John McCain says the United States could stay "100 years... 1,000... 1 million years" in Iraq. But what does he mean?
The liberal group MoveOn.org began airing ads Wednesday against Republican John McCain, citing his claim that the U.S.
Haven't we been listening to talk of "100 years" of war in Iraq for 100 years now? It certainly feels that way. But this favorite talking point of the two Democrats presidential candidates is bogus.
"Instead of offering an exit strategy for Iraq, (Sen. John McCain is) offering us a 100-year occupation," Sen. Barack Obama said on the fifth anniversary of the coalition’s move on the then-oppressed Iraq. But it could have been any day; Obama uses the sound bite often enough.
What the "100 years" talk refers to is something McCain rightly said in response to a question during a New Hampshire townhall meeting in January. The question regarded Bush’s statement that we could be in Iraq for 50 more years. McCain sensibly responded: "Make it 100. We’ve . . . been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day."
When asked to clarify, he would go on to say that it could be 1,000 years, or even a million years. These are the lines that try Democrats’ souls. But McCain was right about the long war. It was a sensible answer. And though it doesn’t sound like the most attractive answer -- who wants 100 years in Iraq? -- it was straight talk from a senator who has a better track record on Iraq than most. And it may not hurt his campaign, either.
John McCain has been insisting that his 100 years in Iraq comment is being taken out of context. That in fact what he meant is that American troops can stay in Iraq for fifty or 100 years if American troops are no longer being attacked. This assertion leads to a whole new set of questions that reflect McCain's lack of understanding of what is going on inside Iraq.
First of all, how exactly does Senator McCain envision getting to a point where there are no American casualties in Iraq? The idea of a large American troop presence in Iraq that does not draw any fire is farfetched. What we have in Iraq today is some odd and complicated mix of numerous sectarian conflicts with Americans stuck in the middle. This isn’t Korea. There will be no armistice or Demilitarized Zone. Senator McCain has not laid out any kind of a roadmap or strategy for how we get to this idealized scenario where American forces are no longer being fired upon.
Second, how long does he think it will take to get to this end state that he envisions? Will it take 10 years? Will it take 20? 30? When under his plan do American troops stop taking casualties? It would be good to know.
Finally, there is the question of a permanent presence in Iraq and the strategic costs to the United States. One of the Bush Administration’s premises for the war in Iraq, was the idea that we needed to eliminate Al Qaeda. But one of the major inspirations for Al Qaeda, was the American presence in Saudi Arabia. In a similar way, creating a large permanent troop presence in Iraq would act as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and draw anger and suspicion from all over the Arab World.
The U.S. government on Thursday released images of a site in Syria believed to be a nuclear reactor built with North Korean know-how. The image on the left shows the results of an Israeli airstrike.
The United States has a message for would-be nuclear proliferators: We're watching you, and we see more than you think. That's the conclusion some experts draw from the U.S. government's unusual April 24 release of evidence that Syria may have been building a nuclear reactor with North Korea's assistance.
Today, U.S. intelligence officials will give closed-door briefings to members of Congress about North Korea’s role in building a reactor in Syria. (Israel, it’s been confirmed, destroyed that nuclear facility with their air-strikes last September.)
Why are the briefings taking place now? This morning the New York Times’s David Sanger speculated that Vice President Cheney is trying to scuttle the six-party disarmament talks by highlighting Pyongyang’s proliferant behavior. Others have floated more intriguing theories. For example, Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks the Bush administration is releasing the information at this time to rescue its tentative deal with the North Koreans by letting them off the hook. “If it turns out we have them dead to rights -- that we have enough information on our own -- then we can eliminate this as a point of contention,” he says. “Maybe we don’t need to negotiate transparency with North Korea because we already know enough.”
Until now, the administration has refused to discuss the video or the attack, other than in a highly classified briefing for a few allies and crucial members of Congress.
The timing of the administration’s decision to declassify information about the Syrian project has raised widespread suspicions, especially in the State Department, that Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration hawks were hoping that releasing the information might undermine a potential deal with North Korea that would take it off an American list of state sponsors of terrorism.
“Making public the pictures is likely to inflame the North Koreans,” said one senior administration official who would not speak on the record because the White House and the State Department have declared there would be no public comment until the evidence is released. “And that’s just what opponents of this whole arrangement want, because they think the North Koreans will stalk off.”
Ambassador Christopher Hill has argued in private that the Syrian episode and the uranium enrichment are side shows, and that the critical issue is stopping North Korea from producing more plutonium and giving up what it has. But his State Department colleagues say that he has been told not to defend the deal, or even explain it.
Specialist Monica Brown, a U.S. Army medic, received a Silver Star for valor in March. Brown is the second female since World War II to earn the medal for her gallant actions while in combat in Iraq.
