Stanley Kurtzs excuse The

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Stanley Kurtz’s excuse: “The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and “nation building” plans around those political constraints, crafting a “light footprint” military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq.”

It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who’ve pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren’t ‘domesic political constraints’. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.

I would say Stanley should go back and familiarize himself with the debates in 2002, 2003 and 2004. But of course he was there.

We’re now down to the Iraqi people or the American people as the primary culprits behind George W. Bush’s disaster.

For what it’s worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on. Now, however, the Army and Marines are too worn down for any more troops to be available. And, more importantly, the sectarian chaos in the Iraq has taken on far too much momentum on its own for more troops to bring it under control. Would the 400,000 troops Gen. Shinseki wanted have led to a successful occupation? Probably not. But there are a thousands gradations of worse. And I think it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it is now. The truth is that so many things were done so wrong in this disastrous endeavor that it’s inherently difficult to pick apart the relative importance of each screw up to the eventual result.

I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I’d basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.

Watching the president snap back to his usual state of denial, what I’ve been thinking about recently is how much of a difference it would have made if the White House had publicly recognized, say back in 2004, that Iraq was on a slow slide toward anarchy and started rethinking things enough to stem the descent to disaster. Let’s say early 2005. Earlier the better. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say it would have been hard to make the course correction in the midst of a presidential election. How much could have been accomplished? How much of this could have been avoided if the White House hadn’t continued to pretend, for political reasons, that things were going well? And since the president now seems inclined to continue with his disastrous policy for the next two years, should we ask in advance what could have been avoided over the next two years if he’d only had the courage to confront reality today.

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