Sustain the surge's success, don't barter it away
According to Fareed Zakaria:
The most significant way we can help Iraq is to be there for the long haul, assisting it economically and politically, but maintaining a much smaller, more enduring military presence. That is a far more strategic role for U.S. troops than policing the streets of Baghdad. Making clear that we aren't going to disappear entirely will change the calculus of all those groups in Iraq that are keeping their "post-American" options open.
Zakaria believes that sustaining the "surge" will detract from this overriding long-term purpose:
The president is wasting his limited political capital buying the surge a few more months. There is a much more important deal to be had here—go down in troop levels, but go long.
Zakaria's argument is similar to one I made last year, before the surge. Like Zakaria, I believed that our need for a politically sustainable presence in Iraq trumps our need to police Baghdad. Thus, it seemed to me that reducing our presence in Baghdad might be the way to go, since it would reduce our casualties and enable us to bring some troops home, and thereby stem growing anti-war sentiment at home.
But stepping up our policing of Baghdad seems to have made our presence in Iraq more sustainable, not less. That's because the public was not opposed to our presence in Iraq so much as to our lack of success. By having some success in Baghdad, the administration made it more difficult for the defeatist Democrats to pull the plug on our entire operation in Iraq. To be sure, our biggest success has been in Anbar province (the area where, I argued last year, we should focus). However, it's unlikely that this success story alone would have been enough to win the political battle in Washington had the situation in Baghdad continued to deteriorate.
But what of Zakaria's argument that the administration should use the success of the surge not to buy six months more of it, but to broker a "deal" with the Democrats to reduce our troop levels in exchange for "going long," i.e., a sustained presence? Zakaria's premise is that "leading Democrats. . .recognize the need for a smaller, longer American mission in Iraq." I question that premise as a general matter, and I question even more the notion that any such recognition by leading Democrats would survive a serious deterioration of the security situation in Baghdad.
Thus, President Bush does not waste his political capital by sustaining the surge; instead, he maintains and possibly even increases it.
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