In the Arena

Obama on Iraq

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Barack Obama lays out a strong and plausible case for his position on withdrawal from Iraq in the New York Times today–with one exception. He’s still clinging to his 16 month timetable for getting the troops home. That’s probably too quick, but I understand why he’s sticking with it: because he doesn’t want the Republicans to call him a flip-flopper and also, I’d guess, because he figures that being overly optimistic about the withdrawal timetable isn’t going to hurt him with the electorate.

The reality here is that the troops are likely to come home with all deliberate speed, but that the exact timetable will depend on the sort of boring how-do-we-move-that-truck, and what’s-the-rotation-schedule logistics that exist well beyond the realm of actual strategic policy. People in the military familiar with the process tell me that we should be down to about 30,000 troops in four years. But these are details of implementation. The real importance of Obama’s op-ed is his insistence that we need to leave–that we can’t have the 100-year bases that John McCain has proposed–and that we need to refocus our attention on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that’s where the real foreign policy debate should be, not the silly diversion over whether Obama is “changing” his position.

Also today, we have Noemie Emery rehearsing the neocon take on the war in the Weekly Standard, a half-throated argument that the left just can’t seem to accept success in Iraq, including the obligatory glancing criticism of me. If you define success as the absence of violence in Iraq, I’ll be thrilled to call it a success. But we’ve got a ways to go, including the reconciliation of the Sunni Awakening forces with the Malaki government, before you can count on that. You also have the likely reality of an Iraqi Shi’ite regime that is closer to Iran than it is to us, and an Iraqi military that has the Badr Corps, which was birthed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard Corps, as its backbone. I’m not sure I’d call that success, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the larger point still holds: the Iraq war was a strategic disaster, part of a deeply stupid regional policy promulgated by the Bush Administration. Why? Because it caused us to lose focus on the real problem, Al Qaeda, the people who attacked us on 9/11, and their handmaidens, the Taliban. This sort of attack, reported in the Times today, suggests a well-organized and entrenched enemy. Obama’s right about the need for more combat brigades in Afghanistan…but we also need a return of the U.S. special ops forces who were working the Afghpak border areas and were pulled out to prosecute the war in Iraq. It was the foolish neocon plan to remake the middle east that made soldiering in Afghanistan so dangerous for the nine troops killed today. Noemie Emery should try to explain the grandeur of the Bush foreign policy vision to the families of those soldiers.

Afghpak Gak: Several readers have asked for the pronunciation of Afghpak…Well, I don’t know. I was thinking that I’m going to be spending a lot of time reporting about the situation on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for the foreseeable future and wanted to save keystrokes. So, how about AfPak? Or Afpak?