Third Way Dispatch

For too long, those of us who support a drawdown in Iraq have offered a laundry list of reasons without a unifying rational. With more than 4,000 American fatalities and tens of thousands of life-altering injuries, it has cost too many lives; at $5,000 per second, it is costing too much money; with our allies looking on in disgust, it is tarnishing our image abroad; with a dizzying array of sectarian conflicts, it is a confusing and unpolice-able civil war; with its pretext long-since exposed as a fraud, it is based on a lie; and with the President’s legacy as “Worst Ever” firmly in place, it is a fruitless attempt to rescue the Bush place in history.

All of these are true, but none of them, together or separately, can convincingly beat back the cynical and preposterous claim by the Bush administration and McCain camp that we are weak, that a withdrawal is abandoning the troops, and that, as Vice President Cheney has put it, that we propose to commit “an act of betrayal and dishonor.”

We can rail all we want about the unfairness of it all, and there is no doubt that history will judge us as correct. Still, in the context of the current Iraq debate, we must have is a framework that explains why we want to end our massive commitment to Iraq in the only terms that really matter when it comes to warfare: the national security interests of the United States. And the fact is, we can now make that case, and make it persuasively. Our security requires that we drawdown in Iraq for two reasons. First, if we don’t, we risk losing the fight against our real enemies: Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Our troops there need immediate and large-scale reinforcements.

Second, without a major drawdown, the US Army will come unraveled. It is on the brink of a major crisis now, and it cannot sustain this pace much longer. We have 170,000 troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with a force that can sustain deployments there of only 100,000 at a time. Without a drawdown (or the extremely unlikely initiation of a draft), the exquisite machinery of our ground forces will seize. Plus, we simply have got to restore a “ready brigade” of troops prepared to deploy on a moment’s notice to hotspots elsewhere in the world. It is practically criminal that the Bush administration has been such a poor steward of our safety that we no longer have soldiers or Marines we can send into the breach to protect the United States if the call comes—as we’ve discovered, fancy ships and planes get you only so far on the 21st century battlefield.

In a new memo, we lay out the national security case for drawing down in Iraq, and we offer up a new 50-50-50 Plan: 50,000 for Afghanistan (about a doubling of US troops there); 50,000 for Iraq (down from the current level of around 140,000); and 50,000 for the future (expanding the Army to meet future contingencies). This plan would let the United States take on and finally destroy al Qaeda where it actually is, provide us with an achievable mission in Iraq, and restore our military to a sustainable course.

We hope you’ll take a look.

It’s hard for George W. Bush to find a new low, but yesterday he managed. Going to a foreign parliament and issuing a fatuous political attack is perhaps the most classless thing that he has done in the course of a breathtakingly classless presidency. And what an attack it was – standing before the Israeli Knesset, Bush summoned the ghosts of Munich in a loathsome attempt to link Barack Obama to the appeasers of old.

NOTE:This Dispatch is by Third Way Senior Fellow Jonathan Morgenstein:

While I was living in Mexico City in February 1995, the newly elected Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo arrested Raul Salinas, the brother of Zedillo’s powerful and wealthy predecessor, Carlos Salinas. Raul was arrested for a high profile assassination among other suspicions. It was a glorious moment in Mexican history.

Think back for a moment to the days after 9-11, to the range of emotions we all felt: horror, sadness, anger, frustration. But we felt other things as well: determination and patriotism. We were resolved as a nation that no band of two-bit thugs was going to attack this country and murder Americans without us damn well doing something about it.

Now, imagine that you were specifically asked to do something about it and were told that your actions would hold the lives of innocent Americans in the balance. Imagine that you were Mary Smith, a senior executive of a telephone company and that an FBI agent came to you with a letter that asked for your help in tracking down terrorists. The letter assured you that the President and the Attorney General certified that what they were asking you to do was legal. Imagine that the FBI made it clear that if you failed to cooperate, Americans could die.

What would you do? Do you assist the government based on their representations that the help was both legal and urgently needed, or do you decline and risk the consequences?

I’ve been around politics a long time (circa the Mondale “surge”), and I’ve heard enough pandering and disingenuous nonsense spouted to keep aloft a flotilla of blimps. I’ve heard paeans to farmers of useless crops, love letters to members of narrow interest groups, and poetic praise to colorless down-ballot politicians. And all of this from candidates I support!

But rarely have I heard such dispiriting nonsense as that to which we were subjected during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Nevada, when the candidates turned to the subject of nuclear power.

(NOTE: This piece was authored by Third Way’s Senior Policy Fellow for National Security, Jonathan Morgenstein.)

Yesterday, the Department of Defense announced the expected deployment of about 3,000 Marines to shore up the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the actual central front in the War on Terror, although yet to be finalized by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, is crucial, if very, very tardy. If the Bush administration hadn’t waited six years to talk about such an idea, let alone implement one, perhaps Afghanistan wouldn’t be slipping back toward general chaos right now.

We give credit to Secretary Gates and his staff for making the shift and finally listening to the progressives who have been calling for such action for a long time. Although many progressive leaders in and out of Congress—and many field commanders for that matter—have been calling for a much greater expansion of US forces in Afghanistan than the 3,000 Marines offered by the administration, this is a good start. Of course, our NATO allies have to pick up the slack and strengthen their presence there as well. However, they will remain reluctant as long as the United States shirks its leadership responsibilities and doesn’t seriously commit the resources needed to win there.

Kudos to both the progressive national security voices who have been pushing for this kind of action, as well as to the progressive majority that took over Congress in 2006. This new majority was responsible for the President finally forcing out Donald Rumsfeld and his myopic staff that bungled so badly everything but the initial phases of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was this progressive pressure that prompted the appointment of a new, reality-based Secretary of Defense, who then ushered-in more capable and less ideological Pentagon leadership.

Indeed, if there is progress as a result of this new deployment, let’s be clear where the credit should lie. This change made at the top of the Pentagon, was forced by progressive pressure and the overwhelming message of disapproval delivered by the electorate in November 2006. And, it was only this change that facilitated the possibility of refocusing on—and winning—the war that we’ve needed to fight from the beginning to actually defeat al Qaeda … Afghanistan.