Flipping Around Iraq, Heading for a Flop

So, it seems that the news from Iraq is relatively good, or at least not so bad as it once was, and now the media expect that Barack Obama must be getting ready to flip-flop about the war. There is this much truth to such speculation: if the war in Iraq had been a painless, stunning success, with little cost in taxpayer dollars and soldier’s lives, if it gave us an upbeat parade at little cost, a good sized majority of American voters would have cared less about any moral arguments. Likewise, if the war drags on and on with no clear purpose or visible benchmarks of victory, a good sized majority will get tired of it, regardless of any moral purpose to staying the course. After all, nobody wanted to fight Hitler on account of persecuted Jews, until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

But if Barack Obama has the sense that he seemed to show in his best-selling books, he can handle this subject without flip-flopping.

First, whoever we elect as president is going to be leading us through situations we haven’t even imagined yet. So the first question is, who has the good judgment to deal with the NEXT few crises to come along.

Going into Iraq was a bad idea. Obama called that correctly in 2003, when he said he wasn’t against all wars, he was against dumb wars. Our so-called allies in Iraq (remember Ahmed Chalabi?) were cynically manipulating a presidential cabinet who were just begging to be manipulated. The pretexts for going in have turned out to be stone cold lies, for the most part. Most important, our president sold us on the idea it would be a cheap war with a fast rosy ending. If he wasn’t lying, if he believed that, he was a fool.

Now, while things may be calming down a bit, it remains true that we have no real friends in Iraq, with the possible exception of the Kurds, who need us more than anyone else does. If we have any other friends, it is the Sunni Arabs we went in to knock out of power, who need us to protect them from the Shia political parties we thought were our allies, who are in fact just waiting for us to leave.

Neither George W. Bush nor John McCain can give us a clear definition of “victory.” Neither one of us can tell us what we get out of “staying the course.” That is because the raw material for an outcome worth the expenditure of American blood and tax dollars simply doesn’t exist in Iraq. That’s why it was a dumb war in the first place.

In World War II, we knew who we were fighting, and why we needed to secure unconditional surrender from the Axis powers. In the Korean War, we knew that either reaching the Yalu River or stabilizing an armistice at the 38^th parallel would make some sense of all we had put into the war. In Vietnam, at least we knew there was a clique of cynical, manipulative, corrupt military officers whose continued presence in office meant that we had not lost. We don’t have any of that in Iraq. The “government” we are fighting to stabilize is just waiting for us to go so they can run their own agenda without interference. The only way we might have gotten a really positive outcome is if we totally occupied the place, as we did with Germany after WW II. That would have required millions of soldiers, and a military draft, plus a much larger budget.

We should be looking for a president who will continually examine all the facts, and do what is best, not stick to an outdated program to make himself look good. If McCain keeps our troops bleeding for 100 years so nobody can say he was wrong about staying the course, he’d be a bad president. If Obama pulls the plug on a complicated situation, where we pay prices for either staying in or pulling out, he’d be a bad president too. Obama should remain firm that this whole war was a dumb idea, ineptly planned and ineptly led. He should also forthrightly let us know that he is prepared to work with all new information which comes in, adjusting policy to whatever will get the best results now. What should not be lost sight of us:

1) Our real security interests lie more in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq.

2) Our military are stretched thin, and our all-volunteer military force is paying an unacceptable price for it.

3) IF it is necessary to really pour more time and effort into Iraq for some reason, that will require a massively enlarged military. We either must all be prepared to make the sacrifices required, or stop pretending we are going to “stay the course” when a tiny fraction of American families are asked to pay most of the prices.

4) Getting out of Iraq will be handled in a responsible way, which may mean adjusting time-tables, deployment, in consultation with the military commanders, so we get the best possible result from a bad situation.

5) No candidate who is honest can really say what the situation on the ground will be on January 20, 2009, so nobody should make their promises in absolute numbers. We do need to know what kind of judgment a candidate will bring to the job, and what their priorities will be, as they review a constant stream of incoming, ever-changing, facts from the field.