Here's the problem with McCain and Kristol's argument: we have no idea how things would have turned out if Obama had had his way 18 months ago.  It's purely a fantasy comparison.  The fact is that we can say next to nothing about what would have happened had we withdrawn.

While we're playing this game, though, McCain cites decreased U.S. casualties in recent months as evidence that his policy was right.  This seems like an odd metric on which to compare the success of the surge to the hypothetical failures of withdrawal.  The fact is that U.S. casualties would be decreased far more if we *weren't there anymore*.  The real argument is about what would happen to Iraq, not what would happen to the number of U.S. fatalities.

I wish there really was a "Kristol Ball" post every Friday.  It worked the first week, but was never followed-up as had been originally stated.

Kristol is just like all the other 'conservative' pundits, who firmly believe that saying the same thing enough times will make it the truth and fact.  Sort of like "failed liberal policies", even though liberal policies have proven to be better for our nation than our last eight years of conservative ones.  McCain (and now Kristol) believing that we've had fewer casualties because of the surge is as asinine as can be - we'd have had next to none after withdrawing.  We would have had zero if we hadn't gone in there in the first place, and would have most likely have captured/killed Osama!  They won't talk about why he's still in the wind.  They won't talk about the condition of our military.  They won't talk about bankrupt education policies.  They won't talk about a whole list of things that would not be issues with liberal policies.

Kristol and the republican establishment has been pushing this newest version of "victory in Iraq" for several months now. It's all they got. Somebody else is going to have to fix this mess and it's not going to be the people who got us into it. Everyone knows it.

It's going to be a bad November for Kristol.

This is good.  As Obama said after the Bush/Knesset flap, we should welcome any McCain concentration on Iraq and away from "values" issue (whatever they might be).  On Iraq, at any rate, the "Senator Arugula", the "Messiah complex" and the "Elite" arguments don't work; no need for anyone to down Crown Royal or to talk about packing pea-shooters in junior Kindergarten; no issue of this or that Church; certain none of race of reverse racism.

Let the debate be about Iraq - and I say this as someone who initially supported the War against Tyranny, who continues to think that removing Saddam Hussein and his gang of criminals was an absolute good, and who has no time whatever for blind pacifism.  The sins of the Bush administration in the justification and prosecution of the war are so manifest and manifold that it would take a fool to try to show "Commander in Chief" mettle on the basis of one small aspect of it.

"Failed liberal policies" is exactly what Dubya has been following for the last eight years. He's just the same rose by another name-it brings to mind LBJ's "guns and butter'' policies later continued by Nixon.

What an idiotic post, Jon.

Gallup demonstrates with over two dozen polls between 1991 and 2003 that always a majority, at times approaching 3:1 and averaging a bit less than 2:1 for the whole period. said "yes" to the rather unambiguous question: " Would you favor or oppose invading Iraq with US troops in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power?" The number in 1993, when it became clear that Saddam would not fall in the wake of his first defeat, was 70%. Bush lies?

Maybe public opinion had something to do with the decision to remove Saddam Hussein.

icarusr, same boat as you. If the surge was so successful, why can't we remove troops? Because then we would risk losing the success. Classic catch 22 equaling an unending occupation. McCain has to argue the surge is going so well that we are winning (always winning but never won) but not so well that we can begin to draw down. Not even leave, but draw down to around our South Korea's 50,000 troops.

Robert, maybe it did, but invading a country because it's a popular idea with American citizens, the vast majority of whom haven't the extensive knowledge and experience required to make such a decision, is an awful idea.  Sen Obama took an unpopular position when the war started, and history (seems to have) vindicated him.

The voice of people has the power of the voice of God, but not the truth of it.

The 1993 spike relates to the cruise missile strike against Saddam after it was asserted by our intelligence services that he tried to assassinate GHW Bush in Kuwait; not after it was realized that his regime wouldn't fall. The other major caveat that Robert leaves out of his polling data from 1991 to 2003, is that Gallup never even polled on that question from 1993 to 2001. Meaning that of the "whole period" of 13 years, seven have no data from Gallup at all.

www.gallup.com/.../Iraq.aspx

If Gallup is squirreling away from data that’s not on their site, please let me know. As is, it doesn’t seem to exist.

There is some data about use of force during this missing period. It shows a large amount of ambivalence towards an invasion and occupation. The polled agreed with "use of force," specifically airpower but had little appetite for an invasion and occupation; some polls showing 2:1 against an invasion in the mid-1990s when Iraq had virtually fallen off the public's radar. That changed around this time:

www.usatoday.com/.../2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm

I seem to recall Kristol arguing for George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 by saying that Bush may have been inexperienced in 2000, but he's demonstrated his experience since then (9-11, yadda yadda yadda).  I don't have a link or anything but it blew me away that he could even say that with a straight face then (or that people might believe it).  Now he's recycling that garbage for McCain.

How about whether the new war was a good thing?

Gold should not be at €899; last Friday Oil had it's biggest one day rise in simple dollar terms, ever! There's only one explanation, war is in the mix and that's tough minded investment talk, not left wing conspiracy stuff. There's a high probability some "incident" will happen pre November. Should help prop up the Dollar, as demand for the currency will spike as oil rises. Those petro dollars will be recycled back to the usual Lon-NY banks.

It's difficult to keep up with the wars, isn't it?

How's the fourth fleet coming on?

Personally, I think the best candidate would have been *conflicted* about the war in 2003, not certain either way.  Oh well.

It's also interesting that neither candidate is taking John Kerry's position on Iraq: rather than pulling out we should try to internationalize the peace keeping (which means ceding control).  As someone who hates the argument that it's ok for us to leave a potentially genocidal power vacuum in Iraq because the politicians aren't acting fast enough (yeah, a frightened Iraqi civilian is really responsible for that), but don't want us there for 100 years either, I wish that was on the table.

People believe the decision to go to war was wrong, but also know that that decision is ancient history. Many of us saw, as Obama did, that the war would be a mistake, and accurately predicted many of its consequences. You didn't need to be a foreign policy expert to do so.

But the question we are faced with now, the one on which this campaign may be decided, is an entirely different one; how do we extricate ourselves from this situation in a way that minimizes suffering for the people of Iraq, maximizes security for ourselves, and maximizes stability in the region?

Being right about the relatively easy call on the initial question of going to war (a question that was as easy for me, a middle aged marketing executive to answer as it was for Obama, at the time a youthful candidate for local political office) isn't a necessarily convincing argument for having the ability, correct experience and depth of knowledge to end the war under the complicated conditions that now prevail, nor an argument for being able to achieve what now needs to be achieved in Iraq and the region - especially when it is your ONLY argument for being able to do so.

The truth is, while McCain supported going to war, he did also criticize how it was conducted. And he can make the argument, based in reality not speculation, that things began to turn around when his criticisms began to be listened to and his policy prescriptions were applied.

It's quite possible that at this stage -- when people are more concerned about how we proceed than about how we got into the war -- McCain's arguments, based on events on the ground, will strike many as stronger than Obama's argument, based on trust in a personal "judgement' that a very slight resume provides few opportunities to prove.

Kristol is a stooge

AlanSP: Counterfactuals are endlessly debatable, of course. But with an exponential increase in violence taking place, a withdrawal of US troops would very possibly have augmented the carnage. I am someone who regularly pronounces anathema on Walker Bush and all of his works but now, we have to decide what is best for Iraq and the Iraqi people.

AlanSP: Counterfactuals are endlessly debatable, of course. But with an exponential increase in violence taking place, a withdrawal of US troops would very possibly have augmented the carnage. I am someone who regularly pronounces anathema on Walker Bush and all of his works but now, we have to decide what is best for Iraq and the Iraqi people.

lymon1, I think I agree with you.  However, if our NATO allies won't even pony up more troops to help us out in Afghanistan, I have serious doubts that the UN will send peacekeepers to Iraq.  It would take a lot of guts for the US to cede control, but if the options are either to cede control to the current Iraqi government (which is twiddling their thumbs), or the UN (which would have slightly more legitimacy than us, but would be a lot less effective), or keep military control for now (illegitimate as we are), none of the options look good.

esmense: Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I think there was a powerful river of opinion that took us into war, that Obama, while having the right position, was unable to stop. And no one in Congress could have stopped the march to war. Now there's an equally strong river wanting us out of Iraq. So Obama's inexperiece will be less of a factor, less of a problem. Obama will be out in front of a movement that is searching for a leader.

Healthcare is a different story. While there is a strong perceived need for change, how do you organize a real consensus out of a mass of unhappy, complaining citizens? I know it challenges conventional wisdom, but I think Obama may have more trouble domestically than overseas. I think America is seeing the error of its ways in foreign policy, but we're at the very beginning of understanding, and grappling with, the mess at home.

