I couldn’t help but return to yesterday’s Washington Post article that had the darkly humorous discussion of whether our new policy on Iraq should be to go long, go short, go big, go wide or perhaps just give it to the running back and have him try to run it up the middle. I don’t grab at humor lightly here. It’s a grim set of choices we have before us. And the cost in lives is immense, whichever course we take. But what our Iraq policy needs as much as anything is a pull-no-punches injection of candor. And calling mumbojumbo for what it is is part of that.
Consider this passage from the Ricks piece in the Post …
The purpose of the temporary but notable increase, they said, would be twofold: To do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence, and also to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a “Go Long” option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.
Even so, there is concern that such a radical shift in the U.S. posture in Iraq could further damage the standing of its government, which U.S. officials worry is already shaky. Under the hybrid plan, the short increase in U.S. troop levels would be followed by a long-term plan to radically cut the presence, perhaps to 60,000 troops.
That combination plan, which one defense official called “Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long,” could backfire if Iraqis suspect it is really a way for the United States to moonwalk out of Iraq — that is, to imitate singer Michael Jackson’s trademark move of appearing to move forward while actually sliding backward. “If we commit to that concept, we have to accept upfront that it might result in the opposite of what we want,” the official said.
Let’s start with the first paragraph. And reason one for temporary build-up of forces. To say that we are building up “to do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence” sounds to me like there is no clear strategic rationale or plan behind the build up. Of course, we want to do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence. We want to do that with the current numbers. We’d want to do it with half the number of troops there. And the same goes for if we had twenty times the number.
It would be different if they were saying, for instance, that we were going to put in 50,000 more troops to seal the borders with Syria and Iran and that that would measurably change the stituation inside Iraq and allow our current number of troops on the ground to stabilize the situation inside the country. I’m not saying that’s a good idea or that I would support it. But at least there would be a strategic rationale, a theory of what a short term deployment of more troops would do and how it would help and change the situaiton. This just sounds like, put in 20,000 or 30,000 more troops and, heck, it can’t hurt to have a few more of our guys there since we’re already having such a hard time getting a handle on the situation.
Read the rationale closely and rationale one seems like argumentative padding for rationale two: “to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a “Go Long” option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.”
But cutting the US presence by whatever number is a withdrawal. It doesn’t have to be ‘defeat’ or ‘cutting and running’ or whatever charged phrased you want to use. But it definitely is a withdrawal. And the whole danger of the policy is that Iraqis might realize that what our policy actually is: i.e., withdrawal from Iraq. Or in this memorably new use of the phrase, that we’re ‘moonwalking’ out of Iraq.
Work it out like ten different ways but what it comes down to is that the policy is largely, perhaps exclusively, an excercise in either fooling ourselves or the Iraqis about what it is we’re actually doing. That tells me we haven’t grasped the heart of the issue and taken the first step in dealing with this situation — which is to stop lying to ourselves about what we’ve gotten ourselves into, how we got ourselves into it and what bad options we can choose to start the long process getting ourselves out of this mess.
