Stay or Leave Part II: The ISG Recommendations

I haven't read the Iraq Study Group Report, but I feel like I have, since it is just about all you hear and read about in the news. The report is getting lots of plaudits from opponents of the Bush Administration for the bleak picture it paints of the situation and for the none-to-subtle indictment its "realist" authors make of the neoconservative perpetrators of this mess. But that was not really the point of the ISG, was it? The point was not to dwell on the failures of the past, failures that have already been massively documented and that even Bush, Rumsfeld and most of the neo-cons now acknowledge. The point was to identify -- in the report's own slogan --"The Way Forward;" to make recommendations as to what to do now. On this score, I can find no one who has anything good to say about the report.

Since the report recommendations (as well as its recriminations) line up so well with the positions being articulated by most of the the Democratic Party leadership and the New York Times editorial page, I would have expected the New York Times' op-ed page to reflect whatever sense of optimism there may be out there. If that expectation is reasonable, then today's op-ed offerings indicate there is nearly universal disappointment in the ISG recommendations and a growing sense that there really is no middle road between "Go Big" and "Go Home".

The Sunday Times has two full pages of op-ed pieces. Today, most of that space was devoted, in one way or another, to the ISG report. The longest of these pieces, "79 Steps To Victory in Iraq," is a collection of a dozen short opinion pieces on the recommendations. Not a single one of them had anything remotely hopeful to say about them. They range between damning with faint praise and damning altogether with no praise at all. Several did agree that success in implementing some of the recommendations is essential if there is to be any hope, but one gets no sense even from these voices that success is actually achievable. The others are contemptuous of the recommendations for exactly that reason: the recommendations are seen as either being banal or as being so removed from reality as to be almost delusional. In total, the sense one gets from reading this dozen reviews is that, even if Bush accepted and attempted to implement, the recommendations, it would change nothing.

Frank Rich's "The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq" makes this point explicitly and goes on to argue that we cannot let the ISG recommendations delude us into thinking there is still hope of achieving even the much watered-down goal of an Iraq "that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." He compares the ISG to a similar group of "wise men" convened by Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. . . . Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training for South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men . . . was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement."

Johnson did initiate peace talks, but it took another seven years, another 30,000 American deaths, and one of the worst domestic social upheavals since the Civil War before Johnson's successor's successor (Ford) finally threw in the towel and just left. Rich's closing comment on this parallel, and on the ISG itself, bears consideration:

The lesson in [the Vietnam analogy] is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

The third and bleakest column is David Brooks' "After The Fall". Despite being the Times' most conservative columnist, Brooks seems as ready as Rich to admit defeat, and he is focused instead on the consequences. Via the conceit of looking back on the present from the future, Brooks predicts that the ISG recommendations will be followed and American combat troops will be withdrawn in 2008; that this will result in a region-wide "30-Years War" during which political power and organization will be re-distributed on the basis of "family, tribe and faith" rather than existing states; and that this war will claim as victims all of the governments east of Egypt, south of Turkey and west Iran. Brooks acknowledges that this will be "a terrible era [with] horrific turmoil and the emergence of sociopolitical organizations whose likes the world ha[s] never seen." But with that he stops. There is no call to try to avert this outcome. He makes it sound as if he believes it is inevitable:

The Middle East's weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism, economic globalization, and transnational communication networks. Efforts to do nation-building without security faced long odds. Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave "responsibly" -- as defined by Western nationalist categories -- were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal."

(It may be that Brooks believes all of this will occur only if we follow the recommendation to leave by 2008, but if that is his point, he doesn't make it).

So where does all of this leave me? Not much further than I was when I wrote this in response to Billy Bob's question, "Stay or Leave?" I admit to being disappointed that the ISG recommendations seem to be either banal or impractical. What did I expect? Not much really. But I did so want to find some reason to hope that I had allowed myself to begin to look forward to the release of those recommendations. When they came out, though, my first thought was the same one I had 4 years ago when Colin Powell made his pitch to the UN on why Iraq was dangerous: "Is THAT all you could come up with?"

So, I am right back where I started from: unable to join Frank Rich and John Murtagh in abandoning entirely any hope of avoiding the kind of future Brooks sees, but yet seeing no reason to believe that there is any way to succeed in doing so.

I can see only three courses that we might pursue at this point: Go Big and Long, Go Small and Long, or Go Home. The first of these is the preference of the right, and a long term occupation of Iraq may well be the course that has the best chance of avoiding a total collapse into chaos (although even that approach didn't work well for the Russians in Afghanistan). But there are neither enough troops nor enough electoral stomach to "go big," so this option is not any more realistic than hoping Iran and Syria will play nice. The "go home" option is the obvious choice if you have abandoned hope or if you believe that the Iraqis and their neighbors will learn to get along once we leave. I am not yet quite ready to do the former; nor am I willing to engage in the self-delusion required for the latter. This leaves the "go small and long" option, which is pretty much what the ISG recommended. So, as lame as those recommendations are, I guess that, for now, I am prepared to give them a try. However, I recognize that if the denoument in five years (or more) years is not any different than it would have been if we left now, the additional thousands of US casualities will lay heavy on my conscience. (I ignore the Iraqi caualities not out of indifference but out of a belief that they will occur regardless of what we do).

Note to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle: May you rot in hell for putting us in this situation. Better yet, may you be sent to spend the rest of your miserable lives in Baghdad. And then go to hell.