I disagree with the point of the main post.  Kristol’s argument in his Times column was that at the time the war going down the toilet  Obama called for troop withdrawal and McCain called for the surge. Bush stared down the ISG and chose the surge as  strategy. The surge appears to have had some reasonable success with it seems, among other things, violence down, with al Qaeda badly dispersed and with the return of a semblance of civic life in Baghdad.  So it seems to me that on that point—whether at that time to implement the surge strategy or start withdrawing troops—it is reasonable to say that McCain was right and Obama was wrong. And it is reasonable to conclude that McCain’s experience and Obama’s inexperience lay behind their disparate decisions. Those bricks are the constituents of  Kristol’s overall argument—coming after his sound thrashing of McCain’s speech as a campaign event—and it is not an unreasonable argument insofar as the commander in chief issue is concerned. What is put against that argument by Cohn: that Obama was right and McCain was wrong on the original decision to go to war. That argument leaves out that Obama was not a U.S. senator and was from a liberal Illinois district at the time, and while his presidential ambitions may have been nascent he did not have to calibrate his position then against its implications for those ambitions. And Obama is a very prudent and calculating man. And Cohn’s argument, I think,   does not concretely meet Kristol’s point as to what real political world context is there to compare the candidates’ respective commander in chief moments. So I would say that at a minimum Kristol’s argument is as persuasive as Cohn’s; and for me specifically it is more persuasive

basman,

I don't think it's fair to say that "on that point—whether at that time to implement the surge strategy or start withdrawing troops—it is reasonable to say that McCain was right and Obama was wrong," for the reasons I mentioned earlier.  One represents a real-world strategy that was implemented with some success, while the other represents a counterfactual.  We can't say what would have happened if we had started withdrawing troops because we did not in fact do so.  The statement, "the surge has had some success" can be backed up empirically, while the statement "withdrawing troops would have been a disaster" is merely an assertion.  It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Of course, the war was a mistake.  Everybody knows that now.  McCain won't admit it, so Obama should hit him over the head with it every day - why not make the point that McCain was wrong and still is wrong?  We need to learn from our mistakes - especially those which touch on questions of basic morality, international peace, and constitutional governance - denying them or ignoring them is not something a great nation can afford.  

Robert Powell suggests above that we went to war because the American people wanted war with Iraq - for several years and in overwhelming numbers - and that this desire for war, rather than any dishonest srguments from Bush is the root cause of our mistaken act of aggression.  I put it to Mr Powell to explain then how Americans could have made such a mistake?  If they were not deceived, and yet were mistaken in their warlike aspirations, what flawed assumptions drove those aspirations, and how did these assumptions take hold among a majority of Americans?

Was it not the assumption that Saddam was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks?

Was it not also an assumption that Saddam had nuclear weapons, capable of producing the "smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud?"

Was it not a logical conclusion, based on those assumed premises, that Saddam would eventually provide nukes to Al Qaeda?

Where did such assumptions come from, and how could such erroneous assumptions ever lead a great nation to such a disgraceful and unjust war?   I wonder.   I wonder too, when an opinion poll became sufficient grounds for an act of war.  

Faced with the repeatedly reported fact that Bush fitted the intelligence to his strategy, Mr Powell concludes that the president was as deluded as were we all - that Bush is not the cause of our delusion.  He didn't lie, he merely followed the polls.

Some of us, it appears, are still deluded.

basman, one quibble:

You write, "That argument leaves out that Obama was not a U.S. senator and was from a liberal Illinois district at the time, and while his presidential ambitions may have been nascent he did not have to calibrate his position then against its implications for those ambitions."

Since he was running for a state-wide office, that his home district was liberal matters little; he had to win support from districts elsewhere in the state, including those red, rural ones down along the banks of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

Furthermore, remember what the country was like back then, during that flag-waving interval between September of 2001 and March of 2003. There was huge support for the war even among Democrat politicians and voters in blue districts.

Lastly, imagine if the second Gulf War had gone as smoothly as the first, as smoothly as McCain and the Bush Administration predicted it would go. It's doubtful that Obama would ever have made it to the U.S. Senate, let alone the White House. He gambled his political future in that 2002 speech, and he did so eloquently, with conviction.

Bob Powell is correct - invasion was extremely popular, and we had been at war with Iraq since 1991.  To me, the amnesia on the Left is breath-taking.  

It is as if 1991-2003 never happened. As if the sanctions regime and food for oil were a rousing success and would have continued forever.  As if Saddam did not possess the scientific-technical base to recreate his WMD program, mostly destroyed by the inspectors in 1998.  As if he did not have ties and contacts with all terrorist groups, up to and including al-Qaeda.

That the Bushies bungled the aftermath of the invasion is beyond question.  However, as noted, violence is down, US dead have practically stopped, knock wood, and the reason the Dems don't talk about Iraqi benchmarks is that this gov't has reached most of them.

State senators in liberal districts all over the US were opposed to war, no doubt.  That, without more, does not qualify them to be President.

Blackie, we only have about 20,000 ground forces in South Korea.  A division plus.  With air and naval backup.

Where, by the way, is the "success' of the surge?

Did I miss the peaceful settlement of the issues separating Shiite from Sunni?  What was the point of the surge - was it supposed to create the opportunity for Iraqis to stabilize their country, or as I suspect merely a strategy to delay the withdrawal from Iraq till after January 2009?  

In that sense, the surge has worked.  Petraeus saved face for Bush.  

Here it is - June 2008 - and we are still surging.  What happens if we drop force levels to the 100,000 mark or lower?  Petraeus says Iraq is still not ready for that.  

Some success.  I look around for the Mission Accomplished banner...it must be here somewhere    

basman is right--Cohn is arguing against a point Kristol wasn't trying to make, and doing a bad job of it.

I agree with bigfish that just because lots of people want something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, but then it doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea either. We went to war in Iraq in 1991 with ample justification, full legal bells and whistles, and massive public support. Then, with over half a million pairs of boots on the ground and the international wind at our back GHW Bush decided that it was too much trouble to actually win the war, so we've been trying to bring it to a reasonable conclusion ever since. This effort included over a decade of ongoing combat operations to enforce sanctions which killed perhaps a million of the most innocent Iraqis while tightening the regime's grip on power and enriching its collaborators. Whatever holes the Gallup data may have, it's a pretty safe bet that most Americans feel that if we're dragged into a war by an aggressive, genocidal totalitarianism we should try to win rather than play for a tie. That seems to me to be the consensus reflected in the huge Congressional majority voting for the AUF in 2002.

We know the downsides of what we did, but we don't know the downsides of what we didn't do. I for one think we're better off without Saddam and his heirs in control of the fulcrum of the world economy.

It's far from clear that if Obama had been involved in this process for years in the Senate representing in some respects the whole nation rather than making a speech as  a state legislator representing a small liberal district he wouldn't have taken the same position as McCain, Clinton, Edwards, Kerry, et al. He said so himself, and his actual Senate voting record is certainly in line with the rest. In terms of how we "get out", my guess is that he will do about the same things McCain would do.

alansp you make a point and clear thinking is helped by focusing more sharply on the distinction you draw. But  respectfully I find it unpersuasive. We have on one hand the surge having some success and we had on the other hand escalating violence that was worsening and that some were calling a civil war. That is precisely what the surge worked on. Surely we can draw reasonable inferences as to the likely consequences of then withdrawal and make comparisons--with admittedly built in continegency; and if not how do we speak intelligently about the world and evaluate judgments?(I didn't use the word "disaster" btw.)

p.s. If memory serves me we had this debate once before--not an Iraq if I recall--where we took positiions opposite to the ones we have here taken.

Maybe not.

Nippers --

Obama wasn't running for a statewide office when he made that speech. He made it in the context of a campaign to represent a very liberal disctrict in the State legislature. See the difference?

He gambled nothing.

So - we stumbled into a war on mistaken assumptions and dishonest presentations of flawed intelligence, but we're better off anyway because Saddam is gone.

Let's accept the premise that it is okay to make war on this or any other scale, with all the "collateral damage" and direct costs of the conflict, on the basis of misinformation, misstatements and misperceptions - that all of this can be justified later by what might have happened if we had not acted when we did and why we did.

Given that assumption, I ask how one can know that we are better off.  Saddam was very bad, but Iraq may end up in the hands of Mr Sadr.  Will this in fact be better for us?  Will the expanded influence and aggressive intentions of Iran be better for us?  Is it better for us that we have demonstrated the limits of our power in that region?  That we have stained our honor and alienated our allies and a billion Muslims?  That we have exhausted our military and added hundreds of billions to our national debt?

What happens when we leave, if we leave?  Will that clearly be better than Saddam?  Would we have been better off to start a war with the Soviet Union forty years ago?  Should we remove the regime in North Korea, Syria, Iran?

The reasoning of the Iraq War dead-enders is amazing.

Neil

basman,

Thanks for the thoughtful response.  We can, of course, reason about things that haven't happened.  This is what we do when we debate the consequences of future actions.  But counterfactual reasoning is distinctly different from reasoning about actual events.  To argue that the surge has "worked," you need some working definition of what "working" means and some empirical evidence showing that it has indeed worked by that definition (although even this is an oversimplification because of correlation/causation issues).  But arguing that withdrawal would not have worked requires a whole new set of assumptions; it cannot be inferred simply from the fact that violence decreased with the surge that violence would have increased with our withdrawal.  It's possible to make a reasoned argument that our withdrawal would have worsened the situation, but Kristol does not do so.  He treats the claim that Obama's plan would not have worked as having the weight of empirical evidence behind it.

Consider a (somewhat contrived) medical analogy in which a patient has cancer and one doctor advises chemotherapy and another advises radiation as a treatment.  They go with chemotherapy and the cancer goes into remission.  Per Kristol's logic, we can say, solely on the basis of this, that the doctor who advocated chemo was right and the other guy was wrong.  See the problem?

