As if to offer denial in the face of disaster -- and commit the U.S. to losing many more soldiers and Marines -- the Bush administration has begun negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades, after President George W. Bush leaves office.
The negotiation, set to conclude this summer, will establish the basis for a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to the Bush administration, the Iraqi government requested a bilateral agreement to replace the expiring U.N. mandate for the occupation, which offended Iraqi sovereignty. Asked if there was any irony in preparing a plan to keep thousands of foreign soldiers in Iraq in the name of Iraqi sovereignty, a National Security Council official, who requested anonymity, replied, "Sure, but we plan to negotiate that aspect" of the agreement.
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The Bush administration has less than a year in office, yet it is now negotiating a deal that will commit the U.S. to an open-ended continuation of its most momentous, and controversial, foreign-policy decision. At the very least, the accord will prove a thorny issue for any successor Democratic administration that wins election on a promise to end the war.
Which was probably the point -- if McCain wins, the country has lost its mind anyway, and endorsed Cheneyism after supposedly repudiating it for several years; if Clinton or Obama wins, they will be hemmed in from day one by an eleventh-hour agreement. Of course, that can be augmented or even circumvented with more mercenary units, and rotating regular troops home.
But the most glaring aspect of all this is that after five years, they're still making this up as they go along. There's scarcely a semblance of a plan, certainly not a proactive one, and not even a reactive or much of an adaptive one. It's just stick people in as needed, take credit and deflect or ignore blame. When Clausewitz declared that war was politics by other means, I guess the Bushies took him as literally as they possibly could.
3 comments:
Are such agreements ever worth the paper they're written on? Aren't they just symbols of the temporary balance of political power and group interest? If Hillary or Obama gets elected and decide to take public opinion seriously, they can easily have their lawyers and speechwriters sell the notion of extricating America from the mess, no matter what an 'agreement' may bind them to do. What's Iraq gonna do, sue America for breach of contract? If al-Maliki gets replaced by a more belligerent Shi'a, aren't they gonna clamor for the Americans to get the hell out, no matter what the agreement might say -- and possibly even reinforce that demand with another bout of insurgency warfare?
This "agreement" strikes me as just more evidence that Bush is utterly deluded when he thinks he has any real control over events in that area of the world. Didn't the Israelis get Amin Gemayel in Lebanon to sign a "peace treaty" with them in 1982, only to find out that the rest of Lebanon would only wipe their asses with that 'accord', hence involving Israel in an 18-year long insurgency warfare they decided to end before losing decisively?
Isn't Hezbollah in Lebanon the result of that "peace agreement" betwen a puppet head of state representing only a fraction of his country and an invading army who installed him in power merely for the sake of getting Lebanon to sign that worthless piece of paper?
That Lebanon analogy seems to be cropping up here and there. It seems scarily appropriate. We still don't seem to get that we don't even know how stuck we are in this yet.
These people have been at each others' throats, in one scenario or another, for thousands of years. The PNAC crowd figured it'd take a decade or two, during which they'd sit back and take profits from wartime industries. And they've certainly reaped the rewards, but obviously we're stuck for a while, and as you say, any treaty is more likely rhetorical cover than anything else.
The only governmental options appear to be: moderate Shi'a open to Iranian influence; radical Shi'a hostile to all comers; return to Sunni dictatorship, in which case, why did we bother in the first place? Oh yeah, freedomocracy™.
I know what option the British would embrace, now thay they're removed that daydreamer Blair from 10 Downing Street.
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