Looking about the shell-pocked landscape of politics and the war of late... I am struck by a lack of perspective beyond the next political event horizon, which I suppose is inevitable in our political system - for which I have no suggested improvement, just noting Churchill's dicta: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
The President looks beleaguered as he stands firm as senior members of his party jump ship to the "the Surge has failed" vessel now being piloted by the Dems (there are Reps on as crew, but make no mistake, Reid and Pelosi are the pilots). This even though, in fact, the Surge itself (the deployment) has just recently ended, and the operations made possible thereby are now in-progress. The quickness to pronounce failure I believe betrays the true intent of the anti-war party's reluctant agreement to continue. Not wanting to be tarred by a "Run Away" brush of Pythonesque quality, they "agreed" to the deployment with their fingers crossed, intending, all along, absent a huge crushing WWII-style victory early on, to do what they are doing now - cry failure, with hopefully no opprobrium sticking to them.
Feh.
Yet, absent a few long-time opponents of the war, none of these profiles in courage are willing to call for outright withdrawal, total and complete.
They search for a "just right" compromise, one that runs down the middle. Either out of genuine conviction that it's the right thing to do and will be successful - or, naked craven political calculation that by doing so, they will appear to be supportive of the overall intent while in fact setting the conditions for failure, again, with no opprobrium attaching to them, and all of it to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld.
Then there is that group living in cloud-cuckoo-land that really believes that at this point, the ISG approach will work.
Heh.
The problem is that these politics do not fit the military reality of Iraq.
They suggest pulling the bulk of the combat troops out, save some elite units for al-Qaeda hunting, and perhaps some units for security work along the borders, yet leaving in place a moderately substantial logistic and training base for Iraqi security forces.
Heh.
Odd, how this war then becomes Vietnam in, oh, reverse, sorta. Major combat operations leading to the fall of the government, a pause of sorts in the violence, major operations against an externally supported insurgency, a period where logisitics and training are provided, trailing off to an ever-diminishing guerilla threat.
If only.
The politics may make sense in the bubble that is the District of Columbia, but the compromise leaves General Petraeus with an untenable military mission. Without significant U.S. combat units to keep the lid on the violence, the training effort would face challenges even bigger than those the troops face today.
And a ineffective training effort would leave many thousands of American trainers, advisers and supporting troops exposed to that rising spiral of violence in the meantime. The net result is likely to be continued U.S. casualties - with no concomitant effect on Iraq's ongoing civil war, as the Shia and Sunni fight it out, with Saddam's left-over thugs struggling to survive and not make the long drop. And al-Qaeda and Iran spicing it up for their own purposes - and deliberately targeting those lesser-defended juicy 'Murican targets.
The American combat presence in Iraq is probably insufficient to end the violence but does serve to keep something of a lid on it, creating that "bubble of stability" in which the Iraqi Army and security forces can be trained. Draw down that level of support, and the violence will rise accordingly. To be effective, the embedded training teams must live and operate with the Iraqi soldiers they are training -- they are not Ivory-tower professors safely ensconced in their safe classrooms unaffected by the realities of the world they inhabit, engaging in "distance learning." The greater the violence, the heavier their losses - quite possibly to little gain.
That will reduce their ability to succeed in their mission of creating a credible Iraqi Army and other security forces. Remember why President Johnson sent in the large combat units - because of the escalating violence in Vietnam, they were sent in to protect US personnel and assets, and to create a "bubble" in which the training of the ARVN could take place. We're trying to do this... backwards. At least that's how I see the alternative plan being offered.
The result will be a vicious cycle. The more we shift out of combat missions and into training, the harder we make the trainers' job and the more exposed they become. Just as it wasn't working in Vietnam, so Johnson sent in the troops, it strikes me as unrealistic to expect that we can pull back to some safe mode of training but not fighting.
Therefore - if the surge is unacceptable, the best option is to cut our losses and withdraw altogether. I would argue that the case for either extreme, the surge or a complete withdrawal, is stronger than for any "Third Way" Goldilocksian approach.
But mark my words - if this war (and long-time readers of this space know I was not keen on invading Iraq, but *am* keen on cleaning up the mess we created by so doing) if the mess that is this war is the Bush-Cheney Folly, the aftermath of a pull-out forced upon the President will make it, as Ralph Peters notes, the Reid-Pelosi Massacres.
And the "middle-ground" approach only serves to prolong the agony in an attempt, well meaning or venal, to provide an escape from responsibility.
Both the surge and withdrawal have strong downsides (to my mind, withdrawal is worse, long-term) but this "just right" political-survival/vengeance-taking middle-ground option leaves us with the worst of all situations - continuing casualties *and* a spiraling of the violence.
I'm a poster child for the Mushy Muddle of American politics. Compromise and a move to the center are normally my preferred way. I *like* divided government, it keeps the politicians busy with each other, reducing the amount of time available to muck about in my business. But what is a good instinct in our politics, isn't necessarily a good approach to a war.
Just sayin'
To no one in particular.
Update: I see that Paul over at Powerline is channeling me. With a more restrained verbosity, too.
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