The Art of Politics

The McCain Mutiny

At least he held his tongue until after the election...

John McCain took a swipe at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, going so far as to say he has "no confidence" in Rumsfeld.

McCain clarified that he does not mean that he wants his resignation - though you'd think one would be a natural extension of the other. However, this backtstab by McCain is simply a larger outgrowth of the clinical addiction to denial that the Congress has on defense matters.

There is much to honestly criticize Rumsfeld and the administration on, both in general defense policy and in handling Iraq. However, the two most repeated harangues are that we don't have enough troops there, and we shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi Army after Hussein's regime fell - a combination of denial of responsibility and feckless hindsightedness.

The dirty little secret about Iraq is - we don't have any more troops to send. Yep - it's true. The only way we can keep up a troop rotation is to cap the number of forces sent into Iraq. Any more, and you can't rotate them out - rotation requires replacement. Even now, we have stop-loss policies keeping servicemen past their notmal deactivation date - why? Because we have no choice. So for Congress to demand accountability of Bush and Rumsfeld is to deflect their own - who appropriates the money for the armed forces? The point is not to absolve the White House, but to demonstrate the Congress in it's appropriations and oversight capacity has ample opportunity to address these issues by making changes, not just statements.

As to the Iraqi Army, this is another meme that is gaining traction among Congressmen and Senators as they opine on the state of Iraq. It has now become almost de rigeur to state that dissolving the Iraqi army was a mistake - and an easy statement to make, because it is offered as a panacea for current difficulties, and carries no burden of having any of it's logical consequences analyzed. So let's analyze them - the Iraqi army, the corrupt functionary of Saddam that kept Iraq under it's boot, was never going to be accepted as legitimate by the Shia and Kurds. So - we could use the strongman's corrupt force as our own, and alienate 80% of the Iraqi population, or we could disband it and start from scratch, and have trouble with the 20% of Sunni's likely to make trouble for any attempt at government reformation. Seeing how difficult fighting the Sunni insurgents has been, does anyone wish to trade that for wholesale uprising among Shia and a cold shoulder from the Kurds? And is there any compunction about using that corrupt force, wielding that murderous group the same way Saddam did?

Hindsight never has the burden of having to prove itself...

Posted by MEC2 at December 14, 2004 07:02 PM