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Article 6.
The New Republic
We shouldn't remove all U.S. troops from
Iraq
Fouad Ajami
June 3, 2011 -- The U.S. war in Iraq has just been given an
unexpected seal of approval. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in what
he billed as his "last major policy speech in Washington," has owned
up to the gains in Iraq, to the surprise that Iraq has emerged as "the
most advanced Arab democracy in the region." It was messy, this
Iraqi democratic experience, but Iraqis "weren't in the streets
shooting each other, the government wasn't in the streets shooting its
people," Gates observed. The Americans and the Iraqis had not
labored in vain; the upheaval of the Arab Spring has only underlined
that a decent polity had emerged in the heart of the Arab world.
Robert Gates has not always been a friend of the Iraq war. He was a
member in good standing, it should be recalled, of the Iraq Study
Group, a panel of sages and foreign policy luminaries, co-chaired by
James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who had taken a jaundiced view of
the entire undertaking in Iraq. Their report endorsed a staged retreat
from the Iraq war and an accommodation with Syria and Iran. When
Gates later joined the cabinet of George W. Bush, after the
"thumping” meted out to the Republicans in the congressional
elections of 2006, his appointment was taken as a sharp break with
the legacy of his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. It was an open
secret that the outlook of the new taciturn man at the Department of
Defense had no place in it for the spread of democracy in Arab lands.
Over a long career, Secretary Gates had shared the philosophical
approach of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, peers of his
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