Just the other day, Dear Husband (DH) was lamenting the paucity of specifics, in either policy or platform, from the presidential candidates thus far.
Via the NY Times, here’s Hillary to his rescue:
WASHINGTON, March 14 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced but significant military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.
In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain in Iraq after taking office would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.
In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more-nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”
From where I sit, it’s been obvious (for years, unfortunately) that American troops will be involved and deployed to the Middle East for a very long time to come. Bush cast the die in Iraq, and although it was horribly, terribly, tragically mishandled, we are where we are, and all the posturing and bloviating in the world won’t cleanly, or completely, extract us.
Polimom wishes desperately that the U.S. hadn’t gone down this road, and FWIW, I always thought it was a stupid idea… but that opinion is, frankly, worth nothing.
We did. Wishes ain’t fishes and all that…
So — we are where we are, Hillary has gone on record as to how she’d handle the Iraq situation if she becomes president… and lots of folks are immediately foaming at the mouth.
Some of this reaction is utterly unsurprising. I fully expected the Out of Iraq Now folks to go right off the deep end, for example… and they have. However, there are some other reactions that caught me off-guard.
Ed Morrissey, for instance:
This statement shows a complete lack of strategic and tactical thinking on the part of someone who want to assume the role of Commander in Chief. The key to stabilizing Iraq and beating the terrorists who have nested in Anbar is restoring order to its capital. If the central government falls, the other goals she mentions — deterring Iran, protecting the Kurds, and so on — will go right out the window. If Baghdad falls into utter chaos and ethnic cleansing, the rest of the nation will follow suit in short order, and Anbar will be the least of our problems.
Even though I don’t always (or even often) agree with him, I respect Captain Ed enormously… but it appears that he (and others, also here) are overlooking a crucial factor: Temporal Distance. By the time we’ve sworn in a new president, Baghdad will most likely have either “fallen into utter chaos” (etc.) … or it won’t.
This is one of the problems with a ridiculously premature presidential campaign during a war. Anything a candidate says they’ll do two years from now assumes conditions to be unchanged — and frankly, that’s ludicrous. If order hasn’t been restored in Baghdad by the end of the summer (much less by January 2009), the U.S. will doubtless begin moving troops into positions very much like Hillary has proposed.
Anything a candidate proposes right now is likely to be moot in two years — including this.
As this endless campaign drags on through time, I fully expect to see a number of candidates back themselves into an inextricable corner as they make sweeping, and probably irrelevant, war commitments. People who deliver pronouncements in black and white will not be able to react to conditions as they change — and they will certainly change substantially.
This is why two years is too big a wrinkle in time.
If order hadn’t been restored in Baghdad by the end of the summer (much less by January 2009), the U.S. will doubtless begin moving troops into positions very much like Hillary has proposed.
I just don’t see it. For reasons I explain in the post, it’s just an untenable position. You can’t have an external army in the middle of a war zone trying to carry on its own finite mission while ignoring their surroundings. If we’re in Iraq with troops, the troops will naturally be a part of what’s going on in Iraq.
The Big Election may be in November 2008, but the primary for many states this time around will be on February 5. So for the first crucial voting, there is less than a year to get your positions out there.
Polimom,
I agree with both you and James Joyner.
(You first.) I agree it is silly for aspiring politicians to be issuing pronouncements on what they would do if they were in charge 2 years before they can possibly be making the decisions. Either they 1) project today’s reality into the future unchanged (which is the same thing as saying what they would do if they were in charge now) or 2) they make assumptions about what reality will look like 2 years from now and how they would respond to that reality when they take charge (in 2 years). The first is useless except as an emotional device to rally the faithful, i.e. “Yeah! He/she thinks like I do! Good for him/her!” The object is to plant the idea that if they think “like I do” now then if I vote them in, they will still think like I do then. There is no other benefit to the “what I would do now” type statements.
Option 2) is more subtle, and that is what I believe Hillary has done. However, she did not describe her assumptions about what the future will look like, so friend and foe alike are just going off about it. Her comments are utterly insane if the future looks like today, and since I do not believe she is insane, just what is she assuming the future will look like?
(Now to James Joyner.) IMHO, she believes The Surge is going to work (mostly). The US forces will provide enough cover and time for the Iraqi army to grow into the security challenge and the Iraqi politicians to strike a deal (which may not hold up over the long term, but that’s another problem . . . ) In that scenario, what Hillary proposes is transparent good sense. If however, she were assuming abject failure of The Surge and the Iraqi army and politicians, then Captain Ed and James Joyner are right–she’s a strategic and tactical dunce, as well as amoral, since she would be willing to ignore a genocide taking place within a day’s drive of several US divisions of troops.
With this statement, IMHO, Hillary is buying insurance against success of the Bush Administration’s revised strategy and objectives in Iraq. She is also putting her Democratic rivals in a bind. They must either reiterate their pledges (to their base) of full withdrawal from Iraq come what may, or make their own future assumptions and state their policies based on them. Since all the leading Democrats are “out now” or “out ASAP with safety for the troops”, they run the risk of looking both opportunistic and strategically clueless come the first primary votes next year.
Very crafty . . . . not the work of a strategically inept thinker at all! 😮
It’s interesting that she would have the troops avoid getting involved if things descended into “ethnic cleansing” – if she thinks our troops would be able to stand by and watch that happen, then she might as well just bring ’em home and cede the area to the bad guys – because any shred of credibility we had left would certainly go down the toilet. (And besides, I am not sure the trouble wouldn’t come looking for the troops in that event.)
~EdT.
Well, there’s Kucinich, who would withdraw everyone immediately, consequences be damned. He is in favor of putting UN troops there.
Of course, Kucinich will get elected the day New Orleans gets Cat 5 levee protection.