Slop Will Eat Itself § Unqualified Offerings: Today’s David Ignatius column merits all the attention of some C-list warblogger’s “Indeed!” but one passage contains a grace note on the theme of “Iraq Forever, Just Because”:
Leaders on both sides endorse the broad strategy proposed in December by the Iraq Study Group: a gradual withdrawal that shifts the American mission to training, force protection, counterterrorism and border security.
Most of the passage comes pre-rebutted by Steven Biddle in yesterday’s edition of the same paper that keeps running Ignatius. (And by Cernig, and Eric Martin, and me, and Yglesias, and the Center for American Progress, but Biddle got the most prominent placement.) “Training” is a plan for equipping and developing better militia members and insurgents. “Counterterrorism” is a loophole that nullifies any supposed scheme to curtail US involvement in Iraq, since by US definition any opposition to the American presence or the Maliki government is terrorism. There’s no argument that a reduced force could provide effective “border security,” though on its face the idea seems like a dandy way to increase the likelihood of incidents with Syrian, Iranian and maybe Turkish troops. And oh yes, entangle the US military with a smuggling economy that probably keeps Iraq from being even more of a basket case.
But you’ve got to love the idea of “force protection” as a main mission. The US military could stay in Iraq for the purpose of trying to keep its members from being killed for being in Iraq. There’s a stirring cause. I know a much more effective “force protection” plan, which I call “get the hell out.”
This is what they’re down to: inertia. The “bipartisan” compromise the Ignatiuses of the world envision is that we stay in Iraq so that we can stay in Iraq. Because if we pulled out of Iraq, well, we wouldn’t be there any more.
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