Decline and Fall

At least someone on the right can see the forest for the trees. While I don't agree with everything in his latest piece, By Bush's Own Standard, Surge Has Failed, his main point is unassailable, unless you're drunk on Rupert Murdoch's special Kool-Aid:

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds.

How do people not get this? The military is utterly unfit to the task of facilitating political reconciliation. Our very presence here ensures that reconciliation will not happen, because all we can do is arm our friends du jour, walling them off from each other, and bribe them to stop attacking each other, while creating potemkin villages for sympathetic journalists and politicians to base glowing reports upon.

Iraqis know damn well that America doesn't particularly care about them or their situation. We've all but abandoned our original goal of bestowing freedom and democracy upon them and are now just looking for a way to bow out that doesn't involve an airlift from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad.

But we will continue to fight here, because winning the political war in Washington is more important than winning the actual war in Iraq. Because saving (the President's) face is more important than saving (American soldiers') lives.

Labels: Iraq, military, politics