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Mission Creep in the Mideast

Posted by ROBERT STEIN in War.
Feb 25th, 2008 | Comments

John McCain’s hyperbole about keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years is alarmingly echoed in a Washington Post OpEd by one of the saner foreign policy experts on the Washington scene.

“What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common,” Anthony Cordesman writes, “is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.

“Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don’t end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020.”

Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as “three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you.”

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Rudi

You are correct in that Cordesman is a sane voice, however he never proposed a rapid pullout of Iraq. What is needed is a sane discussion of real objectives, not the extremes of both parties. Hagel and Powell were right, we've got broken pottery and need to assess the damage.

GreenDreams

Two points. We threw all we had at Vietnam and "lost". Asia didn't collapse and now Vietnam is a bustling part of our manufacturing base. Could we have done better in Southeast Asia? Yes, just as we can do better in the Middle East.

Years ago, I argued that we could have bought victory in Iraq long ago. We have spent more money per Iraqi family than the lifetime income of nearly all of them. We have given them a devastated country of unemployed angry men, orphans and widows, without jobs, clean water, working sewers and electricity and daily fear of death. We could have handed them, at far less cost, 100% employment (placing them under our supervision) rebuilding the water, electricity, gas and sewer, and a working oil infrastructure that they would have a stake in preserving, rather than blowing up. Border security? We could hire a million Iraqis with cell phones on the Iranian border. Pipe dream? Hardly. The linked article echoes my points:

"Dollars are as important as bullets, and so are political accommodation, effective government services and clear demonstrations that there is a future that does not need to be built on Islamist extremism."

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