Still Ignoring The 800 Pound Gorilla

ABC’s Jake Tapper does what a journalist is supposed to do and asks Senator Harry Reid about what happens to the Iraqi people in the wake of a US withdrawal. Unsurprisingly, Reid doesn’t have an answer for him.

It’s quite disgusting that we have members of both parties acting so cavalierly about the future of the Iraqi people. There are 25 millions men, women, and children in Iraq whose lives would be dramatically effected by the consequences of our actions in letting Iraq go to hell and then failing to live up to our responsibility to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Senator Reid voted to authorize this war. He should not be able to weasel out of the consequences any more than anyone else should. We have a moral obligation to the people of Iraq to put their country on a sustainable path towards peace. To fail to do so is a gross abrogation of our responsibilities to the people of Iraq.

Colin Powell warned the US that we were playing by Pottery Barn rules in Iraq — we break it, we buy it. Right now we’ve got a broken Iraq that can still be fixed, even if the costs are great. It’s taken us years to get a strategy that has a chance of working (even though Gen. Petraeus did it in Tel Afar all the way back in 2005), and we can’t preemptively declare defeat and try to wash our hands of the situation.

The future of Iraq is the 800lbs gorilla sitting in the room, and it’s not going away no matter how hard lawmakers on both sides try to ignore it.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has an incredibly good editorial chiding Democratic lawmakers for their own brand of “wishful thinking” on Iraq:

We agree with Mrs. Clinton that President Bush has been guilty of “wishful thinking” on Iraq. When he was promoting his surge policy at the beginning of this year, we said Iraq’s political leadership was unlikely to accept compromises any time soon. It was predictable, therefore, that Mr. Bush’s benchmarks would not be met and that within a few months the policy he put forward without popular or congressional support would become even more difficult to sustain.

But his wishful thinking can’t excuse, even if it helps explain, the wishful thinking on the other side. Advocates of withdrawal would like to believe that Afghanistan is now a central front in the war on terror but that Iraq is not; believing that doesn’t make it so. They would like to minimize the chances of disaster following a U.S. withdrawal: of full-blown civil war, conflicts spreading beyond Iraq’s borders, or genocide. They would have us believe that someone or something will ride to the rescue: the United Nations, an Islamic peacekeeping force, an invigorated diplomatic process. They like to say that by withdrawing U.S. troops, they will “end the war.”

We have to live in the world of reality, not the world of make-believe in which the UN can ride to the rescue or Syria and Iran would love to help craft a democratic and peaceful Iraq. As tempting as it is to escape on those flights of fancy, it doesn’t help the current situation. Iraq is a mess, but it will be a disaster beyond all comprehension if we leave it in a condition where it will be picked apart by every group seeking some advantage in a fragmented Iraqi state.

As paradoxical as it sounds, withdrawal would be an escalation of the war. It would give the Iraqi Sunnis reason to fear being ethnically cleansed from Iraq, ensuring internecine warfare. It would signal to Iran that they could expand their influence there. It would signal to Turkey that the only way to prevent Kurdish militants from attacking Turkish cities would be to invade Iraqi Kurdistan. It would signal to al-Qaeda that the US is unwilling to fight and can be pushed around.

If withdrawal would bring peace to the region, withdrawal would be the sensible course of action — but no matter how much Democratic lawmakers want to think that the Iraqis would be better off without us, those thoughts are delusional. If we leave, Iraq becomes a bloodbath: not ending the war, but ensuring that the people of Iraq face a level of carnage orders of magnitude beyond anything we’ve seen so far.

4 thoughts on “Still Ignoring The 800 Pound Gorilla

  1. Ah, the tangled web we weave. I can’t help but notice that you completely ignored the headlines from DHS secretary Chertoff about al-Qaeda being as big now as they were when they pulled off the 9-11 attacks….even after near extinction at the onset of the war in Iraq. Considering your endless insistence that al-Qaeda is operating at a skeletal level and couldn’t pull off a major terrorist attack, I can see how the DHS Secretary insisting otherwise would be a major embarrassment for you.

  2. Because there’s no evidence that he’s right. Al-Qaeda certainly wants to pull off another 9/11 attack, but there’s no evidence that they have the capability to do so. They don’t have the financial resources that they had prior to 9/11, nor do they have the benefit of lax security. Chertoff’s “gut feeling” is just that — a gut feeling.

    Al-Qaeda was hardly near extinction in 2003 — far from it. We’ve steadily rolled up their senior leadership bit by bit over the past few years, degrading their operations as we went along.

    The big problem has nothing to do with Iraq — it’s the fact that al-Qaeda has sanctuary in Pakistan and Musharraf doesn’t have the power to evict them. Then again, with the assault on the Red Mosque, it’s possible that we’re putting diplomatic and political pressure on Musharraf to push against Islamist elements within Pakistan.

  3. Under the circumstances, one of these two scenarios is correct, neither of which makes your side look good:

    a) al-Qaeda has rebounded to 9-11-01 levels, largely due to the recruitment bonanza that Bush’s misguided war in Iraq has created, or

    b) none of that is true, and it was simply made up by a DHS Secretary trying to scare up national hysteria frenzy as a distraction for the latest batch of Bush administration scandals?

    So does Jay Reding know more than the chief national security professionals in our government? Or are those chief national security professionals engaged in a treasonous subterfuge as political cover for a corrupt administration? Gotta be one or the other.

  4. Or c) al-Qaeda has rebounded due to having a safe haven in Pakistan, which has nothing to do with Iraq.

    or d) Secretary Chertoff was saying what he thought was correct, regardless of the political concerns

    or e) al-Qaeda is trying to attack us again, and has gained strength due to having a safe haven in Pakistan, but does not have the financial and logistical resources to pull off another major attack

    or f) al-Qaeda has become a highly decentralized organization in which amateurs are taking up their name and launching small, less deadly, and often botched attacks in places like London and Glasgow…

    or… etc, etc…

    But hey, if you only want to think in ways that make your silly little political arguments, go ahead. Just don’t claim it’s actually thinking…

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