The last hot meal to be served at Camp Victory, the largest of 505 military bases once operated by the United States in Iraq, was a Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 20. That’s because Camp Victory, one of only 10 U.S. bases still in operation, will be closed soon. According to the agreement signed in 2008 by President Bush and implemented by President Obama, the U.S. military in Iraq is coming home.
Praises be. So what if the U.S. withdrawal comes only after Obama was unable to convince Iraq to extend its welcome under tenable conditions? I’ll take it, and give thanks.
The troop withdrawal, which includes the withdrawal of Christian religious posters and symbols from military chapels, according to the New York Times, will mark the end of a misguided misadventure to secularly convert a member of the Islamic world to the ways of the West.
Despite the courage and sacrifice of American and allied troops, despite the so-called “surge,” despite the endless (and endlessly expensive) attempts to win Iraqi “hearts and minds,” it was a flop.
The top American spokesman in Iraq, Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, can spin all he wants — “It’s not about winning or losing but making significant progress” — but this eight-year “counterinsurgency” didn’t work.
It was a failure — unless, of course, you’re Iran. To borrow from the great Winston Churchill, also unenthralled with the British misadventure in Iraq in the year 1922, we have been paying billions of dollars “for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”
In Afghanistan, meanwhile, no preparations for departure are so clearly evident. For the time being, the U.S. military’s per diem costs — an estimated $350 million just to get U.S. forces fed and in the field every day — are still effectively open-ended.
In fact, Hamid Karzai has just presided over a gathering of the clans, a “loya jirga” assembly of some 2,000 Afghans, who have produced a list of conditions for a continuing American presence.
Here, culled from news sources, is a list of the loya jirga’s conditions. 1) No more immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces. 2) No more night raids by U.S. forces. 3) No more “arbitrary” detention of Afghan suspects. 4) No more U.S. detention centers. 5) Transfer Afghan detainees to Afghan detention centers. 6) A 10-year-limit to any pact with the U.S. 7) Afghans must lead all security missions after 2014. 8) The U.S. should commit to training role and “support.” 9) No more U.S.-run “parallel” structures to handle contracting and other matters; rather, the U.S. should support Afghan institutions. 10) No U.S. attacks on neighbors from Afghan soil.
Can you say “rent-a-cop”?
No wonder Karzai is so enthused. “I absolutely agree with it,” Karzai said of the loya jirga’s list of terms, as McLatchey Newspapers reported. “We would never allow any foreign country to use our soil for causing harm to our neighbors,” he added. Love thy non-infidel neighbors, Iran and Pakistan — the default-affinity that is a basic stumbling block to U.S.-Afghan alliance.
But still Karzai wants more. “The U.S. wants military installations from us. We will give those to them. But we have conditions for this. We will benefit from this. Our soldiers will be trained. Our police will be trained. We will benefit from their money.”
It’s one thing for yet another “ungrateful volcano” to scheme so, cold and numb to the blood and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Americans, even in this season of Thanksgiving. What I want to know is why we put up with it?
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
