ABSTRACT
Across the spring of 2008 the United States had 160000 troops in Iraq; the fifth anniversary of the war had passed and attention in the United States and elsewhere shifted to determine what the Iraq policies and options of the three remaining presidential candidates might be in early 2009 or beyond. All three senators had the opportunity to question General David H. Petraeus, Commander of the Multi-National Force – Iraq; one of them would have to deal with the morass. Despite his broadly positive assessment, when pushed by Senator Evan Bayh, the Democrat from Indiana, General Petraeus admitted: ‘The Champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.’ He had characterised the situation in Iraq to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as ‘fragile and reversible’. Petraeus was clear that corners had not been turned and that ‘we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel’. Yet Senator John McCain envisaged the potential for ‘the genuine prospect of success’ indicating that the US was ‘no longer staring into the abyss of defeat’. Senator Hilary Clinton made the prescient observation that it ‘might well be irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and again’, despite having voted for the war, she, perhaps unwittingly, tapped into the sentiments of failed ambition that drove policy makers towards Iraq across the 1990s and into the post-9/11 era. Senator Barack Obama, begging the indulgence of committee members, identified the ‘massive strategic blunder’ that would require a timetabled withdrawal and an intense regional diplomatic effort, including talks with Iran. It has been clear for some time that the situation would not resolve itself during the Bush administration, now it has been articulated. Petraeus recommended a drawdown of the surge combat forces to July 2008 which would be followed by a 45 day period of ‘consolidation and evaluation’.1 That identification of the massive strategic blunder punctuated years of US attempts to engage Iraq in various ways; first in attempts to rebuild relations after the 1967 War, courting Iraq diplomatically through the 1970s and 1980s, but especially after a pillar of the Nixon Doctrine, Iran, was ‘lost’. The US victory in 1991 enhanced ideologies associated with a transformation
international balance of power into a commanding and pre-eminent strategic position; this was the place Washington now struggled to find an effective exit strategy, with all the attendant narratives on the ‘legacy’ of Iraq and its implications for US power and prestige.2