AlanSP,

Thanks for the thoughtful response,

"He treats the claim that Obama's plan would not have worked as having the weight of empirical evidence behind it."

Let's follow your logic.

How do you know that the alternative that Obama offered in 2003 would work?

How do we know that if US didn't free/invade Iraq in 2003 , US and Iraqi would be better  off today?

Is the alternative when  Saddam and his children rule Iraq for another 50 years is better?

Follow your logic we can't never make any judgment about anything. There are no double blinded studies in history.

Kristol, of course, never did outline the endgame because the endgame is one that pretty much everyone knows our continuing investment in Iraq won't pay for. We can never leave for fear as soon as we leave a power struggle will commence, but we can't stay forever either, so we bide time borrowing the cost of the war from the Chinese as gas spikes through the roof.

Personally, I thought we won the war when we dug Saddam out of his hole. The notion that we are somehow obligated to keep Iraqis from killing each other in perpetuity is ridiculous. Redeploy to Kurdistan and bring most of the troops home.

Was the war a mistake? it need not have been, but it sure as hell was with Bush in charge. Removing Saddam was not worth a trillion dollars (borrowed). It might have been if we truly wrapped it up in 2003, but that is just my opinion.

blackton ,

"but we can't stay forever either, "

Yes, we can, Yes we will. We've stayed forever in Europe, Japan, Korea. Why not Iraq?

We can't bring most of the troops home.. It's all or nothing proposition,

We can  declare defeat, bring our embassy,  all troops all Americans and all people who worked with Americans home or stay the McCain Lieberman course. There is no middle ground.

Jacob, as suggested before, sign up and serve - we're all aware of your unwavering toughness. Barring that possibility, grow a brain.

Butchie,

The assertion that Iraq had ties "with all terrorist groups, up to and including al-Qaeda" is totally unsupported by the evidence and contrary to the conclusions of our intelligence services. Secondly, if the  "Oil for Fraud" program was the key to Saddam's ability to hold-on to power and his eventual reclaimation of his WMD programs (a dubious assertion considering the formidable sanctions regime), the simple answer was for the United States to use it's considerable clout to alter the conditions of that program. Or better yet, to have never approved the program and each and every contract that came through it.

There were options to war; options that would have removed Saddam and not committed the United States to open-ended conflict that has depleted our military and drained our national coffers.

A fair amount of the "success" attributed to the surge is actually due to other causes.  One of them is the arming of the Anbar Sunni which is a step in the direction of the Biden proposal for soft partition and inconsistent on the face of things with the Bush rhetoric about support for the central Iraqi government that is our creation.  Another is that the division of the population into cantons, particularly in Baghdad, has proceeded apace and, by giving sectarian players distinct territory to hold and defend and from which to exclude others of the wrong sect, it has reduced the impetus for violence.   As well, one would expect that a significant increase in the density of troops in a relatively small geographic area, Baghdad, would have SOME noticeable effect on the level of violence.  Finally, there is not much indication that we can "de-surge."  Hence, it as though we have cornered a market.  Yes, we have achieved the corner, but there is no way out of the corner we have achieved.  Dubious achievement to say the least.

The evidence remains that some form of partition that allows the major groups to defend a cohesive territory is still most likely to offer a way out that does not leave Iraq to descend into uncontrolled violence either as a civil war or as a playground for terrorists.  The Kurds have shown us that.  The Anbar Sunni have shown us that.  We just don't want to learn the lesson.  Our policy is harnessed to Bush's rhetoric about the central government because this is the objective he adopted publicly to save face when the ostensible reasons for the war came to nothing.  

mpatrickhendri is correct that we could have eliminated the oil for fraud if we had wanted to.  It would have required public bidding by qualified oil companies for allocations of Iraqi oil, rather than control over contracts by Saddam Hussein, and the payment of proceeds into a trust used directly to pay for food, etc.  If we had taken away Hussein's ability to control who got the oil, there would have been zero incentive to pay money to him under the table.

Deear Obama deadenders,

Please go ahead, continue deny the facts and hope for the worst.

mpatrickhendri  said

"Jacob, as suggested before, sign up and serve - we're all aware of your unwavering toughness."

Are  you suggesting  that only Americans who serve have a right to express  an opinion about Iraqi war?

No, only Repblicans, and  Americans who serve and who are also Republcans.  People who serve, but who have other political views, will be smeared and slandered (e.g. John Kerry, Max Cleland, the guy who confronted Rumsfeld about equipment upgrades in Iraq, etc).

No, only Repblicans, and  Americans who serve and who are also Republcans.  People who serve, but who have other political views, will be smeared and slandered (e.g. John Kerry, Max Cleland, the guy who confronted Rumsfeld about equipment upgrades in Iraq, etc).

"We can  declare defeat, bring our embassy,  all troops all Americans and all people who worked with Americans home or stay the McCain Lieberman course. There is no middle ground."

As much as I think that we should stay in Iraq, you're making a false dichotomy here, jacob1.  There is absolutely a middle ground.  We can leave enough troops on the ground in Iraq to only fight Al Queda, for example.  It's also wrong to assume that McCain's plan is the most hawkish and represents one edge of the possibilities.  We could re-invade, replace Al Maliki (or however his name is spelled; I don't feel like looking it up) with another Paul Bremer, institute a draft here at home, and send lots more young Americans to Iraq.  There are a range of options.  It's not either support McCain's option or declare defeat.  One of the simplest things to know about war is that the future of a country is more complicated than heads-or-tails.

bigfish said:

"There is absolutely a middle ground.  We can leave enough troops on the ground in Iraq to only fight Al Queda, for example"

How this is going to  work?  I think this is a recipe for a hundred year war.

Neil--the "reasoning" of anyone is "amazing" if you want it to be, and make it up yourself out of whole cloth. The invasion, rape, and annexation of Kuwait had absolutely nothing to do with "mistaken assumptions and dishonest presentations of flawed intelligence", any more than did Iraq's development and use of wmd's to kill tens of thousands, its other episodes of aggression and genocide, or its comprehensive violation of the ceasefire agreement and sixteen related Chapter VII Resolutions. The Ba'athist state was a terrorist entity, and a founding member of the State-sponsored Terrorism Club. Moreover, it was an overt enemy regime controlling the keystone state in the region producing most of the oil, and most of the terrorism. These facts have nothing to do with political partisanship.

mpatrickhendri--there may have been "options that would have removed Saddam...", but it's hard to see what they were in realistic terms. Not only were the sanctions collapsing, but so was international support for doing anything that was likely to work. Total/Fina/Elf had just signed a huge deal for the development of fully a third of Iraq's massive oil reserves, and Rosneft was on the line for another deal. There were massive vested interests, both political and economic, that would have guaranteed Saddam's continuation in power if we had given him a victory in 2003 by backing down.

On "the surge", roi is correct in pointing out the various factors at work. But it seems clear to me that adopting Petraeus' tactics has had a positive effect (within reason the number of troops is less important than what they are tasked with doing); and that "the way out" is pretty much as has been stated--continuing to provide security support to the freely-elected Iraqi government on a declining level as we support the increasing ability of Iraqis to manage their own security.  We also need to guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity for a while yet, although I think the internal power-sharing arrangements can take any of several different forms without effecting our basic interests. Ergo the basic outlines of the SFO--we agree to be Iraq's airforce, and they agree not to fuck us over.

Jacob's been a fairly steadfast and vocal supporter of Mrs. Clinton on this site.  It is therefore with little or no surprise that I note the following line: "stay the McCain Lieberman course."  As for the comment about staying in Iraq "forever" as the United States has done in Germany, Japan, Korea, etc. ... This is the sort of specious historical analogy (such as "offering to negotiate with the enemy is equal to appeasement" - the way, for example, James Baker "appeased" Tariq Aziz in November 1990) is so stupid that you wonder if those who say it are at all aware of the many factors that distinguish and differentiate this situation from what has gone on before.  And the cognitive dissonance required to sustain such a thought borders on the pathological.

Just one minor point: we went into Iraq supposedly to "liberate" its people; we went into Germany and Japan to subdue and occupy enemy nations.  Our continued presence in those countries, and in Korea, has nothing whatever to do with maintaining internal peace there or sustaining the democratic institutions (the notion itself is laughable), but rather, in the Cold War days, to serve as a trip wire for invading armies.  

RobertPowell: I don't disagree with much of your analysis or premises and, in fact, I was a pretty vocal supporter of collective action against Iraq both in 1990 and throughout the decade.  Now, with a five-year remove and as revelations are coming in about how decisions were made, we know several things that, to me at least, make me pause and reflect on what was going on in 2003.  

For one thing, you note that "we [would have] given him a victory in 2003 by backing down."  But there was nothing magical about 2003.  The date matters only because the Bush administration made it matter.  Saddam had been going on in his murderous rampage for years; we had already given him his victory by not removing him in 1991, and another year or two would not have necessarily affected his standing or his resources.  But it would have made a huge difference in Afghanistan.

For another, I think we should not so easily separate out ends and means.  The ends might have been noble (well, at any rate, they were for me - removing a maniacal genocidier), but surely we can agree that running rough-shod over our allies ("freedom fries"?  How fucking juvenile could one get in the pursuit of war?), over international law and international institutions was not in the long-term interest of either the United States or, indeed, the Iraqi people, for whom Jacob rends his garment and is willing to have other people's children killed and maimed.

