http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43489-2005Jan2.html?nav=rss_opinion/opeds
Here at kos, we have been spending a lot of time cursing the war in Iraq but not a lot of time focusing on solutions. This was a huge problem in the last election. John Kerry failed to draw a sufficient distinction between him and Bush. When he outlined his 4-part plan to solve the crisis in Iraq, Bush said, "Well, I recognize that plan. That's because it's the Bush Plan!"
After reading William Raspberry's column in today's post, I propose my own solution: Wait `til after the January 30th elections, proclaim victory, get out of Iraq, and spend all the surplus resources on the tsunami victims.
The 9/11 attacks killed over 3,000 Americans. But at least that many have been reported missing from the Tsunami floods. And these floods have already killed at least 150,000 people from around the world. The world was very generous to us when Bin Laden bombed the WTC. A French paper wrote, "We are all Americans now." Now it is time for us to repay that generosity by focusing on a problem which is much more important than Iraq.
Raspberry focuses on the difficulty we have of articulating a solution to the crisis:
Even those of us who thought President Bush made a hideous moral and military blunder in launching the war are largely sympathetic to the way he is conducting the aftermath -- not because it is particularly successful but because we can't think of anything better.
In response to the problem, we need to be like Lincoln at Union Station in 1860: We as a community need to call for an end to the war. If we write to the editor or a congressman, tell them to stop the war. If we call into a talk show, advocate stopping the war. If we write to the editor, we should lay out our three-point plan that Raspberry suggests.
Raspberry goes on to discuss Naomi Klein and her rebuttal of Powell's pottery barn rule. In Klein's article, she says that the reason people want to stay in Iraq is because of the pottery barn rule: If you break it, you own it.
Raspberry writes:
Klein acknowledges that we've broken Iraq, but she argues that our continued presence there doesn't fix anything and only makes it worse. We don't need to "own" the country, she says, only acknowledge the breakage, pay for it and leave.
Just leave. It sounds so simple -- so evocative of the advice Vermont Sen. George Aiken offered another president presiding over a quagmire called Vietnam: Just declare victory and go home.
This may have been a reason why so many people agreed with us on the issue but voted for Bush in the election. They may have felt that even though Bush's invasion of Iraq was wrong, you don't change horses in midstream. We need a candidate who will not just rant and rave at Bush's poor conduct of the war, but a candidate who will articulate a clear and compelling reason why we should change course in midstream.
Raspberry goes on to discuss some of the arguments advanced for staying. I will discuss them one by one.
Leaving Iraq would hurt military morale because all their sacrifices would have been in vain. Our military morale is already low if a growing number of troops subject Rumsfeld to a major grilling about body armor and other concerns. And many others have written Michael Moore and asked why the heck they are in a war way out in the desert. Also, the fact that military recruitment numbers are dropping means that young people simply don't buy into the notion that war is a glamorous thing. And morale is already low if it is acceptable within Army War College circles to question whether the war meets the Just War Theory. Leaving Iraq would not make it any worse than it is now.
Other countries would doubt our reliability. This argument is based on the false premise that countries think we are currently a reliable nation. But we already sacrificed our reliability when we made the case for war in Iraq based on phony documents and false claims of WMD's. The reason nobody except for Britain contributed more than a few hundred troops is because they didn't think we were reliable anymore. Could Saddam have bribed the French and Germans through the Oil-for-food scandal? Perhaps. But that doesn't explain why 200 other countries (including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan) did not deem Iraq's threat to be serious enough or our word reliable enough to send more than a token force.
"What of the moral considerations? Our walking away, with or without a declaration of victory, would be a death sentence to those Iraqis who worked with us in furtherance of our announced mission to deliver democracy to Iraq." What Iraqis? Oh, you must be talking about the con artists who told us we would be greeted by roses and kisses when we liberated them from Saddam. The Iraqi opposition did not have a prayer of liberating Iraq without massive US intervention. So they duped the neocons into thinking that Saddam was hated in his country and that things would be much easier than they were. They're the ones who talked us into this war. They're the ones who should have to live with the consequences.
So a good question to ask people is why do they support a president who has people who would allow themselves to be duped like this. I can't trust these people just like I wouldn't trust a gullible person who would fall for a Nigerian Oil Scam to be my accountant.
Raspberry continues:
Do these rejoinders demolish the argument for just leaving?
Klein doesn't think so. Our continuing presence, she argues, is a magnet for violence against the Iraqis, and our plans for elections seem calculated to spark "the civil war needed to justify an ongoing presence for US troops."
Our "staying the course" doesn't begin to fix what we broke, but rather continues the breakage.
I would add that the continued US presence in Iraq has actually helped Al-Qaeda because it has turned the country into a fertile recruiting ground which they never would have had otherwise.
Raspberry concludes with an idea from two of his readers: Leave Iraq immediately and divert all of our resources towards helping the tsunami victims. I support that idea because it would show Muslims all around the world that we are not the Great Satan that Bin Laden likes to say we are.