Both National Review and the Weekly Standard aim for the Baker-Hamilton Group this week. But when you examine what the Kristol-Kagan team sees as the alternative to a gradual retreat from the South and Anbar into Kurdistan, you can’t help wondering how serious they really are. Money quote:
We hope that he will now take the steps necessary to accomplish his stated objectives in Iraq, including a substantial increase in the number of U.S. forces in Baghdad and throughout the contested parts of the country, as well as a long overdue increase in the total size of American ground forces so that higher force levels in Iraq can be sustained.
How much higher would make a difference? At this point, close to 50,000 to 100,000 extra troops to halt the centrifugal force of societal disintegration in Iraq. Does the Weekly Standard seriously believe that is either politically or militarily possible with the urgency necessary? Of course not. Would, say, another 20,000 troops work in a pitched battle with Sadrite forces to retake parts of Baghdad? Unlikely – and with massive casualties probably prompting an uprising in the South. Anbar is all but gone. The South is a battleground for various Shiite militias and sending U.S. troops in to police the conflict is madness. But even if you reduced troops in the South and West, and focused on 20,000 more troops just for Baghdad, it’s a stretch. As even Fred Kagan acknowledges:
It is certainly true that only the 20,000 or so troops now programmed to deploy to Iraq in the spring are ready to go. Others could be made ready only in months, and would require accelerated training schedules.
We need at least 50,000 NOW. The only way to do that is sending untrained and ill-prepared or exhausted forces into a combat zone as chaotic and as opaque and as deadly as urban warfare in Baghdad. it would mean re-taking Baghdad three years after we did the first time, with far fewer advantages. And the massive surge in U.S. casualties it would mean would provoke massive opposition at home. If Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush had done this three years ago, it might have had a chance. But they were too arrogant to do what was obviously needed when it mattered, and the window of opportunity is over. To ask for such a radical re-upping of the ante now – after the American public’s patience has been exhausted and the Iraqi population has been massacred and thereby embittered on a large scale – is simply a non-starter.
The attempt to belittle the efforts of Baker-Hamilton is therefore pure positioning. In Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, there is tragically no alternative to some sort of retrenchment and retreat right now. I agree we need an effort to expand the military by several divisions. That was Al Gore’s position in 2000, by the way, the candidate the Weekly Standard hounded as insane and weak. It was Kerry’s position in 2004, another candidate the WS smeared as Jane Fonda in drag. Maybe a period of retrenchment and rebuilding of US forces could mean a new offensive in a year or so. But the idea that it can be accomplished swiftly enough now to make a difference in a "country" that has already disintegrated into Hobbesian hell is pure fantasy and Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan must know it.
There is a mood on the right at this moment that is not entirely rational. They are lashing out at the people who can rescue them from the folly of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy in Iraq. They are viciously attacking those who have had the temerity to expain why they lost the last election. And they are throwing the vilest of epithets at James Baker. Please. This is not 1991. They are as graceless in defeat now as they were hubristic in premature victory three years ago. Or to put it more precisely, they are exactly what National Review accuses the Baker-Hamilton Commission of being: "driven by their own internal dynamics rather than by any connection to the real world."
It’s over, guys. Your beloved Bush administration botched this so badly it’s irrecoverable. You enabled them. You never fully took them on when it would have counted – and you trashed those of us who did. You knew this before the 2004 election and still cynically played the anti-Kerry card for all it was worth, telling yourselves you could sway Rummy after the election. Well, you couldn’t and you didn’t. Your policy was sabotaged by a defense secretary who never believed in it and by a president too weak and out-of-it to rein him in. Get over yourselves and recognize that this dream has died. And we have to fight the nightmare we now face rather than pretend your dream is still even on life-support. That’s the patriotic responsibility at this point. And no, I’m not impugning your patriotism. I’m asking you to place it before your shattered dreams.
The Dish 