Iraq's Cruelest Month Coming Up

Next week, against a backdrop of cherry blossoms on the Potomac, we will get the latest Petraeus-Crocker production of "Blood and Sand" for an audience of the hollow men and women in both houses of Congress.

When they get here, the General and the Ambassador will no doubt give us another suave performance to explain the latest twist in the Mideast theater of the absurd--how our Iraqi lawmakers have been in Iran appealing to the head of the Revolutionary Guard, branded a terrorist organization by Congress last August, to persuade Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop killing people in Baghdad and Basra.

If all this feels like being trapped in an endless Pinter play, consider the recent monologues of Andrew Cordesman, one of our most knowledgeable observers. Last summer, describing Iraq as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you," he made a cautious case for starting to withdraw troops early this year. A month ago, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.

Today Cordesman describes "worrisome possibilities" that could deny us "victory" in Iraq--the cooperating Sunni tribes and militias could turn against the central government, ethnic conflicts to control territory in the north could lead to fighting in Kirkuk, Mosul and other areas and the political struggle between the dominant Shiite parties could become an armed conflict. (Could? Check the headlines.)

In 2004, as a division commander, Gen.Petraeus was asking a question to which he clearly had no answer, “Tell me how this ends.” Last year, he was telling us that "we can't shoot our way out of Iraq." No matter what he has to say now, how do we persuade him and Congress to stop sleepwalking with Bush toward the edge of another precipice?

Mission Creep in the Middle East

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."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.

Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.

Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.

We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?

A Sane Re-Start for the Iraq Debate

After all the wishful thinking and political posturing on all sides, a basis for serious discussion makes the “tenuous case” for staying in Iraq while scaling down our presence.

The report urging “strategic patience” is by Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank chaired by former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, with a bipartisan board including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William S. Cohen, a former Republican Senator who was Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton.

Some recent advances in Iraq, Cordesman writes, are the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents. He quotes an unnamed U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman makes a case for phasing down troop levels starting early next year.

His analysis and recommendations will draw fire for being too qualified, too middle-of-the-road and politically unsatisfying. But they have the ring of reality, something so rare in the furor over Iraq that has made Americans unhappy with both the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress elected to oppose him.

Here, at least, is a starting point for facing the true options and thinking seriously about them.

As Cordesman writes, “The U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.”

We’ve lost the war. Can we win the withdrawal?