Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Iraq War: Options

Weekly Standard writer David Gelernter offers a long cheer for the Iraq War in the Los Angeles Times: Don't Quit as We Did in Vietnam. Gelernter thinks we need to stay until we "win." Look carefully at his column and see if you find anything remotely resembling a definition of winning.

In fact, it's really just a long puff piece about how, some way, the antiwar protesters in Vietnam prevented the US from being manly and tough enough to stick it out long enough in Vietnam. Look also in his column for a description of how much longer he thinks the US should have kept troops in Vietnam, how many troops should have been kept there, how many more deaths would have been reasonable to accept.

Then as now, this abstract stick-it-out-till-we-"win" nonsense is much more posturing than policy.

The Times also reports Wednesday (Bremer is Called to White House) that some sort of rapid pull-out is being considered in Washington, although who knows exactly what criss-crossing motives are involved in this particular set of leaks and public positioning.

But when people talk about the "Afghanistan model," keep in mind what that means. The Afghan government, thanks to an international NATO force, controls the country's capital city. Barely. And that's pretty much it. No matter how much puffery goes with it in a particular presentation, the "Afghanistan model" is a bug-out scenario. It won't meet the imperial ambitions of the Weekly Standard crowd. And it's unlikely to protect the Iraqi business of Halliburton and Bechtel.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That LA Times piece is a pretty sad bit of rationalizing...
I would just be happy to have a realistic goal, a timetable and an end strategy. And a long-range estimate of the cost.