Kicking The Can

It’s interesting that the Bush administration keeps creeping, slowly, closer and closer to the progressive position that we need strategic redeployment out of Iraq. Both the announcement of a “time horizon” last month, and now the news that the administration thinks we should withdraw troops from Iraq and send more troops to Afghanistan, seem to reflect the White House coming around to the kind of ideas that the Center for American Progress has been pushing for years. Unfortunately, the tendency in the Iraq debate has been for the right to come around to ideas progressives have been pushing, but only to do so far too late to make a decisive difference.

Back in 2003 and 2004, progressives were urging the administration to pull back from its schemes for radical reconstruction of Iraq and instead to try to strike a pragmatic deal with Sunni Arab nationalists. By the time the administration got around to doing so in 2007 — with “compromise with your enemies” now relabeled as “victory” — Iraq’s political fragmentation was so far gone that it’s hard to see what we can even achieve their. Now Bush is prepared to re-balance priorities, but only achingly slowly. The key thing about the pace of today’s announced 8,000 troop drawdown is that not only are the numbers small but the timing is much-delayed. He’s not saying we’re going to rebalance our commitments now, he’s saying we’ll do it early next year. It seems a little political, you get to announce drawdowns now before the election, but not, in practice, make any strategic decisions.

So Bush will get what he’s long wanted — an opportunity to push the Iraq War onto the desk of the next President. That person will inherit a situation where levels of violent are dramatically lower than they were in 2006, but still high enough that you wouldn’t call Iraq a really calm and peaceful place. Meanwhile, despite the sharp reduction in the fighting, the political conflicts that people were fighting about are all still in place. And various armed factions continue to operate independently of the state. And the peace is being kept by an American force that’s unsustainably large, at the same time that a stretched US military is facing a very serious challenge in Afghanistan. There are choices to be made, and there’s going to be a reckoning with the past two years’ worth of treading water in Iraq, but Bush will avoid making them and get to try to make the case to the history books that it was his successors’ decisions rather than his own policies that led to the problems.