Iraq: Where Are We?
Despair continues to be the most popular response to the Iraq War. The latest accounting (June 10) for where we are by a reliable Brookings Institute team that has been offering a summary regularly in the New York Times finds a few bright spots, especially in Baghdad and Anbar province. Yet it points out that overall levels of violence remain very high and the political and economic systems show little if any sign of progress. Among the utilities, only the increase in telephone subscribers shows steady growth, something that has been sustained since 2003. Other reports, as we have noted, point to the continual drain of the best and the brightest. One survey of university graduates (they do still have them) reports that nearly all of them intend to get out of the country as fast as they can.
But one cannot help but admire the courage (or stubbornness) of the thousands of teachers and doctors that continue to do their jobs as best they can.
The papers have been full of discussions lately of where we go from here. The Republican candidates, other than McCain, do not want to even mention Iraq. The Democratic candidates clearly have little to offer. They differ mostly on how stridently they demand we get out now, and how much equivocation they can sneak in under the cover of stridency. The U.S. military appears to believe that we are going to have a permanent presence for a long time. The analogy being accepted by some now is Korea, where we have remained since the fifties. The position of the leading Iraqis is not too different from the Democrats: “out (but)”.
