Ezra gets to the fundamental point:
Over at Democracy Arsenal, Max writes, "No one, not Crocker or Petraeus can describe what success looks like. When asked by Levin, if all went well what would be an optimistic projection of U.S. troops levels at the end of 2008. Petraeus refuses to answer, saying he can't know. So he won't make projections of what success will look like. But both Crocker and Petraeus have absolutely no qualms about projecting the future if we withdrawal from Iraq."
That's been the striking thread running through these hearings. There are no benchmarks for success, no metrics that control our troop levels or departure. If al Qaeda is strong and sectarian violence is high, we have to stay and fight. If al Qaeda is weak and sectarian violence is low, we have to stay and protect those gains. It's heads we stay, tails we never leave.And that's not even getting into the Iran side of all this, which Lieberman is currently hyping. Look: Iran borders Iraq. They're always going to be there. Iraq, like Iran, is majority Shiite. The dominant party in Iraq, the one we support, is an Iranian proxy. If we can't leave until Iran has no influence in Iraq, we can literally never leave. This is like China demanding that we sever our relationship with Canada. Hell, given the weaker nation-states in the Middle East, it's like China insisting Mississippi sever its relationship with Louisiana. You can insist till you're blue in the face, but the neighbor will be there long after the invader.
This is what makes Petraeus' new "we'll re-evaluate every 45 days" strategy so disingenuous. Evaluate based on what? As Ezra says, if violence declines, we must stay to protect our gains, but if violence increases, we must stay to reduce it. And his point about Iran is also dead on. Once again, re-imagining the situation as if it was taking place here in the US helps greatly clarify things. If a foreign power had invaded and occupied Canada, does anyone honestly believe that we would sit idly by? Of course not. Assuming that the occupiers possessed superior military force to our own, we would undoubtedly support any and all efforts by Canadian militias and political parties to expel the occupying force. We would also, of course, ignore calls by the occupying power to stop such behavior. Not only do we have great political and social affinity for the Canadians, we would reply, but it is also clearly not in our interest to have a hostile military force occupying our neighbor to the north.
In the end, all of this points to the single most important and yet also amazingly overlooked fact in this entire debate: both the Iranians and the Iraqis live in Mesopotamia. We do not. No matter how long we stay, they will always stay longer. It is their home. Life under Saddam was bad for many of them, but this new life we have given them is not any better, and for many it is clearly worse. If we describe the hell we have given them as "freedom," then in this case it might be true to say that they hate us for our freedom. And if that's not a sad truth about this horrible war, nothing is.
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