John McCain and Dick Cheney are in Iraq talking about another 100 years:
Al-Maliki said he and the vice president discussed ongoing negotiations over a long-term security agreement between the two countries that would replace the U.N. mandate for foreign troops set to expire at the end of the year.
“This visit is very important. It is about the nature of the relations between the two countries, the future of those relations and the agreement in this respect,” the prime minister told reporters. “We also discussed the security in Iraq, the development of the economy and reconstruction and terrorism.”
McCain stressed it was important to maintain the U.S. commitment in Iraq, where a U.S.-Iraq military operation is under way to clear al-Qaida in Iraq from its last urban stronghold of Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
“We recognize that al-Qaida is on the run, but they are not defeated,” McCain said after meeting al-Maliki. “Al-Qaida continues to pose a great threat to the security and very existence of Iraq as a democracy. So we know there’s still a lot more of work to be done.”
Hillary Clinton gave a speech on her Iraq policy today, and it is good in places and laughable in others. She has solid positions on reining in our dependence on independent contractors for our national security. And she promises to end the war in a prompt manner. Yet, if you read carefully, it is clear that she plans on having the U.S. Government maintain its control over almost all facets of Iraqi governance. Consider the following (emphasis mine):
When I’m president, we will pursue a more integrated strategy. We’ll empower local leaders and use U.S. and international influence to press the Iraqis to reach political reconciliation, and I will call on the United Nations to strengthen its role in promoting this reconciliation. Not having been a party to the mistakes of the path five years, the U.N., which has already provided valuable technical assistance in Iraq, is far more likely to be viewed as a neutral, honest broker than the United States, especially when it acts on behalf of a broad coalition of concerned states and the international community. The new United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has indicated he is willing to play a key role in assisting the Iraqis. I will also work with China and Russia to ensure that the U.N. envoy in Iraq has the necessary authority by obtaining the Security Council’s explicit endorsement of a strengthened U.N. mandate to promote reconciliation.
And this:
I would further seek to stabilize Iraq by insisting that the country’s oil revenues, instead of U.S. taxpayer dollars, increasingly be used to fund Iraq’s reconstruction. When President Bush began this war, his administration claimed that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction. Well, the Iraqi government has now earned tens of billions of dollars from oil. Some estimates indicate that revenues this year will top $55 billion. Yet since the beginning of the war, the U.S. has allocated roughly the same amount of money as Iraq for reconstruction, $47 billion from us versus $50 billion from them. And now it is even clearer that the Iraqi government is not spending its oil money on reconstruction. There are reports that Iraq spent less than a quarter of oil funds set aside for reconstruction in 2006, and the U.S. Comptroller General testified that as of November 2007 the capital expenditure rate for the central ministries in Iraq was only 7%. Oil profits are showing up in foreign banks even as Iraqi citizens lack basic services.
As president I would immediately direct the Inspector General for Iraq to appoint a special council to investigate and make recommendations directly to me for how to ensure Iraqi oil revenues and U.S. taxpayer dollars on a declining trend are used to rebuild Iraq. It is unacceptable that these oil revenues go unused or worse end up in private accounts while citizens lack electricity and clean drinking water. We will support Iraq’s efforts to rebuild their country, but we will not permit our money or theirs to be thrown away.
And this:
I will work to crack down on the black market for oil in Iraq. According to recent news reports, insurgent groups a profiteering from a substantial black market in oil. The money they make is going in part to pay for IEDs, car bombs, and other tools of terror. The Iraqi government simply has not done its part to crack down on this corruption. The equation here is simple, if we cut off or disrupt these illegal sources of funding, we can deny the insurgents the money they need to maintain their campaigns of violence. So I will order a joint nationwide U.S./Iraqi crackdown on black marketers and oil smugglers. We’ll beef up protection for oil lines to prevent illegal tapping and attacks. We will cut off illegal networks, identify where the stolen oil and other goods are going, who is stealing them, and capture those responsible. We will work with our international community to try to cut off access to the funds that hold these oil revenues. And we will maintain the crackdown success by sending a strong signal to the Iraqi government, show results in rooting out corruption or lose your aid.
This is an attempt to have it both ways. Removing our troops from Iraq involves losing our control over Iraq’s budget, the security of their oil infrastructure, anti-smuggling activities, and the deployment and mission of their defense services. But Clinton is telling us that we will maintain all that control. This is proof that she will keep us bogged down in Iraq even as she brings down the combat troop levels. In short, her policy is very similar to the Nixon/Kissinger strategy towards Vietnam. It’s grossly unrealistic and her portrayal of her policy might sound good and reasonable, but it carries high-level risks of bringing us four more years of occupation. And, as with Vietnam, at the end of those four years (or even sooner) we will probably discover that nothing was achieved and that the extra lives and money brought no tangible gains.
I don’t want to be simplistic. Clinton is at least trying to be honest about the complexities and risks of the problems we face. She touches on the refugee problem, treatment of collaborators, counterterrorism issues, and international efforts to stabilize Iraq (of which we will remain a part). But if McCain and Cheney are offering 100 more years, Clinton is offering at least four.
