Well, of course we can't do that. Not in Iraq (and a lot of other countries). But immunity isn't the issue.
The issue is that President Obama didn't really bust a gut to get an agreement with Iraq. I won't pretend to guess at whether President Obama really wanted an agreement, but it is clear they didn't really try to get one. That's the point. Heck, maybe Obama's staff thought a last minute phone call from The One would nuance the doubts off of Maliki and get the agreement from the sheer charm of the Oval Office attention.
A claim that he is just standing up for our troops is just hiding behind our men and women in uniform. This is an epic fail of diplomacy that increases the risk that what our troops won will be lost. We can still win this, mind you. But we've unnecessarily increased the degree of difficulty.
In light of this failure (which could be reversed, I hope, in the new year), this poll is interesting:
In the online survey of representative national samples, at least three-in-four respondents in the United States (77%) and Britain (75%) believe that removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right thing to do, even if his regime did not possess weapons of mass destruction. However, about two thirds of respondents (65% in the U.S. and 69% in Britain) think the war in Iraq was not worth the human and financial toll.
Getting rid of Saddam is viewed as the right thing to do while ultimate victory and the question of whether the price we've paid is worth it are both low on the positive end. This makes perfect sense, and reflects my beliefs--and I started my blog over the Iraq debate way back in July 2002. The only positive result of the poll is the one that is locked in place--Saddam is dead and his regime destroyed.
The question of whether we've won is still up in the air, even though we definitely won on the battlefield. And the question of whether the price is too high must rest on what we achieve. Just destroying the Saddam regime is a victory, I think. But if we fail to cement the battlefield victory with political victory inside Iraq and strategic victory in the region, we could still lose this war--and make the price we've paid obviously too high.
Iraqis, too, are too close to differing results to be confident that they can judge the liberation of their country and our role:
Sitting in a barber shop in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City slum, three friends agreed after a long and hard argument that U.S. forces brought democracy to Iraq.
But whether democracy can survive and whether the violence (not our fault for standing with them and fighting the jihadis and Sadrists who created the violence, I must protest) is a price worth paying is still up in the air.
The administration and its defenders can focus on a media strategy that attempts to deflect blame on to the Iraqis for the lack of American troops in Iraq after this year, but it misses the point that we still have much to lose, more to win, and a final calculation over the price we've paid for either result. Yet we couldn't exploit Iraqi uncertainty over their ultimate fate to keep any Americans in Iraq after next month. That's no version of smart diplomacy I ever heard of.
Of course, perhaps that's also the point of the media strategy. If their true objective is the White House, the fate of Iraq has no real place in their strategic thinking.
UPDATE: The administration is throwing Iraq's government under the bus when it is clear that Maliki wanted us to stay, the Kurds wanted us to stay, the Sunni Arabs wanted us to stay, and our military wanted us to stay. Yet still the Obama administration couldn't negotiate a way to get to "stay" with that wind at their back.
Epic diplomatic fail.
