Category: Iraq

McCain – with admirable honesty – envisages US troops occupying Iraq in some measure for the next "hundred years." Bush had suggested fifty. This has legs:

Glenn Reynolds celebrates.

An Iraq amnesty policy that might give Romney a few ideas:

The Iraq government is considering the release of some 5,000 prisoners but a spokesperson said it would not include terrorists or homosexuals.

Hat tip: Dan.

Hilzoy vents:

People sometimes talk about "doing what it takes in Iraq", or "giving the surge a chance", as though such choices had no actual downside; as though letting George W. Bush have his way on Iraq policy was like letting your child pursue some wildly improbable but ultimately harmless dream. "Why not let him try?", they say, as though he were a teenager hoping to become a movie star, or me trying to make the NBA. This is obviously crazy: nothing about Iraq is harmless. Our soldiers are dying in Iraq; our money is being spent there; our resources are being diverted away from places like Afghanistan, where they might have done a lot more good. And, to top it all off, we are doing damage to our Army that will take decades to undo, and that might prevent us from responding adequately the next time we face a real threat, rather than one that exists only in Bush and Cheney’s imaginations.

She must want the terrorists to win, right?

Smarter than the MSM:

You rarely get 75 percent of the public agreeing on anything, but it’s right there — over 75 percent of the public rejects the idea of a military operation in Iraq lasting more than five years. Meanwhile, the people leading the current operation are talking about it lasting "at least nine or ten years".

TPM takes stock. This one’s a beaut:

"What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues — oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections — in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state."

That was September 2. There has been no progress on oil revenues, de-Baathification or provincial elections. All that has happened, so far as I can tell, is that competence from the beefed-up US military presence has managed to prevent a full-scale civil war from tearing the place apart. And that presence is about to be beefed down. So what say you now, Senator?

By now, readers will know who I favor in the Democratic race. Here’s my most considered case. But what of the GOP? For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live libertarian from Texas. But picking a candidate is always a mix of policy and character, of pragmatism and principle. And what these two mavericks share, to my mind, is a modicum of integrity. At one end of the character scale, you have the sickening sight of Mitt Romney, a hollow shell of cynicism and salesmanship, recrafted to appeal to a base he studied the way Bain consultants assess a company. Paul and McCain are at the other end. They have both said things to GOP audiences that they knew would offend. They have stuck with their positions despite unpopularity. They’re not saints, but they believe what they say. Both have also taken a stand against the cancerous and deeply un-American torture and detention regime constructed by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. In my book, that counts. I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time – the great question of the last six years – Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain’s position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense. Let’s be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror – at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East – we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency? 

McCain, for all his many virtues, still doesn’t get this. Paul does.

Paul, moreover, supports the only rational response: a withdrawal, as speedily and prudently as possible. McCain, along with Lieberman, still seems to believe that expending even more billions of dollars to prop up and enable a fast-devolving, ethnically toxic, religiously nutty region is somehow in American interests. Given the enormous challenges of the terror war, the huge debt we are piling up, the exhaustion of the military, the moral and financial corruption that has its white-hot center in Mesopotamia, I do not believe that an endless military, economic and political commitment to Iraq makes sense. It only makes sense if we are determined to occupy the Middle East indefinitely to secure oil supplies. But the rational response to oil dependence is not to entrench it, but to try and move away from it. Institutionalizing a bank-breaking, morale-busting Middle East empire isn’t the way to go.

But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites’ enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever – no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.

He’s the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds. And in a primary campaign where the very future of conservatism is at stake, that cannot be ignored. In fact, it demands support.

Go Ron Paul!

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty.)

A testimony to the genius of their military in Mesopotamia:

Rory Stewart, once a deputy governor in the provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, urged a swift exit from Iraq. ‘Embarrassment rather than good policy is now leading our engagement.’ His sincerity and his charm came across very powerfully and he told us a salutary tale.

In 2004 his compound had been under constant attack, receiving 100 incoming mortars a day. The nearby Italian force, 20 minutes away, usually took at least seven hours to arrive with reinforcements. After a year’s absence he returned and found everything transformed. The area was completely pacified thanks to the Italians. But it wasn’t their ‘good intentions’ that had done the trick but ‘their cowardice and incompetence’. This had forced the Iraqis to assume control. His funny, modest and disarming speech attracted grateful waves of applause. Andrew Neil responded by pointing towards the back of the hall. ‘The Italian ambassador and his bodyguards are waiting for you there. And they’re experts in special rendition.’

Almost a case-book study of mission-creep:

The trouble is that the war’s rationale has become circular — "success" means success at putting the military engagement on a sustainable basis. We’re fighting for the ability to keep on fighting. But sustaining that posture keeps making the United States and our position in the world as a whole weaker and weaker.