DO NOT FORSAKE THEM:

Bush's Task: Thrusting New Strategy on 'a Sovereign Nation' (HELENE COOPER, 1/09/07, NY Times)

It's a refrain that President Bush and his top deputies have uttered many times over:

"Iraq is a sovereign nation, and we stay because they have asked us to be there," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in October.

"Iraq is a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy," President Bush said in November.

"It's a sovereign nation; it's their system, they make those decisions," Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American command's chief spokesman in Iraq, said last week. [...]

Taking American officials at their word, Iraq has embraced its sovereignty. Mr. Maliki exercised it in October when he contradicted American officials who said the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable for security measures.

He exercised it again in November when he ordered United States forces to abandon checkpoints and roadblocks they had set up in Baghdad to look for a missing American soldier. He did it one more time in the last days of 2006, when he ignored American requests that Saddam Hussein's execution be delayed until legal issues were cleared up.

The tension between American will and Iraqi action -- or inaction -- has been growing ever since the United States transferred sovereignty back to Iraq in 2004.

That has left the United States facing a paradox. An assertive Iraqi government, responsible for security and for running the country, is needed if American troops are ever going to be able to hand over control to Iraqi soldiers and leave. But an assertive Iraqi government may not always do what it is told, which could result in an American script that the Iraqis refuse to follow.

The central lesson of Iraq, thus far, is the same we ought to have learned in Vietnam: the Iraqis know better than we what needs to be done and ought to decide themselves.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2007 12:17 PM