An American Problem

The Lebanon Daily Star is carrying an op-ed by Michael Young that should be required reading for American politicians. Young points out, correctly, that the world sees the situation in Iraq not as a partisan, internal political problem of the United States, but as an American problem. One that will have devastating consequences for whoever wins the White House in 2008. The Democrats leading the anti-war charge had better think hard about the mess they would be handing their candidate should she or he win. Because even the holiest of holies in the "internationalist" wing of the Democratic party, the UN, is warning of dire consequences of an American withdrawal. (You haven't really seen news of that in the American media, have you?)

So alarming are the implications of an American debacle in Iraq, that the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, felt the urge to intervene last Monday and warn: "Great caution should be taken for the sake of [the] Iraqi people. The international community cannot and should not abandon them. Any abrupt withdrawal or decision may lead to a further deterioration of the situation in Iraq." An Iraqi tribal leader fighting Al-Qaeda who was recently interviewed by the BBC Arabic service said more or less the same thing. If the United States withdrew from Iraq, he warned, his men would find it difficult to defeat their adversaries. 

That Iraq is an American mess is an understatement. However, like many messes, it is a metastasizing one. American politicians are panicking, and in so doing are making many more mistakes than they need to make – so that already we can spread the blame across the political spectrum.

President George W. Bush has the right instincts in believing that the only way to prevail in a place like Iraq is to make an open-ended commitment, with no talk of withdrawal. There are no quick fixes in Iraq, and no obvious slow ones either. But that's hardly enough. Bush seems to have no real clue about what to do next and is going through the same flawed thought processes as those of Richard Nixon in 1969, when he sought to engineer "peace with honor" in Vietnam, while facing a public mostly focused on the "peace" part of the equation. Like Nixon, Bush is fiddling with the switches, even if he, correctly, sees any talk of withdrawal at home as weakening his bargaining hand in Iraq. The military is preparing a plan to cut troop levels in quieter northern Iraq by half in the next 12 to 18 months. Nixon did much the same thing during his first year in office, mainly to reduce domestic political resentment; but this did not alter his desire to pursue, even escalate, the Vietnamese conflict. ……

……The Democrats are in no better a moral posture. Seeing Bush trapped, they are hammering him, hoping this will carry them to victory in next year's presidential and congressional elections. The Republicans sense a looming rout, which is why they, too, are hitting Bush harder than ever. However, the Democrats have no more an effective plan for Iraq than the administration does, and would be just as vulnerable to the misfortunes following from a withdrawal as the Republicans. It may be justifiable to condemn an administration that has been unable to point to an Iraqi upturn for four years, but acrimony only makes the situation worse for everyone, because Iraq is not about partisan American politics.

The Democrats will not be seen as heroes to the rest of the world: they will be seen as part of the American failure in Iraq. And if they get their fondest wish and take the White House in 2008, they will have hamstrung their candidate and crippled American foreign policy for decades to come. The bloodbath that follows the withdrawal of American troops will not be blamed on George Bush, regardless of the fantasies of the left. It will be blamed on America as a whole, the left included. And the blood will be on the hands of those who forced the withdrawal.