It's too late to leave Iraq

I know, provocative headline.  Crowds of 3 to 7 readers (the average for my entries) will angrily respond "It's never to late--what about the troops that are there now!  We need to get them out so as to prevent further death and injury to our troops and the further wasted expenditures that are bankrupting our treasury and selling our kid's future to the Chinese and other governments that are (for now at least) buying our debt."

Well, I agree with all of that.  I am an American but I do have a brain in my head (a disqualifying condition for employment in the executive branch, I'm afraid).  But that's not what I am talking about.  I'll explain after the jump.

 

When the U.S. invaded, with the able assistance of the Hampsters of the Willing, our objective was relatively clear:  Remove Sadam Hussein and get control of his Weapons of Mass Destruction.  O.K., so he didn't have any, though Saddam himself was captured and ultimately executed.  Whatever the justification (well founded, totally misunderstood, deliberately falsified, etc.), we had completed our stated objective, and so it was time to come home, right?

Well, no.  Even the neo-cons recognized that a power vaccuum would ensue due to the decapitation of a government run by a stongman over the last 30 or so years.  So Bush moved on to objective #2, the bringing of democracy to the people of Iraq, a device that he thought would bring stability to Iraq and ultimately serve as a beacon of light to the other peoples of the region wishing to free themselves of totalitarian rule.

The trouble was, of course, that the people running the show were thoroughly in bed with the Project for the New American Century crowd. In other words, they were totally clueless about running a government, let alone a country where the language, culture, history, religion and social structure was unlike anything they understood.  That is why a "Bremer" will eventually be added to the lexicon as descriptor of an administrator with "stunning incompetence" in the same way that a "Quisling" has become the moniker for an "insidious traitor".

But even with all that baggage, the Bush administration could at least point to the conducting of elections, the writing of a new constitution, the freeing of the Shiites and Kurds from decades of oppression, and the beginnings of a cooperative government run (in name anyway) by people who actually lived and grew up there.  Having satisfied prong 2 of the objective list, we could have pulled up the stakes and left.

That, of course, is not what happened.  We were told that this could not be done because it would make Americans look like we "cut and run", that we don't "stay the course", that, instead, we should "stand down when they stand up," etc.  I don't know anyone with more than 4 teeth who actually believed this nonsense, although I hear that it also went down pretty well with the Rapture faction.  The trouble was that our staying in Iraq probably has not had anything to do with projecting power abroad and detering our enemies from landing on our shores.  I think, instead, it is clear that we stayed so that Blackwater, Hallburton, a few oil conglomerates and the rest of Bush's Christmas Card list could continue rolling in the dough.

The side effect of thta mind set has been that Bush has backing himself into a corner in this narrative, and now there is only one thing that will force him to remove the troops.  Impeachment.  And, whatever we may say on this and other progressive blogs, the only thing that would seriously threaten Bush with Impeachment would be his failure to withdraw the troops in the face of an astounding string of military losses, the kind that would make our current casualty list look like minor fender-bender.

History has its share of turning points for modern american presidents using military force to no avail.  Johnson had the Tet offensive.  Reagan had the Marine Barracks suicide bombing in Lebanon.  I don't know what specific event or events will follow in Iraq that will shake Bush to his core and bring the troops home.  I just know that its coming.

So here's the thing.  We have spent upwards of half a trillion bucks in this sandbox for the last 4 years.  Every defensible reason for staying there has been exhausted.  Now, when we do leave, in light of the posture of this administration, it will have been solely and exclusively upon the acknowledgement of cataclismic failure of Bush's (and, sadly by implication, American) foreign policy.

A year ago we could have gotten away with leaving Iraq and at least had a colorable argument about having effected positive change there.  That argument is gone.  Completely.  When we leave, whether as a result of a Tet-like series of events or a single cataclismic coordinated bombing, it will display totally that we did so be cause we had effected nothing but miserable failure.  It's too late to leave Iraq under any other circumstances.