Brass

Kos has a great post about the military brass dismissing claims that they're anywhere near completing the mission in Iraq, despite Cheney's hopeful banter that we're in the "final throes" of the Insurgency. The Military on the ground are being forced to come up with drastic choices in dealing with this enemy, because they know that:

Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.

"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."

Kos ends his post by saying:

The problems have been created by Bush and his ill-advised invasion, but they can't be solved by us. It's time to exit stage left, and hope that Iraqis can sort things out for themselves.

proposing an interesting moral dilemna for the left. Do we support a full pull out of all American forces, which will likely leave a dramatic and dangerous power-vacuum? Or do we support a plan which has clear exit-timing? Or do we support a plan which forces us to stay in Iraq indefinately?

The current track is an indefinate, stagnant Occupying American Force in Iraq; and clearly the results are disastrous. This is not the answer.

I question, though, whether a full pullout is responsible [evidenced in my rant from yesterday]. We, the new American Left, are gunning for an era of responsibility and advocacy, and the abandonment of Iraq would shadow the abandonment of Afghanistan, and would simply be a coda to an era of American irresponsibility. I believe in the "reap-what-you-sow" line of thinking that says that, despite our resistence to this whole concept of Invasion, it was perpetrated by our country, and we're at least somewhat responsible for that. Kos is half-right: the problems of the country cannot be solved by America. But he's wrong to think that they weren't, at least in some form, brought to light by the violent catalyst that was the American Invasion.

So what can we do?