Unqualified Offerings

Radical isolationist General Mark Kimmit, according to a German news agency, speaking to reporters Tuesday:

Washington – The United States does not plan to leave military bases behind in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East, but rather will turn over the ‘long war’ against al- Qaeda to governments in the region, a key US military strategist said Tuesday.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of plans and strategy for US Central Command, told reporters it ‘would be a fundamental error’ to keep a large number of ground troops ‘garrisoned’ in the region.

And

A continuing US military presence in the region would only continue to serve as a provocation for al-Qaeda terrorist propaganda, he said.

Like, um, in the 1990s? And

Kimmitt said the ‘long war’ was different from the Cold War, when the US garrisoned large numbers of ground forces in Germany and Japan for nearly half a century as a bulwark against communism.

In the Middle East, he said, such a large presence over the long term would be counterproductive and would not ‘lead to winning the long war in the future.’

It wasn’t clear how one would know when the ‘long war’ is over, Kimmitt said, but one indicator could be when terrorism is reduced to a ‘local law enforcement problem.’

Did he say his name was “Kimmit,” or . . . Kerry.

Now, I caution: Like everything else the government and military have told us about Iraq, particularly, in the last three years, there’s an awful lot of Real Soon Now in Kimmit’s remarks. It’s conceivable he’s even spinning for elite and mass actors in countries under the CentCom umbrella. Of course he’s spinning for the American public – show me a general and I’ll show you a politician. He may be carrying water for an Army brass fed up with the swift ruin of their service.

Point is, one way or other, he’s stipulating points intervention skeptics have been making since Fall 2001, or, in Brother Leon’s case, well before that.

We told you so. We told you so.

But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m bitter. The reason I’m bitter is that we squandered one of the great opportunities when we turned from surgeon to slasher beginning with the President’s “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002. One can easily imagine an alternate history in which we leveraged the rare combination of sympathy and fear we enjoyed after the swift fall of Afghanistan – offers of cooperation from amazing corners. Through December 2001 I praised the Bush Administration on this blog to a degree that would disorient anyone trolling the archives.

And they threw it away on vainglorious dreams. We’ll never get that moment back. Building even a scale-model replica of it will be the work of years, if it can be done at all.