The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [143]
“For two or three dollars, you can pay some kid to plant a bomb,” one of the officers said. “That’s a lot of money out here.”
By the end of the briefing, a light fog had rolled in, delaying our flight to Kirkuk. While waiting, my foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert, wandered off to chat with one of the unit’s senior officers, while I struck up a conversation with one of the majors responsible for counterinsurgency strategy in the region. He was a soft-spoken man, short and with glasses; it was easy to imagine him as a high school math teacher. In fact, it turned out that before joining the Marines he had spent several years in the Philippines as a member of the Peace Corps. Many of the lessons he had learned there needed to be applied to the military’s work in Iraq, he told me. He didn’t have anywhere near the number of Arabic-speakers needed to build trust with the local population. We needed to improve cultural sensitivity within U.S. forces, develop long-term relationships with local leaders, and couple security forces to reconstruction teams, so that Iraqis could see concrete benefits from U.S. efforts. All this would take time, he said, but he could already see changes for the better as the military adopted these practices throughout the country.
Our escort officer signaled that the chopper was ready to take off. I wished the major luck and headed for the van. Mark came up beside me, and I asked him what he’d learned from his conversation with the senior officer.
“I asked him what he thought we needed to do to best deal with the situation.”
“What did he say?”
“Leave.”
THE STORY OF America’s involvement in Iraq will be analyzed and debated for many years to come—indeed, it’s a story that’s still being written. At the moment, the situation there has deteriorated to the point where it appears that a low-grade civil war has begun, and while I believe that all Americans—regardless of their views on the original decision to invade—have an interest in seeing a decent outcome in Iraq, I cannot honestly say that I am optimistic about Iraq’s short-term prospects.
I do know that at this stage it will be politics—the calculations of those hard, unsentimental men with whom I had dinner—and not the application of American force that determines what happens in Iraq. I believe as well that our strategic goals at this point should be well defined: achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq, ensuring that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the United States, and preventing Iraq from becoming a base for terrorist activity. In pursuit of these goals, I believe it is in the interest of both Americans and Iraqis to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2006, although how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a matter of imperfect judgment, based on a series of best guesses—about the ability of the Iraqi government to deliver even basic security and services to its people, the degree to which our presence drives the insurgency, and the odds that in the absence of U.S. troops Iraq would descend into all-out civil war. When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be had.
Still, it’s not too early to draw some conclusions from our actions in Iraq. For our difficulties there don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They reflect a failure of conception. The fact is, close to five years after 9/11 and fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States still lacks a coherent national security policy. Instead of guiding principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions, with dubious results. Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur? Are our goals in Iran regime change, the dismantling of all Iranian nuclear capability, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, or all three? Are we committed to use force wherever there’s a despotic regime that’s terrorizing