Point it, the surge, what we do next, and so on should not be assessed and analysed in isolation from the mass of lies and incompetence that preceded the war and exacerbated it.  This is what McCain is doing and it will only lead to further disaster.

I simply offer this is as a reasoned analysis from another perspective:

www.weeklystandard.com/.../200qbtpn.asp

Powell, I wish it could be that easy, but how long will Iraq accept our being their airforce? they have no jets of their own, even today, 5 years after the invasion we refuse to arm the military over there with heavy weapons for fear it will be used on us. We can not guarantee the success we want, despite Jacobs protestations we can't stay there forever. The Iraqis will bristle as the colonialist aspects of an enduring presence (maybe not the Kurds, which is why I advocate going there). When we start providing Iraqis with an airforce and heavy weapons, then I will know we are serious about reducing our influence there and getting out, until then I have serious doubts about the long term aspects of this.

The whole point of the surge was that in the aftermath we could begin to pull out, it is why I accepted it when it was done, the point of the surge was not the perpetuation of the occupation forever.

And Jacob, yes you should absolutely go there and serve. If I were 20 years younger I would have. I even tried to get a job in Iraq years back at the beginning. I would even still go if not for my wife and 2 small children. To advocate others to go and serve in your place when you can do it yourself is a sign of weakness. It is called growing a pair.

By the way, we have had people like tec who are opposed to the war who have served there. All the more reason for you to go.

icarusr,

I didn't not support the war from the beginning. I thought that surge wouldn't work   If  my favorite candidate,  Clinton stayed in the race I would probably found excuses not to see the success of the surge.  Now, I don't have to find excuses. I can clearly see that the surge has worked. Looking back,  McCain and  Lieberman were right, Obama, Clinton  and the Liberal Media were wrong.

I remember were two liberal hawks went to Iraq and after returning back wrote op-ed about early promising  signs in Iraq. They were treated by the rest of Liberal media as traitors.

"This is the sort of specious historical analogy (such as "offering to negotiate with the enemy is equal to appeasement" - the way, for example, James Baker "appeased" Tariq Aziz in November 1990)"

However, Bush didn't meet with Saddam.  That would be appeasement.  This is what Obama wants to do.  The disagreement between Clinton and Obama was not about negotiating with enemies. The disagreement was about the merit of making advance commitment to meeting between the president of US and leaders of enemy regimes.

"for whom Jacob rends his garment and is willing to have other people's children killed and maimed"

Your attempt to shut down debates is symbolic of the way Obama wants to unite the country.

"However, Bush didn't meet with Saddam.  That would be appeasement."

To quote Chris Matthews: "You don't even know what 'appeasement' is, do you?  This is pathetic."

Jacob: you're right, I am "shutting down" this particular debate, because I refuse to discuss a matter of national and international importance with an ignoramus who mouths off on "appeasement" without having any historical sense of what that word means or why "appeasement" has become a dirty words.  Once you have had a chance to be educated to the level of a senior high school student (which is when I learned about "appeasement"), then we can discuss Obama's foreign policy.  

As for the surge "working", Michael Kinsley had a wonderful article on that subject.  It's all about defining what you mean by "working".  It was always understood that if you had more troops on the ground and that if you managed to co-opt the warring factions to your side, the internal bloodshed would drop.  This is Warmaking Strategy 101.  But the question is not whether the surge helps reduce violence, but whether it "worked" in enabling a medium to long-term withdrawal of US troops.

If one starts from the proposition that we can and will stay in Iraq forever, then the point is moot: the surge is working because fewer American soldiers are coming back in body-bags than before the surge.  If one starts from the proposition that some sort of extrication is necessary before too long, then the surge is not working at all, because what you need on the ground NOW is not more American troops, but a political solution.

icarusr said,

"It was always understood that if you had more troops on the ground and that if you managed to co-opt the warring factions to your side, the internal bloodshed would drop.  This is Warmaking Strategy 101"

However, Obama managed not to understand this Warmaking Strategy 101.

" then we can discuss Obama's foreign policy"

No,  we can't.  His foreign policy changes every other day.

It's obvious that the surge was the right decision. To continue to deny this is just ridiculous.

But I'm denying that the context of war in Iraq, the context in which the surge happened, was a right decision.  The whole debate about the surge -- in particular when it degenerates into dissing people who express doubt about its longer-term effectiveness -- tends to confuse a tactical event or maneuver withn the strategic framework with the framework itself.  The Bush administration created a morbid framework with the invasion, and changing that framework as much as possible is what the next administration will have to do.

Jacob: in the best tradition of conservative commentators, you have taken a quote out of context and relied on it for a completely ludicrous conclusion.

After all, American casualties in Iraq would drop to zero if the US withdraws its troops.

A "surge" is, by definition, temporary.  It was a political patch that did and will do nothing whatever to make the long-term position of the Iraqis or the US Army in Iraq viable.  And this is why I followed with in my Warmaking 101 comment: "the question is not whether the surge helps reduce violence, but whether it "worked" in enabling a medium to long-term withdrawal of US troops."  

Obama - and the rest of us who opposed the "surge" understood what Kinsley understood and explained quite well: as a "surge", this is simply politicking; as a permanent increase in US troop presence, it is not enough to stanch the bleeding, even if it is enough to reduce it for the time being, until the election cycle is over.  It is and was a cynical ploy that does nothing whatever to help the Iraqis in arriving at a long-term political solution, or the US Army in enabling it to extricate itself.

But then, I don't think you really care about the Iraqis or, for that matter, the young kids who are going to be killed and maimed in Iraq.  I think you just want the US to be in occupation of an Arab country.  Tell me, which do you hate more, the American soldiers whom you consign to their deaths, or the Arabs who will be under US occupation "forever"?

jacob, do you even know what the surge was for? It was designed so that the Iraqi government could have some breathing room to resolve their partisan differences, so that after they were resolved we can begin to leave.

How the hell can you claim the surge worked if we can't leave? We can't leave because the Iraqis have no motivations to resolve their differences. If you take the position that if we do leave it will all fall apart then essentially we are simply keeping Iraq on life support at enormous cost to ourselves. The surge worked in tamping down the violence, but didn't work it addressing the root of the violence. Obama recognizes this, I recognize that, your blinding love of Hillary makes you not able to recognize this.

What is the end game, do you even know?

irony, I think the surge needed to be tried, if nothing else so that our politics won't be paralysed for the next 50 years with "what if" I would feel a lot better about the surge if we actually went about truly arming the Iraqis to defend themselves. It could very well backfire but putting it off and putting it off is not victory. I still think Iraq is salvageable, not in the delusional sense of Bush, but to salvage it means that we truly begin to trust in the Iraqis to govern themselves. While I no longer think the price was worth the cost, I still think that we can still achieve some value, with an Iraq more like a quasi reliable friend ruled by an oligarchy.

esmense,

Yes, I cede the point: in 2002 Obama was not yet a candidate in a statewide race. I don't cede the argument, however: he was at the time considering a run for the U.S. Senate and in making that speech he was making a huge gamble. The opening paragraphs of E.J. Dionne's column this week help to remind us just how big a gamble:

"It was like that all over the country in 2002," Dionne writes: "Democrats in large numbers ran away from foreign policy or just said 'me, too.' Many went down to defeat . . ."

The war wasn't a mistake.  The failure to provide an overwhelming force (Powell Doctrine) for the Occupation was.  A mistake that continued for several years.

Petraeus has demonstrated that with a smart strategy, a small force of 20,000 extra troops could make a profound difference.  But, probably a lot more troops earlier AND a smart strategy, could have made shortened our protracted difficulties.

Remember, Germany and Japan were occupied by four nations in the former situation, and 350,000 troops in the latter.

And this after we had pummeled both nations into the dust.  Something, we certainly did not want to do, nor did we, in the case of Iraq.

The Democrats and the media have been hoping for America to lose in Iraq from the outset because both saw that a victory in Iraq would be a loss for the both of them.

Now that we are gaining ground significantly, Obama can't wait to get in there and initiate a retreat.  So he can prove through a humiliating loss created by himself and the Democrats, that he and the Democrats were right.

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy!

Chan writes:  "The Democrats and the media have been hoping for America to lose in Iraq from the outset because both saw that a victory in Iraq would be a loss for the both of them."

That's a lie.

Icarus,  I am a new man. I will never again, I vow, get personal or insulting with anyone here. Leaving appeasement and 100 years aside, and even leaving the origins of the war aside, is it not plausible to argue that the surge if it succeeds will lead to sufficient political stability in Iraq leading to a point that a troop drawdown will be justifiable and that will leaving troops and bases behind on some basis on a rough analogy with Europe and Korea, even in part on an analogy with in your words” to serve as a trip wire for invading armies” or their functional equivalents in these times and in those places? And while it is invaluable continually to question and reevaluate past actions in Iraq, that seems to be one thing and different, to be trite, from analyzing what needs to be done now, which is my particular focus on this thread and as it was Kristol’s. I’m not sure that McCain, for whom I have no political loves is assessing next moves from the “mass of lies and incompetence that preceded the war and exacerbated it” and I recommend the previous article I linked to a reasoned account of McCain’s plumping for the surge as opposed to Obama’s position when the surge was proposed.

