In August, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) traveled to Baghdad and received a briefing from Gen. David Petraeus, in which he acknowledged his belief that in order to “win” in Iraq, U.S. forces would have to stay in the country for “nine or 10 years.”
This was hardly reassuring. Indeed, for every pundit who insists that the Bush policy is finally, after years of failure, on the right track, Petraeus’ assessment creates a helpful contrast. As Yglesias said at the time, “To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.”
But that’s the 2017 plan. How about the 2037 plan?
Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and a key member of Petraeus’ advisory panel, spoke over the weekend about his vision for Iraq’s future. Marc Lynch reports: (via Kevin Drum)
Without getting in to his arguments or my reservations, I just wanted to lay out Biddle’s best case scenario as he presented it: if everything goes right and if the US continues to “hit the lottery” with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years. And that’s the best case scenario of one of the current strategy’s smartest supporters. Man.
Remember, Biddle is an optimist. He was describing what he sees as the best case scenario.
What’s more, I’d just add that Biddle’s sanguine analysis isn’t improving as violence in Iraq subsides.
Just a couple of months ago, Slate’s Fred Kaplan chatted with Biddle, who described his take on the viability of the administration’s “bottom-up” strategy.
[Biddle] said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years — and that, even so, it would be a “long-shot gamble.”
That was in early September. Now, after returning from a recent 10-day trip to Iraq, Biddle is talking about the same deployment for as many as 30 years.
Yglesias added a good point.
Kaplan gets at some of this, but if your analysis is that we should accept a “long-shot gamble” that entails 100,000 American troop serving in Iraq until 2027 then you owe us some kind of explanation of what the payoff is supposed to be. The cost of doing what Biddle’s analysis suggests is necessary would be enormous. The benefits, meanwhile, don’t seem especially high even if you ignore the “long-shot” nature of the odds. Plug the odds in, and the whole proposition looks ridiculous.
I respect Biddle enormously, and think his argument against a middle path in Iraq is absolutely solid. His analysis of what staying would entail also seems solid. I just can’t understand why he doesn’t see that the obvious upshot of his analysis is that we should leave. To conclude anything else it seems to me you’d need to put a near-infinite value on the prospect of salvaging something to label “success” in Iraq.
And if Biddle is an optimist about Iraq’s future, what are the serious pessimists thinking right now?