Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Obama Like Bush on Iraq?

Thomas Ricks, author of The Gamble and Fiasco (among the best books on Iraq), writes in Foreign Policy that Obama's withdrawal timeline may share Bush's biggest mistake.

It seems to me that by vowing to get out of Iraq in 16 months, President Obama is not departing from the mistakes of George Bush, but repeating them. That is, Bush was persistently overoptimistic about Iraq. His original war plan assumed that the United States would get down to 30,000 troops in Iraq by the fall of 2003. Instead, here we are more than five years later with more than four times that number of troops mired in Iraq. I hope we can stop planning for Iraq only on best-case assumptions. (hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan)

Even writers generally sympathetic to Obama's withdrawal plans (such as Michael Crowley in The New Republic and Fred Kaplan in Slate) have raised concerns about the feasability of his timeline. Even with the wiggle room provided by Obama's caveats on withdrawing combat troops, consulting military commanders and considering events on the ground, as Crowley writes, "it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where troop levels remain stubbornly high."

Ricks concludes The Gamble by predicting that the end result of the surge will be that the US cannot leave Iraq until 2015 or so without a resulting sectarian bloodbath. That awful outcome may be unavoidable at this point as the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the Bush administration calls for a withdrawal by 2011.

Yikes.

--Ballard Burgher

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