Funny, your buddies over at this truly left wing website, find Luttwak a right winger....LOL!
tomdispatch.com
In the meantime, on the op-ed page of the New York Times, a canny right-wing strategist, Edward N. Luttwak, offered a curious plan for withdrawal from Iraq (Time to Quit Iraq [Sort of]), one tailored to the majority of Americans who don't want to "abandon" that country. It was, in fact, a shrewd plan shaped to provide cover for any government. Luttwak suggested challenging Iraqi Shiites in particular as well as various neighboring countries by threatening withdrawal unless they indicated a real desire for us to remain and acted accordingly. He wrote:
"This is no diplomatic parlor game. The threat of an American withdrawal would have to be made credible by physical preparations for a military evacuation, just as real nuclear weapons were needed for deterrence during the cold war. More fundamentally, it would have to be meant in earnest: the United States is only likely to obtain important concessions if it is truly willing to withdraw if they are denied. If Iraq's neighbors are too short-sighted to start cooperating in their own best interests, America would indeed have to withdraw."
Luttwak made the interesting claim that Americans actually have far less to lose than we imagine in any "abrupt" withdrawal scenario: "But [the threat of withdrawal] would be based on the most fundamental of realities: For geographic reasons, many other countries have more to lose from an American debacle in Iraq than does the United States itself." |
