Sep 11th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Petraeus: No “Victory”
General Petraeus recognizes what all sensible people can see, but John McCain and George W. Bush can’t, that there will be no victory in Iraq no matter what we do.
Combine this with Nouri al-Maliki’s endorsement of progressive proposals for a timeline for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and in a sane universe we’d all be recognizing about know that the conservative emperor has no clothes on Iraq.
30 Responses to “Petraeus: No “Victory””
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September 11th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Petraeus is obviously a liberal who hates the troops.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Way to take words way out of context, Matthew. Taking lessons from McCain’s campaign?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Re “the conservative emperor has no clothes on Iraq.”
———
John McCain buck naked? Eewww. I could have done without that picture, Matthew. I bet Cindy turns the lights out.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Plus, dont forget Sarah, too!! She is an expert in foreign affairs and knows God’s plan is for VICTORY!.. (so that the lower 48 states can be annialation for the apocalypse and Alaska can be the refuge) .. so much for putting State’s Rights first..
September 11th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
“This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not war with a simple slogan.”
This is what any sensible person, including Obama, would say. Think McCain and Palin will be questioning Petraeus’ patriotism now?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Wow, poor use of the block quote tags there. Let me try that again.
Virgule, the point remains that Petraeus is hesitant to say there will ever be a “victory” in Iraq while McCain and Palin threw it around the convention like it was a foregone conclusion. Then they subsequently decried Obama for refusing to use it…of course, for the same reasons Petraeus refuses to use it. Petraeus himself says
This is what any sensible person, including Obama, would say. Think McCain and Palin will be questioning Petraeus’ patriotism now?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Bob, I actually agree with what you said and it’s worth pointing out. But that’s not what Yglesias said. “There will be no victory” implies either defeat or never-ending warfare. That’s clearly not what Petreaus said or meant. The fact that it’s not easy to declare victory does not mean that victory is out of reach. It just means that we will only know in hindsight if it happens.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Virgule, I also think part of the point is that it’s not easy to define victory in Iraq, contrary to the McCain/Palin point of view. If we want to define it as a peaceful, stable Iraq that is free of any al-Qaida influence and is a functioning democracy, then we might as well say that “there will be no victory,” right? Or that “victory” as defined above would take some exceedingly long period of time? Matt stretched what Petraeus said to reach his own conclusion, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable conclusion to make.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Bob, you may be able to argue those things but that doesn’t seem to be what Petraeus is saying and the whole point of the post is that Yglesias wanted to use Petraeus to support his argument. And that is definitely a stretch. Petraeus seems cautiously optimistic. I mean, obviously he wants to be careful and he keeps mentioning how the situation is fragile but the trend is definitely looking very good right now. It’s getting hard to argue that Iraq is a quagmire like it seemed just a year ago.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Petaeus said before Congress that this war wouldn’t end like WWII with an enemy surrender on a battleship. Whatever we’ve accomplished in Iraq can be quickly lost if the three major ethnic groups start slaughtering each other again. Have you noticed that the troops we sent to Bosnia over a decade ago are still there also?
September 11th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Actually, US troops pulled out of Bosnia a few years ago. It is now essentially an EU protectorate, but point taken. If you’re implying that Iraq might end up like Bosnia (or Germany, Japan, South Korea), then that doesn’t strike me as being all that bad.
September 11th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Woooo! I didn’t think today’s War or Car would be relevant when I put it up, but it was!
September 11th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Virgule, I didn’t mean that partition was a good outcome, though there are certainly worse. I meant that the ancient ethnic rivalries are so ingrained that a peacekeeper or honest broker may be required for some time, as in Bosnia. It worries me that the Shia who comprise 60% of the populace are in such a hurry for us to leave, while the Sunnis and Kurds want us to stay. I think AQ and Sadr are much weakened, but that ethnic tensions could boil over quickly.
