I don't think Obama is walking in Bush's failed footsteps. First, with David Petraeus, the US managed to somewhat secure the situation with the surge. Now it's just a matter of handing it off to the Iraqi government. I think that the withdrawal date is realistic and that Iraq will step in and complete its part.

Bret-http://student-view-world.blogspot.com/

The Raimondo piece is blatantly manipulative and sarcastic. Putting it up as a 'straw fool' is not a fair presentation of the 'start out now' positions of folks like FP associate Marc Lynch. Read that carefully. When we START may be more important than a guess about when our last track clears the border.

Beyond Obama's clear promise to rapidly wind down the occupation, he inherits a SOFA/withdrawal agreement that W signed off on. The last admin grudgingly agreed to a clear instruction from the Iraq executive and legislature to begin leaving now: Be gone from the cities mid-summer 09, and all combat troops out in 16 months.

Even assuming that the 2010 Iraq govt is good with 40K US trainers in 2011, (Ricks points out those are combat troops too, and trainer casualties confirm that), pulling 100K out removes 7,000 a month for 15 months, starting in April. If we hold at 130K until after Ramadan and elections, we'll need to pull 10-11K/month, which no one is saying is safe, cost effective, or even doable.

Gen Odierno's valid opinion that they'll need us for another 10 years is going to run hard up against the fact that Maliki shored his flagging popularity by getting Team W to agree to withdraw. The SOFA difficulty in Parliament was that so many didn't even want to vote on any legitimizing instument. We're that popular. Most expect the SOFA to easily pass a public referendum. Any Iraq party that's too beholden to US occupation for stability likely will be tossed aside or violently challenged. Like Chalabi and Allawi.

What are the odds that some combination of Christian and secular Arabs, Kurds, or Sunni returnees will convince enough Shiites 'we need Americans, let's strtch the SOFA out another year or two? I suggest that becomes more possible if we begin to demonstrate willingness to abide by Bush's SOFA agreement. Yes it's risky, but it is bipartisan enough (negotiated under teh eye of Crocker and Petraeus) that Team Obama is not swinging in the breeze at the first glitch. Actively refusing to begin the pullout will re-invigorate those that believe driving the foreign devils out is the only path to sovereignty.

Let's say that Odierno is right, that conditions are not set for complying with SOFA, and Maliki or his successor doesn't seem willing to extend. Do we engineer a coup? Are we going over the heads of Baghdad to ask for popular referendum to stay, as Ron Paul once (ironically) suggested. Not likely we'd get that chance. What will Obama and Odierno's successor face in a circumstance where the minority asking us to stay are shooting at those demanding we live up to SOFA?

Compounding the SOFA deadline is that the 2007 'surge' had 'force reduction' built into it, because of the huge stress it placed on the US ground force. The surge period drained the better part of a division in direct casualties and KIA's. Nearly half those casualties are noncoms and officer, talent not replaceable thru new recruits. A quarter of the force in Iraq today is still serving 15 month tours.

With the 17,000 more being sent to Afghanistan we will have 200,000+ men deployed in both wars, more than at the peak of the surge. McKiernan is drumming his fingers for the strategic review to agree that he gets another 10,000, as per his 2008 needs. Even in the phased withdrawal that SOFA demands, our army is a full year away from BEGINNING a reset. That's what Casey and Pace knew in November 06.

In a room full of bad and worse choices, every option is high risk. Living up to our written SOFA word improves the prospects for strategic patience from our Iraqi partners, and maybe NATO too. We can't honor the spirit or letter of the SOFA without visibly edging for the door now. Let's suck it up, thank our hosts, and pay attention if anyone invites us to sit back down for tea, cakes and talk.