On Blackton’s and others’ point of how long should the U.S. stay at present troop levels: that is obviously a potent question and the idea of a limitless or any commitment that does not flexibly address changing conditions and is not self conscious of how it is doing is unthinkable. But conceptually at least if the surge is working and if its own criteria for success are arguably being met and if its goals are concretely stated and if events are arguably trending their way, then at least we have the outlines of an answer to the question. If the issues are framed in terms something like this then I look forward to the intellectual debate that will take place as the campaign progresses.

If you could link to the Kinsley essay I would like to read it. I am completely open on these issues to being persuaded by a better argument. But on your characterization of it, I have some doubts. Firstly, I am not so sure your description of the surge—“ It was always understood that if you had more troops on the ground and that if you managed to co-opt the warring factions to your side, the internal bloodshed would drop”—which by the way I find incisive, is Warmaking 101—a class mind you I have may have slept through. But you seem to understate the, at least theoretical, dynamism of “coopting the warring factions.” That cooption as I understand it is one of the surge building blocks to political stability, itself dependent on physical security. Some argue that it and other building blocks are being set, that Iraqis themselves are now stepping up and that there are signs of Maliki stiffening up some. Truth to tell I am cannot assess those claims, but I read arguments for them more now and again the debate will be interesting. Conceptually though if those claims hold water, then that to me argues for deferring Obamian withdrawal, however phased, and marks a big difference between McCain and Obama. In the way I have tried to frame these issues , I think the 100 year rhetoric is an unhelpful distraction.

I also think you overstate the notion of the surge as a” temporary political patch and will have nothing whatever to do…” with  long term success. That is an hard to test empirical claim that needs to be tested by events on the ground that have not arguably reached a satte of culmination.. Your conclusion assumes things will not work out well and taht conclusion impugns the surge as a strategy.  It is self evident that the surge was a means, by definition, a temporary thing, but its theoretical basis counts on the coopting you before mentioned and other things (including the use of soft power) leading dynamically to increasing bottom up political stability. So if it is working temporarily, as I read you to suggest, then I further suggest it is not  necessarily doomed to failure and the jury is still out on its ultimate consequentiality.

Irony, is it helpful to see the surge as a tactic or a kind of epiphenomenal strategy doomed to castigation because the initial going in was wrong? Even stipulating  it was wrong, but also postulating an arguable chance of success, don’t we in the interest of clear thinking have to distinguish between  the going in and the best means of getting of relatively getting out?

basman, I think it's at least helpful for forcing a wider framework of discussion on "you're against the surge so you're an appeasing cutting-and-running America-hating treasonous Democrat" line of argument.  That said, I agree completely that in pragmatic terms we have no intelligent choice but to look to the advantages of the surge when formulating a method of extracting ourselves from the situation.  There are clearly improvements in Iraq that weren't there in 2006.

Two things, however, one practical and one political:  the practical thing is that we don't know, and can't know, how robust the Iraqi political and social architecture is at this stage.  We have, as Americans, a habit of "quarterly-report" thinking that causes us to miss or ignore questions that require more time to be answered.  Are the various opponents just patiently keeping quiet until we back off and give them more space?  How prepared are the Sunnis really to be a minority in a country that they've run for centuries?  What's the longer term effect of our presence, and does it weaken the development of Iraqi self-governance?

The political thing is simply this:  how many people are praising the surge as a deliberate ploy to re-open the argument about the justification for the original invasion, and at a moment when we finally get the Senate Intel report that finally skewers Bush's gross and negligent abuse of intelligence to distract and mislead the public into war?

www.slate.com/.../2184890

Kinsley: "The test is simple, and built into the concept of a surge: Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? The answer is no."

The problem is not the tactic, or the incompetence that made the tactic possible in the first place.  But that it is a tactic with no strategic plan behind it.  It is "working" only if you define working downward to the operational level.  The surge is NOT working if you actualy try to put in within a strategic plan: for one thing, there is none and so by definition you can have a tactic that achieves your strategic goals; for another, even if there were a strategic goal here (and it is well hidden), it is questionable whether a temporary troop deployment would serve as enough of an impetus for a political development in Iraq, as in fact it has not.  Fewer American body bags in the short-term, but still there will be body bags, and continued presence, and continued warfare ...

Any way, as you well know, it is a neat litigator's trick to slice up an event into meaningless slivers, so as to divert the jurors from seeing the big picture.  The surge and its success or failure cannot be reasonably examined without looking at the big picture, which is - for me at least - the abominable incompetence in the prosecution of a just and justifiable war, from the get-go.

irony, I guess I'm hoping for a discussion that tries to be free of rhetoric, presumes-- as much as it can --the good faith of the interlocutors, I like that word, and is patient with some of us fellas that are not as quick, deep or studied as are others. I don't know how to answer the questions in your second paragraph, but you raise an interesting over arching question--our ability, short of as you say "quarterly report thinking" to make inetelligent forward going judgments as to way things are going and have the potential to go. All I can do in this regard is try to read the thoughtful views of people expert in these matters and assess them as as best I can. My approach overall--at the risk of being naive--is to try to understand the surge without an agenda and try to separate the analytical wheat from the crass poltical chaff. And for examplle--though I have not read Intelligence Report and probably won't--I have sssen accounts of it that construe it as debunking the thesis that Bush lied you guys into this war.  The accompanying intellectual ,or perhaps logistical, problem is to find the time or gather the wherewithal  satisfactorily to inform one's self on these issues and their sub issues without simply lining up behind orthodoxies taken as truth.

irony, I base my accusation on close listening since 2003 to the media and Democratic politicians, and, frankly good friends who are Democrats.

Not every man jack of them is guilty.  Only the vast preponderance of them.  

At least admit that an unambiguous and reasonably quick victory in Iraq would have been a major political advantage for the GOP over the Dems.

Even the victorious Bush I probably lost his second term bid because his victory was a bit ambiguous.  We drove Saddam back into his borders, but Bush I did not topple him.  Many were disappointed in that.

I don't care what you base it on.  I regard it as a lie.  You and your friends don't constitute reality.  The media in 2003 was either gung-ho for the invasion, or (as in the case of the NYT) willing to give Bush a pass on WMD.  I'd also like to hear the evidence that any Democratic politician (in the normal sense of the term) openly stated that he/she desired the U.S. to lose in Iraq.

"I have [seen] accounts of it that construe it as debunking the thesis that Bush lied you guys into this war.

I don't know what you've been reading, basman, but almost any coverage of the report that I've seen emphasizes exactly the opposite.

Icarusr: I read Kinsely’s piece. I note it was written in February 2008 and don’t know whether he thinks any differently in light of what has gone in last half year. Maybe not: but no matter, I love Kinsley, think he is brilliant, but was not persuaded by him here.

I disagree with you that the surge has no strategic plan behind it. It does and I tried to state it as I understood it in my last post. Respectfully I find your argument circular. You assume your own conclusion that there is no strategic plan and then say the surge is not working because there is no strategic plan for it to fit into. But I am not going to retread the old ground of my last post.

I tried no litigator’s trick in trying to answer you and did not knowingly involve myself in any tactical slicing and dicing for polemical advantage. That said, I again respectfully find the imprecision of your last argument confusing. The surge, you assert as a conclusion, cannot be reasonably examined without looking at the big picture of the military fuck ups. Why not? From one perspective, an organic study of the war in its entirety, say, that is true. But so what? Why can’t the surge, just as any other discrete war strategy,  be evaluated by the criterion of whether it in itself succeeds according to its own goals, assuming we can get some purchase on that, no easy assumption to be sure  as between you and me.

(On that last point you may want to look at this: www.commentarymagazine.com/.../how-to-win-in-iraq-and-how-to-lose-10856)

The notion that most democrats are (tendentiously) invested in defeat in Iraq is exactly the kind of argument I want to try to avoid as rhetorical, assuming of bad faith, distracting any analytically irrelevant.

irony: www.commentarymagazine.com/.../10591 and www.washingtonpost.com/.../AR2008060801687_pf.html

But wtf do I know?

An "unambiguous and reasonably quick victory in Iraq" would have been in the best interests of the entire world community, including Democrats, who were heavily involved in the war all along.  By all rights it should have come in 1991. It didn't, and the next twelve years are what made 2003 "magical"--by that time virtually every possible idea for solving the problem short of actually winning the war had been tried, and it was High Noon at the Security Council as well as in the Persian Gulf. A climbdown would have given a probably irredeemable victory to Saddam.

With all due respect to the formidable icarusr and blackton, don't be distracted by the show-business aspects of this story--the decision-making process, which involved going the UN route to a greater extent than any US administration since Truman,  gave Saddam the ability to pull the plug on the invasion almost to the last minute by simply complying with the terms of the ceasefire. Now that we have actually achieved regime change, and the new regime is the most representative and legitimate in the Arab world, don't you think they deserve air support at least as much as the Germans and the South Koreans did?  Let's think evolution here.

"That cooption as I understand it is one of the surge building blocks to political stability, itself dependent on physical security. Some argue that it and other building blocks are being set, that Iraqis themselves are now stepping up and that there are signs of Maliki stiffening up some."

Basman: what is the strategic objective here?  Has this been enunciated?  Do we have timetables?  Do we have concrete plans?  Do we have buy-in from allies?  Do the Iraqis - and I mean the masses outside the Green Zone - buy into this?  Is there a consensus at home about this "strategic plan"?  "Maliki stiffening up some" is too contingent to be an element of a strategy in the correct sense of that word.

