Iraq - no way through but out

By Libby

The Wall St. Journal breaks the news that Gates is muttering about drawing down the troops in order to buy agreement for a long term presence in Iraq. A cold war style containment is the new meme. The new plan is we're never going to leave but they want to keep some significant amount of troops in isolated outposts to "fight Qaida" and train the hapless Iraqi security force and contain the civil strife instead of trying to end it. Sounds to me that's about what they're doing now, except they admit no surge of force will be able to quell the intercine fighting.

It's likely to be a moot point anyway. The Iraqi parliament may vote to deauthorize the occupation in December and even if they don't, as they tell you at the very end of the article, we don't have the troop strength left to maintain the numbers we have on the ground right now. By spring the military will have completely exhausted its ready troops.

But we've had this same conversation too many times in the last four years and there were tow points that struck me when I read this. The first was this graf.

Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Mr. Gates say it is too soon to judge how the surge has fared. The commanders also argue that the effort needs more time to work. Vice President Dick Cheney's views on the success of the surge remain opaque; the only thing he has said publicly is that there are signs of progress in Iraq and it is too soon to give up on this strategy.

I've lived through ten presidents and I suddenly realized that I don't recall any other administration where the VP's opinion of foreigh policy mattered. It would be assumed he stood with the president and it's the president's view that would be noted. I guess the WSJ has figured out who the real decider is.

The other graf that struck me was this one.

"The really decisive activity [in these areas] will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence to comb out insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have gone quiet as we have moved in," said David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in an email.

I was trying to picture how that strategy would work in the daily reality of the average Iraqi. I see armed stormtroopers pounding on their doors, taking their biometrics and demanding to know their allegiance. Then I try to imagine how it would feel if China or Russia decided to invade us to "liberate" us from Bush and started sending armed soldiers, in their coutry's uniform and who didn't speak English, door to door to "register the population." Somehow I don't think that would make me feel all that free.

These guys have it all backwards. We can't impose our preferred result by military force. If we truly want to stabilize Iraq then we need to leave and let Iraqis decide for themselves what to do with their country. The consensus government they will likely form without our interference will undoubtably not turn out to be to our liking. We're either going to have to live with it -- or not.

But that's a decision to be made after the Iraqis have made theirs, not before.