day not a dime has returned to the American taxpayer from the astonishing outlays, riddled with waste and mismanagement, connected with this war. Fortunes have certainly been made by the proponents of this war, but not by milking any intrinsic wealth of Iraq. Rather they have mulcted the American people of their hard earned tax dollars via direct transfer payments to the very corporations connected to the administration that manufactured the war.
To manage their fantasies of wealth and empire, the administration, instead of planning a withdrawal after the fall of Saddam, talked of building the largest US embassy in the world in Iraq and floated concepts of permanent military bases on Iraqi soil. Nothing could have screamed colonialism louder or been more destructive to securing the peace in Iraq than this.
Surely this was a magnificent plan, regrettably it was not part of the deal the President made with the public. No American citizen had ever signed onto a long term occupation of Iraq. Except as a second or third tier rationale or afterthought of justification, we had never heard of such a thing. None of their secret ideological and graft ridden intentions in Iraq were ever made clear to the American people. Instead all we heard was the administration’s tale of liberation, freedom, al Qaeda, and terrorists on the run. As far as the public knew this was a defensive war of necessity and liberation. But once the attack on Iraq occurred we behaved much more like invaders than liberators, far more anxious to secure the security of the oil fields than the safety and well being of the Iraqi people.
If you imagine for a Baghdad second the truly cynical nature of this “liberation” was ever lost on the Iraqi people or anyone else in the region, you are sorely mistaken. With this realization of course, the hearts of minds of the Iraqi people were forever lost from the start. The aggressive behavior of our troops and atrocities like Abu Ghraib only confirmed existing beliefs. The administration’s absurd reliance on a friendly reception to win the war as well as the peace in Iraq was destroyed at the outset by the crude and nakedly dishonest intentions of the underwar. Since we treated our allies like enemies and the Iraqis like a conquered people, nuisances to rather than partners in our grand designs, they resisted us staunchly from the beginning and soon inevitably and predictably began to behave more like insurgents than friends.
If this were really 1880 this cynical realpolitick might have just worked. Unfortunately the one thing the 21st century lacks that was present in the 19th century is the complete docility of a conquered people. The Iraq war was a stupendously good plan if you had somehow not noticed that an entire century and a quarter of history had intervened which made its success impossible.
Though all of the details of the complexity of war needn’t be shared with the American people prior to it - that’s what we hire them for after all - there still must be an essential coherence and honesty between what the people are told and what the politicians are thinking. Unfortunately in this war the disparity between what we have been told and what the leaders of the country were thinking and doing and why, the gap in credibility between reality and cover-up, is unprecedented in our history.
There has never been any benefit to the American people possible from this war, there never could be and there never will be. The very concept of public expenditure for private profit which seems to have motivated it was frankly anti-American in its designs. That this unnecessary war was piggy backed on a real and present danger by terrorists against us and has worked counterproductively to our success in the real war on terrorism, makes it particularly hard to forgive.
Now to disguise their guilt further, finally United States foreign policy has been cynically usurped and inserted as a wedge issue into American politics, creating an even greater split on the home front and making it even more unlikely that proper policies will be logically and properly debated much less pursued. The underwar at every point in the policy, the corruption, the incompetence, the betrayal of trust and lack of historical comprehension, has overwhelmed any hope of any benefit from the policy of a preemptive war against Iraq ever returning any benefit worth the cost to the people of the United States.
3. The long way home
Now in Iraq we are not winning but, as T.S. Eliot said, “We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.” By this time our rationale for staying is no longer an affirmative policy of any strategic benefit to the United States but a remedial policy of trying to correct and contain the very problems that our ill-conceived incursion has created. Irrationally, we are trying to stave off further disaster by greater commitment to an entirely mistaken policy, by throwing good policy and good money after bad, and live soldiers after dead and wounded. When has such a strategy, that of building a good house on a bad foundation, even if laughably mischaracterized as a “strategy”, ever worked? Never. Particularly when the same ones who mismanaged this policy in the first place are the ones in charge of transforming it.
