Surprise! There’s an ominous detail in the 19-month Iraq withdrawal plan that the president is apparently signing off on this week. Withdrawal will barely happen at all this year, as US troops become a kind of last-resort guarantor of order until the December elections. Today, we get the now regular op-ed from O’Hanlon and Pollack telling us that success is just around the corner but that we have "no choice" but to stay for the indefinite future. Plus: Obama will keep up to 50,000 troops in Iraq for ever anyway, so the empire will not end, as it never does. New protectorates like Iraq are like new government programs. They generate vested interests, budgets, and the usual coterie of experts insisting that progress is always on the horizon. I presume that the Reynolds-Hanson victory parade – the faction that believes we have already won thanks to the Great Leader Bush – have no problem with withdrawal after such a stunning mission accomplished (undermined, of course, every day since January 20). But I doubt it.
Much of this is the lingering effect of Bush-Cheney. Like the Israelis in their brutal pulverization of Gaza, the Bushies long ago resolved to create facts on the ground that would prevent the Obama administration from making much progress too quickly. The surge in retrospect may well be seen not as the moment when ‘victory" was achieved, but the process by which empire was made permanent in Mesopotamia, and the dependency of Iraq in the US became impossible to undo. But at some point, Obama will own this, just as he will own Gitmo if it isn’t closed quickly.
He is ramping up the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he is not moving any serious forces out of Iraq for a year; Iraq’s economy is crumbling again because it has no economy but oil; the Kurdish question is alive again; leading Iraqi politicians are suspected of plotting murder and mayhem, and someone is protecting them. Well: just look at what the Brits had to deal with in the 1920s and 1930s. But at least they got the Iraqis to shoulder some of the financial burdens. If the British analogy holds, the US will be in Iraq until 2016 at the earliest. Or until economic collapse makes withdrawal not a matter of choice.
FP is hosting a book-club discussion of Tom Ricks’s new book. Here’s Lynch:
Ricks has been coming under withering criticism from some on the Left for his conclusion that the United States will likely remain in Iraq for many years to come. This is ironic, because he arrives there in no small part because he agrees with many of the main Center-Left criticisms of the surge: that its tactical successes did not add up to a strategic victory, that security gains were not leading to political reconciliation, that the Awakenings risked fragmenting the Iraqi state. Ricks focuses with brutal precision on the never-resolved tension between the military successes of the surge and its political objectives. For all his admiration for the architects of the surge, his reporting and analysis largely vindicate the perspective of the skeptics — and shows that many of those on the inside shared their concerns all along.
I’m doing my best to finish the book. So far, so fascinating … and foreboding.
(Photo: A US soldier stand guards outside the Umm al-Qura Sunni Muslim mosque during a prisoner release in Baghdad, on February 22, 2009. Some 64 Iraqi prisoners both Sunni and Shiite Muslim were released from Bucca prison based in southern Iraq and gathered in the grounds of the mosque to be greeted by their relatives. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 