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09 Apr 2008 12:10 pm

The 100 Years Hedge

Josh Marshall comments on the GOP trying to distance McCain from his 100 years comment:

Here's why Republicans are scared to death of this. No one wants to be in Iraq 100 years from now, even if McCain stipulates to the fantasy that Iraqis will be happy having us occupy their country forever and that the place will become like Finland. And none of our soldiers will ever get killed there and it won't cost any money. If that's the explanation for why we shouldn't be concerned that he's happy to stay in Iraq for a century, that just tells people that McCain is living in a fantasy world.

Dave Wiegel earlier this week:

The wiggle room comes when McCain says he's okay with the 100 years "as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed." And that's where McCain's defenders have chosen to stand and fight. See, McCain doesn't want to fight a hot war for 100 years. He wants to have a base there until the Middle East stops producing threats to the U.S. To say otherwise is "an attack on McCain's character," as Michael Goldfarb puts it in that Weekly Standard link.

That's a dodge, though. It assumes that 1) there is nothing controversial about building permanent bases in Iraq, 2) that maintaining those bases would be completely positive effects on the region, and that 3) there's nothing wrong with a potential president telling the world we'll be in Iraq forever. Not much room for realpolitik there, eh? It's unfair to distort what McCain says, but it's wrong to portray this as harmless straight talk.

My own view is that McCain's comment, in its most benign formulation, misses the key element here: Islam. One reader helpfully pointed out that occupied Japan also had a fiercely proud populace revolted by foreign troops. Sure: but it had been defeated as a unitary state and its Emperor (which we wisely retained) gave the occcupiers sanction. No such unitary state exists in Iraq; and Islam forbids the rule of infidels in its own heartlands - and Iraq has central religious importance for its various shrines and religious centers in the Muslim mind. Secularism has been in decline for a couple of decades. There is no way an Arab Muslim country will tolerate Western troops permanently based on their land - without constant war and threat of war. To believe otherwise is to engage in a "holiday from reality." We've done enough of that.

The future of a permanently occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank. And the deeper we are stuck there, the more our predicament will become the awful, morally corrosive, soul-sapping experience of the occupying Israelis.

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