"Political Surge"

I wanted to make a couple of comments on Kimberley Strassel’s column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. First, she made an excellent point about on doing what is right (more particularly, supporting what you believe is the right course, even if it seems to be not the best political choice, at the moment).

I also have to wonder, as she does, about Democrats who have pinned their political hopes and future on the United States failing in Iraq. It is one thing to have originally opposed the invasion of Iraq or to now say we should get out because our current presence in Iraq is harming things today, but it demonstrates a lack of responsible thought to say we should get out now because we should not have gone in then. Also, to not be able to say, somehow, that while I do not support what we are doing, I still hope it works, seems to be, in effect, hoping for the defeat of the United States. (If the United States is as evil as some on the far left think, maybe that is what one wants, but I do not think you are going to win an election, in most parts of the United States, on that basis.)

Ms. Strassel is right, and this is unfortunate, that achieving success in Iraq "means giving the generals all the freedom they need to keep doing their job." This is unfortunate because in some ways it seems to cede to the military a question that is properly the responsibility of politicians.

The fact is that there is not just one military answer to a question or one military response to a situation. Generals disagree. There are generals who do good jobs and generals who do not. It is the politicians’ job to pick the good generals and then, but only after choosing the right generals, let them do their job – and while still watching over them.

I am not sure the Bush administration has understood the first part of this point – or at least the members of the Bush administration do not make that distinction in their public statements. It was always: support the troops, give the military what they ask for. But that is not the main point. Ultimately, the President is responsible for what the military does because he is supposed to pick the generals.

Lincoln understood this. He fired general after general until he finally found those who could win the war. In World War I John Pershing was picked out of order to head our forces in France. Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall reached down the seniority lists to give D-Day responsibility to Dwight Eisenhower.

It is unclear whether George Bush and his administration have understood this point. And this has been a mistake because it has taken the Bush administration far too long to get the right generals with the right strategy in place to do the job in Iraq. (It seems like the only time the Bush administration did more than take the next general in line was when they apparently got Eric Shinseki to retire early because he disagreed publicly with Donald Rumsfeld about how many troops we would need in Iraq after the invasion – and Shinseki was right.).

It appears that General Petraeus has the right strategy, but he had it when he was in Iraq the last time he was there. Why did we have to wait an extra year or more to get him into place to implement that strategy for the whole country? (The only possible answer is that he had to come home to re-write the manual on fighting insurgencies, but I doubt that is really the answer.)

Now we are in the position that we may lose in Iraq because the Bush administration did not get the right generals with the right strategy in Iraq on a timely basis. And we are in a position that the Bush administration can only get public support for staying in Iraq by deferring to the military.

For one who supported going into Iraq originally and who still wants to see the United States achieve some reasonable set of objectives in Iraq, this is incredibly frustrating – and depressing – because the Bush administration has made the job so much harder than it needed to be and less likely to actually be accomplished.