Compare Charles’ measured and realist sigh of a column Friday with this piece from Bill Kristol published in this week’s Friday-published Time. Both make fair points, I think, but Krauthammer is more persuasive – simply because he is actually considering reality on the ground. I would dearly love to be able to share Kristol’s optimism and commitment to the same president who has brought us this far. But I cannot do so without substituting wishful thinking for reason. To his credit, Kristol has long identified and railed against the Bush-Rumsfeld-Casey strategy (even while supporting all the domestic political forces that would have kept such a strategy going indefinitely). And he recognizes that the Bush administration’s mistakes have been "grievous." But he’s surely wrong about this:
There has been some sniping at the Keane-Kagan plan. But what is striking is that so few of the critics actually go to the trouble of analyzing it – or proposing a substitute.
In fact, many of us looked at it closely (I linked before Christmas and said I had an open mind) and there has been an avalanche of suggestions, ideas and arguments from many who have accepted the gravity of the situation. We’ve heard of plans for partition, redeployment to Kurdistan, a massive new infusion of troops as a game-changer, re-emphasizing the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, talking to Iran and Syria, and on and on. One recent issue of the New Republic contained more fertile ideas in this respect than a year’s worth of Weekly Standards.
Even those who favor doubling down are nonetheless skeptical of whether it is feasible, and whether an escalation of a mere 20,000 can do anything but compound the problem. Among those who believe that a minimum of 50,000 more troops are needed are such luminaries as John Keegan, a conservative military scholar. Others suggest up to 100,000. And in airing the realist case for speedy withdrawal, I think I’ve been candid about the potential for a much wider war than we now have. I just fear that war is coming soon anyway, and that it would be worse for the U.S. to be enmeshed in the middle of it or, even worse, allied with one side of it.
You want anti-American Jihadism brought to fever pitch? Then ally U.S. soldiers with Shiite militias in Iraq. Every Sunni fanatic will be lining up to kill us. Or, ally with the Sunni minority in Iraq. And then you bolster Ahmadinejad and put the Shiites on our tail. Only if we bring overwhelming force to the country and pacify it effectively can we hope to extricate anything worthwhile. Even then, the odds are long. By overwhelming, I mean a minimum of 50,000. It doesn’t look as if Bush is envisaging anything like this. Without it, the reconstruction money is meaningless.
Then we have this:
To lose in Iraq would have real consequences. To succeed in reversing the deteriorating situation in Iraq would also have real consequences. The forces of liberty (if it’s permissible to use so naive a formulation) could regain momentum in the Middle East. Jihadism could be set on the run. Individuals and nations might decide that it is once again wiser to be a friend of the U.S. than an enemy.
It reads like an exhausted script from an exhausted ideology. He argues that we can "succeed in reversing the deteriorating situation in Iraq." But what does that mean? That we can permanently police a sectarian civil war? That we will ally ourselves with a sectarian Shiite government more firmly? Or that we can now achieve in a couple of years something that we didn’t manage in four years in far more propitious circumstances? Iraq is in a civil war; we lost the momentum of liberation in late 2003; the only people who have the capacity to run Iraq as a normal country have fled or been butchered.
The neocons, it seems to me, cannot have it both ways. When it comes to the Palestinians, they tell us that Arab culture is too irredentist and irrational to negotiate with. When it comes to Iraq, they seem to believe that the deepest historic divide in Muslim history, deepened and intensified by the Iraq fiasco, in the middle of a civil war, given passionate new life by the Shiite execution of Saddam, can now be overcome with 20,000 more U.S. troops. Put those Americans in there, Kristol says, and with the same president who has given us the current catastrophe,
the forces of liberty (if it’s permissible to use so naive a formulation) could regain momentum in the Middle East.
No, Bill, it’s no longer permissible to use so naive a formulation. We know better now. And so do you. So give it a rest.
(Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty.)
The Dish 