For members of Congress looking for any ray of hope, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s refusal to even rule out the possibility that American troops could still be in Iraq a decade from now was surely sobering.
Rice was a reluctant witness Wednesday when members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pressed her to lay out the limits of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East.
She echoed President Bush’s determination – and we agree – that setting a specific timetable for withdrawal only plays into the insurgents’ hands.
But there was little said to satisfy lawmakers who wonder if the Bush administration has developed any plan to speed U.S. withdrawal.
Rice told Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., that withdrawal is a question for military planners. “I really don’t want to hazard what I think would be a guess,” she said, “even if it were an assessment of when that might be possible.”
When Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., told her she was leaving open the possibility U.S. troops would be in Iraq as much as 10 years from now, she didn’t flinch.
We recall that Gen. William Westmoreland prematurely saw “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam. Rice isn’t making that mistake, but she did allow herself some happy talk that seems to be contradicted by the Pentagon analysis of Iraqi readiness. “We are moving on a course on which Iraqi security forces are rather rapidly able to take care of their own security concerns,” said said.
Increasingly, Americans worry that a prolonged presence in Iraq is counterproductive.
Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said on PBS’s “Newshour,” “There is … implicit a kind of notion of tutelage that almost smacks of colonialism.” The idea that the U.S. is “creating, in effect, an Iraq” would only intensify resentment, he said. The more quickly the Iraqis are allowed to stand on their own, the better, in his view.
Be that as it may, few see an easy way out, and Americans are growing anxious. “We have to really level with the American people,” Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, told Rice. “This is not going to be over in two years … we’re not going to just be able to walk out of Iraq and this is going to be over.”
With a price tag of $202.3 billion and nearly 2,000 U.S. troops killed since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, leveling with the American people entails political risk that Rice wasn’t eager to take. That can’t go on forever.
