From the
Byman/Pollack article in today's WaPo:
How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward and prepare for the tremendous risks an Iraqi civil war poses for this critical region.
I just love how the erstwhile author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq assures us that the question of "how Iraq got to this point" is the exclusive province of academics and partisans in some far-off presidential election.
Don't sell yourself so short, Mr. Pollack.
In his introduction to that book that so "emboldened" neoconservatives, Pollack wrote that even though Iraq had no direct connection to the 9/11 attacks, their aftermath nonetheless offered a golden opportunity to invade. The rationale? Because a majority of the public,
though largely ignorant of the costs and difficulty involved, supported "military action against Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein's regime"--and because the rest of the world, wary of "cross[ing] the wounded superpower" would "give the US a wider berth."
Anticipating the tone of Colin Powell's notorious turn before the UN by invoking grave threats of nuclear weapons/WMD and Saddam's Arab-imperial aspirations, Pollack solemnly urged an invasion as the only remaining option.
Got cynicism?
Only now that a belatedly informed majority of Americans believes the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake; only now that world opinion of our nation has long since soured; only now that the various "gathering threats" that once sounded so dire have been revealed as empty in varying degrees of ludicrousness; only now do we hear a very different kind of grave description: about the "spillover effects" of unchecked civil war and all their grievous ramifications, told in hindsight with an air of historical inevitability.
In the Balkans, the United States and its NATO allies realized that it was impossible to manage the Bosnian or Kosovar civil wars and so in both cases they employed coercion -- including the deployment of massive ground forces -- to bring them to an end.
That point is critical: Ending an all-out civil war typically requires overwhelming military power to nail down a political settlement. [...] Considering Iraq's much larger population, it probably would require 450,000 troops to quash an all-out civil war there. Such an effort would require a commitment of enormous military and economic resources, far in excess of what the United States has already put forth.
Yep, now that we're trapped in Iraq, conveniently enough, public and world opinion no longer matter; it's time to pony up those 450,000 troops OR ELSE.
Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can't. Instead, Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq's neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but, nonetheless, we have to try.
We? What the fuck "we," Walter?!? Will you and "Prime Fighting Age" Beinart be sharing a humvee, then? Or is your exposure to "poor odds of success" limited to Atlantic City casinos and rolling the dice with other people's lives?
If this all sounds shrill and personal, it's probably becuase I fucking hate the people who carefully and deliberately steered us away from this discussion of costs and commitments before the invasion, because they were in a rush to exploit world sympathy and uninformed, inchoate public rage before it dissipated.
They're the reason my little brother, a reservist and married father of two, will be deployed to this civil war-wracked hellhole tomorrow--on his fucking birthday, no less.
This article sounds like nothing so much as advance marketing for Pollack's sequel, which might be called The Deepening Quagmire: The Case for Drowning in the Unholy Goddamn Mess I Helped Create.
So send me a prepublication copy, Mr. Pollack, and I'll be sure to forward it on to my brother, along with a signed copy of "Dow 36,000". He'll need something to keep his mind occupied while dodging mortar shells.