In a column, Petraeus Meets His Match, in the real, 3.4 million reader TIME, Joe Klein writes about Obama's questions on Tuesday.
The first bit of good news is that he noticed. Obama did a remarkable job of pinning down the Petraeus and Crocker on the elephant in the room--that there is no end state that would have the US withdrawing forces from Iraq that is the least bit plausible in the next five to ten years.
Obama asked Crocker about Iran: We couldn't expect Iran to have no influence in Iraq, could we? "We have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq," Crocker replied. "The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces." Obama then pursued Barbara Boxer's previous line of questioning: If Iran is such a threat to Iraq, why was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted with open arms and apparently a lot of official kissing in Baghdad last month? "A visit like that," Crocker said, avoiding the question, "should be in the category of a normal relationship."
At which point, Obama dropped the hammer. The current situation in Iraq was "messy," he said. "There's still violence; there's still some traces of al-Qaeda; Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success?" Crocker, semi-speechless, chose to misinterpret the question, saying a precipitous drawdown to 30,000 troops would be disastrous. But Obama's question was more diabolical. He was saying, Hey, al-Qaeda's on the run, and Iran is probably more interested in harassing the U.S. military than having another war with Iraq. How much better does the situation need to be for us to leave?
You can see the whole thing above. This was a key point in the conversation. It made a couple of things very clear. First, there will be no more talk of Friedman units. We're looking at a protracted occupation, no matter what, if any of the pony's paradise goals that Bush and McCain talk about are to be approached, never mind achieved.
The second thing it makes clear is the Bush/McCain vision is a fantasy. Al qaeda in Mesopotamia can't be eliminated. It's not an army. It's an idea. There will always be people who want to pursue violent means for achieving islamist states. There will also always be very few of them. They can't be eliminated, but, like Basque separatists, the threat they represent can be reduced. And, in Iraq, the target of that group is the US. Leave Iraq, and al qaeda will be finished in Mesopotamia.
McCain restated the fantasy yesterday:
A peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists.
This endstate is a pipedream. To be no threat to its neighbors, it would have to have no national defense forces. "Contributes to the defeat of terrorists" is pure bull. It can only be read to mean "allied with the United States," which is impossible if the government is to be representative. There is no way a pro-Israel, anti-Iran United States can have close ties to a democratically elected Iraqi government. There is absolutely no way that such a government would permit American bases there, permanently as in Korea or Germany.
Klein also says what up to now has been unspeakable in the traditional media:
Is that why the general wants a "pause" in the U.S. withdrawal this summer?
What could possibly be the rationale for this? Perhaps it is that Sadr's Mahdi Army is the most potent force opposed to long-term U.S. bases in Iraq—and that a permanent presence has been the Bush Administration's true goal in this war. I suspect the central question in Iraq now is not whether things will get better but whether the drive for a long-term, neocolonialist presence will make the situation irretrievably worse.
This is true, of course. The reason for the invasion and occupation is the permanent bases. Stability is not important. Democracy is not possible. But the maintenance of a CENTCOMM's presence in Iraq is the actual endstate the administration, the neo-cons, and a fair chunk of the DC foreign policy establishment favor.
This agenda, doomed from the outset, has been made still more difficult by the need to erect pretexts and smokescreens involving democracy and national sovereignty. As they pretexts have all been passed by, and the smokescreens largely blown away in the hearings, it has laid bare the plans for American hegemony. It turns out that the American people aren't interested in hegemony, and the price of colonialism is too great for the American economy to bear.