The authors STEPHEN BIDDLE, MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK published an Op-Ed in today's NYT which argues that we are Not Quite Ready to Go Home.
They argue it would be morally incorrect to leave Iraq in the timeframe that Obama and al Maliki prefer. Essentially, they rely upon Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" meme: "You broke it, you own it".
I disagree. And I explain why below the fold.
The authors contend that we should not leave until Iraq is demonstrated to be stable.
I contend that stability in Iraq cannot be demonstrated until after we leave. And that must be accomplished by the Iraqis alone, hopefully in a peaceful transition to their final state as one country -- but if necessary, as several countries. I am reluctantly willing to accept that this may require some degree of their own internal violence. We should permit a moderate amount of it if that is what is absolutely required in order to sort things out.
Our goal should first be to use extreme amounts of diplomacy to eliminate or at least limit the prospect that their innate tendencies toward violence will force violence upon themselves. We should reserve our military forces for quelling an uncontrolled violence. And we should do so only with the help of many other countries, especially with the help of all of Iraq's neighbors.
As a last resort we should use the moral power of the United Nations to dissolve Iraq into separate sovereign regions, some perhaps to be acquired by one its neighbors. But the option of combining a region with another country should only be done if the people of that region agree by ballot that it is better for them to be absorbed than to try and go it alone.
The present course of US policy cannot be sustained. Moreover, it is immoral to continue trying to sustain it. The present lowering of violence is not a measure of success. Even the temporary absence of violence would not be indicative of our success. Poland was (relatively) free of violence for over 40 years after the conclusion of World War Two. But their governance was imposed upon them by the Soviet Union, just like Iraq's government is now imposed upon the Iraqi people by the United States. Do the authors consider Poland's situation from 1945 to the mid 1980's a model for their own definition of stability? Sadly I think they do.
The authors subscribe to the same thesis that John McCain does when he says it is OK with him if we stay in Iraq for 50 or 100 years, so long as we do not "suffer casualties". The authors and the candidate do not say so in clear, stark terminology but they want a puppet regime of the United States to exist there in perpetuity, regardless of what the Iraqi people actually want. Why else would we find it necessary to stay there?
We claim to be offering the Iraqis a democracy. But strangely, we never asked them what kind of democracy they really wanted. We appointed several hundred "leaders", hand picked by ourselves, and dictated the outlines of their constitution. Then we placed that document up for a yes or no vote. There were no other constitutions on the ballot, from which the Iraqi people could chose.
The authors and McCain want the Iraqi people to understand that we will always be willing to apply the necessary and sufficient amount of force and other forms of pressure to keep them in the same condition we have already arranged for them to have. That is our goal for their own stability and it is motivated by two other kinds of stability which we covet for ourselves: the stability of our oil supply and the stability of Israel. No one outside of Iraq seems concerned with what kind of stability the people of Iraq actually want.
We should be particularly careful to consider what part similar motivations played in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. It is particularly relevant today, now that we are so deeply in debt, our currency is plunging, the costs we pay for importing oil from the rest of the world has reached unsustainable levels and our unwillingness to produce energy for ourselves, by means other than using oil, all contribute to a sputtering economy at home. We now enjoy an economy that increasingly exhibits the traits of its own, special kinds of violence. And that violence hits us right here, at Home!