http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174844/having_a_carnage_party
posted October 02, 2007 4:33 pm
Tomgram
We Count, They Don't
By Tom Engelhardt
<snip>
Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on
counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing.
In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the
presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling
agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused
to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end
of a first term in office -- five years from now, and 10 years from
the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have
started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus,
who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to
listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to
a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think
historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine
or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi
timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway
consensus that no one -- not in this administration or the next, not
a new president or a new Congress -- will end our involvement in
Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq
and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true -- if only
to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from
even worse.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way
on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are]
not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the
debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq
there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to
win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker
recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out
many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing
various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up
in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official,
"Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this
country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the
departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither
desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq
won't let it happen."
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military
punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of
Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington
do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who
launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that
began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it
will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as
long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to
learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all
leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq") Iraq is, of course,
acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential
campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our
presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and
yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq
debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if
everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end
in sight.
And let's remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count
to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops
have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in
stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported
that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David
Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently: "Many times over the
past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he
needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically sustainable U.S.
deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind,
however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on
their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the
Korea model they had in mind -- though they weren't calling it that
at the time.)
This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems
to have put his money on -- a drawn-down American force garrisoned
in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to
come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers
on what such a model would likely cost.
Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we
land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers
of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500,
50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or
later it will be so.
<end of excerpt>
Engelhardt goes on to talk about the return of the Vietnam style bodycount and its attendent politics after years of scrupulously not avoiding it:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174844/having_a_carnage_party
And the first part I snipped, about the tripartite resolution in the Senate, is also interesting.
FWIW, FAIR points out the obvious fact that, although the Democrats and the media think this is the "centrist" position, it's actually way to the right of the American public, 5% of which want troops to stay for five more years:
http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1003-10.htm
But perhaps it is the center if you weight the averages appropriately, with the ruling class on one side of the scale and the public on the other.
Michael