Thursday, September 06, 2007

SAM BROWNBACK

Did Brownback Whiff After Ron Paul Spoke? Or Did He 'Deserve Better'?

Ross Douthat quibbles a bit with my comment that Brownback “totally whiff[ed]” on a chance to hit Ron Paul last night. 

…what Brownback did, in his non-response to Paul, was offer an actual strategy for moving forward politically in Iraq, addressing the central problem of our occupation head-on in a way that almost nobody else did during tonight's debate. His plan for partition may be a terrible plan (or at best, a plausible endpoint of a "stay till it burns out" strategy), but it's an infinitely more substantive contribution to the argument over Iraq than, say, Rudy Giuliani's famous slam of Paul a few months back, and Brownback deserved better - as do we all - than to have his response scored a failure because he didn't use it to score cheap points against a fellow also-ran.

First, note that a moment earlier, Ron Paul had said:

Yes, I would leave, I would leave completely. Why leave the troops in the region? The fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11. So why leave them in the region? They don’t want our troops on the Arabian Peninsula. We have no need for our national security to have troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and going into Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening Iran is the worst thing we can do for our national security.

Look, if you can’t go after an opponent who criticizes the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in a way that reminds viewers of Robert DeNiro’s Al Capone taking a baseball bat to a disloyal underling in The Untouchables, you really shouldn’t be running for the Republican nomination. The lack of passion is almost Dukakis-responding-to-Bernard-Shaw level.

Anyway, moving on to Brownback’s answer:

I think what we need to do now is look at the situation we have and now have a political surge taking place. This is Thomas Friedman’s statement, but it is true. You’ve got the military that has made a number of progressive steps, particularly in the west, Al Anbar province. They’ve made progress. But we don’t have a political solution on the ground that works in Iraq.

Iraq is less a country than it is three groups held together by exterior forces. It’s the Kurds in the north, the Sunni in the west, the Shi’a in the south, and a mixed city in Baghdad. And yes, there are groups that are mixed around in that. I think we need to recognize that reality. 

We ought to now push for establishment of a Sunni state in the west, still one country, still one country, but separate states. That’s a political solution — that you can take advantage of what the military has done on the ground. That’s what we need to do to move forward now.

“Infinitely more substantive”? I find talk of a “political surge” pretty generic – at the end of the day, the U.S. has a pretty limited ability to influence the relationships between the factions in Iraq, and this is basically the same partition plan Brownback has been urging from the beginning. Also, I’m finding “pushing for establishment of a Sunni state” in the same ballpark as Hillary and Carl Levin loudly wishing for Maliki to be removed. One moment we're insisting the we’re not imperialists in Iraq, and then in the next breath we're telling the Iraqi government what to do. Now we’re going to push a partition plan?

Anyway, Brownback continued:

MR. GOLER: Senator, let me ask you, quickly, if you do that kind of loose federation, how do you keep the Kurds in the north from fighting with Turkey, how do you keep the Shi’a from allying with Iran, and how do you keep the Sunnis from rebelling over having no oil resources?

SEN. BROWNBACK: How do you do it now? I mean, I think you’re going to need a long-term U.S. presence in, I think, particularly in the Kurdish region in the north and the Sunni region in the west, that you’re going to have a long-term — invited by those governments, and you’re going to need it to assure the Turks that the Kurds aren’t going to pull out and to assure the Kurds that the Turks aren’t going to come in. I think that’s what you have to do in looking at the reality.And the next president needs to come in and know foreign policy and not learn it on the job. This is something we need to know going in. The world is flat. I ought to know that. Being from Kansas, I understand flat. (Laughter.)

 

If you’ve been following the Iraq debate at all, this is pretty generic stuff. Ross gives Brownback a lot of credit for this, saying “only Sam Brownback made any kind of stab at addressing the central problem we face in Iraq, the political problem.”

 

Yeah, but I think there’s a reason no other candidate made any kind of stab at addressing the political problem. They had a window of ninety seconds before an audience looking for applause lines, not exactly the ideal venue to lay out a detailed strategy to sort out violent differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds and  their Turkish neighbors. I mean, in a perfect world, Brownback would have the time and audience attention span to get into how the oil revenues from around Kirkuk will affect the Turkmen minority, but if you go into a debate looking for that, you’re invariably going to be disappointed.

09/06 01:36 PMShare