By PHK
If there's one word that is anathema to this Administration, it begins with W. The W does not stand for Walker. It does, however, relate directly to the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq.
The word is Withdrawal. This is the single word that will never pass through the lips of an administration spokesperson - from the President on down to the lowliest government employee. It is banned from this administration's vocabulary.
Now, of course, if the W word were used in reference to the withdrawal of Russian troops from Moscow's former colonies in Central Asia, the Caucasus or Eastern Europe, that would be another story. Or, for that matter, Syria's recent military withdrawal from Lebanon. We would hear a hearty round of applause, and the Bush administration heavyweights would immediately make the rounds of the talk shows trumpeting "their" latest victory in the misnamed "war on terror" or the failure of the Putin Government's "adventurism" in the Russian's near-abroad.
The truth is that the Bush Administration has painted itself into a corner in Iraq. But worse (another W word you won't hear here), it refuses to admit it - at least in public places.
Yet, denial of the inevitable, in my book rarely - if ever - succeeds.
I haven't figured out if Vice President Cheney - who seems to make the foreign policy in this town - has privately begun to explore a face-saving way out of an un-winnable situation; but at least for public consumption, the concept of an exit strategy does not yet exist.
In fact, the reverse is true. More and more dollars are being poured into American installations in Iraq. They include a new super-sized, presumably super-fortified U.S. Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone and into new, more permanent facilities for Halliburton.
Greenbacks now flood out of the Pentagon and into the coffers of private contractors operating in Iraq or working on Iraq-related questions and products like the late spring floodwaters turn lazy streams into torrents in the Rockies.
I, for one, do not always subscribe to the necessity of an "exit strategy." I don't recall, for instance, hearing of exit strategies for the U.S. troop presence in Japan, South Korea or Germany during the Cold War. This would have been ludicrous. And I did not oppose the show or use of American military force as in Bosnia or Kosovo in the 1990s where and when warranted.
In fact, the purported need for American military exit strategies arose during the 1990s after Bill Clinton took the reigns of the Presidency. This clarion call had the stamp of the Republican opposition all over it - and it was particularly popular among isolationists like Jesse Helms who then chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well as unilateral interventionists like Albuquerque Congresswoman Heather Wilson who claimed that the limited use of the American military in non-combat roles in the Balkans was degrading to America's finest fighters. "America's finest" generally agreed - such was the culture of the U.S. military.
The word "Withdrawal," of course, comes painted with all shades of humiliation. It conjures up images of those April 1975 days in Vietnam or Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812 commemorated from the Russian perspective in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.
I also have never blamed US troops - and particularly draftees - for the Vietnam quagmire. Until 2003, I also thought American leadership - regardless of political persuasion - had learned some foreign policy basics. But just as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's aides didn't want to listen to foreign affairs specialists then, today's successors in the Bush administration refuse to listen to the experts in the State Department and the Department of Energy who really did know something about Iraq and its supposed WMD programs in 2002 and 2003. They just might also know something about Iran - it is not the Hermit Kingdom after all.
Aside from Iraq's January 30 elections - in which Iraqi Shiites and Kurds voted in extraordinarily high numbers, the minority Sunni Arabs sat on their trigger fingers and the Bush Administration predictably claimed a pyrrhic victory - little has gone right in Iraq since the earliest days of the invasion over two years ago.
The insurgency, or whatever you wish to call it, appears to have shifted its targets for assassination from official and nonofficial Americans to Iraqis who cooperate with the Americans. Actually, this may make it more palatable for a U.S. "dig-in-for-the-long-term" policy - because it means fewer American casualties, but how long can this last? Until after the 2006 Congressional elections? Will an Iraq occupation still be palatable to the American public by 2008? Will someone in either party have the guts to stand up and say enough is enough? My sense here is that too many political appointees in this administration are experts at finger-pointing and passing the blame. And I do not just mean at the CIA.
Clearly, the Administration's hope is that it will be able to declare the war won once enough Iraqis are trained and have taken over control of their own security. But is this realistic?
Unfortunately, Americans don't even learn their own history very well. Vietnamization - if I remember correctly - did not work. Yes, the circumstances are different today. Regardless, the Bush Administration is not exactly welcome in much of the Middle East- and the continued occupation of Iraq just makes it worse. It seems to me that the sooner Mr. Cheney and company face the facts and introduce the W word into their vocabulary, the better it will be for all of us - and I don't mean it should be undertaken through Iran.
posted for PHK by CKR