Remember the Last Time Bill Kristol Told Us “What to Do in Iraq?”
But wait! We’re not done with recycled neocon hawks and their bad advice yet!
Now we have a two-fer at the Weekly Standard, as William Kristol and Frederick Kagan team up to call for MOAR WAR: What to Do in Iraq.
This would require a willingness to send American forces back to Iraq. It would mean not merely conducting U.S. air strikes, but also accompanying those strikes with special operators, and perhaps regular U.S. military units, on the ground. This is the only chance we have to persuade Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that they have an alternative to joining up with al Qaeda or being at the mercy of government-backed and Iranian-backed death squads, and that we have not thrown in with the Iranians. It is also the only way to regain influence with the Iraqi government and to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces on terms that would allow us to demand the demobilization of Shi’a militias and to move to limit Iranian influence and to create bargaining chips with Iran to insist on the withdrawal of their forces if and when the situation stabilizes.
Quick reminder: in March 2004, Kristol wrote this:
We may have turned a corner in terms of security.
It’s really quite amazing — and not in a good way — to see all the horribly wrong people with bad advice and bad ideas popping up again to try to sell the US public on more bad ideas.