Frederick Kagan thinks Obama's withdrawal from Iraq constitutes "abandoning" Iraq. Matt Duss calls him out:
Interestingly, Kagan doesn’t mention that this "retreat" is being done in accordance with an agreement that the previous administration signed with the Iraqi government. Even more interestingly, when that agreement was signed, Fred Kagan himself hailed it as a great U.S. success.
The neocons are desperately attempting to leverage withdrawal from Iraq, as promised, as some kind of defeat. Bush won in Iraq, remember? It's Obama who lost it. I've gotten used to this kind of reality-free discourse on the neocon right. But the basic fact is: there was a debate in the administration over how many troops to keep in Iraq, but the Iraqis ended that debate. The election that Kagan touts gave us an elected Iraqi government; and key elements of that government refused to offer US soldiers legal immunity on Iraqi soil. And so we finally got a clean end to this disaster – thanks to the democracy Kagan favors:
Still burdened by the traumas of this and previous wars, and having watched the revolutions sweeping their region, the Iraqis were unwilling to accept anything that infringed on their sovereignty.
It's odd that neocons actually resent a sovereign government's reluctance to host an occupying army – even one reduced to a 3,000-person training mission. Wasn't self-determination what the neocons always wanted? Or is it only what they said they wanted?
And no, if Iraq disintegrates, as I suspect it will, that is not Obama's fault either. It's simply another facet of the failure of the surge to resolve those issues it was designed to resolve:
Twenty months after a national election, the country’s leading political blocs cannot agree on who should run the Defense and Interior Ministries. The Parliament still has not passed legislation about how the country’s oil and gas revenues should be divided — years after the Bush administration set such a law as a benchmark for progress.
The issue of whether Baghdad or the Kurdish region should hold sway over Kirkuk also remains unresolved.
Tom Ricks is in my gloomy camp:
I suspect various factions and external actors have been keeping their powder dry while U.S. troops were still on the scene. No one wanted to mess much with "the biggest tribe," especially because those fighters and weapons might be handy once that tribe left. It's like the Jets and the Sharks making nice while waiting for [Officer] Krupke to move along. With Uncle Sam out of the way, it will be interesting to see which players – internal and external –– seek to fill the vacuum.
Why am I such a "pestamist"? — to borrow a term my daughter invented as a child. Because none of the basic questions that led to the civil war of 2006-07 have been resolved-how to share oil revenues, what the role of the Kurds will be, and basically how to govern the country. (On the other hand, supporting the Clinton view, I have heard the argument that the U.S. presence is the factor that had enabled Iraqi politicians to keep questions hanging fire.)
Do not be misled. The US was extremely lucky that its troop buildup coincided with exhaustion in Iraq's civil war, the switching of the Anbar tribes against al Qaeda, and some great military work on the ground. Then we were lucky to get a president intent on getting out, and extra-lucky that the Iraqis refused to let us set up yet another neo-imperial satellite. The idea that this string of great luck should be ignored – let alone gainsaid – seems bizarre to me. If the Iraqis, having secured their sovereignty cleanly, subsequently ask for help in training, we should help. But it is vital that they do so having made their own country whole and under their own rule. Or they will seem to themselves – and others – as a satrapy, not a state. Have the neocons learned nothing from the Arab Spring? Or is the real pint not Arab democracy and self-determination, but US global power?
Or to put it more bluntly: If Iraq collapses into civil conflict, it will be because the entire project was built on wishful thinking, not reality, from the get-go. Which is a pretty good definition of neoconservatism as a whole.
(Photo: Iraq War veteran Brad Hammond walks up the stairs on September 26, 2011 at his house in Lakewood, Colorado. Seven years after returning home from a year-long deployment in Tal Afar, Iraq, Hammond continues to experience severe post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the effects of traumatic brain injuries he sustained in combat. He suffers from chronic anxiety, headaches, night terrors, hallucinations and frequent bouts of aggression and cannot hold down a full time job. He helps his wife Dani care for their three children, while also taking a private mentoring classes to help improve his attention and cognitive skills. Hammond was on a team of U.S. soldiers who opened fire on a carload of Iraqi civilians on January 18, 2005 in Tal Afar, Iraq, killing two, when they did not stop at a checkpoint. By John Moore/Getty Images.)
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