One of the hardest to kill memes about the war in Iraq is the so-called "Pottery Barn rule". The notion is that we made the mess in Iraq, and therefore it is the responsibility of the United States to fix it. I wonder quite a bit why exactly that involves Pottery Barn, but nevermind that.
The problem I have with this notion is that it presumes that if you break a sofa at a Pottery Barn, you are expected to build them a new and better sofa. That, of course, is not the policy of any store. The reason for that is because that you are capable of breaking a sofa does not mean that you can fix one.
I’d like to take a moment to tell all of you about a certain country in the world. Not too long ago, that country was described by Human Rights Watch as having a "poor human rights situation {which} deteriorated further in 2006. The government strictly limits freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Emergency rule, imposed in 1963, remains in effect... The authorities continue to harass and imprison human rights defenders and non-violent critics of government policies." A blogger was recently sentenced to three years in prison for "spreading false and exaggerated information". The penal code allows a judge to suspend punishment for a rapist if the rapist chooses to marry his victim, and provides leniency for so-called "honor" crimes, such as assault or killing of women and girls by male relatives for alleged sexual misconduct. This nation is a dictatorship, claiming so-called "emergency powers" since 1963. They have used tear gas and riot squads against a religious minority celebrating their new year with a candlelight procession within the last year.
That simply wonderful-sounding nation is Syria. And over half a million Iraqis have fled there, to get away from the Iraq we have created for them.
When half a million people chose Syria over the nation we are building, perhaps the problem is that we are not the best people to "fix" the situation we’ve made in Iraq.
The big new front-page revelation in the New York Times today is that Gen. Petraeus told President Bush (said some "senior administration and military officials" – why on earth can’t our ‘leaders’ just tell us what they think instead of engaging in some retarded game of "telephone" beats me) that he wants to maintain heightened troop levels in Iraq well into next year to reduce the risk of military setbacks, but could accept the pullback of roughly 4,000 troops beginning in January, in part to assuage critics in Congress.
So, parsing just that paragraph, the risk of setbacks is so great that he wants to extend the ‘surge’ for another four months, and then he could tolerate the pullback (note that "pullback" and "withdrawal" are two very different things) of about 2 ½ % of the total American deployment in Iraq. And not because he couldn’t use those 4,000 soldiers, but to assuage critics.
Wow. That’s just great news, isn’t it?
Let’s take the most generous metric for success in Iraq we possibly can. Let’s say that success is a nation which is not so horrible that people choose to flee to Syria in droves.
Which is exactly what the most well-known Iraqi blogger just did, in perhaps the most linked post ever. Someone ought to let Riverbend know about how kindly blogging is looked on there. And yet, she’ll be safer now, well beyond the reach of our "rebuilding" efforts.
The premise that those of us who support American withdrawal from Iraq believe is not that we do not have an obligation to the damage we have caused. Indeed, I believe that we see that obligation as considerable.
The premise that we have, and that the evidence supports, is that we are not mitigating that damage through our military occupation of Iraq. The "double-down" strategy of the escalation brought on by the change in military leadership ten months ago has produced results that are so fragile they depend on the maintenance of an increased level of occupation which can only possibly be reduced by a minute amount, which is only being advised for political considerations. That is the actual meaning behind all the "the surge is working" talk coming out of politicians and pundits.
I’m quite sure that Pottery Barn has a policy, where if you bust their sofa and then spend four years flailing away, again and again failing to repair the broken sofa while generally making a mess of the store, to demand that you get out of their store.
And that in the future, you do your shopping elsewhere.