Six Degrees of Separation

Take a look at the following quote. The name(s) have been redacted. See if you can guess who the protagonist is:

[REDACTED], unsatisfied with the pace of political reconciliation in Iraq, laid down an implicit deadline Friday by urging Iraqi leaders to pass key laws by summer while repeating his warning that U.S. troops will not patrol Iraqi streets indefinitely.

[REDACTED] also described as "mixed" the results of two-month-old military operations to curb violence in Baghdad, which have included tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops.

"Our commitment to Iraq is long-term, but it is not a commitment to have our young men and women patrolling Iraq's streets open-endedly," [REDACTED] said at a news conference.

[REDACTED] pledged that the United States would continue training and modernizing Iraqi security forces to enable Iraq to defend itself from attack from abroad. But he made clear that in the future, U.S. troops could pull back from the day-to-day mission of providing security and combating militants. He stopped short of referring to a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

Who said these things? You'd think it must be at least a "moderate" Democrat, right? Or perhaps a RINO like Chuck Hagel. It sounds like "cut & run lite"; it sounds ignorant, since Iraq is already being "attacked from abroad" via the so-called "insurgency" that is being overtly aided and managed by Iran and its Syrian stooges. It also sounds arrogant, almost, dare I say, "colonialist," since Iraq is supposed to be a sovereign nation-state, and its elected leadership not obligated to follow the orders of its erstwhile liberators. And it sounds perfidious, since a "long term commitment" to Iraq has to include "patrolling Iraq's streets" as long as it takes to "control the violence."

(Of course, that process could be hastened along dramatically by invading Iran and toppling the mullahgarchy, but official Washington ran (back) away from reality years ago.)

So....who uttered the above sentiments?

Would you believe George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense?

Maybe Bob Gates offered this in the context of the Democrats' ongoing attempts to wear the Administration down toward accepting a pell-mell retreat from Iraq, as in "You guys have to get your [REDACTED] together quickly, because we may not be able to keep our troops there for much longer." That's certainly a happier interpretation than the alternative, which is that the Bushies are about ready to throw in the towel.

That may be a distinction without a difference, however. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his MPs refused to be bulldozed, declaring that they will take their own sweet time making the "political progress" that is being demanded of them. It would seem that they aren't any more amenable to artificial timetables than the Bushies used to be.

But that is their right, just as it is their right to gather anti-insurgent intelligence as they see fit:

“The detainee gave us names from the highest to the lowest,” Captain Fowler told the Iraqi soldiers. “He showed us their safe houses, where they store weapons and I.E.D.’s and where they keep kidnap victims, how they get weapons, where weapons come from, how they place I.E.D.’s, attack us and go away. Because you detained this guy this is the first intelligence linking everything together. Good job. Very good job.”

The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two, the Iraqis said. The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of a whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.

To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique and proud to have helped the Americans.

“I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” Captain Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter. “We know how to make them talk. We know their back streets. We beat them. I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

As American and Iraqi troops set up these outposts in dangerous neighborhoods to take on the insurgents block by block, they find themselves continually facing lethal attacks. In practice, the Americans and Iraqis seem to have different answers about what tactics are acceptable in response.

Beatings like this, which are usually hard to verify but appear to be widespread given the fears about the Iraqi security forces frequently expressed by ordinary Iraqis, present the Americans with a largely undiscussed dilemma.

Forgive my ubiquitous practical streak again, but what "dilemma"? Perhaps between the nice, soft, safe fantasy world of the New York Times and the reality of life in Baghdad these days. Personally, if I lived there and somebody told me that the reason I and my family were still alive instead of in a pile of bite-sized chunks in a downtown marketplace was because one of my country's soldiers had whipped a piece of terrorist scum with an electrical cord to get crucial intel out of him, I would be profoundly grateful, not prissily aghast. Something tells me American military personnel understand this as well, which is why the "dilemma" is "largely undiscussed." Call it the new "don't ask, don't tell."

Can you imagine how Iraqi officers like Captain Hassan would react if, rather than accepting the intel he extracted and taking care of business with it, his American allies lambasted him for his "torture" tactics, refused to act upon the intel so "immorally" gathered, and treated him and his comrades like they were the enemy? While the "insurgency" kept merrily blowing up their countrymen - and American troops?

Perhaps it would behoove us all to remind ourselves just whose country Iraq is supposed to be, as well as the fact that we are at war there with a dishonorable, illegal enemy who doesn't wear a uniform, doesn't identify himself, and deliberately inflicts casualties on civilians. If our own country was beset with an equivalent insurrection, I have to wonder how important the "torture" issue would be to the average American.

It would also be handy to consider, again, what the alternative is. If - or, rather, when - we pull the plug on Iraqi democracy, the consequence won't be a new election that al-Maliki loses, or the Iraqi version of Watergate. It will be a Saddamite restoration, or an al Qaeda-imposed Sunni Islamist caliphate, or an Iranian vassal state. And only after a mass blood-letting of unimaginable proportions, that will not limit itself to the sands of Mesopotamia, but will flow rapaciously westward.

No matter how much the Democrats try to shove the the square Iraqi peg into the round Vietnamese hole, it will never fit, because of one unalterable difference: the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism is a conflict we cannot quit. Cutting and running, or going wobbly aren't so much not options as simply irrelevant. If we do either, the Islamists will simply come after us to keep killing us. If we stay and fight, they will keep trying to kill us until they're all dead.

Nobody likes the idea of a "permanent war." Nobody wants it. But people would want one of the two ways to make it non-permanent even less - if they'd ever face up to the dilemma at all.