1 Boring Old Man

No Middle Way in Iraq

Throughout 2007, Frederick W. Kagan and AEI’s Iraq Planning Group have monitored the situation in Iraq. In January, Kagan released his phase I report, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, which urged a rapid scale-up and military surge to clear and hold key points in Iraq. Phase II focused on establishing stability after the initial military component of the surge. Last week, in anticipation of the testimony of General David Petraeus, he presented a third installment. Kagan argues against "middle-way strategies" that falsely offer prospects for a significant troop drawdown with minimal costs; rather, No Middle Way counters that such "train and equip" strategies would compromise the progress that has been made, including improved security in Baghdad and Anbar, integration of former insurgents into civil police units, and the dispersal of al Qaeda. At the session, retired General Jack Keane described the "remarkable progress, some of it quite unforeseen" that he had observed in Iraq, and argued that now is not the time to embrace defeat.

• Other speakers at the September 5 conference included Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, and James Miller of the Center for a New American Security.
• Kagan recently analyzed the Government Accountability Office’s Iraq report and the report of the Jones Commission. He has written about policy conflicts over the surge.
• Thomas Donnelly and Gary J. Schmitt recently addressed the surge and military capabilities. Donnelly has also written about defeatism on the home front.

• We must reject legislating American surrender and defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan but we must also reject stay the course as an answer.
• We need a new course.
• We need an honest national dialogue and a determination to be candid about our opponents, honest about the problems, and passionately committed to the survival of America as a free country in which its citizens can be safe.
• We need to make changes today to have our 21st century national security structures ready for the challenges of the 21st century.
• We need a blueprint for reform and success. It is not acceptable that we have more impediments to action than enablers for action.
• We need a strategy—not a campaign—to rationalize ends and means to achieve our objectives in this long war against our way of life.
• The American people are fully capable of understanding the scale of the threat, the dangers to our lives, the threats to our very survival.
• The American people showed enormous patience through the great agony of the Civil War.
• The American people sustained the Cold War for 44 years until the Soviet Union disappeared.
• The problem is not with the American people.
• The problem is with our politicians, our news media and our bureaucratic elites.
• They are afraid to tell the American people the truth.
• They are afraid to explain the scale of the threat and the inevitable scale of the needed response…

These are the people who formulated Bush’s Policy back in the 9/11 days. They’d thinned their ranks back in 2001, as many of their scholars had headed for the White House to take over our government. But, in looking over their site, I ran across something of interest – an impromptu Press Conference on September 14, 2001 with the A.E.I. luminaries that hadn’t teleported to the White House – Laurie Mylroie, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, David Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, Newt Gingrich.

It is interesting to compare what they said then to what they’re saying now. These people are unswerving warriors. They are the force behind our disasterous foreign policy, the one that’s dug us in this very deep hole. But they want more…

Bush to announce withdrawal of troops, official says

President Bush is expected this week to announce his plans for cutting back U.S. troop numbers in Iraq, a senior administration official said Tuesday. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the country, told Congress this week he could see troop numbers sliding by 30,000 – which would reduce the number of troops to pre-surge levels – by July 2008. Administration officials did not specifically say the president would use the 30,000 figure – but one said he would "make clear there are challenges ahead in Iraq, but also enough progress" to reduce troop levels…