Return of the King – an Exit from Iraq

In his March 2nd column in The Washington Post, George Will quoted President Bush as having said, “Our strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down.” Therein lies the problem because the President is confusing strategy with objective. Training Iraqi security forces has often been mentioned as a strategy to meet the President’s objective of getting Iraqis to “stand up”. But then our tactics to execute that strategy have not been very effective either, as we learned recently that the number of “combat-ready Iraqi brigades” had dropped from one to zero.

Mr. Will also quoted Winston Churchill’s dire warning to Britons in 1940 that “Wars are not won by evacuations.” There is no way anyone, Americans or Iraqis, can win in Iraq by the evacuation of coalition forces at this point in time. Nonetheless, one hopes that we don’t have to witness “déjà vu all over again” – a helicopter airlift of Ambassador Khalilzad from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad in the near future. It’s more likely that a reminder of that infamous 1975 video from Saigon could force the Bush Administration away from what Mr. Will calls their “rhetoric of unreality”.

With the incessant media chatter about the likelihood of an impending civil war in Iraq, I was not the least surprised to read in yesterday’s New York Times about “The Conservative Epiphany”. In his column, Paul Krugman writes:

“Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.”

Mr. Krugman concludes his liberal broadside with this incredulous question, “It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?”

I would imagine the answer to that question is rather superfluous, since Mr. Bartlett is in the midst of peddling his new book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”. It didn’t take me any time at all because I have been critiquing Bush Administration policies in real time throughout the President’s first term. In fact, I was constantly haranguing the media for not doing its oversight job, a role which a supine Republican Congress pretty much abdicated after 9/11. You can read all about my lonely crusade in “The Bush Diaries: A Citizens Review of the First Term” published by iUniverse in July 2005.

Also in yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman ("Mr. Nasty, Brutish and Short-Tempered") came up with a great idea for resolving the impasse in Iraq. However, instead of Ambassador Khalilzad and Vice President Cheney playing a good cop-bad cop routine at what Mr. Friedman calls “a national reconciliation conference”, I think that the U.S. delegation should actually pull off a “bad cop-badder cop” number. Such a meeting would surely produce desired results if Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney brought Saddam “Lord Voldemort” Hussein along to the party. All Iraqi factions, including the Sunnis, would quickly get in line – if they realized that an imminent U.S. withdrawal could herald the return of the king?

In the past few months, Don Imus (host of “Imus in the Morning” radio program) and Chris Matthews (host of “The Chris Matthews Show” and “Hardball”) have been rather facetiously touting the return of Saddam Hussein as our exit strategy from Iraq. Well, I had promoted a similar idea, quite seriously, in a letter to the Post on April 25, 2004. This letter, in response to an article by Robin Wright entitled, “U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military” appears in my book, “The Bush Diaries” (pg. 162) and is reproduced below:

“After reading Robin Wright's report, one wonders if the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, might extend his “re-Baathification” strategy to include a “humbled” Saddam Hussein at some point of time in the near future. Outrageous and heretical as this suggestion might seem, we might recall that during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan Administration not only supported Saddam Hussein but also supplied him with some of the raw materials for his chemical and biological programs. With the current situation in Iraq spiraling out of control, Mr. Bremer could conceivably seek the assistance of a “de-programmed” Saddam Hussein to restore law and order in the country? The Bush Administration could justify this action on several grounds:

• Without WMD, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States or his neighbors
• Saddam Hussein is the only one who can prevent Iraq from breaking up into parts ala Yugoslavia
• Saddam Hussein is our best containment-cum-insurance policy against a virulent Iran
• Saddam Hussein was never aligned with Al Qaeda, which is our real enemy
• Re-Baathification, with Saddam Hussein back in the saddle, provides us the quickest, cleanest, and most inexpensive exit strategy out of Iraq

If one thinks this is a far-fetched scenario, which patriotic American would have believed even six months ago that we would resume business dealings with Libya's Moammar Gaddafi!”

This letter was written almost two years ago! The bitter truth is that it contains a strategy that might still work and is probably a more effective one than Thomas Friedman’s proposed shot gun approach with Dick Cheney.