Political Bloviation

Andrew Sullivan writes about a Charles Krauthammer op-ed in the Washington Post, that cites Anthony Cordesman’s latest report on Iraq. He riffs on McCain’s policy for Iraq and what it will take to win in the process:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
If McCain is going to give us straight talk - one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do - and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there’s a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

McCain says we all want to leave Iraq. But some obviously don’t. It is increasingly clear that the point of the surge and the occupation is to stay in Iraq for ever. Do we want that? Is it in the West’s interest? Maybe, after all these years, we can have some minimal honesty in this debate.

Doesn’t that all sound like a wonderful investment of American blood and treasure for minimum of the next decade?

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