Feel free to chortle over some no-nothing backwater state Governor stomping his foot and demanding the President set clear exit strategy conditions and a timetable for the troops to come home.
Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is. … I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.”
Except, of course, in this case the Governor was one George W. Bush of Texas, and the President was Bill Clinton and the troops were in Kosovo. Fast forward from 1999, and the commander-in-chiefly shoe is on the other foot.
Now, to be fair, (a) It has been sixteen years, and it is to be hoped that Bush would have learned something in the interim, and (b) It’s a lot different sitting in the White House than in the Texas statehouse. And, truth be told, I think a legislated timetable is actually a horrible idea, except that it seems to be the only way to get Bush to take any action. Bush has done his typically inept job at actually, y’know, persuading the American people about much of anything about it (except to repeat the same empty platitudes and stomp his foot and say “I will not!”
Still, all that having been said, the quotes from the last presidential election are worth a sad chuckle or two.
“a sad chuckle or two.”
How very sad that we’re at the point that a sad chuckle is all that is left to us. There’s not any clearly-supportable course of action.
Yeah. I wish to God I could just rail at folks, pointing at an obvious solution and arguing, “Just do X and it will make it all better!”
And people call me the young, naive, idealist… 🙂
But just for curiosity sake, why would a timetable be a horrible idea?
Bear in mind I have a head cold here …
Public, legislated timetables are a horrible idea for exactly the reasons poorly articulated by the Bush administration:
– They tell the opposition just how long they have to hold on (and when they won’t have to worry about us any more).
– They tell our supporters when we’re leaving, too.
– They make it impossible (without further legislation) responding to changing factors on the ground — they do, indeed, tie the hands of the military.
Congress is a horrible tool to run a war Nearly everything needed to do so — boldness, discretion, swiftness, clarity, rationality — are antithetical to 535 people thrashing out the latest polls and whether the current defense bill includes that pet project they’ve been aiming for. It’s “management by committee” at its worst.
Granted, those same factors seem antithetical to the commander-in-chief’s office at present, too. And that’s part of what’s driven congress to do this. Though they’re also doing it to show who’s the boss, to get back at the hamfisted unilateralist politics of the last six years, and because they’ve realized that’s what they’ve told their constituents what they’d do (wisely or not) in order to get elected. And the President is forcing the issue for all the wrong reasons, too — not wanting to give way, not wanting to admit error, hoping to blame the Dems for “losing.”
It’s an awful way to fight (or end) a war.
Wouldn’t they also tell the Iraqis “We’re not going to be here forever, and you’ve got just this long to whip yourselves into shape and become independent”?
After all, you’ll at some point let your daughter know that she’s expected to strike out on her own, and that she won’t continue to be supported by you until she’s on Social Security.
Of course, your daughter doesn’t have insurrectionists to complicate matters…
Certainly you need to let the locals know that your support won’t (can’t) last forever. But the assumption that if you just say, “Hey, we’re outta here in twelve months, have fun” means they *will* be able to be autonomous in that time seems a bit arbitrary.
Or, to take the other example — it’s fine to let Katherine know that at some point we expect her to have her own house and job, etc. But I’m not going to necessarily set a date unless I have a good sense that she actually can manage it — and if something comes up, before or after, we *will* be there for her.
Abandoning the Iraqis to their fate and being their guardians forever seems to me a false dichotomy.
Many of my students don’t study until there’s a deadline — an exam, a paper, something like that. If we assume that Iraq is like a student, and being on their own is like a deadline, then if Iraq is like the kind of student who won’t study without a deadline, a deadline may be helpful.
But those are awfully big assumptions, and awfully big “if”s. And the consequences are far more awful, if we’re wrong, than what will happen to a student who is not motivated by a deadline.
It seems to me to be clear that unseating Saddam Hussein would have been a noble goal, WMDs or no WMDs. It also seems clear to me that many mistakes have been made during our invasion of Iraq and our occupation of Iraq, at all levels of the government and the military. It also seems clear to me that due to those mistakes and to other factors beyond the control of the USA, Iraq is more and more a “money pit”: it is a place where we throw money and lives with little or no visible improvement in the situation. So I think it’s a good goal now to get out of Iraq and away from the “money pit”.
But at the same time, two wrongs don’t make a right. An arbitrary exit date seems likely to be a bad idea for the reasons ***Dave mentioned, and because I’m not sure that there is any reason to think that a deadline will help the situation. So, we’re left casting about for a better solution. We need some way to cut the Gordian Knot, but no one has found it yet.
I want to leave my opinion but I also don’t want to make your head cold any worse, so please do not feel as though you must respond immediately.
