By MARTIN SCHRAM
Scripps Howard News Service
The Democratic presidential pack is desperate. Five senators, a governor and a representative are seeking one surefire way to capture hearts, minds and votes whenever they are asked what should be done about Iraq now that post-surge statistics show violence there has at least temporarily declined.
| First instance of the blinders: Violence has declined, but because it's happened on Bush's watch it must be a temporary thing. It's entirely possible that we're currently in the lull between storms, but it's just as possible we're over the hump, which would call for a different assessment. The Iraqi army at the time of the First Gulf War was good mainly for oppressing the populace, but it was very good at that. The new Iraqi army hasn't been used to oppress the populace, being reserved instead for use against actual military (quasimilitary, at least) enemies. They are getting better at that as time goes on, with the combination of training, practice, and self-confidence that we're been giving them. Of those, the self-confidence is at least as important as the training and the practice. When we withdraw, they will be demonstrably the best military force in the Muddle East, certainly capable of dealing with Baathists revanchists. |
Their quandary is based on a false perception that many think and no one speaks: The misguided notion that good news for the U.S. military is bad news for Democratic presidential prospects.
| They've been working to make themselves that way since 1972, haven't they? Lemme see, here: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and now the current crop of fluffheads. Have I missed anybody? |
Wrong. One senator proposed the perfect solution -- and if an Iraq solution is the standard for choosing a standard-bearer, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee ought to be Sen. George Aiken of Vermont. There are, of course, two hitches: Aiken's lifelong membership in the Republican Party, and the fact that Aiken's long life ended in 1984, at the age of 92.
| I vaguely remember Aiken's existence... |
But the Iraq War application of Aiken's famous prescription for ending with honor the Vietnam War remains even more fitting today than it was in the 1960s: Declare victory and get out.
| Oh, boy! We're going to play semantic games! |
Aiken was not your typical anti-war liberal dove. He had supported the war initially and the bombing of North Vietnam. But he knew quagmire when he saw it. And so he sought a solution that would please hawks that wanted a victory, and doves, which wanted the war ended.
| This is what I think of as the "transfusion fallacy." Let's assume you've been hit by a bus. You have massive internal bleeding. Trained medical professionals arrive on the scene. They try to start an IV to replace all those fluids that are seeping into your abdominal cavity or the gutter, depending. But they can't find a good vein. Maybe you're in shock. Obviously all they have to do at this point is declare you transfused, right? Or do you require the actual thing, rather than its description? (I think the answer might vary according to which political party you favor.) |
There never was a U.S. victory moment in Vietnam, but we are there now in Iraq. The war President Bush started has been won. Saddam Hussein -- an evil despot who killed many thousands of his fellow Iraqis -- has been toppled, captured, convicted and executed.
| Bush announced "mission accomplished" shortly after Sammy was toppled, and about six months before he was captured. The Baath regime at that point had in fact been kicked out and rendered incapable of returning. The war from that point forward was against Zarqawi in alliance with the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Baath revanchists. Neither Zarq nor the Muslim Scholars would have allowed to Baathists to recapture power. They were just too stoopid to realize that. |
What happened since then was that Bush committed the same error that Republicans rightly blasted President Bill Clinton for committing in the comparatively minor military mission in Somalia: A never-announced mission creep.
| The mission was to fight al-Qaeda. That wasn't "mission creep." It wasn't a static setup. Only an idiot would have assumed that Qaeda and/or Iran wouldn't try to snatch the Iraqi bone from the American jaws. What was a surprise was how effective a commander Zark was. He was an effective commander because of his experience operating al-Tawhid and Ansar al-Islam, not to mention the training camps in Afghanistan. That, and the fact that being nuts he was hard to predict. |
U.S. forces were allowed to be sucked into the vortex of a bloody three-way Iraqi civil war pitting Sunni, Shia and Kurdish forces against each other. Indeed, it has been at least a six-sided civil war, as Iraq's factions within factions and outsiders from al Qaeda and Iran have slipped into Iraq.
