ISG Responses
A number of blogs I visit were saying yesterday that the ISG report was a dud, unworkable, and that Iraq may already be lost.
It’s difficult to tell whether the ISG report ultimately represents a failure of brainpower or a failure of nerve. The point of the group’s report was to explain the current situation in Iraq and how to best move forward, but instead it ultimately (if unsurprisingly) became a political entity. They took into account political positions in an attempt to craft solutions that would be politically palatable, rather than stating their unvarnished findings. In other words, either all these smart people took eight months to tell us what we all already knew, or they watered down their opinion for the sake of not making waves. Neither option is especially heartening.
It was only this morning while listening to the BBC that I came to a similar conclusion. Iran, for starters, said they were only too happy to cooperate: but first (of course) the US would have to make some concessions. Like timetables. Troop drawdowns. Nuclear programs. Israel, for its part, said the whole plan is “an illusion” (their words, not mine), that the Israel-Palestine conflict had nothing to do with Iraq,that there would be no negotiations with Syria or Iran. The Saudis say we stay, or they go in to defend the Sunni: if the Saudis go in, the Iranians will march in as well (they are already there, in the form of the loyalty-riven al-Maliki and SCIRI’s al-Hakim). If the Iranians and the Saudis march in, there is no way Turkey is going to stay out: not with the risk of the Kurds establishing their own state.
Eliot Cohen, neo-con and Iraq War advocate:
“People sometimes ask me, ‘If you knew then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of the war?’ Usually they’re thinking about the W.M.D. stuff. My response is that the thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this. I’m pretty grim. I think we’re heading for a very dark world, because the long-term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally—for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff.”
Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, said in an interview that the overall concept of withdrawing American forces as the Iraqis built up their military capability was sound. But he argued that the specific recommendations by the panel raised a second problem: if American combat brigades were withdrawn from Iraq, the thousands of American advisers who remained might find themselves dangerously exposed, particularly if the fighting in Iraq grew into a full-scale civil war. The advisers could be killed or taken hostage.
“They came up with a political thought but then got to tinkering with tactical ideas that in my view don’t make any sense,†General McCaffrey said. “This is a recipe for national humiliation.â€
When it’s suggested that I don’t care about Islamic terrorism, I can only point to my opposition to War in Iraq as proof of my concern. Because we are stuck in Iraq, spending buckets of blood and buckets of treasure, our enemies are emboldened. We are less capable militarily to deal with them, and less capable politically and diplomatically to deal with them.
And if Iraq falls into either long-term chaos or Iran’s thrall, things will get very bleak, very quickly. You think $2.50 a gallon for the cheap stuff is highway robbery? You just wait…
Added: Glenn Greenwald asks an important question about the ISG:
these same war advocates — and only they — are deemed even today, as Iraq lays in ruins, to be the responsible leaders who have a monopoly on worthwhile wisdom. Conversely, those who exhibited great judgment and foresight are as mocked and stigmatized as much as ever (just a little bit less overtly, but only a little), and are excluded entirely from the process of determining what we should do now.
This matters for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that people who brought us into the disaster we are in have not accepted responsibility and, consequently, have not changed their mentality or premises any. Where are the mea culpas for Iraq? With very rare exception, they are nonexistent, because nobody believes that they were at fault for what happened. Virtually all of the people who advocated this invasion have all created their own private rationalizations as to why they were right and other people failed to implement their plan.
[snip]
Compare the profound wrongness of Baker’s pre-war arguments to the pre-war prescience and insight of war opponents such as Howard Dean, Jim Webb, Russ Feingold Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi, or the statements over a year ago from crazy, insane, cut-and-run-coward Jack Murtha about what would happen in Iraq if we stayed. The incoherence of viewing the former as some sort of responsible and wise foreign policy expert, while viewing the latter as frivolous and irresponsible radicals, is so intense that it makes one almost dizzy to contemplate.
Yes, why SHOULD anyone care what James Baker and Co. have to say? They were wrong from the start. Why should ANYONE expect them to be right now?
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