POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "Out of Iraq, Some Common Ground: Troop Drawdown Could Enable Democrats and Republicans to Claim Victory," by Neil King, Jr., and Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2007, p. A4.
First para says what I've been arguing for a while now:
The likelihood that U.S. forces will begin pulling out of Iraq later this year is tamping down what was expected to be a rancorous debate over the U.S. role there and providing an opening for Democrats and Republicans to reach agreement on an Iraq policy both sides could tout as a victory.
Petraeus gets to declare some progress, which is real, but the first pullouts will come naturally by the end of this year.
As troop levels fall over the course of 2008 from the peak of 160,000, U.S. forces are likely to gradually shift to more of a training and advisory mission advocated by many moderate Democrats.
Put this reality (Vietnam-in-reverse) with the on-the-ground reality of the continued soft partition (Bosnia-done-backwards) and you've got my package written up in State of the World last December (March Esquire).
Hardly rocket science. Most could see this coming miles away on the troop rotation.
Again, the un-uncertainty on troop levels.
Like it or not, this is our political system working as designed. Bush has been at the plate for a very long time. Congress can't make him succeed. It can only curtail him after the failures pile up.
As the piece points out, the max the surge could be maintained without further breakage of the troops is April '08, and if the Iraqi central government had shown some desire to take advantage of the window we've given them to date, I believe we would have rewarded them with those months.
But that was never going to happen with Maliki. He's there to kill time and protect Shia interests (again, I'm shocked! Shocked to hear the Shia don't trust America after we left them twisting in the wind under Saddam in the early 1990s [more feel-good Powell Doctrine outcomes] and are taking matters into their own hands to secure their future dominance in a southern Iraq where they're 3/4ths of the population).
Bush, by his choices, created the first Arab Shia state--big time. We can whine about that reality or we can adjust to it and see where it takes us. Given the alternative of the usual Sunni dictatorship, I think we do far better on the Big Bang to run with this path, so long as we get less weak-kneed about Iran's reach for the bomb.
It's almost perverse, but this thing is still working out pretty well--the Big Bang. I know, I know, it was sold as the Continental Congress showing up and then everything falling into place regionally--a glorious myth-making bit of nonsense. But the reality is, it'll be ugly and scary and fairly dangerous. That's how real change happens in the real world. You want to pluralize the Middle East? Then get ready for the Shia revival and the Sunni counter-reaction (Nasr's analysis).
You pick your poison, but you go with the structural realities (the Shia are our natural allies, despite the past bad blood), because the alternative sucks (both going back to the support of Sunni dictatorships and finding ourselves back on Osama's side in the Sunni-Shia struggle--an absolute doubleplusungood).
This way (running with the Shia revival), we're siding with the Chinese of this equation, not the Sovs.
Nixon pulled that difficult trigger in 1972, and we should pull it again.