The real Iraq question
7:35pmBoth sides in the Iraq debate tend to ignore, or downplay, the downside to their preferred course of action. On Meet the Press, New York Times columnist David Brooks put the dilemma that both sides need to address:
Personally, I think having gone in there in the first place the Coalition has a moral obligation to see it through. But I expect that mine is a minority opinion. 
So are we willing to prevent 10,000 Iraqi deaths a month at the cost of 125 Americans? That's a tough moral issue, but it's also a tough national interest issue because we don't know what the consequences of getting out are. And the frustration of watching the debate in Washington, very few people are willing to, to grapple with those two facts, that there's--that the surge will not work in the short-term, but getting out will be cataclysmic. And you see politicians on both sides evading one of those two facts. But you've got to grapple with them both.
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hogarth zombie
July 23rd, 2007 8:04pm Report this commentwhat does "see it through" mean, James? Are there any limits?
James Forsyth
July 23rd, 2007 8:18pm Report this commentSee it through means staying until we are no longer acting as a restraint on Sunni Shiite violence.
M. Fernandez, CPT, JA, U.S. Army
July 23rd, 2007 11:46pm Report this commentPetraeus's strategy is based on the successful British Malaya counterinsurgency strategy. That took 8 years. The strategy in Iraq is already working in Al Anbar and Diyala. We should stay until the central government and the Iraqi military are strong enough to maintain their own peace (although I suspect that there will always be some low level of violence in Iraq). I cannot understand why liberals are so concerned about deaths in Darfur and yet so willing to let the Iraqis die. They seem more obsessed with the right or wrongness of going to war rather than the right or wrongness of leaving people to certain slaughter.
Hal from NY
July 24th, 2007 12:43am Report this commentShould the British have stayed in India after 1947? After all, there was a lot of bloodshed in the wake of their departure. The Raj might still be going on.
EyeSee
July 24th, 2007 8:35am Report this commentIf you are oppressed and a force comes in to end it, you would expect the good people to support you (as in liberated countries in WWII) but what do we see in Iraq? The Iraqis seem pretty much to treat what happens around them as somebody else's problem. And that is the key. If they don't appreciate the effort on their behalf then it really is a lost cause. It is not the left's hated Western invaders, but rather the Muslim invaders from Iran and the like causing the mayhem. Where is the uprising? Where is the indignation of the Iraqi people against these murderers (that's real murderers left-liberal, not your ideological, invented ones in US uniforms). The weak minded people who blame Israel for every problem in the Middle East say we had no right to steal Palestinian land to invent a Jewish state. What about the Palestinian land now called Jordan which we invented? The Saudi Royal family? Iraq itself? Facts are so tedious aren't they, particularly when you base the world around a preset ideology of left liberal stupidity. Let's get out of Iraq now.
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