Iraq: Gee, Thanks for Everything — Now Turn Over Your Soldiers So We Can Prosecute Them

If this story in the NYTimes is true, it is a disaster in the making. 

American troops are brilliantly fighting a nasty war in Iraq against terrorists and insurgents who hide among civilians — a war in which the U.S. continues to make huge sacrifices in blood and treasure not merely for our own benefit but to give the 26 million Iraqis we’ve freed from tyranny a chance for a better life.  In two recent raids, American forces have killed people who at least some Iraqi officials claim were civilians, but who our military argues were justifiably shot either becuase they were not innocent civilians or because they appeared to be taking up arms against us.  According to the Times, after all we have done to help create an Iraqi government and give it a chance to survive, the Iraqi government is now demanding that we surrender our troops to Iraqi authorities for prosecution.

I want to take a deep breath here.  The Times article is not clear about which Iraqi government officials are making this demand — we are not told whether they are, for example, some stray Sadr sympathizers in the Iraqi legislature, as opposed to, say, high-level Maliki operatives.  The Times, moreover, is not an honest broker in its Iraq coverage.  It’s entirely possible that, to embarrass the Bush administration and demoralize the troops, the newspaper would portray minor government outliers as representative of majority government sentiment when they are not.

But all that said, the story certainly suggests this demand that we hand over our soldiers is the Maliki government’s position — one the Iraqis intend to push in negotiations with us about a long-term security arrangement.  The war is unpopular at home for a variety of reasons, but its uptick in public support with the success of the surge is based on the understanding that our troops have the freedom to do what needs to be done to prevail in a war of this exceedingly difficult type.  Many of us remain suspicious of Maliki and the inroads Iran has been invited to make in Iraq.  We worry about whether the Iraq we’ve sacrificed so much for will ultimately be an American ally.  Nothing will more rapidly crater the remaining support Americans have for this venture — nothing will prompt wider demands for a pull-out– than the sense that the Iraqi government we’ve propped up is turning on us, and that our troops are being caught in the middle.

Let’s hope this story isn’t true — and let’s get some answers but quick.