"State of Denial"'s Real Revelation

Rich Lowry:

The most important aspect of Woodward’s book isn’t this “news,” but the insight it gives into how the U.S. government has arrived at such a middling, uninspired campaign in Iraq — just enough not to win and just enough not to lose. As State Department adviser Philip Zelikow thought after a visit to Iraq in 2005, in Woodward’s words, “There was too much barely coping, just getting by and making incremental improvements.”

We have been barely coping because we have never made a decision to go all-out, partly due to the restraining influence of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. Oddly, given the way he has become a hate-figure for Democrats, it is Rumsfeld who is perhaps closest to the Democrats’ preferred Iraq strategy as any other major figure in the Bush administration.

Rumsfeld is not interested in trying to win the war outright, so much as handing the effort over to the Iraqis. According to Woodward, “Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and come up with solutions.”

He has tried to head off anything more robust than letting the Iraqis fend for themselves. In October 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to describe the U.S. approach in Iraq as the classic counterinsurgency operation of “clear, hold and build” — referring to the clearing of Iraqi insurgents from a territory and then its securing and rebuilding. Rumsfeld was outraged. Woodward writes that Rumsfeld believed, “It was wrong to say that the United States’ ‘political-military strategy’ was all about what the U.S. would do and not what the Iraqis would do.”

This was a constant tension between Rice and Rumsfeld. She wanted to do more; he wanted to do less. They clashed over the creation of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraqi provinces because Rice wanted the military to provide security and Rumsfeld wanted it handled by private contractors. They argued over security for Iraqi oil infrastructure, with Rice wanting more U.S. involvement and Rumsfeld less. Generally, the result has been a down-the-middle compromise, with the U.S. neither overwhelming our enemies nor letting the Iraqis sink or swim.

This is disheartening if true.

I have no issue with invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, to build secure base from which to hit Iran, Syria, or other Middle Eastern terrorist nations as need be, or to send a clear message to the rest of the world's dictators that waging proxy wars against the U.S. through terrorist groups would no longer be tolerated.

But invading Iraq to basically hand it over to Iran in the end?

That's an awful bloody mess in anyone's book.