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Foreign Policy Realism Realism.

Changing directions for just a moment from the Katrina fallout to pressing foreign policy concerns, Bill Kristol’s editorial in the latest Weekly Standard seems to hit some important points of concern.  Referencing Bush’s August 24 Nampa, Idaho speech, Kristol writes:

In the face of mixed news from Iraq, and mixed signals from the administration, some of the president’s supporters and subordinates have been going wobbly. They’ve been denying that the war on terror is a war, or that Iraq is central to that war. They’ve been defining down success in Iraq, and for that matter victory in the broader war on terror. Fortunately, the president made clear on Wednesday that he isn’t buying the defeatism. He isn’t heading for the exits.

Others want to. Republican strategist Grover Norquist, for example, recently told the New York Times: “If Iraq is in the rearview mirror in the ‘06 election, the Republicans will do fine. But if it’s still in

the windshield, there are problems.” Norquist was reflecting real GOP congressional unease about the war and its implications for 2006.

But would it really be possible to put Iraq in the “rearview mirror” by the fall of 2006, even if we started leaving now? In any case, what Bush did in Idaho was to sever the link between war policy and the 2006 elections. He made clear that his time horizon is 2008. Congress can worry and complain, but Bush is not going to let his policy–U.S. foreign policy–be driven by such worries and complaints. So Republican senators and congressmen can stop the hand-wringing that the war isn’t proceeding according to their electoral calendars. Instead, they can help the administration make the case for the necessity of victory, and could even follow the lead of John McCain in providing serious and constructive criticism of the war effort.

Meanwhile, the estimable George Will proclaimed last week that U.S. hopes for democracy in Iraq were “delusional,” and that we had to be wary of further “overreaching.” In particular, he took aim at a suggestion made in these pages some seven months ago that we consider bombing Syrian military facilities and/or occupying Syrian border towns in order to prevent terrorists from using Syria as a sanctuary from which to enter Iraq in order to kill Americans and Iraqis. No. Will said, “U.S. forces already have quite enough bombing and occupying chores.”

Really? Occupying–maybe. But bombing? Is our Air Force overextended right now? Are we so weak that we can’t deter or punish Syria? Some Bush supporters, especially those already inclined toward world-weary skepticism, have become convinced that we can’t or won’t fight the war so as to win it. That’s a problem for the president. The solution is to explain that we have a strategy to win–not a strategy to withdraw–and to encourage the military to be aggressive and imaginative in carrying out that strategy, and to give it all the resources it needs to follow through.

Then, on Thursday, the day after the president’s speech, the Financial Times ran a front-page story based on an interview with Major General Douglas Lute, director of operations at U.S. Central Command. Lute, still speaking off of old Rumsfeld talking points, and ignoring what the president had said a week before, said we were seeking to draw down troops over the next year in Iraq. Indeed, he seemed eager to proclaim this–and made the case for withdrawal based on Rumsfeldian dependency theory: “We believe at some point, in order to break this dependence on the . . . coalition, you simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward.”

This is war-fighting as welfare reform. Is the problem with our allies and potential allies in Iraq really that they are too convinced we’re staying? Isn’t it more likely that they’re now too worried that we’re going to leave, creating a dangerous dynamic in which Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds each feel they have to fend for themselves?

And more important, if Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, who cares about dependency theory? Don’t we need to defeat Zarqawi? Don’t we need to dishearten terrorists in Iraq and around the world who, as the president said, “want us to retreat”? We need to win in Iraq. We’re not doing someone else a favor. And in fact, private conversations suggest that the operational U.S. generals in the field (if not the planners at CENTCOM) are confident we can win–if we don’t

draw down troops too soon, and if we build up Iraqi troops to fight side by side with ours instead of pretending they can immediately replace ours.

There have been real failures in the execution of the war in Iraq, and a poor job has been done in recent months of explaining the war at home. On the latter front, Wednesday’s speech is a good start. Now the president needs to ensure his own administration is executing a policy consistent with his words, and also that these words are followed up with many more. Wartime presidents need to explain and re-explain what’s at stake. They need to keep the country informed about the war. They need to keep morale high. And they need to take command so that the military and political strategy aims at victory. The success of the Bush presidency depends on his success as commander in chief. So does the success of American foreign policy.

Indeed.  That some Republicans are drifting back to Bush I foreign policy realism is not entirely unexpected, but watching them do so at a pivotal point in the Iraq campaign is disturbing.  Bush, to his credit, has begun to head this impulse off at the pass.  From his Idaho speech:

During the last few decades, the terrorists grew to believe that if they hit America hard, as in Lebanon and Somalia, America would retreat and back down. . . . So now they’re trying to break our will with acts of violence. . . . Their goal is to force us to retreat. . . . We will stay on the offense. We’ll complete our work in Afghanistan and Iraq. An immediate withdrawal . . . would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations. So long as I’m the president, we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the war on terror.

