Petreaus, Iraq, and Options

It's hard to even have an opinion on Iraq anymore.

A lot anyone's position will come down to trust. Who do you trust? Do you trust the President? I think given his track record you'd be hard pressed to find a reason to. He has given so much spin to Iraq over the last few years that America is sick, from both the dizzy spell and the cost in lives and money. His speech earlier tonight was meant to inspire, but it didn't, and it didn't because of the track record the President has laid down for himself over the last few years. His speech tonight tried to emphasize the progress we have made since last year. A year ago, he said, we were close to admitting that provinces were lost to Al Qaeda, that we were being hammered by ever more powerful militias, and that there seemed little hope for ever settling the matter peacefully. Well, I'm sorry but, what? A year ago President Bush was extolling the virtues of the war and blaming naysayers for being down on it and ruining the image of all the progress we were making. But now a year a later they were all right but THIS time is different? It's a hard pill to swallow from a man that has a pathological inability to talk straight, despite his so called Texas folksy charm.

So who does that leave us with? The only other government official speaking with that kind of authority is General David Petreaus, leader of all and everything that is going on in Iraq. He and President Bush have said that Anbar province is a posterchild for everything that can go right in Iraq, that local Sheikhs and other tribal leaders came to the US asking for help. And yet reporters on the ground are saying that all we're doing is throwing money at them in return for their help. We give them money, guns, and by promising them a spot in the Iraqi police force, we give them legitimacy. Meanwhile, outside those cities are makeshift cities of refugees, hundreds of thousands of them, pushed out of their homes by sectarian rivalry and fighting fueled by the same people we are now funding and supporting. And we are hearing reports that the Iraqi Police is corrupt, rife with sectarian feuding, hated by the average Iraqi, and many are calling for it to be disbanded entirely.

Crocker and Petreaus didn't even try to sugarcoat the failures of the government. It seems the government is offering up the lack of progress in the government and asserting military success so we'll take that one as a given and he can claim partial success. But while Democrats seem to be falling for it, by attacking the government and leaving the military situation alone, I don't. I don't think the military situation is nearly so rosy, even if the added 30,000 troops have had a positive impact, violence is still ridiculously high, and I don't consider paying off our enemies (which is ironic considering the President previously said he didn't even want to talk to them, let alone pay and arm them) any sort of success. We didn't learn from that lesson with Osama Bin Laden? We trained and armed the man during the war between the USSR and Afghanistan in the 1980's, and now we're seriously doing it again?

Petreaus is saying five of twenty combat brigades in Iraq will be out by July, which means a reduction in forces (post surge) of 25%. That's cool, but what then? If there is never a political fix to the problem, there will never be a stable Iraq like President Bush is promising. And he appears unwilling to really strongarm them into fixing it. So we have to ask ourselves a couple questions: What do we really expect to do over there? What do we think will happen if we suddenly left? Is it worth it?

My opinions have been mixed on this subject for awhile now. I believed, and still believe that I was right from the start, that Iraq was a bad idea, that we never should have gone in, and that if we were going to go in, it was done all wrong, and mismanaged from the start. But now we are there, and wishing makes nothing so. So do we do the honorable thing and fix what we broke? Or do we cut our losses? I think we do both, or at least, we try to be honorable. I've given up expecting honesty or honor from the White House. He says we will only draw down troops from a position of victory, but he ignores the fact that keeping those 30,000 surge troops in Iraq is unsustainable, we just don't have the men for it, which makes his words more lies and smokescreen. So first: We don't abandon Iraq, not yet anyway. What we need to do is issue them warning, stern warnings, that our continued assistance is NOT without strings or limitations. We give them until the end of Bush's presidency to act. It's arbitrary, but I don't care anymore, we've given them YEARS to act, and they have done little to nothing to make the situation better. So we set a date, too bad, you guys had your chance. Don't trumpet that date from the rooftops, in fact, it should be private between President Bush and Maliki and his government. If it leaks out, well, that's a sign of how weak that government is then isn't it? If they fail to meet the standards we set for them, then we do one of two things: 1. We dissolve their government, take over, and set the laws the way we've wanted them to begin with. Yes, it'll destroy the democracy we've already created and will piss a lot of people off, but if they can't do it, we have to, or else: 2. We get out. If they won't fix it, and we won't fix it, it isn't going to be fixed, and if it isn't going to be fixed, what the hell are we still doing there? President Bush likes to make all these fanciful allusions to World War II, and all the great things we did in Germany and Japan after the war. Is he ignoring the fact that there were military governors there for more than a DECADE after the end of the war? In Iraq we handed control over far too fast. They weren't ready for it. They didn't have the support they needed from within to keep it going, and so it is falling down.

I'm done with the status quo. The status quo is a mismanaged war, and a country that seems unwilling to commit the troops needed when they are needed to fix this problem correctly. And I refuse to let us half ass it for another decade before we finally say we gave it the old college try, but we just couldn't hack it. They can bleed is dry, just like the Chechnyans are doing to Russia, who wastes their best and most valued military equipment on a tiny nation of people yearning to be free. They did it in Afghanistan too, and then, WE were the Iran supplying weapons secretly. So we either put up NOW, or we get out, NOW. It isn't retreat. WE didn't lose. We won. Iraq lost. The problem with pinning this as a win or lose for the US but leaving the outcome up to Iraq is that we don't actually get to fight anything. We're leaving it up to Iraqi politicians to win or lose the war for us. That's what you get from black and white them or us thinking. Fact of the matter is that militarily, our servicemen have performed splendidly in spite of Administration blunders by the dozens. We declare victory and we come home, because we did what we set out to do, but the Iraqis failed. So they lose, we don't. We rebuild our broken army and we prepare to fight another day, but we don't abandon the fight as a whole, and we don't allow them to beat us in a war of attrition, which is exactly what this is becoming.

Secure victory for the future by leaving before it's too late to win in the future. Give them an ultimatum; it's far past time to do so.