Cutting and Running
As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, I feel pretty strongly that once you have overthrown a existing government, you have a responsibility to stay in until a (effective) new government is in place. When Obama said that he wants to bring all the troops home now, I was actually pretty upset with that statement. It felt rushed and not well thought out. But the more I look at what is happening now, looking at charts of the number of Iraqi’s killed, and the number of soldiers killed, any up or down is a local change. The global trend is a constant. We have been in Iraq longer than we were fighting in World War II now. I begin to see Obama’s point, but there is still this nagging feeling that we would be abandoning the Iraqis if we pulled out.
And then, on the Daily show last night, I heard the most compelling argument to pull out yet. Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark is giving a football analogy to Jon Stuart, saying Patraeus is the reserve QB brought in in the fourth quarter, and told to “Pass Pass Pass”. Jon comes back with the obvious response, But he wrote the book on running plays and isn’t being allowed to use it! To which Wesley responds, “it’s too late to do the strategy that he wanted to do because we’ve already lost the hearts and the minds of the Iraqis by the conduct of the first three years.”
Read that last line again. If that is true, it doesn’t matter how many troops we have over there. More, less, they are no longer able to contribute to the process. That is a horrifying thought. I have to admit I am coming around to Obama’s position.
November 11th, 2007 at 13:22
I’ve read a very strong argument that pulling out now, provided we concentrate on pulling out troops and their cmobat equipment only, would be a very good idea.
As for the Iraqis we’re leaving behind, most of them don’t seem too interested in us staying. For the small fraction who have worked for us and who aren’t moles for one faction or another, we can pay for them to be resettled..though we need to be smart and not repeat the mistakes we made the last time we resettled a lot of Iraqis. (We didn’t do that good of a job of preparing them for living in the US, moved people next door to one another who had long running blood feuds, and, in particular, didn’t stress to them that they had to leave honor killings behind in Iraq.)