Iraq withdrawal: spinning on empty
Last week, while the candidates fought gallantly to out-patriotize each other, Iraq again percolated to the top of the campaign gabfest.
It all started with a single word, of course: While stumping in Fargo, N.D., Barack Obama said he might at some point "refine" his policies on Iraq withdrawal, which calls for pulling troops out over a 16-month timeframe.
Instantly, reporters were grilling the candidate on what he meant by "refine": Grasping for wiggle room? Backtracking on his previous dovishness?
McCain's campaign seized the moment by declaring, "Barack Obama reversed [his Iraq] position, proving once again that his words do not matter." Yet tucked into that accusation was the cheerful supposition that Obama had "adopted John McCain’s position" that immediate withdrawal might "risk the progress we have made in Iraq."
Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven placed the "refine" comment in a list of supposed Obama "shifts" on hot-button issues, including executing child rapists, public campaign financing, and late-term abortions.
But Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report pointed out that Obama's Iraq wiggle room didn't just spontaneously appear, citing similar previous remarks from Susan Rice, Obama's foreign policy adviser. Moreover, he added, a commander in chief's willingness to refine a plan isn't political anathema but common sense.
"...he crafted a withdrawal policy nearly two years ago. Of course it’s going to be refined based on changing conditions."
On Liberal Values, blogger Ron Chisud said overzealous reporters were
"resorting to trivialities in making an issue over whether Obama will get out in exactly sixteen months, along with being incorrect if they claim that this represents a change in his position."
Obama's 16-month plan is not exactly radical. Many mainstream analysts and even conservatives in Washington have actively discussed ending the occupation as conditions in Iraq have deteriorated. At the same time, while reporters have been swarming like flies around every alleged flip-flop, they've been noticeably quieter in discussing the actual merits of any exit strategy. When it comes to Iraq, maybe the logistics of withdrawal just aren't as newsworthy as the fact that politicians change their minds.
So is anyone talking about what a withdrawal timetable would actually look like? When and how, with whom and how much?
The Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, a group of officials and policy experts drawn from research and advocacy organizations, Congress, and academia, gave itself a challenge earlier this year: figure out how to get out within 12 to 18 months. Their plan recognizes the uncertainties surrounding the situation on the ground, but spells out concrete steps to leaving Iraq through the cooperation of the international community.
In a recent issue of American Conservative magazine, Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, now a senior fellow at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, put forth an exit strategy based on "gradually withdrawing forces from the outer geographic sectors first, with the goal of reducing our military footprint and consolidating our presence before our final departure."
Such a plan, he argued, would "could be done safely in 10 to 12 months."
The progressive news magazine MotherJones has also done a nitty-gritty rundown of the logistics of withdrawal, canvassing experts on different scenarios for a military pullout, from "the sooner the better" to "stay the course."
A presidential campaign seems like an ideal platform for candidates to be examined not just in terms of "decisiveness," but on the quality of their decisions; voters, after all, get only one chance to decide who will be the Decider for the next four years. But to the engines of the news media, apparently, flips and flops spin better than pros and cons.
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