Money quote(s):
"I haven't seen many attempts to document the ways that the exit is resembling the entry.
A few caveats are worth mentioning up front. The exit is still a work in progress and so there is plenty of time for things to go better (or worse) than might be forecasted now. Any judgment I or anyone else makes on the subject is provisional at best. Moreover, most of the critiques of the entry into Iraq owe more to partisan (or academic) mythology than to actual fact. But they have wide currency -- indeed, in some quarters, they are accepted as self-evident truths -- and so it is worth investigating the extent to which they might apply to the exit."
Mr. Feaver wrote and posted this a month ago (Nov. 7), so the exit has now been completed. And conditions have become, to put it diplomatically, a mite bit shaky, virtually since the moment the withdrawal of combat troops was accomplished.
"At a time when the economy is suffering from some of the worst years since the Great Depression, the echo is unmistakable, and many critics believe that the Iraq decision was dictated by the 2012 election calendar."
Might could be. I did notice that the last of the troops to be pulled out crossed the border into Kuwait before Christmas; it's possible they were even "home before Christmas." Which is a cliché guaranteed to trigger laughter in a military crowd.
"If you find it plausible that Bush let the difficult economic circumstances and the 2002 electoral calendar shape his approach to entering Iraq, shouldn't you find it more plausible that Obama has let his far more daunting economic troubles and the higher stakes 2012 electoral calendar shape his Iraq exit?"
Do electoral politics have an influence on the timing of decisions made by elected politicians? Disbelieving such a thing is beyond CAA's poor powers of naïveté, no matter which party a politician hails from. The better question is to what degree, how much weight such considerations have. Somewhere there's a bright line on this that separates the politicians from the statesmen.
"(T)here is the charge that President Bush put in place the wrong team to handle his Iraq policy and these early failures doomed the effort. Even Secretary Rumsfeld concedes in his memoir that picking Lt.Gen Ricardo Sanchez to head up the military side was a bad choice and Rumsfeld's critique of the civilian head, Ambassador Bremer, is scathing. The team struggled to work together and to understand the situation in Iraq. The crucial early period was squandered, sowing the seeds that reaped the bitter fruit of the sectarian violence of 2004-2006. By all accounts, the Bush administration finally got the right personnel in place when the President tapped General Dave Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to implement the new surge strategy and their ability to achieve unity of effort contributed considerably to the surge's success."
How long did it take Pres. Lincoln to settle on the Meade/Grant command team?
"Midway through his first term, Obama may have finally assembled a solid team with General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Jim Jeffrey. But he started out with a choice that left many people, including myself, scratching our heads: picking Chris Hill to be the Ambassador. Ambassador Hill certainly had a distinguished career, but he had no direct experience with Iraq and so was starting from square one. Sure enough, within months credible reports were circulating about the poor civil-military coordination on the ground. Perhaps the nadir was the description from one of his former subordinates of Ambassador Hill's alleged wasteful distraction to grow a lush lawn on the embassy compound. Perhaps the complaints were petty, but the more fundamental charge that the Obama team squandered valuable time that undermined future success rings nonetheless." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
CAA has, in his own career, noted an occasional but remarkable ambassadorial preoccupation with issues of lawncare, landscaping, and décor. It seems to be symptomatic of micromanagers or, to put it more charitably, of the detail oriented.
If it weren't for the fact that sod and such had to be convoyed under armed guard at risk of IED attack all the way into Baghdad, it would be farcical. As it was, it indicates a dangerous disconnection with reality.
11/7
