"We Don't Wanna Be Another Cambodia" (Or Do They?)

I know it's still early in the morning - well, at least in my time zone - but see if you can detect the common thread running through the following quotes.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in the Washington Post:

Last weekend a traffic jam several miles long snaked out of the Mansour district in western Baghdad. The delay stemmed not from a car bomb closing the road but from a queue to enter the city's central amusement park. The line became so long some families left their cars and walked to enjoy picnics, fairground rides and soccer, the Iraqi national obsession.

Across the city, restaurants are slowly filling and shops are reopening. The streets are busy. Iraqis are not cowering indoors. The appalling death tolls from suicide attacks are often high because of crowding at markets. These days you are as likely to hear complaints about traffic congestion as about the security situation. Across Baghdad there is a cacophony of sirens from ambulances, firefighters and police providing public services. You cannot even escape the curse of traffic wardens ticketing illegally parked cars.

These small but significant snippets of normality are overshadowed by acts of gross violence, which fuel the opinion of some that Iraq is in a downward spiral. The Iraqi people are indeed suffering tremendous hardships and making grave sacrifices - but daily life goes on for seven million Baghdadis struggling to take back their capital and country. ...

We remain determined in spite of our losses. Spectacular attacks may dominate foreign headlines, but they cannot change the reality that Iraq has made steady political, economic and social progress over the past four years. We continue to strengthen our nascent democratic institutions, pursue national reconciliation and expand Iraqi security forces. The Baghdad security plan was conceived to give us breathing space to expedite political and economic development by "securing and holding" neighborhoods across the capital. There is no quick fix, but there have been real results: Winning public confidence has led to a spike in intelligence, a disruption of terrorist networks and the capture of key leaders, as well as the discovery of weapons caches. In Anbar province, Sunni sheikhs and insurgents have turned against al-Qaeda and to the side of Iraqi security forces. This would have been unthinkable even six months ago.

Not Even The Sunnis Want Partition

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi made his comments in an interview with CNN. He said if key amendments to the Iraq Constitution are not made by May 15, he will step down and pull his forty-four Sunni politicians out of the 275-member Iraqi parliament.

"If the constitution is not subject to major changes, definitely, I will tell my constituency frankly that I have made the mistake of my life when I put my endorsement to that national accord," he said.

Specifically, he wants guarantees in the constitution that the country won't be split into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish federal states that he says will disadvantage Sunnis.

Official Takes Case to U.S., but Skeptics Don’t Budge

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Iraq's prime minister, undertook on Tuesday what may have been his most challenging mission yet: trying to persuade American lawmakers who have all but run out of patience that still more patience is required.

In a whirlwind series of closed-door meetings that began with Representative John P. Murtha and ended with Senator Carl Levin - two Democrats who have been leading the charge for American troop withdrawal - Mr. Rubaie sought to make the case that an American pullout would be catastrophic.

"I know that they are running out of patience, and I understand this very well," Mr. Rubaie said in a Monday interview in which he outlined his case. "And we have to play the political game. But I feel we are on the last mile of a walk toward success, and if they let go and don't take our hand, I feel that we are going to lose everything."

Iraqi democratic leaders know the stakes. They know what they have on the line - literally, everything. Especially given what will happen to them and their families at the hands of the Iranians and al Qaeda if the latter's co-belligerents, Murtha and Levin and the rest of the Democrat Party, do their allies the favor of running away from another fight. They know what happened in Indochina after our last cowardly bug-out: millions slaughtered in a triumphalist, genocidal rampage. And yet, when it would have been a safer bet to hedge their chances by cutting deals with sectarian warlords, they took us at our word (despite how we abandoned them following the first Gulf War) and relied upon our promise to stay in Iraq until the mission is finished.

'Tis awfully difficult to be a fool when folly has such a steep price tag. But if - when - the Dems succeed in securing another American defeat, we'll all learn firsthand that this time the folly isn't limited to the sands of Mesopotamia, and its prohibitive cost will follow us home.

UPDATE: Perhaps even sooner than we thought:

A majority of Iraqi lawmakers have endorsed a bill calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops and demanding a freeze on the number of foreign troops already in the country, lawmakers said Thursday.

The legislation was being debated even as U.S. lawmakers were locked in a dispute with the White House over their call to start reducing the size of the U.S. force here in the coming months.

The Iraqi bill, drafted by a parliamentary bloc loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was signed by 144 members of the 275-member house, according to Nassar al-Rubaie, the leader of the Sadrist bloc. …

The bill would require the Iraqi government to seek approval from parliament before it requests an extension of the U.N. mandate for foreign forces to be in Iraq, al-Rubaie said. It also calls for a timetable for the troop withdrawal and a freeze on the size of the foreign forces. [emphasis added]

Diabolical; utterly, completely diabolical - not to mention ironic. Sadr, one of Iran's chief catspaws in Iraq, and his Madri Army have gotten their asses kicked every time they've tried to go up against Coalition forces (just like the rest of the "insurgency"). It must have finally dawned on him and his sponsors that "a military solution" - or at least a primarily military solution - wasn't going to achieve their goals in Iraq. So they've switched to a political strategy - the very prescription foisted on the Bush Administration by the restored Donk legislative junta - and turned Bush's Wilsonian idealism against him and the aforequoted fools who bought into it.

If the elected government of Iraq - the one that we shepharded from embryo to cradle to maturity at not insignificant cost to ourselves in blood and treasure - has been subverted and/or intimidated by its (and our) enemies into telling us to get the hell out - thus "progressing" from maturity to a swift, deep, and premature grave - what can the Bushies do? What can they say? "No, the mission isn't finished, so we're staying until it is whether you ingrates like it or not"? Please.

Thus do Dubya's twin, overlapping chickens of investing the entire war effort in the democratization of a single Middle East state, and failing to liberate the rest of the "fertile crescent," come cluckingly home to roost. The lessons need to be learned: invasions and post-invasion reconstructions have shelf-lives, and the former have to be completed in their entirity first before you worry about the latter.

The frightening thing is that one cannot help thinking that this was our last, best chance to learn and apply those lessons. If we do get another one, the "tuition" will, I fear, be a lot more expensive.

UPDATE II: Parting point to ponder - would this Iraqi withdrawal bill have drawn so many co-sponsors if the Democrats hadn't won last November's mid-term elections, thus gaining the power to force a US retreat from this end?