Morning Glory and Dishonesty
November 19th, 2006This morning I rose from my grave, did my morning things and decided to prepare this entry. Went to the Huffington Post where a headline read, “Scowcroft On Rumsfeld’s Replacement: “He’s Crazy To Take The Job”…” I said to myself, “Self, I’ll bet he said nothing of the sort or it’s being misconstrued,” but I also braced myself thinking that Scowcroft is a foreign-policy “realist” and critic of the War, so he might be saying that, but it turns out that he wasn’t. “I think he’s crazy to take the job,” said Mr. Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, “and I’m very glad he’s doing it.”
The rest of the article is a puff-piece on New Defense Secretary Gates’ life. It’s interesting if you’re into that sort of thing. But I don’t give a damn that his students loved him in Texas. I care if he can handle the Iraq War, and that can’t be judged for awhile, though Henry Kissinger believes we can no longer “win” the War.
“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday AM breakfast show. But Kissinger warned against a rapid withdrawal of troops, saying it could lead to “disastrous consequences,” destabilizing Iraq’s neighbors and causing a long-lasting conflict.
Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq’s neighbors and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region. He also said that the process would have to include Iran and that the U.S. must enter into dialogue with the country. Asked if it was time for President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to change course, he responded: “I think we have to redefine the course, but I don’t think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal.
It seems, to me, that my ideas for the War in Iraq seem to be becoming the consensus. At least, I hope that what Kissinger is proposing — which is about what I’ve proposed, except that my proposal includes a warning to the Iraqis that we’re going to reduce troops in a year — is the new consensus.