These are reassuring words—perhaps not quite as strong as, say, Bill Quick would like to hear (though they do contain a hint of concern that we aren’t fighting forcefully enough), but at the same time, strong enough that they should, for the moment at least, put to rest manyconcerns some of us have been having that the 2006 elections would exert enough political pressure on Bush to cause him to back off of Iraq and define victory down.

That winning this war is crucial to all of us in the United States is, to my mind, undebatable.  How best we do it is a fair question—and the Bushies have had to answer for some of their gambits.  But that we must do it is not open to question—and those who are calling for a troop pullout or any other such maneuver that would, in their minds, help to temper American foreign policy “arrogance” or imperial aspirations in the future are putting their own ideological interests ahead of the country’s physical safety.

10 Replies to “Foreign Policy Realism Realism.”

  1. Karl Maher says:

    I’ve found this site to be pretty helpful in finding out about the war the media won’t cover.

  2. i really like The Fourth Rail. i think they do an excellent job of describing what’s happening in iraq in ways that i can understand.

  3. MC says:

    Because of hurricane dominance it wasn’t widely reported:

    At least 56 people were killed in multiple US air strikes in Iraq against suspected Al-Qaeda hideouts near the Syrian border, an Iraqi security source said.

    The attacks at dawn on Tuesday, the second such raid in less than a week, came as Sunni Arabs, believed to be the backbone of the raging insurgency, were seeking alliances to defeat Iraq’s newly-drafted charter.

    “At least 56 people were killed in the air strikes carried out by US forces near Qaim close to the Syrian border,” the security source told AFP.

    The US military said it had no exact numbers of casualties.

    “There was a total of three strikes targetting terrorist safe houses… Abu Islam (a reported Al-Qaeda operative) and several associates are believed killed,” a US military spokesman in Baghdad said…

    This was on August 30th. Abu Islam was something like #3 on the current most wanted terrorist list.

    “Near” the Syrian border? Who can tell where the border is in the desert really? It’s about time to confuse Damascus with a border town anyway…

  4. Jeff Goldstein says:

    Thanks, MC.

    As I remember that report, FOX was speculating that Zarqawi was in that meeting of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq.

  5. hud says:

    Yeah, well unfortunately Bill Quick is combining Andrew Sullivan’s flightiness and Oliver Willis’ outrage over everything. While there are some underlying good points, I’ve written him off as excitable as Sullivan.

  6. What’s Grover Norquist doing talking about Iraq’s being in the rear view mirror or on the windshield?

    I don’t know if Daniel Pipes is right about Norquist, but if he is, I’m not interested in what GN has to say about Iraq.

  7. DC says:

    If you’re at all curious about the war we’re in, read this book by Marine COL Tom Hammes. Hammes’ is a leading authority on insurgent warfare, and his book is an excellent primer on what he calls “fourth generation warfare” which started with Mao and has evolved and adapted through Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Israel, and now Iraq.

    These “insurgents” believe, with all their little jihadi hearts, that they can outlast the US by defeating our political will. They could give two hoots about seriously engaging our military apart from creating casualties that weaken our resolve at home to carry the fight to foreign soil.

    And why shouldn’t they? We have the same sort of useful idiots now and even a few throwbacks with Hanoi Jane wading into the muck.

    Places like Iraq and Afghanistan will be a testament to Dubya’s conviction to stay the course and do the right thing. It’s a shame we confuse this concept (e.g., doing the right thing) with political maneuvering and soundbites for the evening news.

    Cheers – DC

  8. And why shouldn’t they? We have the same sort of useful idiots now and even a few throwbacks with Hanoi Jane wading into the muck.

    heh, did you see sunday’s Doonebury? i think when garry trudeau (who’s not a war supporter) asks you not to do something, maybe you should consider it.

  9. Tommy Lee says:

    Bill Quick?  Come on you can find more demandding people than Quick.  How about Olympia Snow as a stand up type compared to Bill Quick, a man with as much backbone as Gov. Blanco.

  10. Joshua Scholar says:

    DC you’ve made this comment page completely unreadable by posting that long URL.  You should have hid it inside of a link.

    On the topic of the post, I’ve always worried that the next Republican candidate will trash the war on terror. 

    Imagine, if you will, an election with an isolationist Republican running against an isolationist Democrat. It could happen, and it sends a chill down my spine.

    But you know, the Jihadists are too fucking suicidal to refrain from hitting our civilization for very long.

    Eventually there will be fresh 9/11, 3/11, Beslan (here! maybe), or 7/7 and we’ll go back to protecting civilization

Comments are closed.