Poor John Kerry. No sooner does he deliver a speech that’s receiving praise for its clarity and stinging rebuke of Bush’s folly, than the liberal pundits are now suggesting that maybe Dennis Kucinich was right.
You remember Dennis, the squeaky-voiced Democratic iconoclast who said during the presidential primaries that we should withdraw from Iraq. Even Howard Dean wouldn’t go that far.
But with a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq light years away, pulling out may not be such a bad idea.
“If there ever was a chance to turn Iraq into a pro-American beacon of democracy, that chance perished a long time ago,” writes Paul Krugman this morning in the New York Times.
…But if the chance to install a pro-American government has been lost, what’s the alternative? Scaling back our aims. This means accepting the fact that an Iraqi leader, to have legitimacy, must be able to deliver an end to America’s military presence. Unless we want this war to go on forever, we will have to abandon the 14 “enduring bases” the Bush administration has been building.
It also means accepting the likelihood that Iraq will not have a strong central government – and that local leaders will end up with a lot of autonomy. This doesn’t have to mean creating havens for hostile forces: remember that for a year after Saddam’s fall, moderate Shiite clerics effectively governed large areas of Iraq and kept them relatively peaceful. It was the continuing irritant of the U.S. occupation that empowered radicals like Moktada al-Sadr.
The point is that by winding down America’s military presence, while promising aid to those who don’t harbor anti-American terrorists and retaliation against those who do, the U.S. can probably leave behind an Iraq that isn’t an American ally, but isn’t a threat either. And that, at this point, is probably the best we can hope for.
Is it time for us to reject the notion that while pulling out would bruise our ego and be the cause for dancing in the mountains of Afghanistan, it may be not only the best we can hope for but a stragetically good move to repair our standing in the Muslim world and hence, slow the tsunami of fundamental terrorism?
Even a former Iraq war hawk such as Richard Cohen has begin to wonder.
At one time I would have ruled out anything less than what might be called a U.S. victory in Iraq — a secure nation governed by democratically elected rulers. I would have argued that no matter how the United States got into Iraq, it simply could not preemptively pull out. To do so would have great and grave consequences. It could plunge the country into civil war, Shiites against Sunnis and Kurds against them both. It would cause the country to disintegrate, maybe dividing into thirds — a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shiite south. Where things are not so ethnically neat, expect a bloodbath — and expect outsiders to join in.
Now, though, we all have to face the prospect that Iraq will end up a mess no matter what. The administration’s own national intelligence estimate raises the possibility that civil war may erupt by the end of next year. That’s the direst prediction, but it now seems more likely than the one President Bush once envisioned: an Iraq with some sort of Jeffersonian democracy. That ain’t about to happen and bit by bit, Bush has been scaling back his rhetoric. The truth is that we’d now settle for a pro-American strongman such as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf or Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Both countries are essentially military dictatorships.
Who’d like to be the last man to die for that? I’m looking for a show of hands. But more than that, I’m looking for someone to raise questions that go to the heart of this matter of life and death. In this sense, Iraq is fast becoming Vietnam — only the stakes are higher. (Vietnam had no oil.) It is also Vietnam in the way the presidential campaign is handling it. Once again the GOP is playing the odious patriotism card to silence dissent. As for Bush, he talks about Iraq with the same loopy unreality as he does his National Guard service. He’s a fabulist.
I still don’t think the United States can just pull out of Iraq. But I do think the option is worth discussing. Would the threat of a U.S. pullout concentrate the minds of Iraqis so that they take control of their own destinies? Would the loss of the Yankee enemy cause Iraqis to blame actual bombers for the bombing — and not the United States? Would a threatened U.S. withdrawal get the attention of NATO, not to mention neighboring Middle Eastern countries? Do they want Iraq in shambles? I doubt it.
Bush ought to come clean. What are his goals for Iraq now? Does he plan to bring in more troops if he wins in November or is he simply going to accept defeat, call it victory and bring the boys (and girls) home? If I were still in the uniform I once wore, I’d sure like to know. It’s terrible to die for a mistake. It’s even worse to die for a lie.
Pulling out of Iraq summarily probably isn’t a good idea, and certainly no one in either presidential campaign would dare suggest it, although some, according to this conservative, are saying that’s Bush’s plan if he’s re-elected.
But can we announce a pull-out timetable that tells the rest of the world that we’re unwilling to keep losing men and woman? It might focus other nations’ attention as well as the Iraqis themselves. It might also be the first step in convincing the world that we are not anti-Muslim and respect that Islamic democracies might not need to like Jeffersonian ones.
Of course that would be only a first step. The next step needs to be addressing the real concerns of Muslims in the West Bank, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, as Fareed Zakaria points out today, the hypocrisy of some of those same European countries that have told us what a mistake the Iraq war was.
Update: Kevin Drum has a pretty good post and a citing commenting on The Washington Post’s analysis http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36909-2004Sep20.html piece this morning on the Kerry plan for Iraq. But I still think Cohen, Krugman — and Kucinich — might be on to something.