I'm not going to repeat the popular progressive misrepresentation of John McCain's quote that we could stay in Iraq for a thousand or a million years as far as he was concerned. Any analysis free of political agenda makes it pretty clear that he was referring to a presence along the lines of our long-term deployments in Japan or South Korea. To claim that he was implying that the current situation could continue into the next millennium is disingenuous. However, he is firmly in the military solution camp and supports a muscular presence until the killing stops. Until the killing stops. As Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, that might be awhile.
Clinton and Obama both seem intent upon ending the war and pulling out all combat troops within a year. They would begin drawing down between one and two brigades a month, leaving a nebulous, unspecified number of support troops to, "strike at terrorists, train Iraqi soldiers and protect American interests." This pace is faster than most field officers in Iraq deem prudent and they feel it would leave us without enough force to deal with the situation on the ground.
The Democratic candidates' plans are fiction. Sound-bite strategies to pave the way to the White House along the campaign trail. At best, they should be taken as optimistic suggestions, much like Hillary's "universal" health care plan. Even she admits that the health care battle will be fierce and that's why it's necessary to start with the absolute goal of universal coverage. It's like any act of barter -- you start as low (or as high) as possible and give up as little ground as you can.
That's how one needs to look at the two proposals for leaving Iraq. Start with a year and then see how long it will really take. Eric Rosenbach, executive director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School, predicts, "Four years, optimistically, and more like seven or eight years" until Iraq is self-sufficient. West Point professor Brian Fishman warns, "...when you talk about some kind of end for American troops, it's certainly in terms of years." Anyone who takes specific campaign promises to heart, well, either they haven't been paying much attention over the years or they have a serious case of heartburn.
So, I'm willing to grant that the complexities of Iraq make our leaving within the next couple of years unlikely, even impossible. That being said, is there any goddamn way to get McCain and Bush and the rest of his neocon stooges to quit labeling a measured drawdown of American men and women as a "hasty retreat?" They've latched onto that tired phrase like a Nebraska housewife clutching her handbag in Times Square.
A hasty retreat is what the French beat in the face of the Germans' offensive from the Somme in June of 1940. It's the option you chose in high school through your girlfriend's bedroom window when you heard her father coming up the stairs.
Today marks the completion of the fifth full year of the Iraq War. That's 1,827 days, counting leap years. 3,990 American troops have been killed, 29,395 wounded. 60,000 troops have completed their service commitments but been forbidden to leave the military until their units return. 8,000 Iraqi military and police killed. 89,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. 4.5 million Iraqi refugees. $5-7 trillion in estimated costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
THERE IS NOTHING HASTY ABOUT THIS! This is an agonizingly slow, protracted death of a thousand cuts. We are spending $12 billion dollars each month on this war. Two Americans die each day. EACH DAY!
Do you think their families would consider this a hasty action? Best case scenario, let's say HRC or Obama gets elected and, against the advice of the hawks at the table, ends our Iraqi involvement by 2011. Do you think the families, friends and loved ones of the troops killed between now and then would consider this a hasty retreat? I don't either.
Look, you want to make a case for a continued presence in Iraq, then do so. But deliberately stigmatizing any and all reasoned plans to escape the clutches of an unreasoned and unreasonable war as a "hasty retreat" is unconscionable. It disrespects those who have already died in this game of chicken Bush initiated and it disrespects the thousands who will die in the years ahead.
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