The Democratic leadership has been waiting for the President and Donald Rumsfeld to come up with an exit strategy for Iraq. Barbara Boxer wrote a piece on it here at Daily Kos, where she personally took a letter asking for a plan to Mr. Rumsfeld. For me it would seem that if the President and Mr. Rumsfeld come up with something, anything, then all her efforts to make them look bad would turn to making her look foolish. We need to be the ones who should be putting forth better solutions than can be thought of by Republicans. We Democrats need to take a stronger leadership roll.
Maybe you haven't seen the polls, but the American people aren't too happy about us either.
I mostly see us Democrats being the Box Turtle party, claming up, afraid to take political risks and hoping that the Republicans will self destruct. Well, it looks like we got our wish, however, the American people deserve better; they deserve bold leadership, innovative leadership, and real vision. If Democrats don't come up with a solution for Iraq, what will happen is that people will not vote and that benefits the Republican Party. So, I am going to put this to you very clearly. What are we prepared to do about Iraq?
One solution for developing a set exit strategy that will prevent civil war, and I think it maybe something that many of the readers of this Blog have thought of too but were waiting for our Democratic leadership to forward such a solution, is to change the focus from having troops standing around and getting shot at to moving towards a more police like arrangement.
Create a formidable sized police force. Have American military police officers and police practice consultants lead and train each level of the new structure, from cops on the beat, to detectives, to administrators. Those Iraqis who show American style police leadership ability get moved to hold leader trainee authority with the trainers to be given greater authority as time passes, with the US officers supervision. The new police's duties will be to keep the piece and to find out from the populous who and where are the insurgents. The beat cops look for intelligence on the street and report back to a Special Weapons And Tactical team (SWAT) that arrests or engage the insurgents. In about a year this organization should be able to suppress the insurgent movement well enough to allow a substantial troop withdrawal. Left behind would be the police officer consultants and a smallish mobile military contingency force to deal with pockets of well armed insurgents too large for the SWAT teams. This group will be training Iraqis to do their job and will be out as soon as the Iraqis are capable of doing their job. Once comfortable that the Iraqi Police Response is capable to stand on its own and capture and prosecute insurgents as criminals, the American Police presents leaves. This could be done in short order, in 36 months. If finding good Iraqi police leadership becomes problematic, we could bring experienced police who show strong leadership skills from Iraq to the United States for a year to see how US police departments work and to work along side police in America. They return to Iraq with a mission to recreate strong well staffed police departments in Iraq capable to root out the insurgents.
This is just an example of putting forth a solution and taking the lead on an issue that dearly needs true leadership. Of course it will need a great deal more detail added to it, but you get the idea. We can put forth real solutions and capture the imagination and support of the American people if we just get out of our shells and do it.