Women in the U.S. military are now a fact of life. American servicewomen are flying jets and helicopter gunships, driving and fixing trucks, searching suspected terrorists, patching the wounded and, in some cases, killing the enemy up close. Is that a good thing?
Men and women home from the war acknowledge that there are many questions from the old co-ed combat debate still unresolved, despite years of experimentation.
Shock integration happened when the administration decided to wage a war in Iraq on top of an increasingly complex operation in Afghanistan. And now women in unprecedented combat roles have become essential to sustaining force strength overseas. This situation, and all its unacceptable consequences, will only get worse as long as the Bush administration refuses to initiate troop reductions and limit deployments. The candidates contending to replace Bush, meanwhile, offer little prospect of saner policies: the Democratic candidates have been silent on the realities of co-ed combat, while the Republican nominee insists that we may be in Iraq for another century.
America never consciously chose to send women into combat, but they are there now and in some cases are paying a tragic price.
"Women aren't big and strong enough for combat." I'll buy this when someone explains why the Marine Corps will cheerfully accept a 4-foot-10 male recruit who weighs 96 pounds.
Sure, the Marines will make a man out of him, but even if they water the guy with Miracle-Gro, they won't be able to turn him into a 6-footer. The average man may be bigger and stronger than the average woman, but plenty of women are bigger and stronger than many men. Why discriminate based on gender when you could have straightforward, task-specific strength requirements?
Locking women out of combat positions may help a few American men maintain the illusion of gallantry, but it's time to acknowledge reality. Women will die alongside men in any terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and women, like men, are affected by our national defense policies. It's time to give them the right to fight for their country.
Director Kimberly Peirce and actor Ryan Phillippe might be talented, but audiences don't want to see their latest movie.
Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” is the best fictional film yet inspired by the Iraq war … or at least it’s in a dead heat with “In the Valley of Elah” for that honor. Which doesn’t mean “Stop-Loss” will be any more successful at the box office than its predecessors. As of late Saturday night, "Stop-Loss" was performing poorly.
Undoubtedly, being stop-lossed has to suck something fierce, and I feel for the thousands pulled from their lives and loved ones for a contractual obligation they’re well aware of but probably never imagined would be brought to life. But they deserve better than this. Stop-Loss is Exhibit A -- no, D -- no, J in the case proving Hollywood can’t stand the troops. This insistent portrayal of these men and women as unstable and dangerous -- dehumanized and psychotic -- is outright stereotyping and the building of a stigma. It’s a monstrous act performed by these filmmakers and yet they remain undeterred even by box-office humiliation in their cruel objective to lose a war by tearing down our finest.
Are audiences suffering from war fatigue, as many have suggested? Do they have little interest in following a war on the big screen when they are surrounded by images and stories of it on the small screens in their home?
Moviegoers will not leave their homes unless they're being offered something in the theater they cannot find elsewhere, and what is notable about many of this year's political films is that very few of them actually stand up as triumphs of cinematic art and storytelling. In many respects, the greatest risk of making political art during wartime is that heightened political passion will trump artistic judgment, which in the case of moviemaking means that expressing a political stance will take precedence over character development and plot structure.
U.S. soldiers emerge from cover in Iraq.
Behind the Pentagon's closed doors, U.S. military leaders told President Bush Wednesday they are worried about the Iraq war's mounting strain on troops and their families. But they indicated they'd go along with a brief halt in pulling out troops this summer. The chiefs' concern is that U.S.
Have American forces been strengthened or broken by the War on Terror campaigns?
The Small Wars Journal summarizes a Center for a New American Security and Foreign Policy survey of more than active service and retired 3,000 officers with the rank of major and above across the services, 2/3 of whom had combat experience. According to the survey's website "The nonscientific survey was administered online from December 7, 2007, to January 15, 2008."
Interestingly the biggest identified constraint in prosecuting the War on Terror isn't the size of the Armed Forces, though that is certainly one of the respondent's top priorities. It's getting good intelligence, a desire supported by the sizeable number of respondents who thought it was a good idea to "increase the number of troops with foreign language skills."
Perhaps the most significant piece of long-term strategic data was where the respondents thought the increase in strength was going to come from. From the response they had all but counted out expecting reinforcements from the national elites.
Today's Army is stretched past its breaking point by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sounds of its collapse may be faint enough for policymakers in Washington to ignore, but they are there. An exodus of junior and midlevel personnel illustrates the crisis. Their exit has forced the Army to apply tourniquets like "stop loss" to halt the hemorrhaging, and it has also dropped its standards for recruiting and retention.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has said that the only thing worse than a broken army is a defeated army. But this puts the cart before the horse, because in this case, the breaking of America's military will lead to defeat, both now and later. America cannot afford to send untrained, unready, or distracted troops into complex conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.
