A War Still Seeking A Mission (George Freaking Will of all people)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/10/AR2007091002065.html

A War Still Seeking a Mission

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 11, 2007; Page A17

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America's hands.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

...

A democracy, wrote the diplomat and scholar George Kennan, "fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it -- to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end." Which is why "unconditional surrender" was a natural U.S. goal in World War II and why Americans were so uncomfortable with three "wars of choice" since then -- in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.
...

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This part I basically agree with. In the part not quoted, Will tries to play a cute game saying that Democrats will claim a token withdrawal of troops by Petraeus/Bush as a Pyrrhic victory. In fact, Democrats should NOT claim such a withdrawal as a victory of any kind but point out that it's a symbolic, empty gesture meant to trick Republican voters into thinking that their party has any intention of ending the conflict at all before November 2008.

[EVDebs]

1. Congress needs to revisit the AUMFs of Oct 2002 and even Sept 2001

and remove the "...as he (Bush) determines..." language. Then the need to decide whether to declare war, or not.