President Bush echoed two thoughts from my "Classical Liberal Analysis of the Iraq War" (available in three parts, here, here, and here) yesterday in his press conference.
One was that the idea of the surge is to get the situation in Iraq stable enough so that we can leave:
I want to remind you as to why I sent more troops in. It was to help stabilize the capital. You’re asking me how much longer; we have yet to even get all our troops in place. General David Petraeus laid out a plan for the Congress, he talked about a strategy all aiming—all aimed at helping this Iraqi government secure its capital so that they can do the—some of the political work necessary, the hard work necessary to reconcile. . . .
[I]t’s going to require taking control of the capital. And the best way to do that was to follow the recommendations of General Petraeus. As I have constantly made clear, the recommendations of Baker-Hamilton appeal to me, and that is to be embedded and to train and to guard the territorial integrity of the country, and to have Special Forces to chase down al Qaeda. But I didn’t think we could get there unless we increased the troop levels to secure the capital. I was fearful that violence would spiral out of control in Iraq, and that this experience of trying to help this democracy would—couldn’t succeed.
Clearly he’s at least toying with the idea of the surge is to get things stable enough so that we can get out. Unfortunately, he appears also to be rhetorically reserving the option to keep a skeleton crew of U.S troops there for the indefinite future. This would be extremely ill-advised, in my view, as the troops would simply become hostages in an unstable foreign country. However, Bush appears at least to be strongly acknowledging the notion that the idea of a surge is to enable the great majority of U.S. troops to get out. That’s a good start.
Point two is when Bush said of Iraq, "It’s a sovereign nation." That is explicitly point 1 of the classical liberal position I’ve outlined in my analysis. It also reinforces the notion that Bush is truly looking for an exit strategy (at long last) and that the surge is his attempt at achieving the soonest reasonably graceful withdrawal possible:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. You say you want nothing short of victory, that leaving Iraq would be catastrophic; you once again mentioned al Qaeda. Does that mean that you are willing to leave American troops there, no matter what the Iraqi government does? I know this is a question we’ve asked before, but you can begin it with a "yes" or "no."
THE PRESIDENT: We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.
Where Bush fell short, once again, from a classical liberal perspective, was in his claim that fighting in Iraq is a good way to prosecute the war on terror, which I noted in my analysis is entirely unconvincing.
Failure in Iraq will cause generations to suffer, in my judgment. Al Qaeda will be emboldened. They will say, yes, once again, we’ve driven the great soft America out of a part of the region. It will cause them to be able to recruit more. It will give them safe haven. They are a direct threat to the United States. . . .
It’s better to fight them there than here. And this concept about, well, maybe let’s just kind of just leave them alone and maybe they’ll be all right is naive. These people attacked us before we were in Iraq. They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq, and they’ve been attacking ever since. They are a threat to your children, David, and whoever is in that Oval Office better understand it and take measures necessary to protect the American people.
On the question of whether it’s better to fight "them" here or in Iraq, Bush’s assumption that these are the only two alternatives seems to me highly dubious indeed. We should fight them wherever they are, provided only that there is a real, credible threat to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. And the connection between that and Iraq strikes me as very tenuous indeed.
Regardless of whether Bush follows through on the implication that he’s preparing as graceful and quick an exit as possible, certainly the terms I mentioned in my analysis have begun to enter the debate. Of course I believe that that’s a very good thing, as a classical liberal perspective provides wise guidelines for actions both domestic and foreign.
You are forgetting one thing – leaving a chaotic Afghanistan to the Taliban led directly to the 9/11 attacks. When the Soviets left, the world community just left the Afghans to sort it all out. They didn’t do a very good job of it. Tom Friedman talks about “super-empowered” angry young Muslim men. We can’t leave Iraq to descend into becoming a failed state, unable to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing training camps. It is too easy for them to acquire weapons and transport them to our shores. THe problem with the pure ideology of classical liberalism is that its very purity makes it impractical in the real world. In the real world there are real dangers in leaving Iraq.
Lots of people, left and right, don’t want to admit that. What you say may be consistent with Locke et al, but it may not be consistent with keeping this country safe from harm.
Dear Mr. Karnick:
I really don’t know what to think about this war.
On the one hand, every reason the President states for the U.S. to be there seems valid–even the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Dennis Miller’s one-liner about going to Syria and looking under the Syrian president’s bed where you’ll find the WMDs right next to the Playboys).
Certainly Christians have a Biblical mandate to support and protect Israel or suffer decline. I don’t know if the President is aware of that mandate or, if he is, acts upon it. I assume Israel enters into his strategic calculus at some point.
And there’s even a “bright side” to the casualty figures (if such a grim reality could have a “bright side”): The total number of dead and wounded Americans is roughly the same as the third day after the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. Superior firepower and training, and a lack of organized resistance, are responsible for the relatively low casualties.
But….on the other hand, within a year of D-Day the Allies could claim total victory over Germany. The “war in Iraq” has dragged on for longer than America’s involvement in the Second World War and no end is in sight. (And, yes, I know the argument: No one could predict when World War Two would end, either; it was “for the duration.”) You may have noticed the quotation marks around “war in Iraq”, used because this seems to be a low-intensity police action–unlike Korea, 1950-53, which was a war in every meaningful sense, in spite of official claims that it was only “a police action.” There is no battlefield maneuver of the classic kind in Iraq, just intermittent firefights and the inevitable attrition of bombs and snipers. I’m not saying these are trivial concerns, only that America is now involved in a long-term, nasty guerrilla conflict of the sort that can’t be “won” like the Second World War was, with one side throwing in the towel in a clear-cut victory.
I’m not going to get into a pointless discussion of whether this has been worth American lives and treasure; that’s for posterity to determine, since hindsight is always twenty-twenty. (As for the material cost, somebody on the Internet has calculated it at between $2,000-$3,000 per second, or $62-$93 billion per year; I’ll leave it to the economists to determine whether that’s sustainable in an $8 trillion economy.)
In summary, then, I am ambivalent about this war. I am not a fan of this President (especially when it comes to illegal “immigration”), but he is the commander-in-chief under the Constitution, despite being the lamest duck on the pond; if he feels military action in Iraq is truly necessary, then I suppose it is. (And speaking of that much-neglected document, the Constitution insists on a formal declaration of war before the commencement of hostilities; yet it’s troubling that we haven’t had one since 1941. The Legislative body has abdicated its responsibilities to keep the Executive and Judicial branches in line for many decades now; is the “war in Iraq” just one more example of how the people’s representatives have caved in to special interest groups while the Presidency and the Courts have begun to exercise unchecked power? But that’s a discussion for another time.)
As I said at the start, I really don’t know what to think about this war.
Respectfully,
Mike (not Linda)