Below The Beltway

Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for America’s policy in Vietnam during the Nixon Administration, has said that the War in Iraq cannot be won:

LONDON — Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors _ including Iran _ if progress is to be made in the region.

“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Interestingly, this is a view that appears to be shared by the same neoconservatives who advised President Bush to go into Iraq to begin with:

In an interview last week, [Richard] Perle said the administration’s big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. “If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I’d say, ‘Let’s not do it,’ ” and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. “It was a foolish thing to do.”
(…)

It may also be, [Joshua Murvachik of the American Enterprise Institute] said, that the mistake was the idea itself — that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. “That part of our plan is down the drain,” Muravchik said, “and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy.”

That’s been obvious for some time to any but the true believers. The question is, what do we do know ? Some, like 2008 Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, say we need to send more troops. Others, like Congressman John Murtha, have called for a full scale withdraw. Neither seems to make sense, especially not withdrawing, as Kissinger points out:

Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq’s neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.

“A dramatic collapse of Iraq _ whatever we think about how the situation was created _ would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.

Like it or not, at this point it looks like American forces will be in Iraq in some capacity for the foreseeable future.