What will they really do about Iraq?

McCain, Clinton and Obama have all made broad pronouncements about how they'd handle the war as president. But how do their plans hold up under scrutiny?

By Mark Benjamin

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Politics, News, Iraq, Iraq War, Barack Obama, Mark Benjamin, 2008 election, David Petraeus

April 17, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- Last week President Bush put to rest any question about whether he will hand over the full weight of the Iraq debacle to his successor. By late summer, he said, the number of troops in Iraq will be reduced to pre-surge levels. But after that, the withdrawals will stop. Bush said that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander there, will have "all the time he needs" to figure out if more soldiers should be pulled out.

Bush's obduracy on the future of Iraq underscores the political stakes of the war heading toward the November election. As Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee put it during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq last Tuesday, "I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like."

As they've campaigned for president, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have staked out their positions on the war. But remarkably, even this far into the campaign their plans have largely escaped close scrutiny by the press.

Salon spoke recently with a half dozen national security advisors to presidential candidates from both parties, as well as with independent military experts, about the daunting Iraq issue. In private conversations, all agreed that a political solution among Iraq's bitterly divided sects was the only road to some version of success in that country. And all agreed that certain outcomes, such as a regional war, would be unacceptable from the standpoint of U.S. interests in the crucial oil-rich area.

But even in off-the-record conversations, it was difficult to nail down what the three candidates consider to be an acceptable, and attainable, end state in Iraq. And there is little evidence that the broader plans and tactics espoused by the candidates would result in such an outcome.

Options in Iraq are now limited to a set of bad choices. Even if the next president navigates skillfully, Iraq could still collapse into chaos, drawing its neighbors into a bloody regional conflict costing countless lives and wreaking havoc on the world economy.

The gloomy situation is an undeniable legacy of the Bush administration.

"If you make enough mistakes long enough, you end up with unappealing choices," said Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, who is not an advisor to any of the presidential candidates. "Unappealing choices make lousy political manifestos."

John McCain's position essentially boils down to this: The factions in Iraq that show little sign of reconciling five years into the war will somehow reconcile if lots of U.S. troops remain in Iraq. In other words, stay the course -- success is within reach.

The very similar positions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton essentially boil down to this: The factions in Iraq that show little sign of reconciling five years into the war will somehow reconcile if lots of U.S. troops leave. In other words, start pulling out now -- the Iraqis won't step up until we do, and we can no longer afford to stay.

McCain was a huge supporter of the original invasion, and later Bush's troop surge plan. McCain today, at least, is crystal clear on his overarching goal for Iraq. As he told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council late last month, success in Iraq -- as well as in Afghanistan -- is the "establishment of peaceful, stable, prosperous democratic states that pose no threat to neighbors and contribute to the defeat of terrorists." He's aiming high, to put it mildly. Very few national security experts think Iraq is going to look like post-World War II Germany anytime soon, if ever.

During the Iraq hearings last week, McCain told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "to promise a withdrawal of our forces regardless of the consequences, would constitute a failure of political and moral leadership."

McCain seems Sisyphean when it comes to the tactics he says will result in democracy in Iraq. Fifteen months after Bush announced the surge as a means to bringing about political compromise, there has been very little national political reconciliation, although the Bush administration has been at great pains to suggest otherwise. Ambassador Ryan Crocker was reduced last week to citing a redesigned Iraqi flag as evidence of progress. "In January, a vote by the Council of Representatives to change the design of the Iraqi flag means the flag now flies in all parts of the country for the first time in years," he told Congress.

The Iraqi Parliament did recently pass three laws: They allowed members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party back into government, approved local and regional elections for this October, and granted amnesty in the cases of tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraqi and U.S. custody. But the extent to which these laws will be implemented is unclear.

A third problem with the McCain paradigm was exposed by the recent explosion of violence in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. It showed that anytime rival Iraqi factions decide to engage in a major battle, even 160,000 American troops can do little about it. The whole thing could spin out of control at any time.

While McCain may be clear about his ultimate objectives in Iraq -- however farfetched -- Obama and Clinton remain frustratingly vague. They consistently vow to withdraw U.S. troops -- with little discussion about exactly what would be an acceptable outcome in Iraq or how it would be achieved.

Next page: Did the Democrats' triumph in the 2006 elections help cause the "Sunni awakening"?