McCain In Iraq

Johnny Mac, when are you coming back?  Sorry - one oldie triggers another, but you know I love 'em.  And speaking of oldies, John Burns of the Times offers a must-read look back on Iraq at the fifth anniversary of the US invasion.

McCain first - John Sidney McCain is in Iraq and The Captain ruminates that having a candidate with a temper might be a good thing.

John McCain took some time off of the campaign trail and hit the ground in Iraq this morning.  ... He intends to meet with Iraqi leadership, who might get a glimpse of the McCain temper for their foot-dragging on reconciliation...

Before now, McCain’s criticisms of the Iraqi leadership had been moderated by his status as just another American legislator, albeit one with more clout than some of the other drop-in visitors to the Green Zone.  Now that McCain may be the best friend they have left in the upcoming presidential election, they may take his suggestions on speeding up reconciliation efforts closer to heart.

And John Burns, from his conclusion:

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

Comments

[kim]

If he could bring off a tete a tete a tete with Sistani and Chalabi, I'd be impressed.
=======================

[MayBee]

What a great thing to do.

[clarice]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/reflections_on_our_fifth_year.html>Five Years

[sbw]

My job this week is to end old threads. This was another one:

[OT] I'm very worried that Lindsay Graham is tagging along with McCain in Iraq. I don't trust that man's thought processes and I'm afraid he's going to end up in a McCain administration (Attorney General) or as a nominee for the Supreme Court. That would be almost as bad as if Hillary were elected and had to choose. [/OT]

[Pat Allen]

Look at the end of that quote again: "that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam." But there is a difference between the stability of terror that the Iraqis had under Saddam Hussein and the stability of freedom and the chance to live one’s life as one wants that is our goal and the goal of most of the Iraqi people today.

Besides, Saddam’s stability was no stability for those who feared the knock on the door in the middle of the night or who worried that a careless statement to the wrong person might get them thrown in prison or worse.

The stability of Saddam’s terror is still in Iraq. It is just that, because people are beginning to have a right to choose for themselves and to live in freedom, Saddam’s stability now manifests itself in the terror of Al Qaeda and the suicide bombers.

I cannot believe that the Iraqi people want a return to that kind of stability. They want the stability of the right to live their own lives as they desire, without the fear of a terrorist government or a terrorist group.

But perhaps Mr. Burns’ "impartiality," which he talked about earlier in the article, makes it hard for him to see that difference.

[Cecil Turner]

John Burns of the Times offers a must-read . . .

That looks a lot like his last assessment:

"If they [Americans] were to stay there another three to five years, we could see this becoming a two-trillion dollar war, we could see thousands more American troops dead. And it seems most improbable to me, from my travels in America, that America is prepared to pay that price."

It's horrible, too expensive . . . got it. But this bit is stunningly ignorant:

It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam.

If, in fact, an entire MidEast Arab nation decides that allying themselves with the Americans is better than harboring Islamist bomb-throwers, we'll have achieved something impressive indeed. If the surrounding Theo/Thugocracies determine (in the face of a credible threat of military action) discretion is the better part of valor and decide to stop funding and arming terrorists, we'll have gone most of the way to winning the GWoT. And in Iraq, the "stability" metric will look a lot like it did under Saddam. Something tells me that probably ain't the right measure of merit.

[kim]

Those who don't understand that authoritarianism is stable get to find out.

Sic semper tyrannis.
=====================

[Sara]

Has Obama ever bothered to go check out Iraq in person? Anyone know?

[MarkJ]

From what I can tell Obama has only been to Iraq once: in January 2006.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=3794382

If this is, in fact, the only time Obama has been to Iraq, then it partially explains his almost total disconnection from reality these days. Iraq in March 2008, I daresay, is a very different place than it was in January 2006.