Democrats to Press Bush to Redeploy Troops in Iraq - New York Times

Democrats to Press Bush to Redeploy Troops in Iraq - New York Times

Its been a while since I got into this blog. The mid term elections have come and gone and the Dems took control. Now the question is whether they will foolishly over reach and misread the American people, or restrain the urge to whole sale reverse course in Iraq.

First off, the Dems won not because they have such great ideas for running the country, but because Americans are convinced that the President's conduct of the war is not working and they were fed up with 12 years of Republican control of Congress and the White House in which the Republicans forgot who the heck they were supposed to be.

On Iraq, I think Americans are clear that Iraq is a mess and the administration's strategy for prosecuting it is not adequate to the complexity of the situation. Oh yeah, I know, a lot of people have no idea what Iraq was to accomplish in the first place. To recap, the Bush administration took down Iraq in order to lean on the surrounding countries more effectively to obtain their help in going after terrorist networks. This limited goal was achieved, we got a ot of cooperation from surrounding countries. The problem became mission creep as it went from muscling regional players to implanting democracy to full scale nation building in a socio-cultural political situation the administration never fully understood. As Colin told them, "if you break it, you own it".

While there are plenty of Americans who say bring the troops home now, I think most recognize that having gone in there and wreaked all this havoc, its not a responsible or prudent thing to simply up and leave. Furthermore, the Iraqi people have been plunged into a living hell and I think there is a moral obligation on this country to try to salvage some hope for their futures from this mess.

The other issue was corruption and plain old partisan power politics. The republicans have ruled with an iron fist, and Congress and the White House just scratched each other's back. Congress let the President do whatever he wanted more or less, backing him with legislation. The White House for its part, hasn't vetoed one bit of the hysterical spending being done by Congress. The deficit is getting hammered and the corporate and moneyed interests of this country were being entrenched while the little guy got screwed.

But as the article in the NYT highlights, its now time to see if the democrats are truly able to govern. Iraq is a complex situation. Bush's strategy has failed because it didn't recognize that, and the Dems already sound guilty of the same failure of understanding with their calls for redeployment in the short term. There was a strategic rationale to the Iraq war. The problem is that the war opened up a large can of worms, a Pandora's box that Bush needs to close. The downside is that there are no good options in Iraq now. All we have are bad choices. The Dems make a mistake if they think that the simplistic answer of just bring the troops home is the right move. Bush's strategy failed for lack of respect for the complexity of the problem. The Dems are poised to make a similar mistake.