Wasting lives

This morning, General David Petraeus is scheduled to go before Congress to report on the state of "the surge". Early reports from Petraeus, including a letter to the troops and an interview with the Boston Globe indicate that he is "frustrated with the slow pace of political solutions" in Iraq. Really, what was he expecting? General Petraeus lent his support to the surge as a means of bringing a modicum of stability to Iraq so the government could start to function. The fact that he did this without first securing a pledge from the Bush administration to conduct a diplomacy surge at the same time shows a deplorable level of naivete for someone of his reputed intelligence and experience.

Why do we expect the Iraqis - civilians and politicians - to put four years of horrendous bloodshed and decades of tension and oppression (interspersed by occasional bouts of horrendous bloodshed) behind them and suddenly start working together? There is no trust, no tradition of civil society, and yet we expect them to create a functioning multi-ethnic democracy in just a few short months? On what model or historical precedent are we basing this expectation?

I don't think it's impossible, and neither does Eddy. Part of the reason he volunteered was because he saw this surge as our last chance to create the conditions for a functioning state. However, the fact that there has not been a commensurate surge in diplomacy on the part of the administration says to me that we are wasting lives and simply prolonging the inevitable bloodbath.

In July, Tom Friedman called for a diplomatic surge, drafting the the country's best negotiators -- Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, George Shultz, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross or Richard Holbrooke -- and ask one or all of them to go to Baghdad, under a U.N. mandate, with the following orders: "move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you've reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.''

I'd been thinking the same thing for months, although my perspective was a little more internationalist - thinking of people who have successfully overseen multi-ethnic dissolution and/or reconciliation (i.e. Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela and George Mitchell).

The administration should match the troop surge with a diplomacy surge, NOW!, or bring the troops home. Otherwise, we are just wasting lives.