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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