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Timelines

Posted By Eric Florack On Thursday, July 24, 2008 @ 10:48 In Afghanistan,Barrack Obama,iran,Iraq | Comments Disabled

Spray one apartment and the bugs move over to the next. Wherever there’s the least resistance or the most opportunity, you find them clustered.

The Anbar awakening ruins al Qaeda’s long-term chances in Iraq, and so the clustering refocuses on Pakistan. With the surge succeeding in Iraq and Bush finally coming around to rapprochement with Iran, our re-direct on Afghanistan/Pakistan seems well underway for the next president.

Joyner ^[2] notes the piece and says:

Of course, they could always re-direct back if we “surge” in Aghanistan/Pakistan and leave Iraq before it is able to sustain the gains in security.

Exactly, James.

That concrete is poured, but not dried yet.

And isn’t it amazing? Just a few months ago, the left was spending all it’s time trying to discredit Malaki…and there was much to discredit, though the left never focused on the important stuff… such as he was invariably wrong about timeline pronouncemnets, as Max Boot ^[3]pointed out yesterday.

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ^[4] as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama ^[5].

A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he’s saying — whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, “Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in the presidential election” and that “he’s got to take preemptive steps before Obama gets to the White House ^[6].” By smoothing Obama’s maiden voyage abroad as the Democratic nominee, Maliki may figure that he will collect chits that he can call in later.

But now suddenly because he’s playing the polical animal, hedging his bets, making nice with Obama, (While obviously not really agreeing with him) suddenly the left thinks him a sage for the ages, and he talks about a 16 month timeline. With both Malaki’s half-hearted mouthing of ‘timelines’ and Obama’s politically driven insisance on them, this is less than an impressive list of facts backing the idea of a timeline. Perhaps it’s time, as Boot suggests to leave this to the experts… the commanders…both Iraqi and US, who say a timeline is dangerous to long term peace in the region.

The Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans, “We hope they will stay until 2020.” That is similar to the expectation of Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

What would happen if we were to pull out much faster, on a 16-month timetable? Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, says that would be “very dangerous” — the same words used by Adm. Mike Mullen ^[7], chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ^[8].

We’re still left with the Democrats desperate to lose this thing, so as to not look like the traitorous fools they are… after so long claimng there’s no winning, they’re still looking for a way to look legitimate while claiming the whole thing wasn’t worth it… as I said yesterday. ^[9]