Bloodless Coup

So you are arguing that the current policy is not a failure? On what grounds exactly? And what exactly is this political plan that has been adopted - or I should say is there REALLY a political plan when we don't have the troops (or the army, generally) to carry out what we are currently carrying out for the next 10 years. And even if we did have the troops - is spending their blood and the almost unimagineable amounts of money that necessary to do this for 10 years really what's in the US's best interest? I mean when you consider the opportunity costs involved ... and that of course is before we get into normative issues like whether or not we really want to have American troops dying to cement the control of Islamic religious/political parties in a key area of the world, and over vast amounts of petroleum.

I guess I just think you're being rather too optimistic about a worable, successful plan already being in place. It's not at all clear to me that we're there yet. And as to the people, well the guys you name will be rotated out in a few years ... will the next set be as competent and successful?

I never argued that the application of sound counter-insurgency strategy would win - as I note, the present plan moves us from a certain loss to a possible win (how possible is, of course, up for debate). I fully accept that the situation may still be beyond fixing (in fact, I think that is likely). What has changed since January is that Petraeus has put in place a sound counter-insurgency strategy that might succeed at (in the long term) at chipping away at the base of support by the mass of Iraqi citizens (who either support the insurgency or are so cowed by it that they tacitly support the insurgency).

My argument leaves aside debate over the form of the Iraqi government. In fact, in order to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis, you would need to have a government and policies most of them can support - which almost certainly means some form of Shiite rule. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for American Foreign Policy, as any regime that is installed through American support is likely to be at least neutral towards America, as opposed to actively hostile (it is, of course, bad for democracy in the larger sense, and likely bad for people in Iraq). But, from a purely Realist perspective, this may be an acceptable outcome.

I guess what I'm saying is that a worst case scenario is a partitioned Iraq that includes a Kurdish sovereign state in the north (which will immediately get into a fight with Turkey), a Sunni failed state in the center (harboring Al Qaeda, likely), and a Shiite religious theocracy in the south (that is likely allied with Iran and more-or-less hostile to the US). I think that (pre-Petraeus) that worst-case scenario was more and more likely. I think that now (with Petraeus) we have the possibility of an outcome better than that. My argument in the original post was that I was torn between throwing more resources at Iraq (which, again, I grant may still collapse) which would also make Bush look better and perhaps save the Republican Presidency in 2008 (the better Iraq looks, the better McCain looks...). The alternative is to oppose the "surge", draw down the troops, let Iraq spiral out of control, and increase the chances of removing the biggest bunch of foreign policy idiots to ever occupy the White House since, like, Grant or something.

Short version: the worst-case-scenario in Iraq really harms US interests worldwide; now that there is a somewhat better chance for some sort of success in Iraq, should we pitch more resources in to Iraq ("surge"; and give the surge time to work) when that increases the chance of keeping the idiots running the country around longer, or should we accept what might be catastrophic failure in Iraq in order to remove these bunch of idiots.

As I said, that's my dilemma.

Even if Petraeus has a good plan now, and as you mentioned its success is still highly debatable, is that something that will a) receive enough commitment now or b) outlast Bush? If no, then even if it is a good plan (in the abstract) the implementation will kill it, and thus, it will be a waste. Bringing us back to watching the inauguration of the failed state.

I don't know if the resources devoted to Iraq are sufficient (Afghanistan is heating up, and we could use to send more troops there too...); I know that no amount of resources would work with the previous "head in the sand" approach of the past 3+ years. Again, my point is that Iraq collapsing is a very bad thing, and if we have a chance to prevent/ameliorate that, we should take it. The previous lack-of-plan ensured failure; this plan at least has a chance. I'm not saying I'm fully behind this (as noted, I'm very dubious about this in case it succeeds and we keep the idiots who have screwed up foreign policy in more places than Iraq), just that I'm starting to wonder more.

As for sustaining this, I think that any successes will begin to be seen by January of 2009, and the next President will either see an obvious failure (clearly time to pull out), or will see enough successes to be able to argue for staying in. In any event, that decision is almost two years off; the issue is what we do now.

if we have a chance to prevent/ameliorate that, we should take it

No matter the odds of successful implementation?

No, of course not. I'm saying that (because of the new plan) our failure is not certain, and I'm willing to consider staying. My post was meant to get at the "costs of success" if you want to look at it another way.

Or, look at it another way: if we had a guaranteed success in Iraq, would that be worth the boost to Bush (and his incompetent advisers) and the harm it would do to Democratic chances in 2008? Or would you take the failure and the increased chances for Democrats?

I get that you are trying to do a thought experiment, but it strikes me as an extremely false dichotomy.

And I guess part of what I was trying to get at in my post is that I don't think you are taking this quite far enough - at what cost does a success in Iraq (presuming it could be achieved, presumably with the current strategy) become no longer worthwhile (in terms of an overall national interest) given the opportunity costs involved.

In addition - do you really see partition as the worst case scenario? I'd sort of buy that, but it's never struck me as all that likely given the views of the Shia in Iraq, the Saudis and Turkey.

OK. Not me, which is why I made the post. To me, the two primary questions on Iraq are (A) Do we have a chance to succeed (and I would argue that we have a better one now than before) and (B) will success ruin our chances to remove the people who have screwed up our foreign policy in North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Russia, and some other places I could think of given more time. Those two questions are equally important (to me), hence my post.

So, the question really is: would we sacrifice Iraq - with the caveat that we're not sure how much of a "chance" we're talking about w/r/t success anyway - in order to correct US foreign policy in toto - which is also no guarantee, by the way - by focusing on getting BushCo out?

And saying we have a "better" chance now is pretty vague. I know someone was quoting Petraeus as saying we have a 1 in 4 chance now. Maybe that's better than the 1 in 20 (or whatever it was) chance we had before, but ...

And I was under the impression that the people who led us into this morass were going to be out of a job in 21 months no matter what we do (not counting your Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzs who are already gone). That being the case, I guess I don't quite see this as a pressing concern. But ponder away. :)

No, I think this is a long term concern: while the very high ranking people won't be in office in 2009, I think it very likely that the second and third tier people will move around and stay in DC. In my mind the only way to remove the idiots is to have a Democrat win; a Republican victory will result in some (maybe most) hanging around.

I understand that "better" is vague, but we are clearly doing better today than we were doing three months ago (note: this is with respect to the military issues; politically, I have no idea what Maliki is up to, or how the government is holding up). All we can do is guess reasonably.

Well I think you might be overestimating the ability to expel idiots and wrongdoers - I mean Perle and E. Abrams came back notwithstanding a guilt plea (in the latter case) and 8 years of Bill Clinton.

And I think I get what you are saying in your last comment about military vs. political, but I don't see how they can really be divorced. I mean if we are helping to achieve stability, what is it that we are helping to stabilize? An Islamic religious state? The political situation seems more important to me than the military one, in terms of settling this conflict - and the fact that you don't know what Maliki is up to shows that that isn't going particularly well at all.