As for looking at specific theatres and policies and tactics - well, the question is what the is point one is making?  If the point of saying that the surge is working within a constrained definition of "working", then yes, look at the limited framework, and declare victory even as politically Iraq descends into more chaos and that American soldiers end up staying in Iraq for a 100 years.  And instability continues.  If, however, the point is the defined strategic objective (a stable and peaceful Iraq, and US forces out of there within a reasonable period of time), we are not there and the surge is not working.  You want proof?  The US demand for 58 bases in Iraq.  

basman, I don't know what you know, honestly, but if the following mean nothing to you --

Judith Miller (dishonest and unreliable journalism, later apologies from NYT)

Curveball (strong warnings of his unreliability from partner services)

Chalabi ('nuff said!)

Niger/Yellow Cake (IAEA proved document fakes in an afternoon)

Powell's UN speech/aluminium tubes (analysts weren't sure)

Atta/Iraq connections (Prague airport meeting disproved several times but still repeated by Cheney)

9-11/Iraq connections (why do millions of Americans believe this bs even now?  They didn't invent it)

Timing of invasion to cut off UNMOVIC mission and potential proof of no WMD in Iraq

Wilson/Plame/Libby (attempt to delegitimize Wilson who went to Niger and found nothing)

-- then I don't think the articles you posted are going to help much.

ironyroad ,

What your list has to do with answering the question if the surge was a right decision.

If Judith Miller  is an dishonest and unreliable journalism, does it mean that US forces have to immediately withdraw? How  Atta/Iraq connections should   affect the US strategy in Iraq today?

icarusr,

"f the point of saying that the surge is working "

This is a separate question. You can argue that he surge is  not working but still you should admit that it was a right decision.

Irony, no Democratic politicians openly admitted he wanted us to lose.  That would have been political suicide.  Even now it would.  But, you don't have to be a genius to read just slightly between the lines to know what most Democratic politicians and their media water-carriers really wanted.

They were wishing like crazy for an American defeat because a) it would confirm their opposition to the Iraq war, but b) and more importantly, an American defeat to them was a defeat for Bush and the Republicans.  And they would rather see the Republicans lose than America win.  

Or, to put it conversely, if a clear American victory in the U.S. would have meant another generation for the Republican ascendancy, which it surely would have, then the media and the Democratic party, both of which nowadays are mainly Leftists (not old fashioned Democrats), then they would vote for defeat, no contest.

You are acting, Irony, as if the Democrats today are the Democrats of pre-1968.  They are decidedly not.  Few have served in the military.  Their former president "loathed the military".  Their current nominee for president is comfortable asserting friendship with someone who bombed the Pentagon.

These are not salt of the earth Patriots of old.  Which is why "unsophisticated" people in the Bible and gun-hugging provinces recoil from them.

The Democrats are the Left.  The Left despises the old America.  And the Left since Vietnam longs for the United States to be humbled at every turn.

What is so childish about the entire debate about the war is the assumption that a war is only to be waged if it can be won in some delimited timeframe.

Not every war is WW2.  Some wars go on for decades, centuries.  Even as Rome against the barbarians, for a millennia, until Rome ultimately fell to them.

Right now, we are fighting a war against a new Barbarian.  Whether we stay in Iraq or leave Iraq, it is not going to be over in my lifetime.  Maybe not even in my children's lifetime.  

It may be a war a herpes enemy that can never be totally eradicated, only controlled.  And periodic eruptions are just the nature of the disease.

Intelligent people can live with ambiguity.  Adults can live with the fact that not all problems are solvable quickly.  Some not in a lifetime.  Some never.

The war against the kind of people who struck down the World Trade Center started in the late sixties and has grown in amplitude ever since.

You might rightly say it started 1000 years ago.  Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Moors out of Spain.  The Muslims invaded Europe as far West as Vienna in the 1400s the 1500s and the 1600s.  

Now they have invaded Europe far more thoroughly than ever before.

There is a clash of history, or culture, and of values between the Muslim East and the Christian, secular, and Liberal West.

If you think your disagreements with the Republicans go deep, you're in for worse.

If you would see the West and secular values survive, not to mention classic as well as modern mutated Liberalism, then prepare for a long, long seige.  And prepare for a long, long war.  

Some of which better be an aggressive, offensive, unrelenting war.  And yes, it could easily last 100 years.  I suspect, barring an apocalyptic, indiscriminate nuclear attack from the West, it will go far longer than that.

It may be resolved by a combination of bloody clashes and wars, plus an evolution of intermingling that will eventually undermine it by the disappearance of the differentiation between East and West.

We are actually seeing something of that process right now in America among Jews.  There is the possibility that within a few generations, American Jews may marry themselves out of existence as a recognizably distinct culture, or as a people.  Only the few Orthodox who have kept themselves separate will survive.

History is full of ironies.  This may be the irony of the Jews, a people who savor irony.  And there may be similar ones someday hence for Islam or for the West or for both.

But, before that, expect a long, awful clash.

jacobtl writes:  What has your list to do with answering the question if the surge was a right decision?

Nothing.  I was responding to basman on a different issue.

JD:  as far as I can see, you produce no evidence for almost anything you say.  "Reading between the lines" has a truth content of zero to 100, entirely geared to your (or my) prejudices du jour.

As Bush the Elder lost in '92 after the infiintely more successful Gulf War, there is little basis for a "war means political victory" axiom in American politics.  Indeed, from Lincoln through Wilson to LBJ and Nixon, the opposite assumption might be more accurate.

As I pointed out earlier, there was a lot more water-carrying being done for the Bush White House than for anyone else, going well into the so-called "liberal" media.

The argument about people having served in the military is an interesting one, as the Congress has been pretty bereft of veterans on either side for some time now (let's not even mention the current Administration).  Between 2000 and 2006 I think McCain and Kerry were the only sitting U.S. senators who had served, until Webb's election victory.  However, this may change, and there are also a large number of candidates with Iraq experience running for House seats on both sides of the aisle.  In contrast, in 2006 all veterans running were Democrats (not 100% sure of that).

As far as my own position goes, I thought that the military part of the invasion would go well even if it would be a short, tough fight (in fact, in case I've given the contrary impression, I also thought that Saddam had battlefield wmd -- as opposed to strategic weapons -- and might use them) but I assumed that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld phalanx would always and ever vote for ideology over competence and rational analysis and very probably make a dog's breakfast of the civil-political part.

As it was a more liberal America, a more social democratic Europe, and a strongly liberal Eastern European freedom movement that won the Cold War (with some minor assistance from Reagan at the end, but in that context he wasn't especially conservative), you can imagine what I think of your final comments.  Again, one wonders where the problem lies.  Clearly, the major conflicts have been won with Americans from all political traditions, and it's only rightwingers who find this difficult to admit.  Me, I'm happy to give conservatives some credit.

The war was pointless when it was begun and remains pointless now.  Hence, the tactics are equally pointless even if they succeed in somewhat reducing violence so long as we continue to spend American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve these modest reductions while hobbling our military and our diplomacy in the process.  Our goal should be to get out while giving the Iraqis the best chance to avoid widespread bloodshed.  The project of a democratic Iraq is hopeless because it ignores the history of Iraq, three Ottoman provinces stuck together for the convenience of the British and their control over the oil there.

Chan,

The Democrats don't need to hope for defeat.  It has happened already by any meaningful measure.  When you incur the costs we have incurred for nothing, you have suffered defeat, albeit self-inflicted.  We remain in Iraq because Republicans are shameless about spilling American blood to postpone their day of political reckoning, a worse betrayal of America than anything you could possibly attribute to Democrats.

The war was "pointless" only if one discounts the need for the world community to have some kind of enforcement mechanism to back up resolutions against wars of aggression, genocide, the development and use of wmd's, and state-supported terrorism. Perhaps forty million people died in WWII because the League of Nations was unable to enforce its resolutions in these areas, and the war in Iraq has been the most important test of the UN's ability to avoid the same mistake since Korea. Although the UN was blocked by Saddam's collaborators, most of the world's most important democracies supported the idea of enforcing the Resolutions.

The Persian Gulf is currently the most vital trade route in the world, by far. Gulf oil is the lifeblood of the world economy. Preventing undue interference in the trade of vital commodities of the sort repeatedly perpetrated by Ba'athist Iraq has been seen as a legitimate causus belli since the dawn of civilization, and maybe before that. The entire industrialized world has a big stake in a reasonably stable and peaceful Iraq, and it seems to me that Obama is a lot more aware of this fact than a lot of his supporters. Anyone who thinks we're just going to bail out of Iraq and live happily ever after is deluded.

It seems to me that certain people are missing the point about the arguments regarding victory. This probably won't sound coherent to most, but I'm gonna try anyway.

The purpose of the war was to take down a Muslim fascist who was falsely connected to AQ and 9/11, and falsely believed to be preparing to use recently acquired WMD for nefarious purposes. The job was to go in, grab Saddam, and get out.

The first failure was the Administrations desire for regime change. It seems, at least to me, that they didn't expect the power vacuum which appeared when they started disbanding agencies which had been corrupted by the Baathist regime; I'm thinking they didn't realize that this meant removing the whole kit and kaboodle. Bush, recognizing the mistake and being not that evil at heart, could not bear to leave the country in ruins, so he rolled out a new plan for cleaning up the mess.

