Only by setting a clear deadline and a sound withdrawal plan can America hope to keep encouraging Iraqis to make and implement the political reforms needed to stabilize the country, said The New York Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
No matter who wins the presidential election, the United States is on its way out of Iraq. Sen. Barack Obama offers the most specific and speediest withdrawal plan, but even Sen. John McCain will not be able to keep a large number of combat troops there for long.
Without a major pullback from Iraq, the Pentagon will not have enough troops to fight in Afghanistan — where the United States is in danger of losing the real war on terrorism against Al-Qaeda and the Taleban. If that is not reason enough to begin serious preparations for a withdrawal, the Iraqis have decided that it’s time to scale back the American military presence. That’s the crux of a new security agreement that American and Iraqi officials say is nearly finished.
It would require American combat troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 unless Baghdad asks them to stay. That’s longer than Obama’s mid-2010 target but still the kind of finite framework that President Bush and McCain long opposed but are now being forced to accept.
We still do not know what McCain means with talk about some kind of magical “victory” in Iraq. Even American military commanders acknowledge that recent security gains are fragile. And there is no near-term expectation that Iraq can be the kind of stable democracy that Bush and McCain had envisioned. What we do know is that there is a lot to be done, and done quickly, to ensure that the withdrawal is safe, orderly and limits further damage to Iraq and its neighbors. One of the most urgent tasks for the Bush administration is to ensure that Iraq’s Shiite-led government fulfills its commitment to integrate about 54,000 members of the Awakening Councils into security and other government jobs. The Sunnis’ 2006 decision to work with the Americans instead of attacking them has dealt a crippling, perhaps fatal blow to Al-Qaeda in Iraq and is a major reason for the decline in violence.
