Give Bush Another Chance?

Here’s a tough quote from Joe Biden:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost. They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively."

This is, of course, a central feature – again! – of the decision we have to make on Iraq. Is this Bidenjimcoleap_2 president proposing something that he genuinely believes will work? Or is this political cover until he is out of office? Can we, in other words, trust him? 

I’m sure some advocates of a two-year permanent surge with sufficient troops to make it work are completely sincere. Their position is respectable, if somewhat unpersuasive. Their laudable goal now is simply to prevent a completely failed state in the Middle East. I’m not so sure, however, about the president’s motives. I don’t believe he’s ever been serious about the war in Iraq – because he has never committed sufficient resources to match his rhetoric, and took his eye off the ball in the critical period in 2004 and 2005. In the end, you observe what a man does, not what he says. And everything Bush has actually done (forget the highfalutin rhetoric) is to telegraph a clear message: Iraq is not that big a deal; my ego comes before candor; as president, I can do what I want anyway. We will soon be faced with an excruciating choice between what looks like another half-measure and trying to make the best of a swift exit via Kurdistan. Under both scenarios, we will have the current president, who is obviously incapable of the kind of deft diplomacy and military focus that we desperately need in either case.

The choice, then, is pretty simple. Should we give the president another chance: six months, say, and see where we are? At least then we will not have to endure the taunts from those who’ll declare the Democrats lost the Iraq war, or the predictable stab-in-the-back chorus (take it away, Sean Hannity!) At the same time, isn’t it basically immoral to send young Americans to die for a piece of political cover that no one seriously believes can work? Isn’t it immoral to ask young Americans to perish in brutal street-fighting so that we won’t have to endure the crowing of the stab-in-the-back right?

It now looks possible that we could have an even worse mess: the president will declare a surge, and the Democrats will refuse to pay for it, while continuing to fund the troops already enmeshed in a failed policy. Gridlock in Iraq; gridlock in Washington. The worst of all worlds. I guess we’ll have to listen carefully to the president this week, and make our minds up when all the data is in.

(Photo: Jim Cole/AP.)

Sane Hawks

Eliot Cohen and Bing West make sense (WSJ-Delete):

We prefer an offensive strategy based on three ironclad principles: take the offense immediately against the death squads in Sadr City, who are now unsettled; arrest and imprison on a scale equal to the horrific situation (or at least equal to New York City!); and insist on a joint say in the appointment of army and police leaders. If the Iraqi government refuses, we should be willing to disengage completely, and soon.

I’m skeptical – because it would mean allying U.S. forces with sectarian Sunnis. But it makes much more sense than anything we are now hearing from the White House.

Krauthammer and Kristol

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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.)