TBogg:
Like Viet Nam, we are losing in Iraq. That's a fact. You cannot beat an insurgency that seems to have an unlimited amount of "martyrs" willing to walk into the public square and blow themselves up taking twenty or so citizens with them. The American military is bunkered into the Green Zone behind blast-proof walls and razor wire because; if they walk out into the streets...they're going to die. It's Fort Apache the Bronx. Those who are supposed to be in control of the streets are the Iraqi policemen, but if they are in control, then why do they have to wear masks? Because, if they don't the insurgents will come to their houses and kill them. Iraq is probably the only country in the world whose entire police force is in the Witness Protection Program.
With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can't meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.
Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.
There's a bit of a cross-blog discussion going on based in large part on Atrios' recent note that "Iraq is going to be continue to be a big problem for Democrats". The whole discussion bothers me, not least because I chafe at the notion that "the Iraq problem" is going to be foisted off on Democrats for a solution. In truth, of course, it probably will be -- the Bush deficit, the Bush bungling of world diplomacy, and the Bush war are going to each be with us long after Bush himself retires to the relative comfort of the hotter-than-hell Texas range.
I'd be happy to simply see the Bush administration figure out what to do about Iraq, but that's not going to happen. And it can't happen, because there is no "something" that can be done. The entire premise, of occupying a hostile nation and campaigning for their support by bombing the holy crap out of their neighborhoods and families, was and is a neoconservative fiction from the start.
If anything, the only thing surprising about the Iraq occupation is that it has so persistently mirrored what war critics predicted; a rapid military "win", followed by a Vietnam-like insurgency that bogs down U.S. forces and destabilizes any nascent attempts at self-government. That's not horn-tooting; anyone not fully under the spell of yay! war could see it coming ten miles off. But, as Yglesias hints, there isn't much ground there for war supporters and war skeptics to pair off and dance. War supporters desperately cling to the notion that there will be, might be, could be some avenue by which this international fiasco can at least be dulled, rather than admit their support was mistaken. War skeptics like, admittedly, myself, aren't in any mood to take patronizing, self-serving crap from people whose past judgment has ranged from horrible to catastrophic. And so, there's an impasse within the party, and indeed within American politics in general. We are, in a word, stuck.
That's in no small part due to a much larger and more serious problem: in Iraq itself we are, to use the same word, stuck. We can't leave, or the government will quickly fall, leading to a civil war and failed state that makes Afghanistan look like a model of success. We can't stay, either, because our military is draining resources (and humans) at unsustainable rates. Largely everyone outside of the White House briefing room acknowledges this, and nobody, on either side, has been able to propose an exit strategy that is anything short of failure. The only question is when, and how bad things will get in the interim.
I can't pretend I have a "solution" to this war. And I'm not naive enough to think that I have, as a Democrat who is still extremely angry with the role my party played in enabling pre-war fictions, a solution for turning a failed war of preemption into a winning partisan campaign theme. But perhaps we can recognize the manner in which the rest of this war is likely to unfold, and work backwards from there.
The known end result of the Iraq War will be one thing, and only one thing: one or more large and permanent U.S. military bases within the confines of Iraq's borders, most likely in the southeastern part of the country. This is the crudest PNAC definition of victory, and any "victory" by United States forces will be all-but-forced to provide it. Sooner or later, U.S. forces will stage something between a carefully televised parade and an unorderly retreat to those bases, surrounded by the relative protection of many-miles-wide perimeter no-mans-lands, and leave the rest of the country to its own devices. All that is required, for this to happen, is a government nominally in charge enough to prevent large-scale insurgent action against those permanent U.S. bases.
Whether or not Iraq devolves into a full-scale civil war after U.S. forces withdraw to this "compromise" position is debatable, but all indications are that the civil war is already quite underway, if operating in the shadows. As most knowledgeable Iraq sources point out, police and government figures are largely under constant guard, in hiding, or both, and the insurgency (for lack of a better word) has had substantial success in disrupting low-level interim government activities. Furthermore, the insurgency is largely faceless; there is no position of negotiation available to the interim government. It also, gauging from the relative impunity by which it attacks pro-western figures, would appear to have nontrivial support among the surrounding populous.
It is clear, also, that Iraq will exist as at least a partially-failed state for some time. Iraqi connections to terrorism before the war hovered somewhere between sparse and fictional; post-war Iraq is likely to be a haven for deadly and now-quite-experienced anti-Western cells, much like Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation and withdrawal. Like in post-Soviet Afghanistan, sealing the borders to prevent worldwide movement of these cells will be all but impossible.
So, that's what post-war Iraq is going to look like, presuming the population of that country is not won over by either more bombings or a few really exceptional pro-U.S.A. Britney concerts. If anyone can fashion a winning Democratic message out of that bloodied litany, you're a better (and infinitely more cynical) strategist than I.
There is one, and only one Democratic "strategy" available: press the Bush administration to provide the particulars of an exit strategy -- the measure by which the United States will declare "victory" and go home -- and continue to press the point that the rationale for the war, the evidence for the war, and the strategy for the war were completely fabricated by the Administration. A press for an exit strategy will more quickly reveal the central, crucial point -- that the administration has none, and cannot construct one that will sound good in comparison to the war's already steep cost in lives, money and honor. A press for the accountability for war will reveal the utter folly with which the Bush administration turned the worldwide support and resolve of Nous Sommes Tous Americains into a failed war of shifting motives and disastrous consequences.