Frank Rich: Petraeus' "I don't know" moment.
Frank Rich talks about how General Petraeus, the chief Bush propagandist for the occupation of Iraq, said, "I don't know" when asked if the occupation had made this country safer from terrorism. For the last few months, the Republicans touted him as the professional soldier that would tell the truth about the progress in Iraq. But when it came down to the key question, whether that occupation had made us safer from terrorism, he could not give a straight answer. In other words, given his poor record on Iraq elsewhere, he was exposed with that answer as nothing more than a propagandist and not a general capable of managing a conflict.
The phony military offensive that he launched has been shown to be a complete shambles. There are more sectarian deaths than before, the so-called "government" has only met one out of their 18 benchmarks, there are more deaths of our troops than there were before, and the air strikes that we have launched in increasing number speak to the desperation on the part of the Bush administration, not the success.
And if we accept that the reason that the 9/11 attacks were successful was because of the lack of communication between the various agencies dedicated to stopping that, by that measuring stick, we are no safer than we were before 9/11. Rich points out that Petraeus is out of touch with his own CIA man, Michael Scheurer, who said that Bin Laden was stronger today than he was before 9/11.
George Bush would not lead on Iraq -- he passed the buck to Petraeus. And Petraeus will not lead either, given his "I don't know" moment at his testimony. So, we must lead where the Republicans fail. We must recognize that unlike Vietnam, Iraq is a failed state that is slipping into anarchy. There is no way to guarantee that the various political factions will stop fighting. But setting a date certain beyond which our troops will not be there is still the right way to go. It will put the various political factions on notice that they cannot count on calling in the US military or calling in air strikes to dispatch political foes. It will put them on notice that they must stop depending on us to provide security that we cannot provide. The various political factions in the former Iraq must be forced to take responsiblity for their own futures, not wait on us to impose a solution.
From there, the rest must be up to them. We must do everything that is in our power to help -- call a regional summit, work with Iran and Syria, and settle refugees from that country here in the US. But how the region that was formerly the nation of Iraq is divided up must be up to the Iraqi people, as well as the repatriation of the refugees and the distribution of the oil revenues. Doing so means coming to terms with the limits of our own power -- we must recognize that there is no military solution to this crisis; only a political solution.
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