McCain of course will want the debate in Iraq to focus on the success of the surge in the short-term as a blueprint for future success down the road. In the larger context, he wants to frame the race as a referendum on retreat and surrender versus victory and prestige. He says the war will be won by 2013.
But what does “won” actually mean – a stable and democratic Iraq, or just a stable Iraq, or something else? On that question McCain is deliberately vague but continues to stick to the Bushian view that both stability and democracy there remain the goal and remain achievable (never saying though what or how much stability or democracy there must be for us to declare victory. I mean just because people vote in Iraq now doesn’t mean they have a functional or stable democracy, so when does it become one).
But Obama and us Democrats have to answer that same question as well. What does our vision of success in Iraq look like and how will our policies (of withdrawing and redeploying troops) achieve it and our wider security aims in the region? We need to answer this question and set out our vision to prevent McCain from setting the context for debate on Iraq and because we need to present our policies as meeting strategic objectives beneficial to the United States. Just getting out, while politically popular, does not a sound policy make.
Earlier this year, in early April I believe (right before bitter-gate did for Obama and diverted media focus onto guns and God and away from Iraq), when Iraq general Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker did their rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting on the success or lack thereof of the surge, Obama started to take us toward a debate on defining success in Iraq. As Joe Klein’s reported in TIME below:
Obama hit Petraeus and Crocker with an artful series of questions about the two main threats: Sunni terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran. He noted that al-Qaeda had been rejected by the Iraqi Sunnis and chased to the northern city of Mosul. If U.S. and Iraqi troops succeeded there, what was next? He proposed: “Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace of al-Qaeda but rather to create a manageable situation where they’re not posing a threat to Iraq.” Petraeus said Obama was “exactly right.”
Obama asked Crocker about Iran: We couldn’t expect Iran to have no influence in Iraq, could we? “We have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq,” Crocker replied. “The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces.” Obama then pursued Barbara Boxer’s previous line of questioning: If Iran is such a threat to Iraq, why was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted with open arms and apparently a lot of official kissing in Baghdad last month? “A visit like that,” Crocker said, avoiding the question, “should be in the category of a normal relationship.”
At which point, Obama dropped the hammer. The current situation in Iraq was “messy,” he said. “There’s still violence; there’s still some traces of al-Qaeda; Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success?” Crocker, semi-speechless, chose to misinterpret the question, saying a precipitous drawdown to 30,000 troops would be disastrous. But Obama’s question was more diabolical. He was saying, Hey, al-Qaeda’s on the run, and Iran is probably more interested in harassing the U.S. military than having another war with Iraq. How much better does the situation need to be for us to leave?
The thing is that while McCain and Co. point to the success of the surge as a rationale for staying in Iraq for years into the future (why, because for them a long-term heavy military presence in the Gulf is desirable to check Iran and Islamic militancy and watch over all that oil from a more amenable location then Wahabi Saudi Arabia), Obama was already turning that very success into a justification for getting the bulk of our forces out.
Obama is on to something here and it went largely unnoticed at the time. But, what he is doing (and I expect he will do more of once he wraps up the nom) is defining success in Iraq in a more realistic and honest way than McCain does (because McCain doesn’t want to admit that he prefers to keep American bases there forever for purposes to do with much more than Iraq). To press the point home, Obama will have to draw McCain out on this more (goad him into admitting this), will have to hammer the weak case for keeping our troops there long-term, making it clear that doing this not in our interests, not necessary to check Iran, not necessary to protect oil and very possibly destabilising in its own right – and then present an alternative policy.
Of late, Obama has been taking the fight on foreign policy directly to McCain and Bush in a way no leading Democrat has taken on the Republicans on security issues for a long time. He has dissected their failures, from strengthening Iran, to enabling Hamas (through their naive belief that democracy can thrive even when the fundamental conditions of liberty are non-existent). Its good to see. From critique to setting out an alternative vision and defining success in a realistic way. That is the next step and Obama seems to already be taking it.
Really gets to the heart of where the general election debate will be going. Matt Yglesias makes a similar point in this month’s Atlantic, in his “Accidental Foreign Policy” piece. There he shows, as you have mentioned, that “Obama has been taking the fight on foreign policy directly to McCain and Bush.”
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p>As Yglesias says:
For the better part of a generation, top Democratic politicians have followed, with astonishing uniformity, the same set of unwritten rules in their approach to foreign affairs: match GOP “toughness”; tack to the right on major foreign-policy principles; and, above all, avoid taking positions that could be criticized as weak.
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p>Instead, Obama has articulated a new/old vision, quite Kennedy-esque of tough but wise internationalism and one that modernizes, finally, our armed forces (including gradual nuclear disarmament).
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p>I do believe that while withdrawing from Iraq alone “does not a sound policy make,” any new vision begins with leaving from Iraq. I think that Obama has contextualized that withdraw properly as part of a larger foreign policy shift, and not simply an end in itself.
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p>Thanks for the great post!
Defining success means also defining failure. Which leaves you — and/or your successor — with the unenviable burden of a hard goal. It’s not greatly in America’s power to decide the course of things in Iraq; Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Kurds all have more control in that direction. I still maintain that a cursory look at 19th and 20th century history demonstrates that this project will end in a failure however defined, and I wouldn’t want to see that made official. Makes it harder to declare victory and get out when the time comes.
I agree that a look at the history of foreign intervention in the Middle East makes it unlikely that the U.S. will “succeed” in Iraq on Bush and McCain’s terms (i.e. a functioning democracy without an Iranian or al Qaeda presence and a strong, free market economy).