Not only is there no longer any military or strategic benefit to the United States from our continuance of a failed policy in Iraq there is no benefit to Iraq either. From an American politician’s narrow perspective, however, the ongoing failure in Iraq plays better far away than it will once it’s over and brought back close to home. Rather than have to find the courage to bring the troops home, if they could get away with leaving them there forever, they would.
Obviously the time to end the war in Iraq or derive any significant benefit from its continuation has long since come and gone. But if left to the politicians, because it will expose them to the universal recrimination their failed policies deserve, there will never be a good time to get our troops out. They will always find excuses to remain. They have already floated every evasion, denial, excuse and untruth they can to cover up their incompetence and lack of will.
And in the meantime they continue to blame everyone else for their errors. In their desperation, the authors of this looming defeat (by their definition of political victory) are trying to wage preemptive war against the American people by labeling them “defeatists” for daring to point out that the policies they continue to favor are leading us to certain defeat. Mindlessly regurgitating phrases from Viet Nam, our last great politically engineered fiasco, they claim that any withdrawal of troops from Iraq is a “cut and run” strategy. Instead they propose to continue with the same - stay until we can’t stay any longer - policies that clearly have no hope of success.
By now, the only ones who still want to keep our troops in Iraq are the politicians in both countries. Since, by this time, each group of politicians holds a minority position in their own country, neither group is necessarily the best barometer of what is best for either Iraq or the United States. On the contrary the majority of people in both countries want the occupation to conclude as soon as possible.
Their current favorite, albeit negative, justification to stay in Iraq is not to stay so that things may improve but so that they may not grow any worse. This is hardly sustainable. To suggest our troops need to stay in Iraq to keep Iraq safe is an absurdity belied by the steadily growing destruction and violence accompanying our presence there. We have been there for three years and tribal and sectarian violence has gotten progressively worse. Three years is more than long enough to discern a trend. How one of the primary causes of the disease of deterioration can suddenly be reborn as the primary impetus of consolidation is not explained. Yet this complete contradiction in theory and thought stands as their primary rationale for continuing the policy.
Other reasons given for staying in Iraq, “we must win” or “we can’t afford to lose this now,” are similarly specious. Especially when you understand that the very policies they say it is desperate to continue are the very ones that have brought Iraq increasingly close to the brink of the very civil war we say we want to avoid. This is logic tantamount to trying to avoid falling over the edge of the cliff by edging ever closer to the edge of the cliff. To blindly persist in a policy that is not working is no policy at all. To maintain we “must win” in Iraq now is nonsensical. Transparently the “we” they are so interested in protecting in such statements is not the United States but the reputations of the politicians who got us into this.
Of course, we were also told we couldn’t afford to lose Viet Nam – yet we did (despite all the losses awarded us for our politicians’ persistence) and won the Cold War in spite of it. The lesson of history here is to beware presidents and politicians who persist in confusing the best interests of their own careers with the best interests of their country’s. They will always give preference to their jobs to the detriment of the nation and label it patriotism.
The longer this defective strategy continues, by its diabolical denial, it systematically paints us farther into a corner and continues to erode any feasible grounds for our troops’ orderly and dignified withdrawal. We have said we will not leave Iraq until the country has achieved peace and self-determination, even though Iraq obviously can’t possibly achieve peace and self-determination until after we’ve left. The occupation is not proof against growing sectarianism but the primary enabling component of the destabilization at the root of the unrest. True security in Iraq can not be achieved in Iraq as long as we remain there and yet we’re told we can’t leave until after it does. It’s like refusing to let a mortally ill patient enter the hospital until after the disease that’s killing him has spread too far to be contained.
The very concept of not taking the burr out from under the saddle until the bronco has stopped bucking belies its own purpose. Any idea that democracy can be imposed on a highly fragmented society against the tumultuous backdrop of an Islamic political, social and religious reformation during an unpopular foreign military occupation amidst outside international terrorism and internal, internecine sectarian violence in an embittered, war torn country which has never come close to establishing democratic institutions on its own is like trying to reconstruct the Taj Mahal out of soap suds in a canoe rushing toward Niagara.
