Iraq War: The current dilemma

Ted Kennedy is calling the Iraq War "George Bush's Vietnam." After all the bad historical analogies that have accompanied the Iraq War, I'm suspcicious of all of them now.

But Molly Ivins has a good description of the current problem facing American policy-makers: Iraq: it's a crowd pleaser 04/06/04.

I like to think of myself as part of the "so what do we do now?" crowd, but it is like drinking gall. We could try what we clearly should have done from the beginning -- put more boots on the ground. We've got 130,000 troops there now. (Remember when the Bushies told us it would be down to 30,000 by the end of last summer?) Gen. Eric Shinseki's "several hundred thousand" prediction looks more prescient all the time. The trouble with that scenario is that it violates the First Rule of Holes (when you're in one, quit digging.) Second, it may be too late.

Then there's the old reliable, "Bug out now." I always liked Sen. Aiken's advice on how to get out of Vietnam: "in boats." Yep, it could be time to declare victory and go home. That seems to be President Bush's plan. He can just say, "Well, we took care of the weapons of mass destruction, so we're outta here."

The Pentagon has already announced it's boosting it's forces in Iraq by 24,000 or so by delaying scheduled rotations of troops already in Iraq. With possibly more to follow.

It seems pretty clear that more troops are needed in the occupation force to protect the forces that are there now. But an increase in the troop levels is also a military escalation on the US' part. Does it make sense to escalate unless we have an attainable goal that can be achieved at reasonable cost.

Ivins ends by expressing sympathy for John Kerry at the prospect that he might have to take over this mess in January and make the best of a miserable situation.  Billmon expresses a similar thought:

... [I]f Bush doesn't survive [the election], will the incoming Kerry administration have the will, or the political capital, to continue the war? Or is it already lost, with only the size of the bill -- in lives, money and U.S. prestige -- still to be calculated?

The worst-case scenario could be one in which a Kerry administration is paralyzed -- unwilling or unable to commit the forces needed to secure the country (which might not be possible in any case), incapable of developing an alternative policy, but also unwilling to take the political hit for, or risk the geopolitical consequences of, bringing the troops back home.

In many ways, this quagmire is even worse than Vietnam -- and will be much, much harder to escape from. It's difficult at this point to imagine any good options waiting for a hypothetical President Kerry to take office. But he'd almost certainly find plenty of bad ones.