The Weekly Standard, to its credit, has agonized over the war in Iraq like few other overtly partisan magazines. While loudly proclaiming their support for the invasion, editor Bill Kristol and contributor Robert Kagan have written a series of blistering editorials admonishing Donald Rumsfeld for his handling of the war over the past year and a half, while demanding the deployment of more troops in country to do the job properly. While many other publications have followed a straight line of support or opposition to the war, the Standard, while never antiwar, has publicly aired its discontent, thereby fulfilling its mission as a leading political journal.
This week’s issue features Frederick W. Kagan’s cover story, “Blueprint for Victory,” which is a less direct critique than some of Kristol and (Robert) Kagan’s fusillades. And, while not wholly convincing, it raises some valid points.
Kagan hypothesizes that ultimate victory in Iraq hinges on the “refocusing of coalition military efforts” to the “central challenge” of convincing the Sunni minority to stop the insurgency and join the democratic process. The failure to occupy the Sunni Triangle looms large in his piece, because “Besides allowing Zarqawi and his ilk to step in, it also meant that the Sunni Arabs of Iraq never felt that they had been defeated.” This all comes back to troop levels. “[T]he absence of coalition forces from many of the cities in the Sunni Triangle has reinforced the message that the U.S. presence is fleeting and will lighten as the weeks go by,” Kagan says.
His solution? Increase the size of the American military and “act aggressively now to pacify the Sunni Triangle”; stop any talk of “exit strategies”; and concentrate on the defeat of the insurgency instead of on training Iraqi troops.
It’s probably too late in the game for the United States to follow this path, but hey, it’s a plan — which is more than either the administration or its critics have offered to this point.
This week the Left is equally fixated on Iraq. In the November issue of The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias tackle an issue that has been consuming liberals in much the same way that the Harriet Miers debate has been fracturing conservatives: the issue of what to do with liberals who supported the war and now are “willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently.” The argument that Rosenfeld and Yglesias ascribe to the “liberal hawk” set (which includes much of the staff of The New Republic, as well as writers like George Packer, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen) is that “the invasion and occupation could have been successful had they been planned and administered by different people.” Rosenfeld and Yglesias call this the “incompetence dodge,” and spend the remainder of their piece dismantling it, concluding that “The future of a morally serious, reality-based liberalism depends on interventionists learning from the Iraq debacle lessons more profound than that George W. Bush is a bumbler.”
In New York magazine this week, Kurt Andersen takes a look at another extension of the Iraq debate: Judith Miller. He calls on the Times to give her the boot, and traces her saga back to the disgraced Jayson Blair, who Andersen refers to as a “greenhorn psycho, a freak accident” who entirely consumed the newspaper in the summer of 2003. “Blair resigned on May 1, 2003; [Howell] Raines left on June 5, and it wasn’t until July that [Bill] Keller succeeded him. One of Miller’s handlers, the investigations editor, had left the Times; another nominal boss, [Jill] Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, was at the center of the uprising against Raines. In other words, during the very period when free-ranging Judy Miller desperately needed adult supervision — when she was publishing another half-dozen exciting stories about the discovery of Iraqi WMDs, when she was having all her conversations with Libby et al. about [Valerie] Plame and [Joseph] Wilson — her senior management was entirely consumed by the Raines-Blair horror show.”
It’s an interesting take — that the ever-energetic Miller took advantage of distracted colleagues and bosses in order to do her damage — and one that is almost entirely convincing.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.