Framing Iraq: A 50-50-50 Plan

contact@thirdway.com (Matt Bennett, Vice President for Public Affairs) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:26:00 -0600

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.

Third Way Dispatch: Framing Iraq: A 50-50-50 Plan

Framing Iraq: A 50-50-50 Plan