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p>But wouldn’t leaving a withdraw undefined allow its critics to define the “failure” that you’re talking about. If an Obama (or a Clinton) presidency did decide to leave Iraq, talking concretely about the benefits of leaving and the downsides of staying will be essential. This is especially true because the media and a large section of the American people will be attracted to the idea of “victory” that McCain and Bush are so obsessed with, however vaguely-defined or unreachable.
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p>Some wiggle room is obviously essential, as the U.S. won’t ultimately be able to determine the course of events. But setting up expectations would be helpful, as Iraq does not present good, clear policy options. Letting the Republicans and the media press the idea of “failure” seems to be the alternative to defining sucess.
If you stand out there and say that “it is a failure to leave Iraq before X,Y,Z” and then leave before any of those…then you’ve announced that you and America failed. Yes, Republicans and the media will press that. American voters hate the idea of America failing, and American exceptionalism is so ingrained in our culture that the automatic presumption is that somebody “lost” Iraq. Setting such a stark and clear benchmark would mean that Obama or Clinton would be paying a very high price for having done so, something I expect.
I don’t think that any Democratic president should set up clear benchmarks for leaving, which could force the U.S. to staying forever or “failing” under the new terms. I think that any Democrat should commit to leaving but create realistic expectations about what a withdrawal might entail. Iraq itself will never be a “success,” but withdrawing from Iraq will be perceived as successful and wise if it is portrayed as part of an alternative foreign policy vision, as lanugo suggested in the original post.
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p>Changing the conversation to other national security priorities, such as aiding Afghanistan or attacking global warming, would reduce “the very high price” for withdrawing from Iraq. The most important matter though is finding a way out. Really good article in last month’s NY Books by Thomas Powers reflecting on how that might be achieved (or not).
Like sabutai, I think that trying to define success is going to be unsuccessful. First remember that, unlike France or Denmark, Iraq was invented very recently. The British created it after WWI. They stitched together three disparate provinces, played “God Save the King”, and installed a spare king they had lying around on the throne. Presto a country. Bush whacked it and it’s not going to come together — if at all — anytime soon.
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p>There are two aspects of the Bush Occupation of Iraq that will change in a coming Democratic Administration:
get with the program and check out the new and happening stuff about our next great adventure in Iran.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/in…
Instead of arguing about what success is, why not instead define it as a failure and conclude that we should cut our losses and get out.
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p>The military would be pissed that they just got Vietnam-ed again. Well, they did. Maybe after two strikes, they’ll learn.
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p>BTW, McCain’s response to the notional attacks presented above is simple: “We can’t leave or draw down because Iraq will be drawn into civil war / lots of bloodshed.” Which is impossible to disprove, because it’s true; that might happen.
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p>A real argument for drawdown has to accept — at least internally — that lots of Iraqis may die as a result, and that we Americans accept that because we are concerned first about our own national interests.
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p>That argument may not be made to the public in those terms, but among us reality-based bloggers, let’s keep this reality front and center.
Lots of Iraqis — possibly a large majority — want the U.S. to leave.
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p>When the mission is as unclear as it is, one gets stupid stuff happening like the recent incident of military personnel using a Koran as target practice. Or you get unnecessary brutalization of Iraqi civilians.
To my admittedly partisan eyes, the Republican party frequently looks like the party of wishful thinking. Supply-side economics is an obvious example. So too is the idea that there’s a Department of Waste somewhere that if we could just find it and shutter it, we could lower everyone’s taxes and increase services. Other wishful Republican thinking includes the beliefs that racism has disappeared and that global warming should worry no one. These kinds of wishful thinking all have a strong, often electoral, appeal. Hence their persistence in the face of evidence.
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p>So too here. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that some “success” can be pulled out of the Iraqi failure, but boy are the Wisher in Chief and the Wannabe Wisher committed to clapping their hands until Iraq gets well.
In the end, what constitutes “success” is all in the eye of the beholder. Why define success is a good question.
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p>I guess its just a different way of saying that we (Democrats) need to determine and set out what our objectives in Iraq and the region are and how our policies will achieve them. In the end, once we have made our objectives clear then we can determine whether we have met them or not, i.e. whether they have been successful.
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p>Its also been suggested in response to my initial post that setting out our plans may not be such a good idea because then we could actually be held to account for achieving them. I think otherwise. The reason we need to do this (at least at a high-level) is to give the American people a sense we also have a plan and are not just getting out irregardless of the consequences. I don’t think it will be possible to not spell out what we want to achieve in the region.
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p>As to whether we should just declare Iraq a failure and leave: doing so plays right into McCain’s hands for one and it also makes it out as if we don’t have real interests in the region that do need to be attended to, when we clearly do. As progressives, I’d assume we don’t want a genocide in Iraq. For the purpose of preserving regional peace, we don’t want an overtly Iranian client state in Iraq. We also don’t want undue instability in the region, with all its attendant ramifications for oil prices (as progressives we should care what $200 a barrel may mean to working people) and potential further conflict. Diplomacy will be a big piece of the equation but it is naive to assume that our words can be backed up without some continued military presence, reconfigured and smaller of course.
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p>If we want to draw down our troops in Iraq (which we do) then we need to do so in a way that prevents these worst case scenarios from occuring to the best of our ability. While we don’t control everything in Iraq and some things may happen regardless of what we do, I disagree with the notion that we can’t affect a realistic policy that takes us largely out of direct military engagement while preserving our interests and the larger balance of power in the region. Obama and Clinton have essentially said so much when you read the fine print below their “WE WILL END THE WAR” headline message.
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p>Going forward, our nominee will need to set out a vision for what we do there. We can’t afford to let McCain define the terms of declaring what is in our interests and therefore what success in Iraq is.
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