This is particularly true when the form of government we are trying to impose on this country is democracy which does not lend itself to force and dictation. Democracy requires a modicum of voluntary trust and tolerance and cooperation to arise spontaneously among all its participants to establish. Each faction must be willing to subsume a small part of itself in favor of a greater good for all that is often not easy for the vengeful to see.
As all the elements of self-sacrifice that normally compose democracy seem to be in short supply here, the goals we say we are staying in Iraq to achieve cannot be obtained in the way we are trying to achieve them. As a general rule it is simply not possible for one nation to reengineer the very being of another nation. Whenever you cut into the fabric of a country’s core ethnic, tribal or religious roots to try to transform it from within and dictate another style of government on it, you create a counter movement and rotation and backlash which immediately rises in opposition to ensure that it can’t be done. In Iraq we have gone too far in. We have ripped the fabric of civility apart and exposed the dark undercurrents of hate and intolerance that lay just beneath the surface of any nation and splayed them bare to the open air. By now we are too much a part of problem by now to ever be a part of the cure.
Yet we have placed their apprehension of true democratic understanding as a condition of our withdrawal from Iraq and the ultimate measure on which the relative success of this war should be judged. For their own purposes our leaders have staked our nation’s reputation on an unachievable abstraction which is not in our power achieve. To simply achieve law and order would normally be difficult enough in an invaded country. But our administration has inexplicably chosen Iraq to mold into a transformative democratic paradigm with which to change the Middle East and perhaps the world! In vain pursuit of creating a chimerical new Eden in Iraq on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates we’ve in the interim completely lost all ability to achieve simple security with the water running and the lights on. Such an astonishingly ambitious goal would have never been attempted even by (and by this I mean especially by) far more capable governments of our past let alone one of the least capable we have ever seen.
Naturally it’s to be expected that the government of Iraq would want us to stay in order to continue to prop them up but no one in Iraq currently has less control over events than its own government. As should be clear to any objective observer by now, whether we leave in two months or two years, the way things are currently headed this government will not survive the occupation. Reason has lost out to passion and power has long since moved to the streets and to the guns. That is where the future shape of Iraq will be formulated. This is not the way any one would want it to be but it is the way it is, and no amount of wishful thinking or additional loss of American life is going to alter the equation.
Like it or not, the future of Iraq is liable to be formed by forces over which we have the least control. If they choose to keep some key elements of the existing government is something we may strongly recommend but not ensure. We no longer have a vote. But the longer we stay in force, the more discredited and less effective and respected the current government of Iraq will become.
If our government hadn’t invented a determination to control a course of events over which we could never conceivably have control, we wouldn’t still be there. Iraqis must determine the future in Iraq and they will, in short order, once we leave. Their future is their own. True, it won’t be pretty but it will probably be quick. The ensuing result won’t be very democratic; it may well be a divided country; it may be a strong-arm, one man rule state; or a borderline theocracy. But there is very little we can do about it now except counsel and advise. It is delusional and self-defeating to entertain any thought to the contrary. Yet this is the entire crux of our policy.
Meanwhile, not only does the situation in Iraq continue to worsen, as it has nearly every day since the fall of Saddam, and the price for our occupation continue to escalate, but the violence has and will continue to radicalize and destabilize the region. It is part of the entirely simplistic approach to this policy that its proponents assumed that the rest of the world would stay static and docile while we worked our magic in Iraq. Many pretend that the increasingly aggressive behavior of Iran and Syria and the election of Hamas and the provocations of Hezbollah have nothing to do with our presence in Iraq. They are mistaken.
The region has to be considered as an interconnected whole and to posit 150,000 American troops in Iraq in the middle of a power vacuum of our own creation, was bound to cause massive reactions and eventually bring instability to the whole region. To not understand this is to comprehend nothing of foreign affairs, or Islam today. We risk greater and inevitably worse repercussions the longer we stay tied down where we are.
