Domenici joins the falterers
New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici has called for a new strategy in Iraq, aimed at getting some US troops home.
He’s not after immediate drawdown, but this is a move from the ‘as long as it takes, whatever it takes’ sort of rhetoric that Bush would prefer.
“I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops or a reduction in funding for our troops,” Domenici said. “But I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home.”
September will be a big month. As was pointed out on NPR this morning (you can listen from here, the current strategy isn’t without merit, far from it, but a ‘progress by September’ timeline is probably too short. Petraeus himself didn’t help by giving significance to his planned report to Congress in September when he accepted that there could be an assessment made at that time:
Visiting Iraq April 19-20, Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker to discuss the Iraq surge, which will boost the U.S. commitment to more than 160,000 troops by early June. During the meeting with Gates, it was agreed that Petraeus and Crocker in early September “would provide an assessment of the situation in Iraq with respect to our mission and offer recommendations on the way ahead.”
The problems with public resolve, even as (at last) promising tactics are being employed in support of a sensible strategy, has to be primarily the fault of the people who approved and drove earlier efforts in support of too-optimistic strategy (particularly those who placed so much importance in the idea of a familiar sort of democracy being installed in Iraq) and who appeared to actually believe their own bromides about likely outcomes in Iraq (paging Paul Wolfowitz). The public’s patience won’t be limitless and it’s not just an issue of “there are mistakes in any war” because these previous mistakes are rooted in the whole decision of why the US went to war and what it was trying to achieve.