No, they're not considering admitting that IN SO MANY WORDS (and obviously won't do so), but that's the inescapable conclusion from the policy discussions that are currently going on and reported in today's New York Times.
Today's story below the fold:
The Bush administration is considering the withdrawal of additional combat forces from Iraq beginning in September, according to administration and military officials, raising the prospect of a far more ambitious plan than expected only months ago.
Such a withdrawal would be a striking reversal from the nadir of the war in 2006 and 2007.
One factor in the consideration is the pressing need for additional American troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other fighters have intensified their insurgency and inflicted a growing number of casualties on Afghans and American-led forces there.
The article goes on to points out that more Americans have died in Afghanistan than in Iraq during the past several months, that our commanders on the ground in Afghanistan are asking for at least 10,000 more troops there, but that because we've got so many troops tied down in Iraq, they're not available for use in Afghanistan. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
The New York Times story somehow managed to avoid mentioning who has been saying for quite awhile now that we had short-changed the war we SHOULD have been fighting (against the people who were responsible for the death of more than 3,000 of our fellow Americans on September 11, 2001) in order to fight the war we didn't need to be fighting at all (in Iraq).
And now, for some history that the New York Times didn't provide. Exactly one year ago tomorrow, on July 14, 2007, an article appeared, authored by Mike Glover of the Chicago Tribune, that contained the following:
The U.S. should shift troops from Iraq to pursue al-Qaida along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Saturday.
He said President Bush's war-fighting policies have left the United States at greater risk from terrorists. The first-term Illinois senator said decisions by the Republican president had allowed Osama bin Laden and his deputies to elude capture.
"We cannot win a war against the terrorists if we're on the wrong battlefield," Obama said. "America must urgently begin deploying from Iraq and take the fight more effectively to the enemy's home by destroying al-Qaida's leadership along the Afghan-Pakistan border, eliminating their command and control networks and disrupting their funding."
In a comment that I suspect even some members of the Bush administration, if given truth serum, would have to admit demonstrated a lot more wisdom than anything we've seen from this administration, Barack Obama went on to say:
Obama contended the Bush administration erred by choosing to fight in Iraq rather than concentrating on Afghanistan, where he said al-Qaida has rebuilt itself.
"They have entirely regrouped along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," Obama said. "The threat of terrorism has actually increased and we've seen a massive spike in terrorist activity, in part because we did not finish the job in Afghanistan and were distracted by a war of choice in Iraq."
To me, an indispensable characteristic of any successful President, at least in the modern world, is strategic judgment, and the ability to identify and hire people who also exhibit strategic judgment. By that, I mean strategy not only in the military and geopolitical context, but in the broader context of realistically knowing where you are, identifying the challenges you face, identifying realistic goals and the resources available to meet those goals, and the ability to formulate a realistic plan to use one's resources to achieve their goals. Having a leader with strategic judgment is particularly important when a nation (or any other organization) is facing major challenges.
My major reason for supporting Barack Obama all along was that he has demonstrated sound strategic judgment to a degree that is extraordinary among politicans, and unique among those running for the Presidency in this election. He demonstrated it in not only his early opposition to the Iraq war, but in opposing it for the right reasons, and he demonstrated it again in the kind of campaign he put together.
Above all, strategic judgment demands an ability to see the big picture and to understand where one is in that big picture. That's certainly not to say that details aren't important, but when you're trying to find your way out of a forest, it doesn't much matter how minutely you can describe the bark and leaves on each tree.
Perhaps never before in this country's history have we faced more important strategic challenges than those we face today. We're already dealing with a time in which we're not the world's major industrial producer. Many Americans alive today will, for the first time in their lives, have to deal with a time in which we no longer have the world's biggest economy. We are facing the end of cheap and plentiful oil for the first time in the lives of virtually anyone alive today. We're facing climate changes of a rapidity and extent that appear to be unique in recorded human history. And oh yes, we're fighting two wars and dealing with the demands of those who think we should be fighting a third one.
For all the criticism he got for his remarks, Wes Clark had it exactly right. John McCain is a man of unquestioned personal courage and tenacity (or at least I think they SHOULD be unquestioned), but those are far more important qualifications in the job description for a fighter pilot than for a President. Fighter pilots can't worry about the big picture, because they've got to be totally focused on the IMMEDIATE challenges or they won't be around to worry about the big picture. There is absolutely nothing I can see about John McCain's background, or his utterances in this campaign or in recent years, that give the slightest indication that he's a "big picture" thinker or possesses stategic judgment to any extraordinary degree.
In a time when we face gret strategic challenges in the world, it seems to me to be particularly important to have a President who has demonstrated that he has strategic judgment. We're fortunate that we have one.