Just a few months ago, Los Angeles Times's editorialists were backing Mister Bush's splurge of blood and bucks in Iraq, arguing that it would be foolish not to try one more time to turn the disastrous American occupation of that country into something ... less disastrous. Today, they gave up. Some excerpts:
Bring them home
But what now? After four years of war, more than $350 billion spent and 3,363 U.S. soldiers killed and 24,310 wounded, it seems increasingly obvious that an Iraqi political settlement cannot be achieved in the shadow of an indefinite foreign occupation. The U.S. military presence — opposed by more than three-quarters of Iraqis — inflames terrorism and delays what should be the primary and most pressing goal: meaningful reconciliation among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. ...
The mire deepens against a backdrop of domestic U.S. politics in which support for the ill-defined mission wanes by the week. Better to begin planning a careful, strategic withdrawal from Iraq now, based on the strategies laid out by the Iraq Study Group, than allow for the 2008 campaign season to create a precipitous pullout. ...
But an important element needs to be taken off the table: American blood. The U.S. should immediately declare its intention to begin a gradual troop drawdown, starting no later than the fall. The pace of the withdrawal must be flexible, to reflect progress or requests by the Iraqis and the military's commanders. The precise date for completing the withdrawal need not be announced, but the assumption should be that combat troops would depart by the end of 2009. Iraqi political compromise is more likely to come when Washington is no longer backing the stronger (Shiite) party. U.S. troops could then be repositioned to better wage the long-term struggle against Islamic extremism...
Having invested so much in Iraq, Americans are likely to find disengagement almost as painful as war. But the longer we delay planning for the inevitable, the worse the outcome is likely to be. The time has come to leave.
There's a ton of stuff to challenge in those few paragraphs, and more still in the paragraphs you can read by following the link. For one thing, does the Times editorial board really believe the civil war started after the surge?
But, hey, who am I to refuse my old employers a welcome to the reality-based world, even if they've only arrived at the outskirts?
Where this newfound viewpoint came from - one that papers like the Poynter Institute-owned St. Petersburg Times arrived at long ago and reiterated today, as noted in DWG's Diary - is anybody's guess. Perhaps the editorialists got an early whiff of their newspaper's story about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's alleged disagreement with his boss over Iraq policy. And perhaps, unlike, say, The Wall Street Journal's editorialists, they actually have in this case taken to heart what they read from their own reporters.
A spokesman for Gates insisted there was no distance between the Defense secretary's thinking on the timetable for Iraq and views held by the White House or Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.
But his warnings to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki are just the latest indications from Gates that he believes the window of opportunity for the administration to get Iraq right is closing sooner rather than later.
Any determination by Gates that time is running out on the current plan could severely complicate the administration's strategy this summer, a prospect that has begun to worry some backers of the troop "surge."
"I believe Gates is on a completely different page than President Bush and Gen. Petraeus," said a former senior Defense official who has supported the buildup. "He wants to see some results by summer, and if he doesn't see those results, he seems willing to throw the towel in."
Unlike some, I am no great fan of Robert Gates. Telling the truth a couple or three times about Iraq does not make up for an entire career of deception and shaping of bloody policies like those the U.S. imposed on hapless Central America in the 1980s. But, as the Times story makes clear, Gates was a primary, perhaps the primary, writer of the conclusions of the Iraq Study Group. Those conclusions were and are deeply flawed and suggest a kind of American Empire Lite. But they are at least a step or a step-and-a-half better than what the U.S. is engaged in now.
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