Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down yesterday with the editors of the New York Daily News to discuss Iraq policy. She repeated most of the mantras we’ve come to expect from administration officials, including the obligatory sense of impatience.
“[O]ur patience is not endless — not just the patience of the American people but the patience of the administration.
“They’re hard issues, but they don’t have the luxury, really, of time.”
Top administration officials, including the president, say stuff like this all the time. Iraqis need to get better, faster. Our patience is limited. Ours is not an open-ended commitment.
The Bush gang really needs to change its rhetorical approach, because none of this makes any sense. Or more to the point, the rhetoric is entirely inconsistent with administration policy.
Bush’s approach to the war is predicated on the notion that our patience has to be endless. To do otherwise would be to leave before the job is done, which would mean, as the White House sees it, the decline of Western civilization. If our patience is limited, we might abandon Iraq, leaving terrorists to fill a power vacuum that will endanger the world.
Rice added that Iraqis don’t have the “luxury” of time. This echoes the recent comments of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who insisted, “The clock is ticking.” This, too, sounds nice, but contradicts the war strategy. As the administration sees it, if Iraqis are given a finite amount of time, the “suiciders” and “dead-enders” will think we’ll eventually leave, and they’ll “wait us out.”
Put it this way: it’s not helpful for Rice to suggest time is of the essence when the rest of the administration is talking about the “Korean model” in which the U.S. will maintain a presence in Iraq for the next five decades.
By definition, this is a conflict with no intended end. The administration says the war is over when Iraq can sustain, govern, and defend itself. As far as Bush, Rice, McCain, and Lieberman are concerned, we can’t leave until it does. By any reasonable definition of the phrase, that is, of course, an open-ended commitment.
If this debate is going to have any intellectual seriousness to it, war supporters, including Rice, have to admit the obvious. In January, on Meet the Press, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), was at least honest about it.
Graham: We should try to win this war. And the day you say we’re going to withdraw — three months, six months, a year from now — the effect will be that the militants will be emboldened, the moderates will be frozen, and we will have sent the message to the wrong people. Who started this…
Russert: So we’re stuck there forever.
Graham: Well, you stay there with a purpose to win.
In other words, given this worldview, we very well may be stuck there forever. Or, given the Korea talk, at least mid-way through the 21st century.
So, Secretary Rice, let’s cut the talk about our limited patience and limited time. Either change the policy or change the rhetoric, because right now, the two clearly don’t go together well.