I'm impressed. From the excerpt in the Times, your book looks fascinating.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article5776368.ece

Sorry, Mr. Ricks, but the United States military has no legitimate business in Iraq to begin with. The war was an atrocity for which there is no adequate moral justification. It released still-unmeasured gushers of death, mutilation, pain and material loss into the world, and its perpetrators are criminals who should be locked up. If Obama is in danger of anything, it is the danger posed by the usual hazard befalling civilian leaders: the susceptibility to being dazzled and intimidated by pins and ribbons and medals, by square jaws, stiff postures and pompous bearings, and succumbing to the military predators who always want more, and who will never stop looking for ways of turning their botched and barbaric ultraviolent escapades into "wins", in the name of spurious and fantastic "national interests", interests that reside more in the reputations of the powerful than the well-being of the citizenry.

I support victory for the American people, not victory for the national security class who planned and executed this piece of barbarism. If the national security class suffers a humiliating loss, Americans as a whole will win. Our children now and in the future will be safer from their incessant predatory hunt for cannon fodder and tax dollars. Maybe Americans can finally pull the plug on the obese and sick national security leviathan that has swallowed this country, but represents a dying post-WWII and Clod War era.

Obama is not overoptimistic about Iraq. In fact, he considers Iraq of small importance – like most Americans. The improved security in Iraq did not help John McCain in the presidential election because voters believed our successes in Iraq came with too high a price tag. Ironic for McCain,” victory” turned out to be rather worthless.

All goals have a limit on acceptable costs. Iraq ended up costing too much, too much in lives, too much in money, and too much in international reputation. Now, America has a serious problem -- "it's the economy, stupid!"

Of course Obama can’t have our departure from Iraq produce a quick unraveling of the country allowing chaos to be unleashed. That would hurt him politically at home. So he must be careful with exiting the country.

Sorry Mr. Ricks but it seems abundantly clear that YOU are the one repeating Bush's mistake by staying there and throwing good lives and money after bad.

According to Joan Walsh, you yourself admit that the surge was a strategic failure. The war party has had more than its fair share of chances at achieving whatever their objective du jeur happens to be.

The Iraq War is an unjust and illegal war of aggression that was sold to the American people by means of a despicable WMD hoax. This unjust war has killed as many as a million Iraqis. That is quite a lot of dead people. Few tyrants can claim as many deaths. I'm not sure that even Saddam Hussein killed that many Iraqis.

You can pretend you want to stay there for their own good but the Iraqis say they want us out. In fact their democratically elected government -- remember all the purple fingers? -- already voted us out. Who are YOU to overrule THEM?

All that's left to do is figure out what our reparations bill is and get out in as orderly a fashion as possible. From the American perspective we already have the worst case scenario. We have replaced a secular, anti-Iranian, power-balancing regime with a bunch of religious fanatics who treat women like subhumans and will be a satellite of Iran. You can't unscrew that pooch.

If we want to help the Iraqis -- THE IRAQIS -- with police protection we can do that. We can provide air support and Special Operations forces where appropriate. We could even leave a small number of troops behind -- and I mean small.

But when one faction of your government unjustly attacks a country and a different faction takes over and the citizens of the victim country want you to leave, then the just thing for the new faction to do is leave.

We also can't afford it.

As far as I've been able to gather, there is far, far less than meets the eye to Ricks' claims. I haven't read the book, so maybe I'm missing something, but I read Ricks' interview with Amazon.com and came away puzzled at just what all the sound and fury is over.

Step 1 in the bait and switch is redefining what "The Surge" is. When Bush proposed his escalation, the argument was all about whether or not we should be putting 30,000 extra troops in Iraq. That is what we on the left opposed: more troops in Iraq.

But what Ricks and others are doing now is conflating the surge with a contemporaty change towards more sensitive counterinsurgency tactics. Nobody was against using smarter counterinsurgency tactics and talking to people in neighborhoods rather than breaking heads. Couldn't they have talked to people in neighborhoods with the men they already had?

Step 2 in the bait and switch is conceding all of the counterarguments against the surge but then going on as if they were minor details. So Ricks concedes that the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was already over before the surge. And Ricks concedes that putting the Sunnis on the U.S. payroll stopped them from attacking us. Finally, Ricks admits right up front that the surge utterly failed to accomplish its intended goal -- the strategic objective of political reconciliation.

