Sunday, August 14, 2005
Endgame In Iraq
I've gotten impatient with a lot of the opinion pieces being written about the administration's Iraq policy lately. Commentators jabber on, repeating themselves endlessly. Yes, we know Bush lives in a bubble. Yes, we know he's an idiot. Yes, we know this administration is a gang of crooks and nitwits. It's true, I know, but can't we just accept these facts and move on?
Finally, someone is saying something a little different. Frank Rich writes a very interesting opinion piece in the Sunday Times:
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
Therefore, Rich says, there's only one possible outcome left in this war -- attempted Iraqization of indigenous forces, followed by a massive American troop withdrawal by next summer, which just might save the skins of the chickenhawks in Congress. It would, of course, be a strategy based entirely on wishful thinking, one more castle in the air dreamed up by Bush, Cheney and Rummy.
I don't know if I entirely agree with Rich on this -- I think withdrawal would not be of political benefit to Bush if Iraq immediately plunged into civil war -- but it might happen.