But isn’t this point somewhat irrational because eventually we will leave and the opposition will know when that is anyways? It’s not like we are suddenly going to pull out ninja style and leave the enemy scratching their heads saying, “Duh which way did he go Georgie?” 😉 Hell whether we have a plan or not for withdrawal, everyone is gonna know when it happens cause it will be all over the media. There is no way around this.
So staying around with no end in sight just means that troops have a bloody quagmire to look forward to. And perpetual service. I think not having a strategy for completing the mess we started does more of a dis-service to the military than saying, “This plan right here that myself and my cabinet has worked on outlines a clear strategy for not only how we will win, but we will do to bring our military home.” That to me sends a clear message that our government is actually trying to do something.
Our supporters should know what we are playing to do so they can plan accordingly as well. No one wants to get bogged down in a never ending conflict. So why are we putting ourselves in that position?
But besides those issues we should be asking one question and one question only. Does fighting in Iraq actually make us safer? If the answer is no then why the hell are we still there?
I am sorry, but I fail to see how managing a child is synonymous with managing a war. You need a clear strategy for a war because people’s lives are at stake and we shouldn’t be wasting them by implementing an ad hoc plan. Life can be run on a more ad hoc basis because a lot less is at stake.
But that’s not what I’m saying by any means.
Turn it around. You’re fighting an insurgency against invaders, or you have big plans on how your faction is going to take over the country through bloody, violent means. The invading troops have been an obstacle. Would you rather:
a. Be told that they will start pulling out in a few months, and be completely gone in a year.
b. Be told that they will be there until they feel their job has been done, which job is defeating you and/or getting the local forces ready to do the same, and they might never completely leave.
I agree. There needs to be a defined end, and (one would hope) a path toward getting there.
I agree with that, too. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s being legislated.
I don’t believe that if we leave, the terrorists will be on the next plane over, too.
That said, what is the likely result of a US pull-out as things currently stand? Continued civil war, possible genocide, likely take-over of Iraq by forces either friendly to or inserted by (or even backed by troops from) Iran. That doesn’t sound good for the Iraqi people (to whom we owe something for our part in this mess) and it certainly doesn’t sound good for the region, which remains the biggest oil producing region in the world. Destabilization there is not going to do the US any good, even in a best case scenario (let’s say, ah, gas prices jumping to $5/gal.).
I’m all for reducing dependence on foreign oil. Going cold turkey is usually a painful and dangerous way of doing so.
It’s certainly more desirable to have a strategy than not (though ad hoc improvisation is a key to winning any war, from what I’ve read).
What we’re faced with at the moment are no good paths forward. I’m not saying that “stay the course” is by any means a winning or desirable strategy. I’m saying that pulling out by timetable is no great improvement *except*, short-term, it gets our troops out of there (which is no mean plus, but let’s not fool ourselves that there will not be repurcusions beyond that.
Well unfortunately this is already happening. The top Iraqi officials we put in are pro Iranian, at least according to one of my Arabic sources.
I know we screwed up the region and a lot of Iraqis were killed from it. It really does piss me off. But how the hell do you fight a civil war? There isn’t much we can do for Iraq until they stop fighting with each other.
Maybe we could help in some way if our military understood Arabic culture and how to distinguish between different factions of Arabs. But our military personnel get no training on this at all. And many of them don’t even speak the language. Some of the military personnel see an Arab and all they think is terrorist, how does this help? How does any of this get us closer to winning?
I think there is going to be another attack whether we stay or leave. Last I read Al Qaeda is getting stronger and it doesn’t cost much to attack. But I would rather spend money protecting and securing our borders than fighting a worthless war and wearing our military thin.
The repercussions extend far beyond “just” another terrorist attack. There are geopolitical and economic results as well. This mess will need cleaning after for at least the next fifty years.
And border security and the like is fine — but nobody ever won a “war” (or resolved a conflict) by staying on the defensive.
That said — as I said, I wish I had an easy answer that everyone was ignoring that would make it All Better.
Define a “win” that can actually happen.
No genocide? A stable government friendly or at least neutral to the USA? Full oil production? Regain our moral high ground (such as it was) and our former rep as good guys (more or less)?
Without gutting our military the rest of the way. (Which al Qaida would love to see far more than the ‘liberation’ of Iraq.) Without becoming monsters — which is the only way the Turks or Saddam managed the place. Without bankrupting ourselves. Further. Without a draft, because to get one we’d have to be hit so hard that we’d just as soon bomb the whole place flat. We can’t afford a Pyrrhic victory either.
The low estimate for excess Iraqi deaths that wouldn’t have happened without our intervention is about 400,000. That’s like 5 Virginia Techs a day — and Iraq has less than 1/10 our population.
Please, somebody define an achievable win, a way out of the pit George has led us into.