Iraq Forever?

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:



Iraq Forever?

Last week's intense focus on whether the surge was working obscured the real Bush agenda -- a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq.

Spencer Ackerman | September 18, 2007 | web only



Having lost the battle over the surge, Democrats in the Senate are back to an incrementalist approach to the war. After Bush endorsed General David Petraeus's plan to return to pre-surge combat strength of about 130,000 troops in Iraq by the end of July, the Democrats mobilized.

Senator Jim Webb, the Vietnam veteran who won his Virginia seat last year on an antiwar platform, will push forward for a third time with his bill mandating that troops serving in Iraq remain at home for at least an equivalent amount of time as their deployments. The bill is a two-fer: Not only does it take a large burden off the Army's shoulders, but it would, in practice, constrain the Pentagon's ability to keep troop strength in Iraq at Petraeus' desired levels. Unsurprisingly, Defense Secretary Bob Gates replied on Friday that Webb's "well-intentioned" bill would create problems for the next year's meticulously planned deployment calendar -- and in any event, he'd prefer to drop down to 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2008.

If the current debate between Webb and Gates over force postures remains on those terms, it'll be a sober, mature and respectful accounting between serious defense professionals. It may well result in a more sensible deployment schedule for active-duty Army soldiers in Iraq, who now face an unprecedented "deployment-to-dwell" ratio of 15 months in Iraq to 12 months at home. And it will obscure the starkest fact to emerge from last week's Petraeus/Crocker hearings: The U.S. will remain in Iraq, in some capacity, forever.

One of President Bush's most under-appreciated maneuvers of 2007 was his recasting of the debate over the war into a debate over the surge. Commentators endlessly interpreted the surge as a "last chance" for the war to succeed -- something the Bush administration, crucially, never promised. But as a result of this misperception, endless inquiry over the last several months has focused on whether the surge has succeeded on its own terms: whether it pacified Baghdad; whether it deserves credit for the Sunni tribal shift against al-Qaeda; whether it nurtured a glacial sectarian reconciliation. It's a pattern of analysis that rests on a simple proposition: Since the surge is the last chance for the war to succeed, if it has failed, then the war must be brought to an end.

That proposition is false. Whatever the surge's virtues, (is a reduction in sectarian violence in Baghdad the result of better U.S. strategy or the fruit of a victorious Shiite strategy to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis?) it has had a clear political benefit for the president, turning criticism of the war into criticism of a slice of the war. General Petraeus made it clear last week that the infusion of troops into Baghdad was what allowed him to emphasize a strategy of population protection that doesn't apply in less-troop dense areas of Iraq, so when troop strength returns to 2006 levels, the strategy will accordingly shift. Those who criticize Petraeus because they want to stop the war will have gained little more ground than they occupied in December 2006. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=iraq_forever