| While the whole game keeps playing in Washington, D.C., with General Petraeus providing unverifiable numbers to claim military progress, a whole host of verifiable claims regarding the relative lack of military progress, something has been forgotten:
We're not making political progress.
Earlier this summer, I was talking with a Republican friend of mine who was still committed to the war. It was nice to have a chance to chat with someone smart, intellectually honest and in total opposition. During that conversation, he talked about the difficulty in this war was the same as in Vietnam -- we were fighting with one arm behind our back.
There's a reason for that. We've already had the military victory. We conquered Iraq. Saddam Hussein has been ousted, caught, tried, sentenced, and executed for his crimes.
At this point, we need a political victory. But we can't marshal that ourselves. The Iraqis need to figure this out -- and they don't appear particularly likely to. No matter how long we stay.
So any concern about chaos erupting in the Middle East is not a question of whether we stay 6 more months, 6 more years, or 60 more years. When we leave, the situation will get worse and then get better. The upshot is that the sooner we leave, the sooner we stop wasting American lives and money and the faster we put whatever process we can in place to deal with a post-American world.
James Fallows, Matthew Yglesias, and Ed Kilgore, a pretty broad mix of writers, all make similar points.
Matthew Yglesias makes another good one: Nearly 60% of Iraqis think killing American troops is "justified." It seems to me that even 10-25 percent of the population actively approving of attacks on American troops might make our mission there impossible. But when an actual majority support killing our soldiers, then how, exactly, are the soldiers supposed to help Iraq's population? It just doesn't make sense, on any level, to think that a giant military deployment can play a constructive role under these circumstances. In fact, it just may seem that if a majority support attacks on Americans, our continued presence may be inflaming the fighting over there, serving as a method of recruiting and training young terrorists who would otherwise want nothing to do with blowing up their own country.
Just a thought. By the way, Nir Rosen laid out this argument two years ago in The Atlantic, the sanest bastion of establishment thought throughout this entire fiasco. |
