Peter Beinart of the New Republic captures the sense of a terrible impasse that pervades my own thought pattern when I try to figure out what steps that players on Team Bush and the new and diverse Democratic players in the Senate and House should do to support or hector the White House.
Beinart writes:
"In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving. Once upon a time, you could have plausibly argued that, by staying, the United States might make things better: We could have improved security on the ground and thus enhanced the Iraqi government's authority while weakening the insurgents and the militias. That would have allowed Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders to make the tough political compromises that might have pulled Iraq back from the brink. But, since February's attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the violence has grown so shocking--and the sectarian hatred so intense--that asking either the Sunnis or Shia to disarm (no one is even asking the Kurds) is inviting them to commit mass suicide. The Bush administration keeps telling Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to take on the Shia militias, as if the guy just lacks motivation. But the militias are not a threat to the Iraqi state; they are the Iraqi state. By their grace, Maliki stays in office and remains alive."
I'm guessing from the results and analysis of the 2006 elections that the majority of the ever-expanding independent voters chose Democratic candida tees not because said voters support immediate or even rapid withdrawal of forces. But where trying, perhaps, to widen the options the country might have to remove our soldiers and Marines from the quagmire--to end this open-ended "We will be with you always, unto the end..." flavor of the mission.
These independents, these quasi-GOP, quasi-Democrats, depending on the state of the union-- may have voted simply for SOMEBODY to come up with a Iraq War paradigm that will stop the situation from continuing to grow more dire, to get the Iraqis to stand up for themselves and create order with fewer and fewer Americans carrying the load, to present options other than, say , what Senator McCain proposes in his" stay 'til hell-freezes-over strategy" or pull out altogether in a rigid timetable, as some Democrats have advanced.
They want something in-between. Or at least these voters hope for it.
Hope. It's something Joe Klein in his recent book "Politics Lost" says every successful presidential candidate has used in some form to win the White House. Carter wins in 1976 because he tells people our government can be as good as its people. Reagan wins in 1980 and 1984 because of "The Speech", a twenty minute vision of America with its best days ahead of it; Clinton wins in 1992 part because he "comes from a place called Hope". Of course that leaves out a lot of pandering to the middle-class and promises to end all sorts of problems with the vaguest of details, but you need the Hope message.
The premise of "hope above all" is that America is populated by an essentially optimistic people who in the final analysis want to feel not only safe from terrorists and bad guys, but also that, somehow, we make a difference for good in an area we send men and women to die for. Most Americans I suspect don't want us to stay forever in a foreign country grinding up our volunteer soldiers. We've made mistakes in Iraq, but, in the final analysis, its their country. We're not the British Raj and this is 2006, not 1906.
My particular "hope" right now is not something I can produce great detail on. The more I look into Iraq, the less likely a radical change seems possible. You have the chaos of civil war on the ground, the terrorist threat that clouds everything, and, like Vietnam, the personal honor of very personable and powerful men--well, mostly men--in D.C. to consider.
I do think we should draw down our troops in some sort of step-by-step approach over a matter of say, eighteen months, and downplay this Neo-Con/Neo- Wilsonian idea of bringing democracy to a part of the world that's too far from Europe, North American and East Asia (where moderate republics exist in the main). Above all, we have to let the Iraqis have their country back, for better or worse. I don't think sending more troops or waiting ten years is going to make the leaving any less of a risk.
Our young men and women who have volunteered to defend this country are owed a better chance of survival than to ask them to somehow give us a Middle East free of risks.
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