August 15, 2005
Declaring Defeat
I was away this past weekend at a ceremony and accompanying festivities for my dad's retirement from the Army after 29 years. Thus, no recent posts. Meanwhile, I missed the spate of articles on Sunday announcing the new Administration exit strategy, to declare defeat and go home:
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
But really, I didn't miss much. Any serious observer has known, conciously or not, that Iraq was a lost cause for some time now. The real question was always when and how, precisely, the Administration was going to admit it. I was prepared to see them fight reality all the way out, to let the next Administration face ignominious defeat in early 2009, but I suppose that, too, was unrealistic. The armed forces simply can't last that long. ("It's a race against time because by the end of this coming summer we can no longer sustain the presence we have now," said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who visited Iraq most recently in June and briefed Cheney, Rice and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This thing, the wheels are coming off it.")
But more importantly, for the past several years, whenever I've gone home and Iraq has come up, there's always been a chorus of, "What about the good news?" and "I still think this is winnable." Simply put, there was none of that this time around. What I heard repeated both in conversation and speeches were references to "Hard times. Hard times." The Pentagon gets it.
Looking back at my rundown of how we could win in Iraq, I concluded by saying the Administration would never follow the course I laid out. I left the obvious follow-up, "So what is going to happen?" unaddressed. I'm still not sure how they're going to gloss this domestically, but it looks like we'll be either throwing up our hands in mock exasperation over the failed constitutional process or throwing up our hands in false celebration over its success and announcing that we've completed our task. Whatever happens there, we'll follow that by a stepped up withdrawal (directly after the December elections or sooner, if no elections are likely to take place.) We may decide to tie some of the larger militias into a fully constituted Iraqi "army" to provide security, but we'll basically leave Iraq for the Iranians to sort out, ala Syria's national foster care system for Lebanon.
Posted by ben at August 15, 2005 06:58 AM