Ignoring options in Iraq

Because blaming Democrats is more politically advantageous than trying to end the fighting. (My bold).

WASHINGTON - The language on a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq voted out of the House and Senate conference committee this week contains large loopholes that would apparently allow US troops to continue carrying out military operations in Iraq's Sunni heartland indefinitely.

The plan, coming from the Democratic majority in Congress, makes an exemption from a 180-day timetable for completion of "redeployment" of US troops from Iraq to allow "targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations of global reach".

The al-Qaeda exemption, along with a second exemption allowing US forces to re-enter Iraq to protect those remaining behind to train and equip Iraqi security forces and to protect other US military forces, appears to approve the presence in Iraq of tens of thousands of US occupation troops for many years to come.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed, by 218 to 208 votes, the US$124 billion House and Senate supplemental appropriations bill that requires US troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq by October 1. President George W Bush has said he will veto it. The Senate is expected to approve identical legislation, setting the stage for the first veto fight between Bush and the majority Democrats.

The large loopholes in the Democratic withdrawal plan come against the background of the failure of the US war against the insurgency - including al-Qaeda - in al-Anbar and other Sunni provinces and the emergence of a major war within the Sunni insurgency between non-jihadist resistance groups and al-Qaeda.

The Sunni resistance organizations represent a clear alternative to an endless US occupation of hostile Sunni provinces that has driven many activists into the arms of al-Qaeda.

[snip]

A five-page US Marine Corps intelligence report on Anbar last September reflected that view. It said Anbar province was a "vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq". Media reporting on the province largely conformed to that interpretation. The notion of a two-sided war in the Sunni heartland bolsters the Bush administration's political position that any talk of a timetable for withdrawal is defeatist.

In fact, however, it is far removed from reality. The majority of the important Sunni insurgent organizations represent a second anti-al-Qaeda force that has far greater potential for defeating al-Qaeda than the US military does.

[snip]

Nevertheless, the Sunni resistance option was clearly seen last year by the US military, Khalilzad and even Bush himself as preferable to an unending US counterinsurgency war in a hostile Sunni heartland. But the administration has quietly shelved that policy option as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have confronted Democratic demands for a withdrawal timetable.

The White House would rather be in the position of blaming the Democrats for its "defeatism" than pursuing that option more vigorously.

Democratic leaders in Congress, meanwhile, appear to believe they must support a continued US war against al-Qaeda to avoid being tagged with defeat. But the initial Democratic plan voted out of the conference committee on Monday is only the first of several congressional battles on Iraq policy to come in the next few weeks.

The massive loophole for continued US war in Iraq will be one of the issues fought over in these coming rounds.