Iraq War: US not leaving soon

Even if we want to.  At least that was the message from witnesses testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week:

Witnesses: No quick end to Iraq burdens Atlanta Journal-Contitution 04/21/04

"My own experience from Bosnia, from Kosovo, from Haiti is that it takes a great deal of time to build an army or to build a police force — three to four to five years," Samuel Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "I think we're talking about another $200 billion at least in the next three years." ...

The administration has sometimes failed to "communicate its Iraq plans and cost estimates to Congress and the American people" and "must recognize that its domestic credibility on Iraq will have a great impact on its efforts to succeed," said Chairman Richard Lugar.

Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top-ranking Democrat, said U.S. forces in Iraq "may soon be confronted by an untenable situation . . . caught between hostile Iraqi populations that they were sent to liberate and an increasingly skeptical American public." He added, "No foreign policy can be sustained in this country without the informed consent of the American people, and there has not been an informed consent yet because we have not leveled with them."

It's nice to see Congress starting to show more signs of life over the Iraq War.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution link comes via Juan Cole, who also testified to the Committee.  The newspaper article doesn't use the five year figure, but Cole says that among the witnesses there was:

... wide agreement that the US is stuck in Iraq militarily for at least 5 years, and can't expect really substantial help from allies. I personally thing it is even worse than that. I have said I think this generation of young Americans will be the Iraq generation.

Cole's own testimony to the Committee is available online.  This is part of his analysis of initial political mistakes by the occupation authority (CPA):

Although the US did wisely choose to attempt to incorporate some grass-roots Iraqi political organizations into the Interim Provisional Government, it excluded others.  Thus, the London branch of the Shiite al-Dawa Party was given a seat, but the Tehran branch was not (both groups had come back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam, linking back up with local party members who had remained and organized covertly). The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had a Badr Corps militia of perhaps 15,000 trained men, was given a seat, but the Sadrist organization was not. The Islamic Party of Iraq, a Muslim Brotherhood-derived party from Mosul, was given a seat, but the Salafis of al-Anbar Province were excluded. Of course, some of the excluded groups were hostile to the US occupation, and might have refused to serve, but it is likely that some representative of those tendencies could have been found who would serve.

Worse, the US gave special perquisites and extra power to a handful of expatriate politicians with whom it had cut backroom deals. These expatriate politicians had often been involved in scandals, had no grassroots inside the country, and were widely disliked.  Many Iraqis feared that the US would shoehorn these expatriates into power as a sort of new soft dictatorship, and that they would betray Iraqi national interests in preference to personal and American ones for years to come.

It's looking like we'll be hearing a lot from those exile politicians for years to come.  And a lot of the news will not be good for the United States.