The Crossed Pond

As Adam is in a posting mood right now, this passage in a Sully post struck me. Andrew, incidentally, is posting a lot of thoughtful ruminations on Iraq and the way forward this week. It’s clear, to me anyway, that he began that exercise as a way to check back in with himself on the topic as the debate—now that John “Full Speed Ahead” McCain is the nominee—moves forward. Clearly, as an original supporter of the war and someone who still remains enormously intellectually sympathetic to the arguments in favor and in favor of continuation, that he wants desperately to find some reasoning that makes sense to him. It’s equally clear, the more he reads himself further into the current debate, that he just can’t.

Anyway, this post is good. It begins with a discussion of the Cordesman report, which McCain and others are citing as an example that the best way forward remains “staying until the job is done”, and that the surge is working. Although, as Cordesman takes great pains to sketch out, even after illustrating convincingly and comprehensively that things are demonstrably better on the ground there than they have been, what remains to be done for any measure of success to be achieved is still so ridiculously vague, un-progressed-on, and simply put perhaps intractable, that it doesn’t exactly bode well for the McCain argument.

So Sullivan asks, perfectly fairly, what is required to continue our policy of full speed ahead, stay until the job done? At a minimum?

But Cordesman understands – and is admirably candid about – what remains to be done. We need roughly the same amount of troops we have now through at least the next presidency, and probably through 2016 or even 2020. We need to be spending money in the country consistently for the next decade….

If McCain is going to give us straight talk – one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do – and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there’s a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

All of that strikes me as both accurate and germane.

One of the thing that has been bothering me about the “stay until the job is done” stance is how amorphous it is. From the biggest question (”Okay, until what job is done?”) to the specifics (”how are we going to retain the troop levels needed just not to backslide?”) to the ridiculously specific. That, and how flimsy and unfalsifiable the justifications are. “We can’t leave until we know it’s impossible to succeed.” Dot. Dot dot dot.

I spent much of the run up to the Iraq war honestly on the fence. What ultimately lead me to come down (weakly) on the anti-war side, prior to invasion, was that I just hadn’t seen any evidence that we were adequately prepared for or even adequately cared about the challenges we would face once in, instead using amorphous rhetoric as a substitute for actual policy and military and political objectives. I had doubts along those lines, and as my standard is pretty high for foreign interventionism not as a matter of direct self defense, I couldn’t sign on.

Now, I’m not convinced the pro-war side STILL is interested in dealing with anything but abstractions and said rhetoric. I remain unclear, from a McCain standpoint, what our strategy and objectives actually are. But the costs, I think, are clear, and Sullivan isn’t over-exaggerating them. It requires a commitment of 150,000 troops stationed permanently in Iraq for at least the next 10 years, hundreds of billions of annual spending (much of it—more than is usually the case for government expenditures I mean—flat out wasted, sucked up by graft and corruption, or simply disappeared), and tying down the largest military force in the world Gulliver-in-Lilliputia style. And, one thing that Sullivan is not counting, it also requires that we keep a monolithic, ready-made, thumb-biting causi belli for every disgruntled Middle Eastern on earth, just sitting out there in the middle of it all, building permanent bases, torturing random innocent civilians, and blowing up shit and killing people on a daily basis, with all the existent political rhetoric that is required to maintain support for it here at home being broadcast out to the world (including much of what is not exactly the best of us). Doing all this for decades.

That’s the cost.

I still can’t quite figure on the payoff, or the plan.