A lot of readers, most notably those we've picked up from Hewitt, wonder why I don't stick firmly with Bush/Petraeus during the surge. They wonder why I would argue that it's a good thing for Dems to tie Bush's hands in his remaining time.
So let me reiterate to be clear:
I supported Bush's Big Bang decision to topple Saddam. To me, it was never about WMD, which is an overblown fear (it's not the ultimate Rubicon now that global war is off the agenda, it's just a super-weapon that we must deal with). To me, it was about a rule-set breaker who flouted the will of the global community for years on end. We got up the nerve to stop him in the early 1990s, and then, true to our Powell Doctrine roots at that time, we refused to finish the job.
9/11 happens and we respond to the apparent source in Afghanistan. Then Bush and neocons get up the nerve to finish the job in Iraq, ending the horror of the sanctions regimes, finally rescuing the courageous Kurds (well on their way to nationhood thanks to the northern fly zone), and giving the Shiia a chance to avenge the genocidal warfare rained upon them by Saddam with our implicit okay in the early 1990s (our southern no-fly zone eventually ends that). The Sunni Serbs responded as expected, Al Qaeda and others take advantage, and the insurgency begins.
The insurgency need not have grown so formidable, but the Ford reruns of this administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld) knew what they knew: 1) don't do Vietnams and 2) restore the presidency destroyed by Watergate. So they planned a truly brilliant war (Just Cause on steroids) and then with almost criminal neglect they didn't bother to plan for the peace, and stubbornly fought the postwar's entire unfolding.
Bush, so decisive in the first term when it came to kinetics, is lost when it comes to the non-kinetics. Saddled with two amazingly weak SECSTATES, both of whom were picked to be exactly that (weak, talking-point deliverers and nothing more), this administration has been adrift the entire second term, just as I feared (thus my call for Kerry). Bush was effective in changing the rule sets and putting the Middle East's board in play, but he's been amazingly ineffective when it comes to convincing others to adhere to that new rule set, in large part because he lacks--along with his entire administration--any significant strategic imagination.
Bush refused to take advantage of the changes he himself set so effectively in motion in the region. There was a huge groundswell of change across the Middle East the first 18 months following the war. When he had the chance to start regional dialogues that addressed the real fights of the region (Iran v Israel, Iran v Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda v House of Saud), he did not. He stubbornly stayed the course in Iraq, pretending an internal solution was possible in what quickly and logically became a regional conflict that all players on all sides are effectively conflating in a host of asymmetrical ways.
Bush's first great answer was to rerun the entire WMD drama on Iran.
Bush's second great answer was the surge. As I wrote several times earlier: the surge with serious regional diplomacy--that I would gladly support.
But the surge without serious regional and international diplomacy--that I do not support.
I do not support it because it is designed to fall.
I do not support it because I think it's Bush's ruse to Iranify the Long War.
I think that if Bush attacks Iran on his watch, he'll screw up the Big Bang permanently and could quite easily trigger a long-term rivalry with Russia and China in the region.
I find these pathways beyond stupidity, and so I do not support them.
People who act like you either support Bush's mismanagement of this postwar or you're un-American are myopic in the extreme. They're acting like we should put our entire team on the field for the extra point when we need to score a couple more touchdowns before the game clock runs out.
We are told: Why negotiate with people who don't want us to win?
I will tell you why: because we're not going to win--or lose. We're either going to keep the Big Bang rolling or we're going to let it die and let the region go right back to what it was. Not every play in this game is going to be for positive yardage. Sometimes we'll punt and play for field position.
And yeah, when we screw up royally, we'll take our medicine.
We've screwed up Iraq (outside of Kurdistan) and if we want to cut down our exposure, we'll have to accept many compromises. You can get mad about that and blame Bush or you can get mad about that and pretend the Left "stabbed us in the back." But stubborn is as stubborn does and Bush made all the big decisions, so whine about that or move along, because when the Dems tie his hands now it's not about preventing some illusory "win" in Iraq, it's about stopping a strategically idiotic war with Iran, which won't fix Iraq but make our entire effort there to date a complete waste of blood and treasure.
Bush, in my mind, has no idea how to win at this point. He pretends we can screw up and then take no pain for our efforts, so he eschews negotiations with people who have no intention of helping anyone but themselves (duh!). So both they, and everyone else involved in Iraq will continue to screw us, and both our blood and our treasure will continue to go largely wasted until Bush loses the stubbornness or simply leaves office.
I have no anticipation of Bush gaining strategic smarts any time soon, nor Cheney, whose Manichean world view makes him far more of a menace to America than any of our enemies. So I want the clock to run out on them with no further damage being inflicted on our strategic position.
I want to win. I just don't pretend we can come back on a single drive from being behind several scores.
As for those who do, they're free to have their own opinions.
But I can't peddle that sort of crap. It just won't get me in front of audiences like the 250 senior officers of CENTCOM I briefed on Monday. I just would never get those chances with that mindset. And you know why? They're totally interested in winning, not who gets the credit, so politics doesn't interest them one bit.
The point right now is how we move ahead, not how we save this presidency.
I believe in the United States, not in any one leader.
And I want to win in the end, not on the next play.
So let me be clear as crystal: my guys never leave office. They are there administration after administration. They know exactly what I'm about and I know exactly what they're about, and we get along just fine.
The politicians, meanwhile, get exactly what they deserve.
Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 2:09PM 
