Yesterday Gen. Petraeus brought a report of how things are going in the war in Iraq to the Senate Armed Forces Committee. All 3 presidential candidates (Clinton, McCain, Obama) made statements and posed questions to the good general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Patriots all, in my estimation.
The marathon back and forth offered very little in new information. The surge has had some success in some areas as we have already been told, but there remain many problems yet to be solved, which we also already knew. The general fended off many attempts to get him to project some date for completion of our mission in Iraq. One problem being that the mission seems to have evolved over time. What started as a gung-ho, kick butt military operation to depose Saddam Hussein and get control of imagined weapons of mass destruction that was supposed to be over in 6 months, has become a muddled, imprecise, quagmire of nation building, tribal mediation, economic development and law enforcement. Iraqi government officials are milking our presence and largesse to their advantage as much as possible as they drag out the process of solving their big issues. Why should they spend their resources to sustain the country as long as we are willing to foot the bill?
Barack Obama offered parameters that may help us get a sense of how to measure our progress. On one end of the scale is the Bush-Cheney-McCain ideal that Iraq somehow morph into a stable democracy, a beacon of freedom and civil rights in the heart of the middle east, and an oil rich friend of the United States. By any reasonable estimation that will take decades to happen if it is even possible. On the other end of the scale is the situation that exists now which Obama described as: "a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an al-Qaida base."
So there you have it. After more than 5 years during which more than 4000 American service personnel have been killed (not to mention ally losses and many thousands of civilians), at a cost of a half trillion dollars, what we have to show for it is a messy, sloppy status quo with ongoing violence and rampant corruption. And no end is in sight.
Whose idea was this? I don't get it.