This brings me to the present and the current contention of the success of the surge and the failure that will occur if we withdraw before our objectives are complete.

First, the surge was intended to improve stability, in order to eliminate the most signficant hurdle to the government's efforts to establish itself more securely; the surge worked to improve stability but the government has shown that the violence was not actually holding them down. Violence is always something of a hurdle to political processes, and the surge has allowed for better progress than before, but ultimately the surge was not what the Iraqi government needed because violence was not their biggest hurdle. So, the surge, per se, has worked to reduce the overall level of violence. However, it turns out that this is not the most signficant hurdle faced by the fledgling government, and therefore has failed to actually accomplish our objectives. We may yet salvage signficant worth by providing a new, better position from which to accomplish our objective, but will never have been the key to accomplishing our objective.

Second, defeat is only confirmed once the established objectives are no longer feasible. Precipitous withdraw is not necessarily conceeding defeat. First, withdraw, in one form or another, is technically required for victory. Second, it is not a given that war, or military occupation, or whatever you want to call it, is absolutely required in order to accomplish the objective of establishing a new and improved Iraqi government. In fact, it may be that occupational forces are more of a hindrance to the objective at this point if for no other reason than (justifiable) resentment among the populace impeding progress.

Of course, this brings up the issue of diplomacy, a concept which has been rapantly abused these past several years. This has been covered by others, so I'd just like to point out that apparently yesterday W decided that multilateral appeasement of Iran is the best route to deal with the growing threat they represent. And yes, that idea is as retarded as it sounds, but that is my point; that is exactly how retarded it sounded from the moment W opened his mouth in the Knesset to equate diplomacy with appeasement, and then, by virtue of a "straw man", attack Obama's call for renewed diplomacy.

"Preventing undue interference in the trade of vital commodities of the sort repeatedly perpetrated by Ba'athist Iraq has been seen as a legitimate causus belli since the dawn of civilization, and maybe before that. The entire industrialized world has a big stake in a reasonably stable and peaceful Iraq..."

So why all the bother with the falsified evidence?! And why fervently deny the oil interests at stake when the concept was brooched?! Your idea sounds great, but it tastes like garbage; there was ample time to make this argument before the US invaded Iraq, but only years after the fact does this argument come forth. Bullshit.

", and it seems to me that Obama is a lot more aware of this fact than a lot of his supporters."

I would like to agree, but I can't because I think you're setting up strawmen here; the only people I've seen who claimed/argued/asserted/promoted the idea that Obama is going to precipitously withdraw from Iraq, or not fully consider ramifications in regards to factors like those you have laid out, are those people who have been trying to build a case against voting for Obama.

GSpinks makes a pretty good case for how Iraq evolved from "regime change" to "nation building." A few remarks that will hopefully clarify the rest:

--"The purpose of the war was to take down a Muslim fascist who..." had repeatedly launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands and caused world recessions; had developed and used wmd's to kill tens of thousands; was an active supporter of a variety of terrorist groups, leading a state that was itself a terrorist entity; stood in defiant, manifest, material breech of the legal obligations under the '91 ceasefire and subsequent related Chapter VII Resolutions, thereby representing the greatest single threat to the post-war international system since 1950.

--There was no "falsified evidence". A small number of obscure "experts" had doubts about things like aluminum tubes and  the like, but it was the overwhelming consensus of the world's intelligence community that Iraq still possessed wmd capability. Read the text of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, written by a Democrat and signed into law by Clinton. Captured documents after the fall of Baghdad indicate that Iraqi generals, and perhaps Saddam himself, thought so. Bush supposedly knew better? It is to laugh. More to the point, it was Iraq's obligation under the ceasefire agreement to disarm "pro-actively and transparently". That it did not was made unambiguously clear by Hans Blix in his final report, Jan.27, 2003.

All of the points I've cited in terms of justification were made at the time. Unfortunately the Bush people saw fit to flood the airways with so many additional justifications that some of them were bound to turn out wrong. Predictibly, those are the ones focused on by people opposed to the invasion in a rather transparent and sleazy effort to re-write history.

I'm an Obama supporter, so I'm certainly not trying to build a case against voting for him. What I read from many of his supporters indicates that they have a much different take on what should happen next in Iraq than he does.

It won't be precipitous, but Obama is going to end the misadventure in Iraq.  It will not have accomplished anything in the end other than removing Saddam Hussein, empowering the Shi'a to the benefit of Iran, and demonstrating that American power is in fact far more limited that what we or the rest of the world believed before the war. Then the Republicans will, as usual, claim that the brilliant victory that was just around the corner, vindicating all of their claims, was stolen by cowardly Democrats.  They are still making that claim about Vietnam even as it poses no threat to anyone I know of and is rapidly developing its commercial relations with the US.  If we lost there, we won by finally losing, sparing ourselves and the Vietnamese more misery that, in the end, would have changed nothing.

Conservative thinking about the use of force is seriously, profoundly flawed, to our enormous detriment.  Conservatives wish the world to see that we have the military means to accomplish whatever we want and the will to do so if otherwise frustrated so that the world will conform to our demands, both explicit and tacit, without need of force.  To that end, conservatives like to tell a good story.  War is part of creating a good narrative for ordering the world.  Thus, for example, the notion that we invaded Iraq to vindicate the UN which was being defied by Hussein.  Now, securing compliance with present and future UN resolutions would have been and would yet be a good thing.  But how could we possibly vindicate the UN while in fact defying it ourselves?  The UNSC at at the point of invasion declined to authorize the use of force.  Sure, we could rehash the tortured legal logic that claims that the resolutions from the First Gulf War had somehow sprung back to life.  But even if that were plausible (and I don't think it was), do we imagine that the world as a whole believes that?  Do we think that be ignoring the evident will of the SC in 2003 not yet to authorize force that we have somehow added to the prestige of the UN?  All we have done is demonstrated that when it suits us we will ignore the UN.  The lesson learned by other countries is to do the same with impunity.  This is particularly so because, at best, "enforcing" UN resolutions in the manner we chose was a once in history event.  We are, due to our own behavior, far less likely to gain the cooperation of the other permanent members of the UNSC so as ever to have ANY resolutions authorizing force and we can be sure that there will never again be any UNSC resolution that is the slightest bit ambiguous about the extent of any force authorized.  As a matter of the structure of world power, both inside and outside the UN, we did not vindicate the UN, we neutered it, made it nearly useless for the future.  Conservatives no doubt think this is a good thing.  I rather doubt it.  But it does not make sense to claim that we were acting to vindicate the UN when we were plainly ignoring the will of the SC as it was in 2003.

Similarly the narrative that Hussein was a bad guy sitting on top of critical oil, trade routes, one thing or another.  So what?  The only thing he could possibly do with his oil was sell it into world markets, which is indeed all anyone needed him to do with it.  You cannot drink it.  And in a world of modern arms, what threat was Hussein in reality to "trade routes?"  About all he could do after 12 years of sanctions was waste his money on the ostentatious construction of new palaces to convince the Iraqi people that he was still in charge and unbowed by world pressure.

Was the invasion of Iraq a continuation of the First Gulf War which had an ambiguous ending?  Let's agree that it was.  But then, was it so essential that there be an unambiguous ending that it was worth more than a trillion dollars, the loss of prestige, the wasted and blighted lives, the damage inflicted on Iraq, the evisceration of the UN regime to achieve it?  Most wars end ambiguously, and the impact in history is often not what might be expected when the war ends.  Even World War I, a triumph, ended ambiguously.  You can argue that the fecklessness of the Allies in the face of Hitler led to WWII, and I agree with that.  But the fact remains that the conclusion of WWI was not sufficiently unambiguous to prevent a far worse disaster a mere two decades later.  Not only are wars ambiguous, but the ultimate outcome is often highly unexpected.  That is why war ought to be the very last resort, when there is really no other alternative.  Not only is the damage inflicted enormous, but the chances of an unambiguous outcome that permanently "solves" the problem are low -- as we have seen in the second Iraq war where we have nothing so much as a costly mess as the outcome -- and the chance that history will end up taking a worse turn as the result of war is far from negligible.

Unfortunately, conservative thinking about war seems to be smitten with WWII where there at least seemed to be an unambiguous outcome that re-shaped the world to our advantage.  But that was a TOTAL WAR engaging the entire world, costing tens of millions of lives, fought to the point of "total surrender" of our enemies.  To say that this was not typical of war in history would be a vast understatement.  And, indeed, the outcome was not really unambiguous at all because, in order to win the war at a cost we could accept, we in fact had to maneuver so that most of the cost was borne by the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union shouldered that burdened -- taking casualties about 1,000 times greater than ours, a couple of orders of magnitude more than we would have accepted, and emerged vastly more powerful at the end.  Thus, while we emerged from the war as the pre-eminent power, in part because we were relatively unscathed but mostly because we were on that economic path anyway, the war took the Soviet Union from being a relatively backward power to being our rival and near equal.  It then took another 50 years of cold war for the end finally to be played out.  Had we displayed the sort of impatience, the extreme unwillingness to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty that we did in Iraq, probably no one would have survived the intervening 50 years.  (Although, it is probably also true that the vivid awareness of the stakes of a hot war between two massively armed nuclear powers is what kept our ambition in check, not that there weren't plenty of conservatives itching for hot wars all the time.)

