Cutting and running.

According to George Packer's newest New Yorker dispatch from Iraq, the occupation phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom really is winding down. There's the adaptive stay-the-course paradigm in Tal Afar that Bush and Rumseld love to talk about. Then there's the rest of the mission in the rest of the country:

...The trend is away from counterinsurgency and toward what, in Washington, is known as an “exit strategy.” Commanders are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power. (During the past five months, the number of air strikes increased fifty per cent over the same period a year ago.) More than half the country is scheduled to be turned over to Iraqi Army control this year. This is the crux of the military strategy for withdrawal, and it is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. President Bush has always insisted that the turnover and “drawdown” will be “conditions-based”—governed by the situation in Iraq and by the advice of commanders, not by a timetable set in Washington. But everywhere I went in Iraq, officers and soldiers spoke as if they were already preparing to leave. A sergeant in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said, “We’ll be here for ten years in some form, but boots-on-the-ground-wise? We’re really almost done.” He said that the U.S. Army doesn’t allow itself to fail, and when I suggested that Iraq hardly looked like a victory the sergeant replied, “So you adjust the standard of success. For me, it’s getting all the Joes home. It’s not that I don’t give a damn about what’s going on here. But that’s how it is.”

...In other words, “conditions-based” withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington. I suggested to Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, who has been a critic of the Administration’s war policy, that this sounded like a variation on the famous advice that Senator George Aiken, of Vermont, gave President Johnson about Vietnam, in 1966: declare victory and go home. “In a twenty-first-century version, yes, probably,” Hagel said. “It won’t be quite that stark.” The Administration, he said, is “finding ways in its own mind for back-door exits out of Iraq.” He added, “We have an election coming up in November. The fact is, we’re going to be pulling troops out, and I suspect it’ll be kind of quiet. We’re going to wake up some morning, probably in the summer, and all of a sudden we’ll be forty thousand troops down, and people will say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know.’”


The GOP's wet dream would be to be able to effect a drawdown of troops -- accompanied inevitably by a drawdown in the reporters who accompany them and who will otherwise continue to monitor and publicize the uptick in Iraqi civilian casualties as US forces retreat from the streets to their fortified bases -- without appearing to cave in to demands by John Kerry, John Murtha or other liberal/Democratic critics of the occupation in Congress. (I'm guessing the silent cut-and-run probably has more to do with the need to protect the military vote anyway than to yield to Democratic pressure.) It seems fairly vital for Democrats not to let the Administration get away with this. I'm partially convinced that pulling out of Iraq is the only viable solution for the US and its remaining allies (against the wishes of Tal Afar's mayor and various other Iraqis interviewed in Packer's article). But to overthrow a dictator, plunge a nation into sectarian conflict and then wash your hands of the whole affair is a moral atrocity. Whatever their individual positions on leaving or staying (a hard ethical question), Democrats have to make Americans understand this.