In their latest article in The Weekly Standard, Kagan and Kristol argue that Democrats shouldn't be passing resolutions setting "arbitrary" troop limits for Iraq deployments, and instead should be listening to General Petraeus, the only man equipped to produce a sensible judgement about required troop levels.
But there's an excellent reason for ignoring the good General's advice.
Soldiers are a practical bunch. Give them a mission, give them some resources, and they use their training, inventiveness and a good deal of gung-ho to apply the resources to achieving the mission.
That's the idea behind the neocons' suggestion that we ought to be paying more attention to the troops on the ground than domestic opposition. The notion we're all supposed to be imagining is that troops are a spring-loaded mechanism, and you wind them up just right then push the release button to make them surge unstoppably towards victory. If a meddlesome third party weakens the spring, who knows what'll happen?
The problem with that is that it leaves no room for changing the mission. And that's what we're contemplating in these early days of 2007.
The original mission was to find WMDs, unseat Hussain, and destroy any imagined threat which Iraq might some day manage to conjure up against whoever the hell cares about Iraq.
That original mission was well and truly accomplished. When President Bush went as a pilot to his dress-up party on the aircraft carrier, one of the finer points which many observers missed was that the mission had, indeed, been accomplished. A further point which virtually everyone missed was that there was now a new mission, one which the Authorization for the Use of Military Force never countenanced, and which nobody, including this writer, actually understands.
The Iraq War finished in 2003. Now we're in the Iraq Occupation, and Bush has been winding-up his spring-loaded military towards quashing insurgencies, or whatever the hell we're meant to be doing over there.
And if you ask a commander on the ground what he thinks he needs in order to complete that mission, he'll tell you.
But now we're in 2007, and the public doesn't appear to be particularly enthusiastic about continuing The Occupation. The Democratic Party was elected on a platform of ending the war as soon as possible, and what's needed in order to do that is a new mission.
If you tell Petreaus that his mission is to quell the insurgency, then ask him what resources he'll require, of course his answer is going to be, "More troops." Duh. With more troops, I'm certain that he'll pursue insurgents with single-minded zeal, and every time more Americans die he'll request more troops to fill their shoes, and every time he meets mounting opposition he'll request more troops to quell it, and it'll continue more or less along those lines forever.
Until the mission changes.
If you tell Petreaus that his mission is to withdraw from Iraq with as few American casualties as possible, then ask him what resources he'll require, what do you think his answer will be?
More troops? Get serious.
The neocons' insistence that we listen to the commanders on the ground stacks the conversational deck against those of us who want the war to end. It also has reality completely backwards: The job of the military is to execute the will of the Government. If the Government changes, and establishes a new will, it isn't the military's job to perpetuate the previous mission against the wishes of the new regime.
Instead of talking to Petreaus and asking him what he needs, we should be talking to Bush and telling him what we want. It's then his job, as Commander in Chief, to equip the military with the tools they need to execute that mission.
To those of us who want to end the war, I say that the last person we should be seeking advice from is a person who has been ordered by his superior to pursue and expand the war. It makes no sense to discuss or debate anything associated with Iraq with General Petreaeus. We don't need to talk to him to find out what he needs to fulfill his orders, we need to talk with his superiors to get his orders changed.
The American people want the mission changed. They want the occupation to end. They want the troops to come home. The correct person to discuss those matters with is George W. Bush. The correct person isn't someone who has sworn an oath to do whatever George W. Bush tells him to do, no matter how foolish, irresponsible, short-sighted and stupid it may be. Don't allow the neocons to shift responsibility for this fiasco onto a General, away from the Commander in Chief.