Endgames

The major topic of the 2008 Presidential Elections seems to be the war in Iraq, or issues related to that overarching argument, whether it's torture, the PATRIOT Act, or the concept of wire-tapping. Only two of the candidates for the Republican and Democrat parties voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, with individuals like Barack Obama not having served in the legislature at the time of the vote. Nearly everyone else has openly supported the war at some point in their careers, and many continue to support it still.

There are a variety of endgames which could occur, depending on which candidate is elected.

If a mainstream Republican wins, the war will most likely continue with a blue legislature demanding benchmarks. An unlikely event would involve an invasion of Iran. As much as the mainstreamers hate Iran, if they're mainstream they hopefully have enough political savvy to realize we all might riot at that point. If a mainstreamer wins, I'm going to practice tying bandanas on my face. Humor aside, this second option would almost guarantee that the Republican party would become unelectable for a time.

Mainstream Democrats are a bit harder to call. One pundit, and I forget who it was, suggested three ending scenarios for Democrats and Iraq. The second is that Democrat is elected on a withdrawal platform, and faced with all of the information about Iraq, switches positions and uses the benchmarks idea, but keeps our troops in the area (and perhaps even surges). This could really gum up the party, and it would be interesting to see what would happen to our blue friends as a result.

The second possibility is that a Democrat withdraws the troops and permits Iraq to have a civil war (and we just don't see enough of those these days). If troops are withdrawn, we can certainly expect this to happen. The resulting conflict would then be blamed on Democrats for withdrawing, not for Bush's invasion, and that would be a credible assessment. This would render the Democrats, like any Iran-invading Republicans, in a supremely unelectable position.

The third option, if I remember it correctly, is that Democrats would withdraw and Iraq would get it together. Since we've established a democracy (an irony in itself), it is highly unlikely that Iraqis would get behind a political tradition almost completely foreign to their regional history.

Other possibilities would involve breaking Iraq up into three districts for Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia Muslims. Dennis Kucinich, the other Congressman in the running, also has a somewhat detailed plan for withdrawing.

When it comes to the war, I have a harder time accepting Ron Paul's approach than any of his other ideas. He advocates a quick troop withdrawal. He thinks that our military presence keeps lesser extremists in check, but at the same time it keeps Iraqi politicians from taking steps towards independence or even decent responsibility. If we withdraw, Paul suggests, the Iraqis will have to govern themselves because of the grizzly alternative. I'm not sure that this concept is present in the minds of the Iraqi public. Between dictatorial rule for a couple of decades and Islamic traditions that usually have monarchic/theocratic rule, I doubt self-interest will enter into the equation for your average Iraqi citizen.

In short, I'm still not sold on any Iraq war plan. I don't like the idea of staying there, but there are a lot of risks involved in leaving. I do think we invaded a sovereign nation under false allegations, or failing those WMD-charges, poor rationale. While the functional history might judge George W. Bush as a decent president for offing a dictator, ideological types like myself will still be nauseated for quite some time.