As the Iraq Study Group exemplifies, it’s easy to criticize the conduct of the post-invasion policies in Iraq, but difficult to offer anything but a recap of what the Bush administration has been doing for two years, topped with a couple of slices of pie-in-the-sky.
During the Congressional election campaign, I could find no Democratic plan that addressed specifically what they proposed to do in Iraq other than ending the military campaign, immediately or over the coming months. No Democrat addressed the question of what would be likely to follow withdrawal and what should be done to counter the almost certain results of that action. The closet approximation was Senator Joseph Biden’s proposal to divide Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite regions, which would lead to military intervention by neighboring Turkey, Iran, and possibly Syria.
Mike Porcari emailed the following article. It suggests that the Democratic party leadership have expended all their time and energy on criticism aimed at winning Congressional elections and very little on serious study of alternatives other than cut-and-run.
If the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is representative of the level of informed intelligence among Congressional Democrats, any changes in Iraq policy wrought by the new Congress will be far from good.
Read Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda, by Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor.
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