Of all the arguments offered by critics of the Iraq War, there
are two that strike me as particularly problematic. The first one
is the idea that the only way to get Iraqis to make progress on
their own is to force their hand by setting a timetable for
withdrawal. While war critics will point to the chaos in the Iraqi
government, the corruption, the ethnic rivalries, and the
inadequacy of their military on the one hand, on the other hand,
we're supposed to believe that all of this will improve once we
withdraw. This assumes, however, that the difficulty Iraqis have in
stabilizing their own country is merely a matter of will. But
Iraq's political problems that are arising from a mix of
ethnic/sectarian divisions, the natural difficulty of emerging from
having spent decades under a brutal dictator, and the real
challenges posed by rebuilding a military from scratch within a
warzone are much more complex than that. What's more, the sooner
the Iraqis know that we're going to leave, the more likely it is
that al-Maliki will move closer to Iran.
The other argument that's been bothering me has become popular
on the blogs and was expressed by Ted Kennedy this way: "A year
ago, the president said we couldn't withdraw because there was too
much violence. Now he says we can't afford to withdraw because
violence is down." The idea, of course, is that those who support
the war effort want to be in Iraq forever, and will argue for
continuing a large troop presence no matter what the situation on
the ground. But it is a gross distortion of the actual arguments
made by supporters of the war. The idea is not that the U.S. has to
stay there because violence is down, but that we have to stay to
consolidate our progress because violence could very easily spike
up were we to leave prematurely. As Gen. Petraeus has been arguing
repeatedly, we have made significant security gains in Iraq, but
they are "fragile and reversible." So, nobody is arguing that we
have to stay in because violence is down. In fact, it's evidence
that the administration actually learned something from its
"Mission Accomplished"/"last throes" mistakes of the past by
acknowledging that even after steady progress, violence can easily
flare up again. The hope is that we can keep reducing violence to
manageable levels while we train the Iraq military until they reach
the point where they can handle a reduced level of violence on
their own. Whatever you may thing of how achievable that goal is,
it certainly isn't an argument that we can't leave Iraq because
there is too little violence.
topics:
Military, Iraq, Iran
