Tom Donnelly addresses the Hillary Clinton-Richard Lugar "moderate" idea that America must retreat from Iraq in the near future for reasons of domestic political calculation. It's a push for what could best be described as orderly humiliation:
Operation Phantom Thunder, the first real effect of the Iraq troop surge of the past six months, is improving the battlefield situation in Baghdad and the surrounding towns. But in Washington, those who believe the war is already lost--call it the Clinton-Lugar axis--are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home.
The most notable defeat last week in Washington was the speech given by Richard Lugar, the senior statesman and senator from Indiana and voice of moderate Republicanism. On Monday, Lugar announced that he had concluded that the surge was irrelevant: "The prospects that the current surge strategy will succeed . . . are very limited within the period framed by our own domestic political debate." And while President Bush may want to hang tough, "the resulting contentiousness with Congress would make cooperation on national security issues nearly impossible." That is, Bush's commitment to victory is disrupting Lugar's desire to restore bipartisanship.
The consequences of putting short-term bipartisanship ahead of victory in Iraq would be severe -- a catastrophe that Donnelly hints at but leaves mostly to the imagination:
This is the final fantasy of Lugar-Clinton and the Washington establishment: that withdrawal in the face of multiple and highly motivated enemies can be neatly calibrated--extended through 2012 in the CNAS concept. And it is in this respect, too, that the view from Washington is badly out of touch with the view from Baghdad. Petraeus, his troops, and their Iraqi counterparts know they're in a war--a blood-soaked "act of force to compel the enemy to do our will," as a famous Prussian once put it. Indeed, the methods of al Qaeda, driven by religious zeal, come as close to embodying the Clausewitzian notions of "absolute war" and "maximum use of force" as can be found in the modern world.
If we're in an absolute war in which nothing is off-limits to the jihadists -- not innocent civilian lives, not anyone's children, not preservation of historical artifacts, not treaties, not the U.N., not respect for religious freedom, not national boundaries, not individual liberty, not doctors or hospitals or ambulances, not social niceties or conventions, and not anyone's survival, not even that of the jihadists -- then what exactly would a retreat from Iraq "within the period framed by our own domestic political debate" achieve?
What exactly would retreat achieve? And at what cost?
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