Troop Withdrawal: A Case of Cold Feet?
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There are some antiwar cohorts, and strangely together with liberal hawks, who are getting cold feet in the stream of politics calling for withdrawal. The worst instance of this is Fareed Zakaria, Newsweeks’s renown analyst and critic of the war since its outset. He hedges over its “timing” when events in Iraq are no worse now than previously. He seems to have visions of mass panic in Vietnam during the Ford administration’s directive to pull out. Zakaria notes that since there has been no sudden spike in American deaths — what’s a few a week, after all — the Democrats are being Machiavellian in hitting Bush while he’s down and drawing his blood. On the contrary, the antiwar movement from the beginning has always been about the blood of the troops in a war poorly planned and undermanned. Of course, Zakaria would argue that was then; I would argue it is the result of now since lack of troops means our dependence on Iraqi forces.
Zakaria argues that this shameless political move is ill-timed in light of the coming Iraqi elections and should be what we do now — since oddly Condoleezza Rice is now in charge of the war! — and not dwell in the shortcomings of the past. He implies that while our policy is now “on firmer footing,” political opposition could “precipitate disaster.” He presumes that the opposition is calling for a “panicked withdrawal.” Zakaria artfully uses Ambush Alley, a scourge to US Troops for two years, now secured by Iraqi forces, while ignoring the implicit removal of US occupational checkpoints along the way from the airport to Baghdad.
This famous analyst, until now calm and open-minded, smells disaster in the withdrawal on the one hand, but on the other, withdrawal serves as a “useful purpose” when Iraqi leaders “realize they could be on their own, without the United States to blame.” Zakaria should know better than to attack straw as though Murtha and his ilk panicked. Old Marines invented “strategic withdrawal.”
Copyright © 2005 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: December 14, 2005.
