Everyone remembers Bush’s famous line, “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” It wasa favoriteof his, just a few short years ago.
I don’t know if anyone’s left to defend the remarkable combination of incompetent and deliberately delusional that the Bushies have mastered. But if there is, it seems as if, by their own admission, the Iraqis won’t stand up until 2012 or 2018, depending on whether the issue is internal security or securing their borders.
Let us assume Mr. Qadir is correct in his forecasting and Iraq is in control of Iraq circa 2018. If most of the American forces concurrently withdraw as this process happens, well, what’s the problem? Wouldn’t President Bush’s line have come true? Everyone’s happy, right? Of course, we can’t forget about our enduring relationship, like Mrs. Clinton says:
Don’t worry, RTFirefly. 2018 - 2003 = 15 years, which is pretty standard for a guerilla war like this. We’re going at a good pace. Gott Mit Uns.
Huh? Have they changed their positions since that debate a month or two ago when the top three wouldn’t commit to a withdrawal within their first term of office? They have all promised a swift start to a withdrawal, which, while better than what the Republicans offer, is hardly what the article implies.
But seriously, when have we ever been able to invade a country, establish a new government, and get out in anything short of a decade? Japan and Germany had internal stability rather quickly after WWII, but we’ve still got military bases in both countries. Maybe those forces are there as for our own defense as for theirs, but we didn’t particularly want either country to be self sufficient wrt their defense for a long time after the end of the war.
Bush promised a quick and easy war. You would have to have been an idiot to believe that.
Don’t blame the Iraqis- they’re rebuilding an entire country. The city of New Orleans is still a mess 2 1/2 years later, and they don’t have the worries of a civil war getting in their way.
I knew I shoulda Pitted Stoller, Bowers, etc. for the damned 2013 meme while it was a big deal last summer. But I just didn’t quite get to it.
All Hillary’s promised is a pretty swift start to the withdrawal; she’s pretty vague about what happens later. Obama and Edwards have both been more specific about getting practically all U.S. troops out of Iraq fairly quickly. Edwards has basically said we’ve got to protect our embassy there, and keep open the option of ad hoc special-forces missions against terrorists as needed, but otherwise just get out.
In one of the debates last summer, the Dem contenders got asked whether they’d have all U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013. Neither Hillary, Obama, nor Edwards would commit to that. A number of people in the lefty blogosphere who really should have known better (and I’m looking at Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers in particular) turned this into a “see, they’re all going to keep our troops there forever” meme, from which they extrapolated to “there’s no reason to support Obama or Edwards over Hillary with respect to Iraq.”
The differences I’ve noted above between Obama and Edwards on the one hand, and Hillary on the other, were already quite clear. But the spread of this meme did a lot to help blur those differences. I’m still pretty pissed at those aforementioned guys on account of it.
Well, that’s it, isn’t it? Japan and Germany did have internal stability within weeks of the respective V-days, so keeping troops there wasn’t controversial: a tour of duty in Germany or Japan in 1946 wasn’t likely to mean you’d come home in a box, or sans part of a limb, or with your brain cells scrambled by high explosives. And we wanted to be there, unlike Iraq, which most Americans are ready to be rid of.
I didn’t believe it, as my pre-war posts show. But he did make those promises, and most Americans believed him. Guess we’re a nation of idiots. Can’t do much about that. Hell, by your metric, there were plenty of idiots on this board, including posters that both of us respect. Plus much of Congress, the editorial boards of most major newspapers, and all but a very few conservative pundits and bloggers in the U.S.
But this particular idiocy continued after we were bogged down in this war. We kept on being told by Bush and his people that soon as we’d captured Baghdad, or rounded up the dead-enders, or trained enough Iraqi security forces, or captured Saddam, or formed a provisional government, or trained more Iraqi security forces, or held elections, or trained more Iraqi security forces (this one was a favorite in 2003, 2004, and 2005), or formed a real government, or ratified a constitution, or got the Iraqi troops more experience in taking the lead while under U.S. supervision, then operating independently (a favorite in 2005, 2006, and 2007)…you get the idea.
One of Iraq’s responsibilities, as part of the ‘surge’ plan, was to take control of security inside the country by November 2007. If the surge didn’t work, that was going to be Bush’s last throw of the Iraq dice, but who’s calling him on it now?
Maybe all smart people realize he’s been bullshitting us all along, but there still seems to be an abundance of stupid. There won’t be an editorial in the WaPo tomorrow admitting that they shouldn’t have been so dumb as to trust Bush over and over and over again. A whole bunch of conservative pundits are castigating the left for refusing to admit that the ‘surge’ worked, even though it hasn’t.
So what do we do about this abundance of idiocy? Just saying that only people we can dismiss as idiots believed Dubya isn’t sufficient, because of how many there were altogether, but especially in the commentariat. What do we do about a national dialogue dominated by idiots? Exile Russert, Matthews, Broder, Friedman, etc. to St. Helena? I mean, I’m all for it, but I consider myself a bit of a radical in this respect.
