According to the WaPo, the Pentagon may be warming to increasing U.S. troops in Iraq and then boosting training and guidance of Iraqi forces during a U.S. drawdown. But citing first-hand meetings with President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, former Washington Governor Dan Evans in a Seattle Times op-ed yesterday asserts increasing U.S. troops makes little sense. The more hawkish conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer agrees, but in Monday's Times goes further than Evans. Krauthammer argues the great need is for a reformulated coalition government that can win the allegiance now granted by Iraqi troops only to "mosque or clan or militia," following 30 years of political rape by Saddam.

The Economist's blog Free Exchange argues that a liberal economy and a liberal democratic political system in Iraq or anywhere are "superior to the alternatives;" and the "role of culture in impeding political and economic development" must be acknowledged. As must, Free Exchange fails to specify, cancerous theocratic tendencies. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite Muslim militia leader allied with the vehemently anti-U.S. Iranian Islamist regime, would seem to rank high among current cultural impediments to political progress in Iraq. Mark Steyn notes:

When I had the honor of discussing the war with the president recently, he was at pains to emphasize that Iraq was "sovereign." That may be. But, at a time when a gazillion free-lance militias are running around the joint ignoring the sovereign government, it seems a mite pedantic to insist that the sole militia in the country that has to obey every last memo from Prime Minister Maliki is the U.S. armed forces. Muqtada al-Sadr is an emblem not of democracy's flowering but of the arid soil in which it's expected to grow. America would have been better off capturing and executing him two years ago.

...Someone in the GOP needs to do what Ronald Reagan did so brilliantly a quarter-century ago: reconcile the big challenges abroad with a small-government philosophy at home. The House and the Senate will not return to Republican hands until they do.

A good place to start on the current Iraqi challenge is not only with increased U.S. troops to Baghdad, but also the taking out of al-Sadr. As John McCain recently urged. al-Sadr's two million or so Baghdad-based adherents are called The Mahdi Army. This particular protector-in-chief of the Mahdi - the envisioned apocalyptic redeemer of Islam - needs to be put on an express bus to the hereafter.

TECHNORATI TAGS: IRAQ, TROOP STRENGTH, DAN EVANS, GOVERNMENT,CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, MUQTADA AL-SADR, IRAN, MARK STEYN, JOHN MCCAIN

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 22, 2006 10:47 AM

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