Gen. Wesley Clark has an
op-ed in today's NYTimes in which he proposes, in some detail, "The Next Iraq Offensive." Reading it, it's difficult to know whether he is seriously behind the curve of political events or cannily laying out a course to be ignored by the Bushies and thus preparing an "I told you so" position as events in Iraq devolve ever further.
It would be beyond arrogance for me to dispute what a general with Clark's military and diplomatic experience declares is the course for military success in Iraq. Taken at face value, each of his recommendations make sense militarily: Take greater control of the borders, particularly on the Iranian side; expand the strategy of clearing areas of insurgents and backing Iraqi troops in keeping them cleared; continued joint military efforts against insurgent strongholds.
It is on the political and diplomatic sides where I think Gen. Clark is, frankly, blowing smoke. While he correctly judges the administration's approach as showing "little sense of Middle Eastern history and politics," Clark seems unaware that political events both in Iraq and the U.S. have moved well beyond his prescriptions for intensified outreach to reassimilate insurgents and obtain their assistance in "wiping out residual foreign jihadists."
Clark goes on to list a number of things that the Iraqi government "must" do, including enforce the ban on armed militias and request American backup of six to eight brigades for the next two years. He also asks that the Pentagon provide better crowd-control training and more translators for our troops. That is, undoubtedly, a non-starter for Pentagon planners who anticipate withdrawing troops and replacing them with airstrikes.
Although Clark's diplomatic prescriptions for the U.S. are perfectly sensible, including wringing concessions from a weakened Syria and allied international engagement with Iran, his wish list for Iraqi political and diplomatic performance seems like just that--hopes and wishes that we'd be hard-pressed to elicit from the factions controlling the Iraqi government today.
Once again, Clark lays out a series of "musts" for the Iraqis: They must change their Constitution; they must claim the oil revenues for the central government, not the provinces; they must preclude the creation of a Shiite autonomous region; they must have a "broad initiative to reduce sectarian influence within government institutions"; they must "do more to ensure" broad representation of all those religious groups in the various government institutions, including police, ministries, army and judiciary.
I am hard pressed to see what pressures we can bring to bear on the Shiites, currently sitting in the catbird seat, that will induce them to take this "must-do" list seriously. Will we threaten to withdraw our military support? Our money? Or should we just threaten a coup to replace one hand-picked group with another while we jabber on about freedom and democracy?
In the matter of U.S. troop levels, Clark seems to be playing toward that mushy American middle, although as a genuine general rather than the armchair variety, he has military rationales for keeping upwards of 80-120,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely. He prescribes 20,000 troops for border security, 30,000 troops for action against insurgent bases, and operational reserve of an additional 30,000 troops. It's not clear if that reserve of 30,000 is part of or in addition to a further 30-40,000 troops Clark says are needed as backup in the militia-clearing exercise.
In all of this, Clark does not provide any real benchmarks for success. The timeline is fuzzy. He doesn't spell out what inducements we can offer that would shift the Shiite power-players onto such a course. He doesn't answer the explicit criticisms of Gen. Odom or Rep. Murtha, i.e., that our very presence in Iraq feeds the insurgency and makes the situation worse. Nor does Clark explain how we are going to hold the Army and Marines together in a situation of deteriorating recruitment, multiple tours of duty and attendant battle fatigue, equipment shortages and failure. Then there is the matter of what this filthy war is doing to the psyches of individual soldiers--and our civilians. Every time an innocent Iraqi is killed, maimed, wrongfully imprisoned or humiliated, we take a hit.
The polls aren't lying. The Iraqis want us out. Americans want us out. And here, in the NYTimes, Wes Clark wants us to stay in Iraq with no timeline, no exit strategy beyond a list of politically dubious conditions, and no effort to address the reality of what we're facing.
We are facing ignominious defeat. We are facing the reality of turning Iraq into a Shia-dominated ally of Iran that might well remain a chaotic nest of jihadists and terrorists-in-training. I assume that is why Clark is adamant about staying. But the political reality has now consolidated around leaving and dealing with the consequences.
Clark ends with this encouragement: "Don't bet against our troops." That's just sentimental hogwash. It is not a "bet against our troops" to assess the dismal political and diplomatic realities that we have bequeathed to the world after these years of Bushist incompetence and misrule.
If Clark maintains this position, I wonder how he will sell it as a presidential candidate in 2008 when the enormity of our folly will be even more apparent. Or perhaps, as I speculated, he's preparing his "I told you so" speech.
Update: In the op-ed, Gen. Clark points to this supposed success in Iraq:
"The current strategy of clearing areas near Syria of insurgents and then posting Iraqi troops, backed up by mobile American units, has had success."
I wonder how Clark would answer this father of a dead Marine, killed in Haditha, western Iraq, last August. Bob Herbert quotes Paul Shroeder, father of Lance Cpl. Edward August Shroeder II:
"My son told us two weeks before he died that he felt the war was not worth it," Mr. Shroeder said. "His complaint was about having to go back repeatedly into the same towns, to sweep the same insurgents, or other insurgents, out of these same towns without being able to hold them, secure them. It just was not working, and that's what he wanted to get across."
[Cross-posted from The Broad View]
[edited to correct minor spelling error]