I’d love to see some cites that Obama is going to get “practically all” of our troops out of Iraq toot sweet*. (I don’t care about Edwards, because I’m convinced he isn’t going to win.) I’ll be shocked if we have any fewer than 50k combat troops in Iraq 4 years from now no matter who is president.
Yep. When it came to this war, there were a bunch of idiots everywhere. It’s like they saw us invading, then getting out in a few years, but didn’t think about a reasonable process that would actually allow that to take place. It didn’t take a genius, though, to realize that the Shi’a and the Sunni weren’t going to get along and that Kurds basically wanted an independent state.
We do what we always do-- bungle through a solution as best we can. We support the candidates that we think can best clean up the mess that’s over there right now. I completely understand the desire to bitch and moan about the current situation-- I do it all the time, myself. But the reality is that we made an absolute mess of things over there, and we’ll probably have to have some substantial presence there for some time to come in order that the region doesn’t implode. I think all the major presidential candidates recognize that.
*Here is what Obama says on his web site, but he leaves too much wiggle room for contingencies that are quite likely to occur and that would prohibit him from getting all the “combat troops” out of Iraq, whatever it even means for troops to be “combat troops” in the first place. If we’ve got guys sitting in barracks somewhere in Iraq who are not actively patrolling things, are they “combat troops”? And just how many troops are going to be needed to protect our embassy and diplomats? 1000? 10,000? 25,000? Beats me. How many US troops would you want to have protecting you if you were a diplomat over there?
I think it’s still important to remind people that our President was feeding us a line of bull that he had to know was a line of bull, simply in order to keep the game going. That he still has 32% of the American people who think he’s doing a good job it still way too much.
But also, it’s important to do in order to hold our media accountable for the shit they purvey. Tony Snow, no longer constrained by being Bush’s press secretary, said a day or two ago that we shouldn’t have expected Bush to foresee how things have gone wrong in Iraq. He’ll have future opportunities to peddle his bullshit on the air - and not just on Fox. Bill Kristol’s NY Times op-ed yesterday was about how the libruls need to admit the surge is working. WTF was the NYT doing, hiring him?
I’m with Atrios on this: it’s as important to fight the craziness of the media narrative as it is to elect the right people, because too many of the people that you’d hope would do the right thing seem to have internalized the notion that if the Broders of the world say bad things about you, you’re the one who must’ve overstepped.
I thought ‘combat troops’ was a military term of art, that had a specific meaning.
As far as the rest of it goes, (a) he’s saying that he will get the combat troops out on that timetable, barring contingencies; this is something Hillary doesn’t say anything like. (b) They sound like reasonable contingencies to me, rather than an excuse to dump his timetable the moment he’s in office.
If I was going to be over there, I’d want however many troops it takes to keep the embassy safe from an assault by ground troops - plus I’d want us to maintain the nearest of those ‘permanent bases’ as a nearer, quicker escape hatch than our base in Kuwait.
There’s a lot of issues no one has raised because they’re still a few steps away, and one of them is the reality that we can’t maintain an embassy in the war zone that is Iraq unless we plan to keep a pretty decent force there to protect it. ‘Getting out’ anytime soon will mean abandoning our embassy. But right now, there’s nobody forcing Obama or Edwards to address that question, so they’re not. But that doesn’t mean that their positions on Iraq are little different from Clinton’s.
Point missed by all: it doesn’t matter if the Iraqis can defend their borders. The only people stupid enough to invade were us, and we’re already there…
Huh. By the standard set in the OP, there are an awful lot of countries around the world that haven’t “stood up”.
South Korea can’t be considered to have done so, since a significant portion of their defense is guaranteed by us. Never mind that they are free and stable.
The same can be said of Germany and Japan.
This particular criticism seems misplaced, and I think there is an awful lot we can debate about this war without harping on this.
Agreed. I think the key thing is that we announce a withdrawal and that we start taking some troops out. Both Obama and Hillary will do that. Whether or when they get “all” the troops out is something that I hope they haven’t predetermined at this point in time. If you look at what Obama said in response to questions about that debate answer:
That’s pretty open ended, if you ask me. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that the press likes a simple situation-- a candidate is either going to get all the troops out or not. It ain’t that simple. Just like when they report on bills that would “require” Bush to get the troops out by X date, when in fact they only say that “the goal” is to get them out by X date.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to defocus the main thrust of your thread, which is that Iraqis aren’t going to “stand up” in anywhere near the time that Bush led us to believe. And as others have said, they have no reason to do so long as we say we’ll stay until they do. We need to start getting out of there now, and we’ll see have quickly they can suddenly “stand up”.
As I read the cite in question, the Iraqi forces won’t be able to hold internal security until at least 2012, according to the gentleman in question. To what extent does the U.S. guarantee the internal security of South Korea, Germany, and Japan?