MoveOn is sort of like this old friend of the Democratic Party. It’s as if it’s, you know, your, your teen – your – a friend of yours from high school, and you don’t mind hanging out with them back in high school, and then they keep showing up at your parties, and they get a little drunk and obnoxious, but you’ll still – you’re afraid to criticize them because they know too much about you or something.
The Secretary of Defense made the rounds this weekend, appearing on both Fox News Sunday and This Week. Gates pointed out to Chris Wallace that political progress is coming along at a slightly better pace than the media cares to acknowledge, noting that “Although some of these laws haven’t been passed that we’ve put as part of the benchmarks and so on, things are actually happening in terms of oil revenues being shared, provincial empowerment, Baathists from Saddam’s army being brought back into the army. So some of these things that we refer to as reconciliation are taking place on the ground.” On This Week, Gates pointed out some of the flaws in Jim Webb’s efforts to micromanage the war:
“It really is a backdoor way to try and force the president to accelerate the drawdowns. … We would have to cobble together units from various smaller units and individuals that wouldn’t have trained together. These are a number of the force management issues that we would have to deal with, and you end up with a force that goes in, we would have to gap unit–we would have gaps in the combat operations where a unit would be pulled out before its replacement got there, there might be a matter of weeks there and you wouldn’t have any overlap that we use for situational awareness and so on. So the point is, we would have to manage the force by individuals not by units.”
Jon Kyl used his time on Face the Nation to draw some attention to the consequences of rapid withdrawal as advocated by most of the left.
“I don’t know of any responsible foreign policy or military analyst that doesn’t appreciate that a premature withdrawal would have severe national security consequences. The president has talked about it, Secretary Gates has talked about it, General Petraeus has talked about it. Start with Iran. Leaving a vacuum in Iraq for Iran to fill would have disastrous consequences for us. The genocide that would likely–and ethnic cleansing that would probably occur if the Iraqi forces are not able to keep peace and stability there would be blood on our hands, in effect. We went in there and bought it, and as Colin Powell said, when you buy it, you own it then. The consequences to our own security by al-Qaeda having a place to plan and a safe haven for their work we can’t predict, but we know that it would be disastrous to have a place for al-Qaeda to be safe. All of these things would be horrible consequences for a premature–as the result of a premature withdrawal.”