Unfortunately this leaves us waiting for the very same policy makers who were frightened and duplicitous enough to get us into this mess to somehow suddenly turn brave and wise enough to get us out of it. This is a little like FEMA hiring Michael Brown to correct all the mistakes that Michael Brown made when he was head of FEMA. Unfortunately George Bush is the Michael Brown of Iraq (and was ultimately the head of FEMA too) and he his entire team (Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al) that got us disreputably into the war are still in charge, insisting they’ve never made a mistake, wouldn’t change a thing and we must stay the wrong course. And all their supine supporters in Congress are still telling us that it is unpatriotic and defeatist to protest their incompetence and defeatism.
Diplomacy is best when it is played like a complex and subtle game of three dimensional chess. Our foreign policy apparatus in this administration has broken down and is being played with all the shrewdness and depth of children losing at checkers. It is controlled by people more interested in hoping against hope that they will be vindicated in their errors than they are in correcting all the errors they have already made. Unfortunately, there is no one with any strategic grasp in this administration or in Washington that has their ear. Other ideologues are already insanely suggesting widening the war farther, into Syria or Iran.
Since they refuse to acknowledge the lessons of history our leadership has doomed us to repeat them. So in Iraq we are now pursuing what might be called the Viet Nam strategy of certain defeat. Their plan is to wait until the dissolution becomes absolutely untenable and then leave in a mad rush through the last door left open with the odor, by our own leaders’ unrealistic definitions of victory, of defeat surrounding our retreat. It is not defeatist to point this out but it is certainly defeatist to continue to pursue the policy which ensures defeat and is only continued because of a lack of will to change it. This is how weak politicians traditionally circle their wagons and conspire to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory.
Of course we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Still it’s not too late to start doing now what we should have done from the beginning, to quit nursing our delusions and chasing chimeras, but keep our political and military feet firmly planted on the ground to make the hard choices necessary to succeed.
It is long past time for the people of the United States to begin take back control of our own hijacked policies and to give the Iraqis back control of theirs. The politicians will never do it of their own volition. The American people, the true “deciders” of American policy, must demand that Congress and the White House get our troops home as safely and expeditiously as possible. It is hardly defeatist to accept the observable truth that only Iraqis can determine the future of Iraq and accept the obvious reality that there is no longer any American military solution possible in Iraq (a fact long accepted by our military leadership).
Unfortunately it is always infinitely more difficult to get out of a war than to get into one. It will not happen overnight. Any fool can do the former, it takes an honest, energetic and clear headed policy to achieve the latter. The first thing we must do is prepare the ground for withdrawal by taking control of our own policy back. We do this by establishing a loose timetable for a careful withdrawal. Contrary to what has been said, this will not be “cut and run” but must be effected with measured care, infinite strategic calm, balance, logic and diplomatic skill. Strategic withdrawal in warfare is the most difficult of all the military arts and if done timely and well has often been the means by which wars are won not lost. If it is well executed it may actually help to provide some of the semblance of the context and direction the Iraqis have always needed to make some hard compromises and decisions about their future.
Let’s be clear. Timely, intelligent withdrawal is the only way we can preserve any semblance of good will and residual benefit from our sacrifice in Iraq and hope to continue to exert any beneficial control over future events. Obviously the end of our occupation can hardly lead to any worse disorder than we are already heading toward. Sometimes it is only by preparing to leave that you can win.
Is this a “cut and run” strategy? As opposed to the “stay until we’re beaten and forced to leave ignominiously” policy we are currently executing with such success? Absolutely. We must CUT our losses to consolidate our gains. We accept the good of the victory we have already achieved in Iraq according to the original goals of the war. Then we RUN all the dishonest and incompetent politicians who misled us into and mired us down in this mess out of town. There is only one good solution and clear way out in Iraq and that is toward home.
