To the tune of Auld Lang Syne: “We stay because we stay because we stay because we stay. . We stay because we stay because we stay because we stay"

I didn’t see a transcript, but did anyone in the great meeting yesterday ask this question: Bush, McCain, Crocker and company keep saying we need to stay “until” the Iraqi government is “ready” to take responsibility for its own security. But how can what we call the government be accepted as a government that can induce all insurgents to lay down their arms when it is itself being protected by a foreign government? As long as we are protecting it from its own people, it is not, by definition, a government. Does it occur to them that, inherently, we can never ourselves make this government ready because it’s not and never can be a real government until we are gone? No, because admitting we can’t do something that’s literally impossible is surrender.

We’ve been “training” Iraqi security forces for 5 years now, and yet they supposedly still cannot establish control anywhere. Why not? It’s surely not because Iraqis are incapable of doing it. I’ve always wondered where the hell we get off telling Iraqis they need our training anyway. The Mahdi army and the Sunni insurgents don’t seem to need any training to fight hard. Or could it possibly be that the security forces have no motivation beyond earning an income to keep their families alive, and have no desire whatsoever to protect the status quo as long as it includes a foreign army? Are we training them in tanks and fighter jets? Of course not, but how can they provide security without the instruments of security necessary when there’s no social compact – i.e., before the Swiss model takes hold? Obviously, you need tanks, and armored personnel carriers and artillery and jet fighters to maintain security in Iraq and protect the borders. Why aren’t they getting those things so they can stand up so we can stand down? Because maybe half of them would defect to the insurgents and unfriendly militias, and turn them on American soldiers? (At which point the other half would join them or go home?) If that’s the case, why the hell are we there?

It seems to me, too, that Iraqis who are willing to be freedom fighters against a foreign invader should be the very core of building national strength. The only possible solution is for the leaders of the Shia, Sunni and Kurds to get together and figure out how to solve the dilemmas we created. Maybe some of the people and structures of government we created will be retained, but the leaderships of those groups will themselves have to figure out a modus vivendi. They will have to decide all that. They don’t like each other much, we are told, but that’s the only way it can happen. We can’t do it ourselves, and we can’t even broker it – at least under this Presidency -- because except in the case of the Kurds, it would seem likely that nobody who involves themselves with the United States will be accepted as leaders. We might have a chance to broker the brokers, which I assume will have to be Syria and Saudi Arabia supporting the Sunnis and Iran supporting the Shia. Maybe we should be at the table, if they will let us, to support the Kurds, but it seems like it would be preferable for somebody else, almost anybody else, to take on that role.

Iran can get back into the game easily: Ahmajinedad simply has to apologize for his obnoxious statements about the Holocaust – just say he’s learned a lot, and learned he was wrong – and that his words about Israel being “wiped off the face of the map” was a mistranslation of figurative language. Yes, he has much sympathy for the struggles of the Palestine people, and will always support them in their struggle, but he will also support their efforts to obtain a just and lasting peace with Israel. Would that be so hard to do? Probably would be harder to get it published in U.S. newspapers than to actually say it. (How could Iran be a convenient enemy if we heard him he say that stuff?)

So here’s where we are now: by Senator McCain’s “100-year” formulation, we have to stay until we have forced all the Iraqis to be happy with our staying, at which point, assuming we reach that point within 10 years, we can stay for another 90-something years because nobody’s shooting at us. Although ostensibly neutral polling inside Iraq has seemed to indicate a huge majority of Iraqis already want us out of there as soon as possible, and although we have to bomb out a few neighborhoods once in a while with some unfortunate civilian collateral damage to kill some of those who are not happy with our staying, we can make the Iraqis as a whole happy to have us because … well, because we’re the United States of America, I guess. For sure, we cannot leave until all the Iraqis are happy to have us there, because it would be surrender to succumb to the wishes of the majority of the Iraqis.

Anybody who doesn’t get that as high geopolitical strategy that serves the critical national interests of the United States of America is either a traitor or a coward. Anyone who thinks we are twisted into a logical monstrosity, and who doesn’t think the same people who did not have a clue what they were talking about and put us into the mess, will have the right answers for getting us out of it can just shut up – and we’re not going to listen to them anyway. Only those who think we should stay until we force the Iraqis to be happy with our staying will be given a microphone.