Is this the final table leg falling out from under the Bush administration’s Iraq policy? Frequent White House visitor (and according to Bob Woodward unofficial adviser) Henry Kissinger says victory isn’t possible in Iraq and there has to be some kind of regional settlement:
Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.
In a wide ranging interview on British Broadcasting Corp. television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors — including Iran — if any progress is to be made in the region.
“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday AM breakfast show.
And Kissinger’s statements get more critical as you read this AP account and others. He is suggesting the administration made poor policy choices and that Bush had the wrong impression of how the war was progressing. None of this suggests an administration that has been at the top of its game. Kissinger is not calling for an quick pullout:
But Kissinger warned against a rapid withdrawal of troops, saying it could lead to “disastrous consequences,” destabilizing Iraq’s neighbors and causing a long-lasting conflict.
“If you withdraw all the forces without any international understanding and without any even partial solution of some of the problems, civil war in Iraq will take on even more violent forms and achieve dimensions that are probably exceeding those that brought us into Yugoslavia with military force,” he said.
The L.A. Times adds:
Instead of holding elections and trying to build democratic institutions from the ground up, Kissinger said, the United States should focus on more limited goals: preventing the emergence of a “fundamentalist jihadist regime” in Baghdad and enlisting other countries to help stabilize Iraq.
Speaking in unusually blunt terms at a time when the administration is reviewing policy options for Iraq, Kissinger emphasized that he did not intend to be critical of the president or other officials who have managed the U.S. effort in Iraq.
“I supported going in,” he said. “I’m basically supporting the administration. And these are the criticisms of a friend of the administration who thinks well of the president.”
With friends like these….READ ON:
Kissinger has made some of these points before, especially his argument that the United States should try to “internationalize” the problem of Iraq by enlisting other countries, including Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Russia, in a joint effort.
But as debate escalated over possible changes in U.S. strategy in the wake of the Democrats’ victory in the congressional election, his latest comments amounted to a sharp critique of the administration’s course.
He said he would have preferred a post-invasion policy that installed a strong Iraqi leader from the military or some other institution and deferred the development of democracy until later. “If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed,” he said.In Iraq, he said, elections, the centerpiece of the administration’s political strategy, merely sharpened sectarian differences.
“It [was] a mistake to think that you can gain legitimacy primarily through the electoral process,” he said.
And he suggested that Bush may have been slow to change course in Iraq because advisers told him the United States was winning the war.
“As long as he was told he was winning, he had every reason to pursue the recommended strategy” that his advisers had proposed, Kissinger said.
He declined to elaborate, except to add that it was impossible to portray the current state of affairs in Iraq as “winning.”
But didn’t President Bush say the U.S. was winning in Iraq? (Someone will have to call Kissinger and set him straight)
You can watch the video of his interview HERE.
Via Watching America
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.