10:32 pm
McCain Doesn’t ♥ Maliki (Or Our Troops)
As I noted earlier today, Iraqi Prime Minister Nour al Maliki has endorsed Barack Obama expressed support for Barack Obama’s sixteen-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic now has a response from the McCain Campaign:
“[Maliki's] domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” [Emphasis added.]
So let me get this straight.
We invaded Iraq to stop them from producing WMDs. When that didn’t work out, we retroactively invaded Iraq to stop Saddam from helping Al Qaeda. And when that didn’t work out, we retro-retroactively invaded Iraq to give it a democratically elected government capable of making its own decisions. And now that that isn’t working out, we have retro-retro-retroactively invaded Iraq to protect our troops in Iraq.
The McCain campaign’s new line of reasoning reminded me of something I read in a 2001 report by the UN on Responsibility to Protect. R2P, as its supporters like to call it, came out of the immediate aftermath of Kosovo, when then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was concerned that that conflict had created a precedent for military intervention without UN sanction. He thought that a set of guidelines might define clearly when military intervention is necessary and how it should take place.
The final report of Annan’s “International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty” (which had the misfortune of being released on the morning of September 11, 2001) is still worth reading. I suggest the McCain campaign might want to pay particular attention to the following passage:
The [military] operation must be based on a precisely defined political objective expressed in a clear and unambiguous [mission], with matching resources and rules of engagement…. Force protection for the intervening force must never have priority over the resolve to accomplish the mission. [Emphasis added.]
If you follow the McCain campaign’s logic, that is exactly where we are in Iraq, as of today: we’re fighting a war to protect our forces fighting the war.
I have a slightly better idea.
Why don’t we protect our forces by bringing them home? To paraphrase the McCain campaign, I think that that is what the voters “care about.”
Of course, not everyone in the McCain campaign is completely delusonal. Ambinder also got an email from a “prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign.” His response to Maliki’s statement was a bit more succinct (and colorful): “We’re fucked.”
And that friends, is change we can believe in.