Newsday’s James Klurfeld
provides reasons the Bush administration may give up on Iraq:
there is a battle royal going on inside the administration over what to do about the mess in Iraq. . . secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, an original member of the Iraq Study Group, understands that the "we must win" doctrine makes no sense either politically or, more important, substantively. . .the insurgency in Iraq, while aided and abetted by al-Qaida, is fueled by the country's indigenous Sunni-Shia split. Many experts have concluded that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is more of a problem than a solution.
Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA official now at the Brookings Institution, put it this way in a recent article in Foreign Affairs: "It is time to recognize that engagement there is more of a trap than an opportunity for the United States. Al-Qaida and Iran both want Washington to remain bogged down in the quagmire."
Riedel and others say nothing has bolstered al-Qaida's standing in the Islamic world so much as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Riedel says Osama bin Laden's strategy has not changed: It is to "provoke and bait" the United States into "bleeding wars" throughout the Islamic world. He says the better course now would be a withdrawal of forces and renewed concentration on battling al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Newsday’s James Klurfeld provides reasons the Bush administration may give up on Iraq:
2 comments:
Hi Dad,
So - what do you think?
I have to say I agree with Riedel.
Aloha,
Derek
Democracies don’t begin wars. They prefer peace, and respond to aggression only when forced to. The war in Iraq came in two parts. First, we defeated Saddam, whom the United Nations was fighting since his 1990 unprovoked act of aggression against Kuwait. On behalf of the UN, though not according to the UN’s preferred timing schedule, we removed Saddam from power in 2003.
Some Iraqi government had to replace Saddam, and two separate forces—al-Qaeda and Iran—have set out to destroy the government we are trying to stand up in Saddam’s place. As difficult as it is in Iraq to fight both al-Qaeda and Iran simultaneously on behalf of Iraq’s new government— and we would leave the moment that government asked us to go—it will be harder to fight either al-Qaeda or Iran in the future somewhere else, I believe.
Riedel doesn’t agree. He says both al-Qaeda and Iran want us to remain in what he calls the Iraq “quagmire,” and that we frustrate their objective by pulling out. Like we frustrated North Vietnam by pulling out of South Vietnam? Just to ask the question is to answer it. More likely, both al-Qaeda and Iran would be delighted to defeat us in Iraq, and would make the most of victories there by carrying the fight to new battlefields.
We might well lose in Iraq. This is a very real possibility for the classic reason—democracies lack the stomach to sustain long, inconclusive wars. But let’s not try to pass off any Iraq loss as some kind of victory.
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