Bush Coming Out With Timetable For Iraq?
This would certainly be an about-face in Bush’s foreign policy if what is forthcoming is as it is described here:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 — The Bush administration is drafting a timetable for the Iraqi government to address sectarian divisions and assume a larger role in securing the country, senior American officials said.
Details of the blueprint, which is to be presented to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki before the end of the year and would be carried out over the next year and beyond, are still being devised. But the officials said that for the first time Iraq was likely to be asked to agree to a schedule of specific milestones, like disarming sectarian militias, and to a broad set of other political, economic and military benchmarks intended to stabilize the country.
Although the plan would not threaten Mr. Maliki with a withdrawal of American troops, several officials said the Bush administration would consider changes in military strategy and other penalties if Iraq balked at adopting it or failed to meet critical benchmarks within it.
A senior Pentagon official involved in drafting the blueprint said Iraqi officials were being consulted as the plan evolved and would be invited to sign off on the milestones before the end of the year. But he added, “If the Iraqis fail to come back to us on this, we would have to conduct a reassessment” of the American strategy in Iraq.
In a statement issued Saturday night, a White House spokeswoman, Nicole Guillemard, said the Times’s account was “not accurate,” but did not specify what officials found to be inaccurate.
The New York Times is calling this a “timetable,” but given that the anonymous source for this information is apparently describing the new plan as a “schedule of specific milestones” I’m not sure that “timetable” is entirely accurate.
A timetable, to me, means specific dates. It would go something like “Iraqi forces will take over control of Baghdad on December 1st and Falluja on December 15th and then American troops will leave on December 30th.” A “schedule of specific milestones” means, to me at least, something entirely different. More along the lines of “First Iraqi forces will take control of Baghdad, then they’ll take control of Fallujah and then Americans will leave.” That is still a schedule for withdrawal, but it doesn’t have any specific dates. Which means that it wouldn’t really be a reversal of Bush administration policy.
I think President Bush has been right all along to reject a schedule of hard dates for our mission in Iraq. War is a very fluid thing. Trying to live by a schedule of arbitrary dates in an environment as chaotic and full of twists and turns as war is just plain foolish. Not only because any sort of a hard schedule isn’t likely to survive the realities of the war in Iraq, but also because such a schedule can be manipulated for propaganda purposes by our enemies. Any time we’d have to push a date back for operational reasons or whatever our enemies would declare a victory. They’d claim that their “glorious” opposition to the “American infidels” is causing us problems.
Which is probably why so many of President Bush’s political enemies want a hard schedule in Iraq. They can use the hard dates for their own propaganda purposes just as the terrorists do. If we set a date for giving Iraqis control of a particular province or city and then have to push that date back because of some sort of setback the Democrats would undoubtedly seize upon the date change as evidence of the fact that America is losing in Iraq regardless of whether or not such a statement is warranted or not. The Democrats desperately want the war in Iraq to appear to be a failure, and an arbitrary schedule of hard dates in Iraq would, because those dates would undoubtedly have to change given the fluid situation, give them plenty of opportunities to do just that.
Like most Democrat ideas for Iraq, a timetable for withdrawal is not about sound foreign policy. It’s about making Iraq look like a failure (or even be a failure) so that they can use the war as a political weapon against the President.
