Petraeus advisor sees troops in Iraq for 30 years

The Carpetbagger Report:

In August, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) traveled to Baghdad and received a briefing from Gen. David Petraeus, in which he acknowledged his belief that in order to “win” in Iraq, U.S. forces would have to stay in the country for “nine or 10 years.”

This was hardly reassuring. Indeed, for every pundit who insists that the Bush policy is finally, after years of failure, on the right track, Petraeus’ assessment creates a helpful contrast. As Yglesias said at the time, “To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.”

But that’s the 2017 plan. How about the 2037 plan?

Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and a key member of Petraeus’ advisory panel, spoke over the weekend about his vision for Iraq’s future. Marc Lynch reports: (via Kevin Drum)
Without getting in to his arguments or my reservations, I just wanted to lay out Biddle’s best case scenario as he presented it: if everything goes right and if the US continues to “hit the lottery” with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years. And that’s the best case scenario of one of the current strategy’s smartest supporters. Man.

In the meantime, many number of soldiers are going AWOL.

Democracynow.org:

Number of U.S. Soldiers Going AWOL Jumps 80 Percent

The number of U.S. Army soldiers going AWOL has jumped 80 percent since the United States invaded Iraq. Overall about 4,700 soldiers deserted this year – a 42 percent jump since just 2006.