Well damn, Tom. That doesn't leave much for the surge to take credit for, does it? Not much at all.

The bottom line, apparently, is that Ricks has written a book about the history of the surge and Ricks thinks we need to stay in Iraq -- and those two facts have almost nothing to do with each other.

"Suppose you wanted to arrive at a specific location in Chicago (or some other city unfamiliar to you). A street map of the city would be a great help. But suppose you were given the wrong map, and it was actually a map of Detroit, even though labeled Chicago. Can you imagine the frustration and ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination? Behavior and attitude could not help you if you start out with the wrong map. But once you get the right map, then diligence and attitude can make a real difference. But the first and most important requirement is the accuracy of the map."

Stephen Covey

I think we need a new map.

I just read Rick's editorial in the CJ and believe there is a lot of truth in what he says regarding our government's intention to remain in Iraq for a long time. This may have some impact on the editorial to the CJ.

Rick's view is a warning I believe. A warning that there is a sinister commonality of shared power at our goverments highest level, motivated by greed, power and special interests. One of the members of this commonality is the military and their industrial counterparts.

They must be made to realize that there is a new economic and defense paradigm fostered by a reduction in our power and wealth, a result of the military and economic excesses of Bush, and showing up in the latest economic and military failures and costs, but going back to Reagan and including Clinton. This new paradigm does not support or allow us to continue our military inteference in the Middle East, Mesopatamia or South Asia based on fear, economics and intervention. The new paradigm will require the use of our many other instruments of national power, reducing the military costs and uses to only direct national defense and security matters. This means less money and deployments around the world for our military while using our State Department. Our State Department should be driving the train in Iraq and Afghanistan with the military involved in only a limited way if at all. We must demilitarize our country and government.

The longer Obama is in Washington the more he is likely to become part of the sinister commonality of power that is meant to ensure the wealthy stay wealthy and businesses stay blessed and the military stay powerful. The new paradigm reality of us having less world power does not support the continuation of this sinister commonality of power. Change. Harold Trainer, USAF RET Viet Nam Vet

----- Original Message -----

I guess the question is complex: How many combat-troops can be withdrawn without loosing the capacity to defend the supply of the troops remaining? How many combat-troops are nedded to protect the various investments made by private companies? And for that sake, how many are needed to stage a military coup if Maliki goes hardcore and joins Iran?

The question back of course is to what extent the US can retain such a huge forcepresence for 5-10 years, and if loosing Afghanistan is worth it.

While Obama was telling the CBC reporter in Ottawa that he "believes in diplomacy and development and not military solutions", 17,000 troops were heading to Afghanistan! He hasn't learned anything from the Bush Regime of Errors it seems. Or is warmongering conditional upon the relative charisma of its presidential advocate?

I don't think anyone in the administration thinks that we'll be withdrawing from Iraq because everything is going great. My opinion, and I think that of most that favor withdrawal, is that we should leave because there's limited strategic gains available and we're unpopular among the Iraq people. I tend to put the most weight on the second point.

At present, the Status of Forces Agreement mandates withdraw by the end of 2011 and withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 2009. That's assuming we can win the referendum which will may be quite tricky if we haven't shown signs of heading out.

Tom Ricks' is an expert on this certainly, so I believe him that there's fighting ahead. But I read the Outlook article an aside from mentioning the risk of ejection he didn't talk about the SOFA.

What's the basis of for believing that the Iraqi popular opinion and/or the Iraqi government will reverse course and ask us to stay through 2015? I don't think in the past we became more popular when things got more violent. Similarly if the situation declines the Iraqi government will become more dependent on us, but the government itself would then become less popular and likely be voted out in favor of those that favor U.S. withdraw.

I apologize if Ricks explains this in the book, but I didn't catch it during his Daily Show appearance or in the Outlook article.