Exit Strategy The American objective in Iraq should be to get out WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Christopher Dickey Newsweek Updated: 12:13 p.m. ET May 05, 2004
May 4 - John Kerry himself asked the question he’ll have to answer if he ever becomes president, and I, for one, would like to hear him answer it now. Way back in April 1971, when his memories of combat were still fresh, he sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and famously demanded, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” He was talking, then, about Vietnam. But he should give us the answer, now, about Iraq. Because however much you parse the differences between the wars, they share a central, inescapable problem: no exit. Or, more precisely, no exit that politicians talk about honestly.
Right now, Kerry’s taking the position that Richard Nixon took in the campaign of 1968, which was to offer the same basic approach as the sitting president, but say he’d do it better. Candidate Kerry can’t get away with claims to have a “secret plan,” as candidate Nixon did. But the plan Kerry does offer presumes he can persuade leaders of other countries to send lots of troops to Iraq—maybe some of those same leaders who supposedly told Kerry, secretly, they want Bush voted out of office.
“Mistakes have been made,” Kerry said in his big Iraq policy speech last week (note the weirdly passive tone). “But we do not have the choice just to pick up and leave, and leave behind a failed state, a new haven for terrorists, a creator of instability in the region.”
OK. But how do we know when that job’s done? What makes Iraq a successful state? And how can we be sure that the spectacle of a continued American presence won’t inspire more terrorism around the world? As we struggle to solve the insoluble problems of Iraq, what do we do about the moral rot that occupation brings to the occupiers?
How do you repair the kind of damage done to our image by those pictures from Abu Ghurayb prison? They’re disgusting, to use President Bush’s word, not just because they suggest prisoners have been tortured, but because they are racist pornography: a perky young white woman, who could be the girl next door, points out the sexual equipment of naked, humiliated Arab prisoners. What’s next? “Girls Gone Wild” goes to Abu Ghurayb? They are peculiarly and profoundly American, those cheery snapshots, especially in the eyes of those Arabs to whom we said we’d bring dignity and democracy. Friends of mine at senior levels in the American government (professionals, not political appointees), are simply stunned. “We have become a zealous, arrogant and deeply racist country,” one told me. “Not the traditional black-white racism of our respective youth but one that has elevated ‘American’ to a race that is above all others.”
Mistakes have been made? Indeed: no weapons of mass destruction. No operational links to Al Qaeda. Now this. “You have destroyed this country under false pretenses,” a senior United Nations official says he warned the White House when it started trying to drag international organizations back into the line of fire. “The only justification for what’s been done is to occupy the high moral ground.” Well, that’s a whole lot harder to do today than it was even a week ago, and a few reprimands and investigations aren’t going to change that fact.
What the American people want to hear from Bush or Kerry or anyone who can tell them is not that we’ll “stay the course,” but that we can see the finish line. Maybe I’m wrong about this, you tell me at [EMAIL PROTECTED], but I think what folks really want is a plan for getting out of Iraq, putting it behind us, and making the world safer for Americans in the process.
Well, one way to start is to say getting out really is the objective; say it clearly, honestly, unequivocally and absolutely.
full: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4900136/
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