A Knight in Dragonland

Andrew Sullivan has been on a roll lately. Here’s a great analysis of McCain’s Iraq strategy from the Daily Disher.

If McCain is going to give us straight talk – one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do – and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there’s a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

Troops are getting burned out after multiple extended combat tours. Suicide rates among military personnel are on the rise. Our enlistment standards continue to erode. Valuable officers are being alienated out of service for many reasons, including the fact that newly enlisted privates are now getting bigger bonuses than experienced re-enlisting captains. Meanwhile, world opinion of the U.S. is abysmally low while China and a resurgent Russia flex their foreign policy muscles, unrestrained.

Yet conservative pundits continue to maintain that our occupation of Iraq makes us stronger, and a carefully planned & staged withdrawal would make us weak. That logic escapes me. I think the overwhelming evidence tells us that just the opposite is true.

Senator McCain is going to have a hard time selling his vision of perpetual war.