Iraq: Onward Through the Fog

The net effect of the departure of Defense Secretary "You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Donald" Rumsfeld is to leave the U.S. with one fewer bad option on Iraq. In the overall scheme of things, little else changes.

Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's replacement, was CIA director when The Decider's daddy ran the show and has been a member of James Baker's Iraq Study Group. Gates and Bush Père have been shocked over the ham-handed way in which war has been prosecuted. They (privately) opposed the war in the first place and have to be elated that Rumsfeld took the fall for the thumping the White House and Republicans received in the mid-term election.

Although tainted by the Iran-Contra Scandal, Gates is as intellectually tough as Rumsfeld but is a team player. Rumsfeld's nickname as the "7,000 Mile Screwdriver" who micro-managed the war from his desk at the Pentagon, was well deserved.

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I don't think that there are a whole lot of bloggers who have over their desk a detailed map of Baghdad with overlays showing the districts where American troops have conducted security sweeps. (They would be Sadr City, Kadhimiya, Shula, Washash, Al-Shurta and Al-Khamsa, so there.)

So while Kiko's House has done about as thorough a job of covering the war as any other blog, it comes as a shock to be suddenly confronted with the possibility that a hitherto inflexible war policy has finally been discredited and a new phase to the war is suddenly upon us.

To use baseball parlance, the trouble is that Gates has been called in to pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded and nobody out.

Gates has three options:

* Stay the course (please, no laughing).

* Escalate.

* Start to disengage.

Esclating is out of the question. At best, staying the course is a short-term option. That leaves disengagement, which is what the the Iraq Study Group is likely to recommend next month.

That non-binding recommendation probably will include a call for a phased withdrawal while putting substantially more resources, including military advisors, into stabilizing Iraq through better training and equipping its army and national police.

Building a democracy, an elusive goal at best, will be de-emphasized, and it will be recommended that talks be opened with Syria and Jordan over a long-term solution for Iraq. Those two countries have the most to lose if Iraq collapses and there is an exodus of refugees.

The study group is a creation of Congress and from the outset has been seen as a way for The Decider to have some political cover as his administration explored ways to get out of Iraq.

Prior to the election, the president was dissing the study group in his typically arrogant manner, but with the hindsight of a crushing electoral defeat, he said twice in his Wednesday press that he would "work with" it.

Representative Tom Lantos, the California Democrats who will head the House International Relations Committee in the next Congress, got it exactly right when he cautioned that he wasn't sure how much the study group's report would matter.

"You can't unscramble the omelet and the tremendous mistakes that were made after major military operations. I don't see any magical solutions, but the president may be sending a signal of a change in course."

(Photograph of 2003 bombing of one of Saddam Hussein's
Baghdad palaces by Agence France-Presse)