We have finally achieved some sort of détente in our counter-productive domestic political battle over the War in Iraq.
Democrats will no longer attempt to fund the troops over there until next Tuesday, and Bush will embark on something he is not prone to do: listen to and play nicely with others.
We have turned our attention to a more appropriate target – the Iraqis. Place the burden on them. Forget the earlier faulty assumptions about how the Iraqis would stuff our rifle barrels with roses. Forget the prior mismanagement of the “peace” campaign.
After handling the war part swiftly and effectively, as we did in Afghanistan, the Administration felt itself invincible. This neo-conservative-shaping-the-world-into-a-Pax-Americana was a piece of cake. Watch out history books: here we come.
Unfortunately, those in middle eastern cultures seem to approach military and political struggles differently than we would think or like. They scatter, go underground, and bide their time. When the landscape turns a bit, pow! They strike.
In fairness, many people anticipated the resulting behaviors and problems that we are seeing now. After all, this is a big country, and an even bigger bureaucracy. Odds are that many would hold varying views, and someone has to be right, or closer to right than others.
True, this administration did not appear to fall back to those alternative views quickly enough, assuming that it really is changing direction now.
I hope that this legislation about Iraqi benchmarks or milestones or targets or accomplishments or whatever is your preferred term of art leads to as positive an exit from Iraq as possible. It is simply imprudent for the U.S. to pull up stakes precipitously as much as everyone wishes this conflict would simply cease immediately and go away forever.
We are torn because we do not have a strategy that we can understand and agree upon. Again, we are dealing with differing cultures, deep religious divides, great sectarian hatreds, and a world view that is as far from ours as East is from West.
One complicating factor is the 2008 Presidential election. The campaign began this cycle earlier than I recall in my three and one-half decades of presidential voting. My sense is that Democrats harbor such resentment towards George W. Bush that they not only want to bury him alive and twice when he is dead, but they would prefer that the words Republican Party are stricken from university political science classrooms.
Call it an obsession. They are trying to knock Bush from his perch, and the fate of America’s reputation in the world and its future diplomatic prospects would be for them a small price to pay to make W. squirm. Impeachment is not a viable option. It would seem to be a reflexive, vengeful tit-for-tat for the Republicans’ pursuit of our last president.
If Iraq is unable or unwilling to grab the levers of power to control its country’s fate, neither Americans nor the world community would misunderstand the circumstances under which the U.S. leaves Iraq.
The war is over. I reported on that over one year ago. The task is getting out of Iraq in the proper manner. We need to find and define what is proper.
Maybe our political leaders have finally spewed enough venom at each other that they can focus on the real task. It is not selecting a president for 2009. It is not running away from Iraq as quickly as humanly possible. It is not about ensuring George Bush’s negative legacy. It is about our country. Our reputation. Our role in the world.
Leave Iraq, but “Do It Right.”
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Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 600 words.
© May, 2007