MindSpinner

Every weekday morning, a student office aide brings me a newspaper in my classroom. Most days I don’t have time to look at it. If I manage ten minutes for a working lunch and two bathroom breaks, it is a good, comparatively relaxed day. I check the headlines online at home, and sometimes I drill down for more, but mostly I am behind. My favorite news source, NPR, is outblared, a lot of the time, by Jimmy Eat World, or whatever else my kids are playing, using the eMac downstairs for a boom box. (You have to give Apple credit; it’s a pretty effective boom box. If only the million dollars in funny money found in the dryer yesterday had been real, the teen tykes would have iPods and headphones for Christmas, and I would have NPR.)

A holiday, though, affords me a chance to catch up. I’m noting with particular interest the turning of the tide regarding Iraq. Early this year, Bush, upon direct questioning, indicated that, if the Iraqi government asked for a pull-out, he would honor that request. On January 28, the New York Times reported Bush’s remark in an interview:

[A]sked if, as a matter of principle, the United States would pull out of Iraq at the request of a new government, he said: ‘’Absolutely. This is a sovereign government. They’re on their feet.'’

Now that the elected Iraqi government is calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, I like to think that Bush is cornered by the demands of integrity. The whole world has him cornered. The LA Times suggests this morning that this is so:

President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces.

The administration’s pivot on the issue comes as the White House is seeking to relieve enormous pressure by war opponents. The camp includes liberals, moderates and old-line conservatives who are uneasy with the costly and uncertain nation-building effort.

It also follows agreement this week among Iraqi politicians that the U.S. troop presence ought to decrease. Meeting in Cairo, representatives of the three major ethnic and religious groups called for a U.S. withdrawal and recognized Iraqis’ “legitimate right of resistance” to foreign occupation. In private conversations, Iraqi officials discussed a possible two-year withdrawal period, analysts said.

The developments seemed to lay the groundwork for potentially large withdrawals in 2006 and 2007, consistent with scenarios outlined by Pentagon planners. The approach also tracks the thinking of some centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior representative of his party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden’s call for an Iraq timetable, published in the Washington Post today, lights the way forward. Biden begins,

The question most Americans want answered about Iraq is this: When will our troops come home?

We already know the likely answer. In 2006, they will begin to leave in large numbers. By the end of the year, we will have redeployed about 50,000. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 will follow. A small force will stay behind — in Iraq or across the border — to strike at any concentration of terrorists.

There’s more, of course. I feel somewhat better already just to read a plan by someone who has bothered to envision one. In a pinch (and the Iraq debacle is a mighty pinch), I don’t really care how we achieve the turn of the Screw-Up, I’m just glad to think that this may be occurring, even while I’m going about the business of my days and writing posts about the dog and the cat.

On another level, my concern is that, even if policy is redirected, we simply do not have leadership in place skilled and with-it and visionary enough to see us through - unless the Bush administration is willing to lay aside hubris and listen to wiser voices while simultaneously grappling with actualities instead of trying to crochet palatable perceptions out of lies. Leaving Iraq means leaving an Iraqi army to defend a nation, if we are not to fail Iraq utterly, and the formation of that Iraqi army remains a worrisome challenge. James Fallows, in the latest issue of The Atlantic, explores the obstacles to success. Having interviewed those close to the situation, Fallows writes:

What I heard amounted to this: The United States has recently figured out a better approach to training Iraqi troops. Early this year it began putting more money, and more of its best people, on the job. As a result, more Iraqi units are operating effectively, and fewer are collapsing or deserting under pressure. In 2004, during major battles in Fallujah, Mosul, and elsewhere, large percentages of the Iraqi soldiers and policemen supposedly fighting alongside U.S. forces simply fled when the shooting began. But since the Iraqi elections last January “there has not been a single case of Iraqi security forces melting away or going out the back door of the police station,” Petraeus told me. Iraqi recruits keep showing up at police and military enlistment stations, even as service in police and military units has become more dangerous.

But as the training and numbers are getting somewhat better, the problems created by the insurgency are getting worse—and getting worse faster than the Iraqi forces are improving. Measured against what it would take to leave Iraqis fully in charge of their own security, the United States and the Iraqi government are losing ground. Absent a dramatic change—in the insurgency, in American efforts, in resolving political differences in Iraq—America’s options will grow worse, not better, as time goes on.

By the end of the six-page article (in its online form), Fallows outlines necessary the level of commitment we must make to training an Iraqi army if we are to leave honorably. I, in my little house with my stack of essays to read this afternoon, simply do not know enough to weigh Fallows’ conclusions, which I’ve excerpted below, but I do know that I fervently hope the exit plan for this war and for the building of the Iraqi army somehow, behind the scenes, falls into extraordinarily capable hands.

In sum, if the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for “transformation,” and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters. It will need to create large new training facilities for American troops, as happened within a few months of Pearl Harbor, and enroll talented people as trainees. It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes. It will need to broaden the Special Forces ethic to much more of the military, and make clear that longer tours will be the norm in Iraq. It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq—and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years—before it is too late.

Postscript:

Now then, while we have George W. Bush facing the demands of reality, let’s please call upon him to note recent findings regarding the influence of human activities on the build-up of greenhouse gases tied to global warming (CO2 levels being 25% higher than they have been at any time during the last 650,000 years).