The fact is that Bush and company had no interest in making the arms inspection regime work because it never would have had the unambiguous narrative that conservatives crave.  If there was anyone in Congress who believed that Bush would use the power given him to force a diplomatic solution rather than just rush to war, he or she was a fool.  With additional time, pressure, and cooperation from the other powers could it have reduced the risk that Hussein was hiding WMDs to a very low level?  Probably.  Could the oil for food program have been reshaped so that it could not be used by Hussein?  Almost certainly.  Could we have waited out Hussein enduring some uncertainty and ambiguity and ultimately gotten rid of him, even if by death, without the enormous price we have paid?  Highly likely.  

In reality, the purpose of the war was not as an urgent response to the threat of WMDs.  Nor was it to rid the world and the Iraqi people of a heinous tyrant (one we bore much responsibility for creating).  Nor was it to spread democracy.  Nope.  The real reason for the war was as a display of American power.  We chose Hussein because he as weak (certainly far weaker than 12 years earlier when he had been defeated in four days).  We chose him because he was a pariah whom  we assumed would be mourned by no one.  We chose him because he was located in the region we wanted to impress with the length of our reach and the force of our arms.  Yet, in the end, we have accomplished nothing so much as demonstrating the limits or our military power.  The defiance and bellicosity of Iran are but one direct result, once it realized that the odds of any US military effort against it have, as a direct result of our failure in Iraq, become spectacularly low.  Our real and most threatening enemy lies hiding in Pakistan, out of our reach, indeed further out of our reach.

The US simply cannot afford to continue with the neo-con fantasy world.  None of us likes ambiguity.  We want our lives to have a narrative arc in which action produces clear response and we move from opportunity to decision, succeeding or failing, rising again if necessary.  But the world of international power simply is not the same in any qualitative sense as the life of an individual.  Patience and consistent pressure, constant search for new ways to move toward ultimate goals, these are the media of success.  We have to get over our impatience and our desire for heroic narrative and drama.  In a world of rising new powers, we cannot afford any longer to indulge ourselves this way.  We could shrug off Vietnam.  We are not going to shrug off Iraq nearly so easily.  The conservatives constantly want to engage our prestige in some utopian cause and put us in a position where we then cannot back down except at what they claim is unacceptable expense.  It is stupid to engage our prestige so lightly.  It is equally stupid to insist that we are always without alternatives.

Take Iraq apart, or at least stop preventing it from coming apart.  Arm its three large populations so that they can defend themselves.  Leave.  That will be enough of a lesson to the defiant and far more deft, if cynical, that pouring our blood and money into the sand to vindicate the hopeless fantasies of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

damn, Roid, I love it when you get all polemic!

"had repeatedly launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands and caused world recessions; had developed and used wmd's to kill tens of thousands"

None of which was sufficient cause for anything beyond (lame duck) diplomacy until W took office: Compassionate Conservatism to the rescue?

"but it was the overwhelming consensus of the world's intelligence community that Iraq still possessed wmd capability"

An overwhelming consensus does not negate the falsity of said conclusion. False conclusions were drawn from the evidence that we had. Bush claimed we had indisputable proof. We found no usable WMD.

"it was Iraq's obligation under the ceasefire agreement to disarm "pro-actively and transparently". "

Ummm, would *you* disarm so transparently living next to Iran? So apparently we can add a litany of STUPID to the litany of WAR MONGER?

"All of the points I've cited in terms of justification were made at the time"

The fact remains that there is underwhelming proof that the invasion was absolutely necessary for the sake of the region, especially in light of exactly how much appeasement has been practiced by W. over the last 8 years.

Until someone can convince me and the rest of us that W. is not a war monger, no amount of reasoning on the justifications will matter; like Roid said, it will always boil down to Republicans need to flex military muscle as a negotiating tactic, or for fun and profit.

I agree with a lot of what you write here, roi. In the interest of brevity, I'll try to underline rather than expound upon the points I find most interesting :

--"...removing Saddam Hussein, empowering the Shi'ia..., and demonstrating that American power is...limited" --sounds like a home run to me. The first was mandatory in order to even continue the discussion about the utility of the UN. The final Security Council approval was blocked by France, not by "the Security Council", for very specific reasons. We invaded Iraq to vindicate not just the UN, but the whole idea of having some kind of enforceable standards of international conduct. To the extent that the UN can continue to play a useful role here, I'm for making reforms based on this fiasco.

The second represents a mechanism that's perhaps our best chance of developing a reasonable arrangement with Iran going forward, as we must. Iraq currently has the most representative and legitimate government in the Arab world, and the first ever example of a Shi'ite-dominated democracy. This is no small thing, and something that will redound to our long-term advantage.

The third brings a welcome note of realism. If people liked the invasion of Iraq, they will just love a war with Iran, Pakistan, or North Korea, any of which would make Iraq look like Grenada.

Counseling patience is commendable. I think it's fair to say that patience has its limits, and after several decades of fooling around with Saddam's regime to the detriment of just about every principle and interest we had in the region, by 2003 enough was enough. Now, doing what you suggest in your last paragraph sounds agreeable. The timetable is the remaining issue.

Consider this: better them than me:

This Is Why Facts Matter

Jennifer Rubin - 06.13.2008 - 4:09 PM

"Senior Brookings Fellows Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack gave a report today and entertained questions at a Brookings briefing on Iraq. It was the single most illuminating presentation I have witnessed on the status of Iraq and the potential way forward. Neither man can be accused of shilling for either the administration or John McCain for numerous reasons: both have been strong critics of the war and O’Hanlon opposed the war at the onset and still believes on balance it has not made us safer. I understand from Brookings that the entire transcript will be posted, but I offer some highlights below.

O’Hanlon explained that the last three months has been the “spring of the blossoming of Iraqi security forces” and Iraq is on an “impressive trajectory” although we have not yet “reached a stable end point.” He stressed that the 80% reduction in civilian violence was much better than he thought possible. He went through a detailed review of Basra, conceding that Maliki’s actions took the Americans by surprise and that in the first week things went poorly. However, by the second week two brigades were deployed from Al Anbar ( a testimony to massive improvements in Iraq security force logistics) and the mission was successful, allowing the Iraqi army and national police force to now control the streets of Basra.

Pollack echoed these observations, saying that “The headline was the emergence of Iraqi security forces.” He explained that the fundamental shift from Americans leading with Iraqis in support to Iraqis leading not just “hold” but “clear” operations is now “well underway.” He observes that sectarian divisions within the military are receding as mixed Sunni and Shia units have been successful in Basra and Mosul operations. He sees vast improvement in military leadership which “is one of the main reasons for improvement” in the security situation. He credits the military success with allowing for a “fundamental rearrangement” of Iraqi politics, observing that Maliki is now “flying high” with new found respect from Sunnis. The big picture take away, he says, it that having achieved remarkable success with major issues we now can begin to address “second and third order problems” such as insuring that military forces “stay in their lane” and do not subvert civilian leadership.

I asked O’Hanlon whether his previous criticism that Barack Obama was in denial about facts on the ground still stood. In a lengthy answer he and then Pollack avoided a partisan hit on Obama and I think revealed their true purpose: to inform the public and policy matters about the real situation in Iraq and allow Democrats to in essence climb back off the surge opposition policy limb they have crawled out on. (This is my description; they were quite tactful and even optimistic that this is a time when political leaders can reorient themselves to new facts.) Both indicated that it would be a mistake with critical provincial and national elections upcoming in 2008 and 2009 to begin an abrupt withdrawal in 2009. O’Hanlon offered that Democrats could take credit for having pressured Iraqis on a political front with the clear message that our presence would not be indefinite and that they should accept that “the good news is you may be able to leave earlier than proposed based on progress and not on defeat.”

Continuing with the answer, Pollack said that “our support is absolutely critical” in the short term and that “a massive withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2009 is not a good idea.”

O’Hanlon continued by praising McCain’s May 2008 speech that envisioned half the U.S. forces out by the end of his first term. He then said that there might be a “more optimistic” timetable which Obama could conceivably adopt whereby we would return to pre-surge levels this year, see a modest reduction in 2009 and further reductions to 50,000-70,00 troops in 2011.

The program continued with many more probing questions and insightful answers which I strongly encourage all to read when the transcript is available.

I think this presentation highlighted several things. First, facts do matter and they are readily available to anyone who cares to find them. Second, the wisdom of the war and the mismanagement of the war for a number of years needs, for the sake of the country’s national security, to be separated from what we do now. As O’Hanlon said “we are where we are.” Third, Democrats can save face and claim credit for pressuring the Iraqi government if they are inclined to depart from their defeat at all costs approach. Fourth, no one should be Pollyannaish about the success to date but a better outcome than almost anyone would be imagined is now possible. Fifth, the military success of the surge followed by the remarkable progress of the Iraqi military has now empowered Maliki as a truly national political leader. That is what we had hoped when the surge began and that is the basis by which we can achieve a decent outcome and eventually draw down our troops. Finally, I am considerably less optimistic than O’Hanlon that there is now a political window during which the Democrats can be weaned from their defeatist perspective. I fear it would be too great a shift for Obama and the Democrats who have banked on failure. I hope I am wrong and pray that this is the beginning of a reconciliation with reality"