| That's the war we've been fighting since May, 2003. It's the war we're now winning, by the way, thanks to Dave Petraeus, his staff, his commmanders, and the men and women they lead. The Kurds have from the start been reliable allies, who've been supporting the new government. The Shiite split is mostly between Tater and SCIIRI, and we've pretty deftly turned SCIIRI's Badr Brigades from a threat to an asset, while we're beaten Tater to within in an inch and a half of killing him at least twice that I can recall off the top of my head -- and it's my opinion we should kill him, if only for the al-Khoei incident. The kaleidoscope of Sunni insurgent organizations ran the gamut from gangsters to Baath revanchists to beturbanned nutcases, and it's always been my contention that the war against them had to be intelligence driven -- not only to kill the worst of them, but to induce the kinds of splitting and side-changing we see going on right now. |
Muslims are killing Muslims -- and the U.S. military has been allowed to become trapped in the middle, being killed and wounded by all factions and fringes.
| According to the Association of Muslim Scholars, it's the poor, defenseless Iraqis who're trapped under the brutal occupation. Our main target has always been AQI and its allies and fronts -- Ansar al-Islam and the two branches of Ansar as-Sunna, and now the Islamic State in Iraq. But when they're setting up IEDs and such, you can't really ask which organization they belong to and they refuse to wear uniforms or even the same color turban. The sorting has to be done at the top level, which is why the 1920 Revolution Brigades and a couple or three others are now on our side -- and if they decide to go back on the other side again, we've got some real good intelligence to chase them down, just from having been in close proximity to them for this long. |
American men and women on their second and third tours in Iraq have been at war longer than their grandfathers were in World War II.
| Whoopty doo. The poor WWII troops were there much longer than were their WWI parents. A better comparison would be with the Indian Wars, that took the better part of the 19th century. |
But now, U.S. military figures show that the civil-warfare in Iraq has become, at least statistically, a bit more civil.
| So now's the time to throw it all away? Is it just me, or does that statement make no sense whatsoever? |
So Iraq's politicians have no excuse to continue refusing to make political peace. But they do need a push.
| Iraq's politicians have been working on making political peace for quite some time now. Part of the problem has been that the insurgency has been reflected within the body politic as well. They've only lately become strong enough to shut down the Association of Muslim Scholars, and they're still not strong enough to have al-Dulaimi killed. Tater, transparently controlled from Terrorhan, has been a part of the government. The Sunnis, recall, refused to take part, for the most part, preferring to kill and maim their fellow Muslims, which gave rise to the Shiite death squads in retaliation. It takes time and the appropriate tools -- a can of motor oil, a hot iron, and a pair of large tweezers -- to sort out a can of worms. If you only have the motor oil and half the tweezers when you start, you're really making things worse before you make them better -- and once you get the hot iron things go a lot faster. |
That should be the Democrats' new master plan.
| Brilliant. Simply brilliant. |
Start by celebrating the fact that the U.S. troops won their war.
| The current war isn't quite won yet. |
This is the perfect time for Democrats to demonstrate the extinction of their three decades of reflexive dovish imagery.
| Right. By pulling the troops out before the job's done. It's really about what we expect from them. |
Fly with the hawks by celebrating U.S. military victories. Out-hawk the hawks by vowing to accomplish what Bush failed to do -- vanquish al Qaeda.
Bush has been working pretty hard and with quite a bit of success on vanquishing al-Qaeda wherever it raises its pointy little beturbanned head. 50 years from now he'll get the credit he deserves, but I'll be long dead by then so I won't be around to say I told you so.
There's been a continuous stream of Soddies, Yemenis, Syrians, Egyptians, and others tromping into the Iraqi killing fields to be... ummm... killed. You might almost describe them as the flower of their generation, since they're the ones with education and money for the most part, leaving the dullards and the broke back home as a cheering section.