The Middle East has few examples of shared power of any sort. It would be a tragedy if Iraq fell into sectarian war after all that they and we have been through.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Wish all you want E. “Victory” or whatever happens in Iraq is up to Iraqis. We can stay for six months or 100 years. We cannot decide their fate. All we can do is to decide to leave or stay at costs that are way too high already. Bosnia is no comparison at all, not even close.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
nukev, I agree it’s up to the Iraqis. We have responsibilities, but in the final analysis they must decide if they want to be a real nation. It could go either way. Ben Franklin said after the Constitutional Convention, “We’ve given you a republic, if you can keep it”. We’ve given the Iraqis a chance they never had before — at great cost. What will they do with it?
September 11th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
The Middle East has few examples of shared power of any sort. It would be a tragedy if Iraq fell into sectarian war after all that they and we have been through.
Did you know that before you started a damn war?!?!
Because I did, this is what makes my head want to explode. I knew what the Shia were, I knew what the Sunni were, I knew what the Kurds where, every academic IR specialist understood what was going to happen (including a Condelezza Rice who wasn’t stuck mouthing bullcrap for the Bush administrations).
If you *did* know that’s almost worse, but if you *didn’t* why don’t you just sort of concede this is the sort of thing you in over your pay grade for and stick with writing letters to the paper about your property taxes.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Ed Marshall, of course. That’s what stopped Bush senior. GWB, the Democrat leadership, and previously the Clinton administration all concluded that removing Saddam was worth the risk. Only a couple dozen Senators voted against the war. Eventually, Saddam would have died or been deposed, anyway, and all hell would have broken loose. Like after Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart.
I’m happy to let historians debate the wisdom or folly of our decision to remove Saddam. What matters at this point is that we gradually turn the defense of the country over to the Iraqi government without the place falling apart again.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:14 am
GWB, the Democrat leadership, and previously the Clinton administration all concluded that removing Saddam was worth the risk.
It was all political! It was bullcrap to pander to the hoopleheads (ie, you). We need to get serious in this country. We aren’t there yet, the Obama Campaign isn’t serious enough about foreign policy either. This is disgraceful, it’s idiocracy.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Oh, OK.
September 12th, 2008 at 1:12 am
It wasn’t? You seem to be able to string a sentence together. This wasn’t a bad idea? No historian in the future is going to think this was a great idea. If rainbows start jumping out everyone’s collected asses in Iraq tomorrow, it’s still not a good story. It’s still a tragedy.
You don’t get this? I’m talking to a wall here? Do you not understand what you did?
September 12th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Actually, if you read Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic, I am not sure how McCain defines victory. At one point he and Lindsay Graham tell Goldberg victory will mean “withdrawl with honor.” At the same time, it clearly reveals that McCain believes in “preventive” war as a useful way to solve problems and he views the current Government of Iran as a problem. He asserts that Iran could develop an nuclear weapon; if it does it could give it to Hezbollah; and Hezbollah will then launch it at Israel, which he considers the same as an attack on the U.S. I don’t know what kind of war he would launch on Iran, I assume primarily an air war and sea blockade, but such a war would justify the continued occupation of Iraq, especially if Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq, either directly or through surrogates. And from his beliefs about Vietnam and in his actions regarding Iraq, McCain will believe that if can maintain the “will” to victory, that will be sufficient to win the war no matter the costs because once started, “the Honor” of the United States means only victory is acceptable. Neither he or Goldberg seem not to consider the moral question that launching such a war will send tens of thousands to their deaths, based on an hypothesis that they may be saving more people from some possible future event. (By the way, neocons like to use the Rhineland example with Iran, where France and GB failed to stop Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. Its a poor analogy in many ways. But that would not have been a “preventive” war. It would rather been a direct and appropriate response, with the correlation of forces very much to their advantage, to a direct act of agression breaching the Versailles treaty and putting France and Belguim under direct threat. A classic example of a “preventive war” was the German/Austro-Hungarian response to Serbia, Russia and France in July 1914. That did not work out so well.
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