Now Just How Do You Do That?

By January 2013, at the end of my first term as president, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won and Iraq is a functioning democracy. The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated and there has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001.

I received this paragraph in a much larger e-mail from the McCain campaign, and similar language shows up in his most recent ad. Let me confess here that the key issue for me this year is the war in Iraq, and more broadly a strategy for the war on terror. Many people think the Republicans have the edge on this, but I don’t. I think neither party has a real, long term, promising strategy, and in lieu of that I think getting the troops out of Iraq and making them available for other activities is critical.

But here’s what bothers me about this ad. How do you accomplish a goal like this? It’s a pretty picture. We’d all like to leave winners, or at least I think we would. But how? What is John McCain going to do differently that will suddenly make it possible to win the war and get the troops (or most of them) out in just four years?

The problem with this war, as with many peacekeeping actions before it, is that the objectives are not stated in military terms. You send your armed forces to defeat enemy forces. Our armed forces have done very well with that. Any particular target you give them, they handle effectively. I’m very proud of our military capabilities and the young men and women who carry them out. I’m very disturbed at the way in which we use them.

But in Iraq they have been given a non-military objective that simply cannot be accomplished. You cannot make Iraq into a stable democracy. Only the Iraqis can do that, and many of them don’t want to. In the meantime, our armed forces are poorly equipped to be an army of occupation, and our citizens (thank God!) are poorly equipped to ask them to be a successful occupying army.

Unless John McCain is going to pull out some new, previously unheard of strategy, there is no reason to believe he can accomplish this goal. It sounds nice in an ad, but he might have said he was going to take a stroll to the moon and back.

I should mention that each remaining candidate has problems with their goals and their means. Neither Clinton nor Obama are admitting the full impact of their health care plans, nor are they going to be able to accomplish them within the specified budget. That’s just my opinion, of course, but I think the history of government programs is on my side.

Each candidate should be asked again and again just how they will accomplish the things they claim they’ll accomplish. We must not vote simply for the best dream. McCain may have just “out hoped” Barack Obama!