Sullivan has a thoughtful post up about the Iraqi surge. It has long been trumpeted as a success, and yet its stated aim was to provide enough of a security window to enable a political reconciliation and, presumably, allow us to leave. But despite a temporarily improved security situation in Iraq the last few years, progress, however you might define it, has not just been elusive been not even spotted. Sullivan’s fears is that the surge was sold as a way to potentially get us out of Iraq but, in fact, has just mired us deeper while the theoretical goalposts are just as far away as they ever were. And Obama appears to be taking the shallow conventional wisdom of the Iraqi surge and applying it to Afghanistan. We’ve now spent “six years of occupation, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, 5,000 dead Americans, countless wounded and disabled vets, and up to $3 trillion in taxpayers’ money”, and the ultimate goals of both wars seem as far away as ever.
The surge was sold by many on the right who aren’t necessarily neocons but who do like to kick dust on national security (McCain, for example), as a necessarily evil, a temporary stopgap that would serve to give us just enough more time for the situation to reach some kind of self-sustaining equilibrium which would afford us the opportunity to extract ourselves without the country sliding into full blown civil war. Many of us, at the time, thought that was a polite fiction, and that if we held to the idea that the risk of destabilization upon our extraction was in itself unacceptable, what we were actually doing was continuing to lay down a foundation for a permanent outpost, a client state of the United States for which we would forever be responsible and which would forever suck our resources, time, and energies. A colony, in other words, except one which is in a constant state of insurgency and for which our strategic interests (and the value of pursuing them versus the cost) remain unclear. Even the soft version of that position—that we at least ought to define a realistic set of conditions that we could term “victory” (or “acceptable”), that we ought to at least begin to set benchmarks which would at least begin the process of extraction or at least insantiate, on a policy level, that such was our ultimate goal—was more or less shouted down and never amounted to much, even from the Democrats.
And so we are in a situation where very few people consciously want us to remain in Iraq forever, and yet have created a political and policy framework where every option of withdraw has been taken off the table. We don’t want to stay, in other words, but we categorically refuse to leave. Success, or the notion of acceptable conditions for leaving, have been defined in such a way so as to make the entire venture like a dog track, with a mechanical rabbit speeding on ahead of us, and we, the dogs, never figuring out why, no matter how fast we go, we never seem to gain on it. Except on this track there is no finish line when the officials end the exercise and the trainers mercifully leash us and lead us away. There is only the never-ending run, and the possibility—actually, inevitability—of collapse. We can’t catch up to the rabbit, but we can’t outlast it either. But stopping the whole futile endeavor mid-track never seriously occurs to us. Maybe, as with the dog, we’re just incapable of doing so. Our minds just don’t work that way.
Sully sez:
You want empire? Then say so and get on with it – with far more forces, and massive cuts in domestic spending to rebuild thankless Muslim population centers thousands of miles from home for decades into the future.
You do not want empire? Then leave.
Those are the presidential level choices.
And neither Bush nor, it seems, Obama has the strength to make them.
What Andrew is not allowing for is the possibility that those in power have already made that decision. Whether consciously or not, government expansion, as it always does, has an inertia all its own. And so the rabbit runs on.
