Mark Danner in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
—George F. Kennan, September 26, 2002 I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years.
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006
In the coming weeks we will hear much talk of "exit strategies" and "proposed solutions." All such "solutions," though, are certain to come with heavy political costs, costs the President may consider more difficult to bear than those of doggedly "staying the course" for the remainder of his term. George W. Bush, who ran for president vowing a "humble" foreign policy, could not have predicted this. Kennan said it in October 2002: Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.
If we are indeed in the third act, then it may well be that this final act will prove to be very long and very painful. You may or may not know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
On the subject of "solutions", I would draw your attention to my digest of Rumsfeld's Rules: 2. It is easier to get into something than to get out of it. 8. For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. 9. Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.
On the subject of Rumsfeld, Novak finds no one who is satisfied with the orchestration of Rumsfeld's exit. Iraq: The War of the Imagination |