While that's been going on, Jemaah Islamiyah has been rolled up in Indonesia, thanks to U.S. and Australian intel and the rise of people with a bit of sense to Indonesia's executive. The Philippines has seen the virtual demise of Abu Sayyaf and the extinction of the Pentagon Gang -- anybody remember them?
The Islamic Courts showed up in Somalia last July and they were on the run by December. Somalia, for the first time since Siad Barre, has a government in Mogadishu, albeit one that's shakey and often frightening to look at.
In Algeria, where GIA and GSPC were wreaking havoc in 2002, the Algerian army is in control, GIA's extinct, and GSPC's been forced to consolidate with other North African hard boyz into an out-and-out al-Qaeda franchise. In 2002 the Algerian army was still chasing them on foot. Now they've got vehicles, helicopters, and night vision goggles. Wonder where those came from?
In Afghanistan the Taliban, despite daily claims that they're winning, are being slaughtered in droves, upward of 40 at a time. Only in the heart of Qaeda country, the NWFP, where we can't send troops and where the government won't cooperate, is al-Qaeda still strong. And the Bush involvement with the government of Pakistain has been intense, if you've been watching. Benazir's there as a result of U.S. pressure, and I'm guessing Nawaz is back as a result of a U.S. (or Soddy) afterthought.
Bush's shortcoming is that he's not publicizing all this -- the public should be jumping up and down, cheering and throwing rose petals. Instead, most people don't know about it. And people working for some newspaper chains are actively trying to hide it from them. | |
Also, defeat for a second time the Afghanistan Taliban that, because of a Bush Team attention deficit disorder, was allowed to regain what they had lost.
| Sigh. The Taliban "resurgence" is a result of Pakistain thinking they can control them, rather than some shortcoming on Bush's part. The main Taliban effort is in North and South Wazoo, not in Afghanistan -- at least at this moment. The commander to watch isn't Mullah Omar, but Baitullah Mehsud. But I'm sure you, Martin Schram, knew all that, right? |
Now is the time for Democrats to demonstrate that theirs is the party of 21st-century smart power, the combination of military and diplomatic power and vision.
| The Dems have made themselves the party that espouses more European-style solutions. Europe has been handling Iran for... how long? And France has taken the lead with Lebanon. All we do is supply a bit of military hardware and an occasional unobtrusive word of encouragement. Neither is what you could call a singular success, though the Syrians are at least out of Leb. |
Failure to seize the initiative now could cause Democrats to be forever outside the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., looking in on Inauguration Day. Now is the time for Democrats to declare "Mission Accomplished!" And show that they are ready to move vigorously to accomplish the next stage by sending Iraqi politicians the only signal they will understand -- by getting out.
| They're not ignorant brutes who know only the language of a kick to the head, y'know? Though I guess the Dems could be the ignorant brutes in this case, capable of communicating with another political process only by snarling and betrayal, kind of like Hamas without the facemasks. |
And also by declaring their party's determination to defeat the enemy that attacked us on 9/11 and has been allowed to survive and recoup, recruit anew and threaten us again.
| How're you going to defeat them if you refuse to fight them? Batter them into submission with "soft power"? Send them a strongly worded memo? The enemy in Iraq is al-Qaeda in Iraq. If you're too dense to understand that, you're too dense to write on the subject. Try sports writing or theater criticism or write restaurant reviews. |
Democrats can rally around any of several commonsense withdrawal plans. One of the first was proposed two years ago by former Reagan assistant defense secretary Lawrence Korb, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress: Withdraw most troops through a strategic redeployment, but keep some troops in the region with a mission of preventing al Qaeda from establishing a new sanctuary there.
| They've already got sanctuaries there, fer Gawdsake. What do you think Fallujah was? And Ramadi? What do you think we've been doing all this time? The foxtrot? |
Democrats can take their guidance from yet another bit of wisdom from Aiken, who said in 1966: "I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls."
| I think we need more bustards. But both statements are well beside the point. |
(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram(at)gmail.com.) |