Juan Cole: Rich, McCain, and the Coming Heartbreak Ridge

[seafan]

At first glance, Frank Rich's column in the NYT of April 6, 2008, seems to scold Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for their characterization of John McCain's intent in Iraq as being "a hundred year war."


Rich says:

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

Not 'a hundred year war'..... a hundred year enduring presence. McCain wants to fight the few more years necessary to ensure a stalemate in Iraq; this stalemate would then facilitate a long-term presence there. (Rich's point for Obama and Clinton is to drill down on that specific meaning of McCain's words.)



Now, on to the crux of the analysis of the incisive Rich piece, by Juan Cole:



Rich, McCain, and the Coming Heartbreak Ridge

By Juan Cole
April 07, 2008

Frank Rich's "Tet Happened . . . and No One Cared" is an elegantly written and argued examination of the current situation in Iraq that seems to me to pretty much nail it.

Rich demolishes so many of the myths put out by McCain and the American Right generally. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da'wa Party, which back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are closer to Iran than the Sadr Movement. It was al-Maliki's parliamentary coalition that sought the cease fire by asking their Iranian patrons to broker it. The main motivation for the attack on Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra was to ensure that ISCI wins the elections in that key oil province in October.

.....

Rich begins and ends provocatively in arguing that the charge that Sen. John McCain has advocated a hundred-years war in Iraq is a canard, and takes the focus off much more substantive errors that McCain does make.

The only thing I would say is that McCain's analogy to South Korea, which comes from rightwing imperialist historian John Gaddis of Yale, has two implications. The first is that Bush is Harry Truman and it is July 23, 1950 (just after the US lost the Battle of Taejon and had to retreat) and there is a danger of the Communists overwhelming the South.
In McCain's mind, 'staying the course' and supporting the surge is akin to Truman committing large numbers of troops to make sure that we fight to a stalemate, containing America's enemies in Iraq.
The second implication is that once a stalemate is achieved and acknowledged, as in Korea from 1953, there can be an enduring US military presence in Iraq.

So while it is not true, as Rich rightly says, that McCain wants to fight for 100 years, it is true that his analogy does imply several more years of hard fighting.

McCain sometimes says we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq, and sometimes says we are fighting Iran in Iraq. Neither is in the least like North Korea. The Korea analogy is not really an analogy, since we are not fighting to support one half of a country against the other half, nor are we aiming at a successful partition of Iraq that leaves the enemy in control of half the country!

.....

Rich is right that the main danger of McCain is that his thinking on Iraq is muddled. But it is also a danger that he thinks he is Harry Truman and it is 1 August, 1950 in Korea. What he is actually offering the American public is a series of Gen. Douglas McArthur's "Home by Christmas" offensives, the ultimate result of which would be an uneasy stalemate in the Middle East with a division or two of US troops hunkered down for decades.

McCain is advocating the equivalents of the Battle of Seoul, Heartbreak Ridge, and Porkchop Hill, followed by spending trillions on a permanent US base. These are all before us in his vision.
McCain is actually promising a potentially long and destructive military campaign to reduce Iraq. McCain as president would likely have to invade Basra and crush the Shiite militias there, and a series of Sunni cities, including Samarra and Mosul, may have to be destroyed.
To paraphrase a notorious comment from Vietnam, what McCain is really offering is this: "We had to destroy the country to save it, sir."

McCain's implicit pledge of a decade-long further war, waged in order to get to the point where the US military can stay in Iraq for 100 years. Such a war would roil the Middle East, and we have already seen Turkey invade Iraq, we have seen money flow to Iraqi Sunnis from wealthy Gulfies, and the US, at least, charges that we have seen Iranian arms flowing in (how would that stop, exactly, when they can even be bought on the world arms black market by militias that siphon billions from the Iraqi petroleum production? McCain's vision of Total Victory is likely to profoundly destabilize the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf for decades to come, endangering US strategic interests and ensuring high fuel costs that endanger the US economy.

So I wouldn't dismiss the danger implied by McCain's remark.

Meanwhile, in yesterday's http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120752308688293493.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries">Wall Street Journal, in advance of General David Petraeus' testimony on The Hill today, the Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham tag team trumpet *the surge is working* propaganda:

When Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress tomorrow, he will step into an American political landscape dramatically different from the one he faced when he last spoke on Capitol Hill seven months ago.
This time Gen. Petraeus returns to Washington having led one of the most remarkably successful military operations in American history. His antiwar critics, meanwhile, face a crisis of credibility – having confidently predicted the failure of the surge, and been proven decidedly wrong.
September, advocates of retreat insisted that the surge would fail to bring about any meaningful reduction in violence in Iraq. MoveOn.org accused Gen. Petraeus of "cooking the books," while others claimed that his testimony, offering evidence of early progress, required "the willing suspension of disbelief."

.....

In the past seven months, the other main argument offered by critics of the Petraeus strategy has also begun to collapse: namely, the alleged lack of Iraqi political progress.
Antiwar forces last September latched onto the Iraqi government's failure to pass "benchmark" legislation, relentlessly hammering Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as hopelessly sectarian and unwilling to confront Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Here as well, however, the critics in Washington have been proven wrong. ..... Most importantly, Iran also continues to wage a vicious and escalating proxy war against the Iraqi government and the U.S. military. The Iranians have American blood on their hands. They are responsible, through the extremist agents they have trained and equipped, for the deaths of hundreds of our men and women in uniform. Increasingly, our fight in Iraq cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.

.....

Unable to make the case that the surge has failed, antiwar forces have adopted a new set of talking points, emphasizing the "costs" of our involvement in Iraq, hoping to exploit Americans' current economic anxieties.
Today's antiwar politicians have effectively turned John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on its head, urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or bear any burden, to assure the survival of liberty. This is wrong. The fact is that America's prosperity at home and security abroad are bound together. We will not fare well in a world in which al Qaeda and Iran can claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are ascendant.

.....

Indeed, had we followed the path proposed by antiwar groups and retreated in defeat, the war would have been lost, emboldening and empowering violent jihadists for generations to come.
The success we are now achieving also has consequences far beyond Iraq's borders in the larger, global struggle against Islamist extremism. Thanks to the surge, Iraq today is looking increasingly like Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare: an Arab country, in the heart of the Middle East, in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims – both Sunni and Shiite – are rising up and fighting, shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers, against al Qaeda and its hateful ideology.

It is unfortunate that so many opponents of the surge still refuse to acknowledge the gains we have achieved in Iraq. When Gen. Petraeus testifies this week, however, the American people will have a clear choice as we weigh the future of our fight there: between the general who is leading us to victory, and the critics who spent the past year predicting defeat.

There is no dialog with rigid, ignorant ideology. Unfortunately, the worst of it emanates from our own government.

[housewolf]

1. Excellent post - important

Thanks for posting this, it contains excellent analysis and points.