Over at CAP, Larry Korb and Brian Katulis have released a new plan for withdrawal from Iraq, what they call Strategic Redeployment. The plan itself is well presented, fairly intuitive stuff. During Bush's tenure terror attacks have increased, Iraq has gotten worse, our allies have been bombed, and all the rest. From there, it should be clear that the current strategy isn't working, a new approach is needed. Hence, redeployment rather than withdrawal. Korb's plan is presented as a way to enhance our effectiveness in the War on Terror by changing our troop focus and mission priorities, an approach that strikes me as a smart cooption of Bush's conflation of Iraq with the War on Terror. The redeployment itself would:
• Take 80,000 troops out of Iraq during 2006;
• Demobilize all Guard and Reserve troops so they could focus on Homeland Security;
• Take two active brigades (which means up to 20,000 troops) and use them as reinforcements for Afghanistan and African/Asian counterterrorism operations;
• And put the remaining 14,000 troops in Kuwait and nearby marine bases to strike at terrorist camps in the area and guard against further destabilizing threats to the region.
There's a bit more about communication strategies and reconstruction efforts and better diplomatic initiatives, but that's the nut. What I like about this plan, though, comes in the title. The emphasis on redeployment strikes me as a very savvy resolution to the prime conundrum of those advocating for withdrawal. The American people don't much like losing, retreat, defeat. And withdrawal, while they might agree with it in theory, can easily be spun as one of those nastier heuristics. Redeployment, however, grabs Bush's merging of Iraq and the War on Terror to argue that we need a focus shift, which is exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to do while enmeshed in enduring warfare. That Iraq had made us less safe is an easy case to argue, but when the alternative is a simple return home the discussion gets trickier. When the alternative, as it is here, is a redeployment into formations and positions that'll better protect against terrorism and let us back off from this fruitless war in Iraq, well, Democrats are on stronger ground.
