Iraq: Considering a long-term commitment

I’ve changed my mind about Iraq, said Anthony Cordesman in The Washington Post. Having recently visited the post-surge Iraq, I no longer think a stable, democratic state is out of reach. Hopeful signs are everywhere. “The United States and its allies are winning virtually every tactical clash.” Al Qaida is in retreat. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has just extended his militia’s cease-fire for six months. But these and other positive auspices will mean nothing if the U.S. yields to temptation and cuts troop levels prematurely. Building a secure state will require a long-term commitment of U.S. troops and aid, until at least 2012 and perhaps as long as 2020. “If the next president, Congress, and the American people cannot face this reality, we will lose.”

Try convincing defeatist Democrats of that, said Charles Krauthammer, also in the Post. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have promised their party’s liberal base that they’ll start withdrawing troops right after taking office, and have the bulk of them gone within 12 to 18 months. They dismiss the success of the surge, saying military success doesn’t matter until Iraq achieves “national reconciliation.” Well, Iraq is achieving it. The Iraqi parliament recently passed major legislation that gave a large measure of power to individual provinces, freed thousands of Sunni prisoners, and provided for oil-revenue sharing among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Slowly but steadily, Iraq is unifying. “What will the Democrats say now?”

They should say the surge still isn’t working, said Michael Kinsley in Slate.com. The whole point of sending additional troops, President Bush said more than a year ago, was to “hasten the day our troops begin coming home.” Now, both he and Gen. David Petraeus insist we must maintain 130,000 soldiers in Iraq indefinitely to preserve the surge’s gains. In other words, the surge has made it possible for Americans to spend another decade baby-sitting a primitive and violent sectarian state. All we’ve managed to prove in Iraq, said Andrew Bacevich in The Boston Globe, is that the so-called Bush doctrine has failed. This administration invaded Iraq on the theory that a democratic state there would cure the “pathologies” that afflict the Middle East. But despite the U.S.’s expenditure of $600 billion and thousands of lives, Iraq and Afghanistan still aren’t self-sustaining states; they’re “quasi-permanent dependencies.” Meanwhile, Islamic extremists have grown more powerful in Gaza and Lebanon, and more defiant in Iran. The next administration will have more to deal with than Iraq. It will have to reshape our relations with the entire Muslim world.

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