Leaving Iraq, Honorably
By Chuck Hagel
The Washington Post
Sunday 26 November 2006
There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis - not the Americans.
Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.
The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation - regardless of our noble purpose.
We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.
It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited. There will be a new center of gravity in the Middle East that will include Iraq. That process began over the past few days with the Syrians and Iraqis restoring diplomatic relations after 20 years of having no formal communication.
What does this tell us? It tells us that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest - without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years. The Middle East is more combustible today than ever before, and until we are able to lead a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, mindless destruction and slaughter will continue in Lebanon, Israel and across the Middle East.
We are a long way from a sustained peaceful resolution to the anarchy in Iraq. But this latest set of events is moving the Middle East in the only direction it can go with any hope of lasting progress and peace. The movement will be imperfect, stuttering and difficult.
America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership - not an American divine mission.
The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We've already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.
We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.
It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder - one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead.
To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Monday, November 27, 2006
What a mess!
Wartime Sacrifices
By Arlen Parsa
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Sunday 25 November 2006
Never before in American history has such a costly war been fought with so little immediate sacrifice asked of all Americans. Less than one year into his first term, President Bush made clear the terms of his war: every other country was either with us, or against us.
Just this year, the president raised the stakes again, saying that his "War on Terror" (how you can wage war against a tactic escapes me) is the "calling of our generation" and that America is once again a participant in a grand "struggle for civilization." This rhetoric should come as no surprise considering that the commander in chief has already likened himself to other wartime leaders such as Winston Churchill and compared his "War on Terror" to World War II. Even his branding of the two sides involved in the fight - the "Axis of Evil" versus "America and her allies" - is the same "axis versus allies" language used in Churchill's war. Yet, for such a war with so much in the balance, our leaders have asked surprisingly little of us.
President Bush has encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives: take vacations, he once suggested. He certainly took his own advice, having taken well over 300 days off so far. Clinton took only about 150 days off in all of his eight years as president - and he wasn't even leading the free world in a struggle for civilization itself.
More Americans have now died as part of the president's so-called "War on Terror" than perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. America has now been fighting in the name of "civilization itself" for longer than it ever was during World War I and World War II. Outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that it could take "any number of years ... five, six, eight, ten, twelve years" to achieve peace in Iraq alone - much less win the "greater War on Terror."
At the same time, President Bush became the very first American president ever to grant tax cuts during a time of war. The largest corporations have gotten billions of dollars of taxes back from the government, and the wealthiest Americans annually get more money back in the form of tax refunds than the average American earns in a year. Meanwhile, the largest federal surplus ever (which Bush inherited from Clinton) quickly turned into the largest deficit ever. When President Bush's Democratic predecessor left office, American national debt lingered around 5.5 trillion dollars, and was shrinking at a faster rate than it ever had before. Years into Bush's presidency, we find ourselves with the largest national debt in history (the president's new debt ceiling is now 9 trillion dollars, which the US is expected to surpass before he leaves office).
This is perhaps ironic because Republicans have always prided themselves in their ability to reduce the size of government and maintain fiscal responsibility. Democrats, on the other hand, are oft portrayed as irresponsible, big tax-and-spend liberals. Under the current White House administration, however, it seems that the Republican party has become the party of big-spenders and no-taxers. If there's a worse way to run government during a war that supposedly threatens every civilized culture in the entire world and will supposedly drag on for ages (many in the administration are already calling it "The Long War"), I can't think of it.
Of course, they didn't plan things this way. Originally, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had wanted to wage his war in Iraq "on the cheap." He ignored the suggestions of his top generals who said that his mission would need far more troops than he had allotted. Rumsfeld even fired highly-decorated four-star general Eric Shinseki after the latter maintained that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq to secure the country after invasion and prevent an insurgency (key members of the White House administration later claimed that nobody had predicted an insurgency would arise after the invasion). Instead, a meager force of American troops went into Iraq with lightly-armored humvees and inadequate body armor.
Our soldiers resorted to bulking up their 'thin-skinned humvees' with scrap metal they found in Iraqi junkyards (which they termed "hillbilly armor"). Later on, a group of Congressional Republicans voted against sending more body armor for American soldiers because they wanted to keep the budget down. Poor military families back home passed collection plates at church asking for donations that would help cover the few hundred dollars it would cost to send their sons and daughters the life-saving vests that they had been deployed without. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want," Rumsfeld told one soldier who confronted him about it with a trembling voice at a televised question and answer session.
The White House has promised time and time again that during this conflict (in which the entire world is at stake) there would be under no circumstances a draft. Rich sons and daughters would never be called up to serve alongside their less-well-off fellow Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. "We will have an all-volunteer army" the president has loudly proclaimed. The military for its part has kept quiet, but bent over backwards not to reinstate conscription.
The Pentagon has lowered the IQ requirement and lowest acceptable test scores of enlistees, and increased the maximum age at which people can enlist (now 42 years old). And now, there are even foreigners serving in our armed forces. Still no gay people allowed, though. (It was reported earlier this year that Pentagon manuals still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder like schizophrenia, a consensus that the medical community abandoned in the 1970s.) The Reserves and National Guard have been sent to Iraq, and some of them are on their second tour of duty. Reports circulated not long ago that one recruiter was so desperate to fulfill his monthly enlistment quota, he persuaded an autistic kid to sign on the dotted line (after great embarrassment, the Army was later forced to let him go).
President Bush and his fellow powerful Republicans have viciously attacked Democrats and others who don't embrace their war endlessly. When the president is challenged (which is seldom), he backs away from his harsh rhetoric and replaces it instead with a condescending glare. People who don't agree with me aren't unpatriotic, he replies; they just "don't understand the stakes in the War on Terror."
December is coming up, and President Bush is expected to be on vacation for much of the month. If he continues taking time off at the rate he has been, by the time he leaves his second term, the president will have vacationed for more than 1 of his 8 years in office. Earlier this year, the Pentagon ordered an entire brigade of soldiers back to Iraq - before they had even made it home from their first tour. They literally turned around and boarded airplanes headed in the opposite direction. At least the president will be home for Christmas. Not everyone is so fortunate.
During World War II, Churchill ordered strict food rationing. World War I vets formed the British Home Guard to fend off the potential German invasion with pitchforks and shotguns more suited to hunting with bird-shot (while all the younger men and equipment were on the front lines fighting the Axis). Nowadays, putting yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your SUV is strictly optional and tax cuts are mandatory. President Bush thinks history will look back upon his war as just as important as the one Churchill and the rest of the world waged half a century ago. From the way this president acts, you wouldn't think so.
Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.
By Arlen Parsa
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Sunday 25 November 2006
Never before in American history has such a costly war been fought with so little immediate sacrifice asked of all Americans. Less than one year into his first term, President Bush made clear the terms of his war: every other country was either with us, or against us.
Just this year, the president raised the stakes again, saying that his "War on Terror" (how you can wage war against a tactic escapes me) is the "calling of our generation" and that America is once again a participant in a grand "struggle for civilization." This rhetoric should come as no surprise considering that the commander in chief has already likened himself to other wartime leaders such as Winston Churchill and compared his "War on Terror" to World War II. Even his branding of the two sides involved in the fight - the "Axis of Evil" versus "America and her allies" - is the same "axis versus allies" language used in Churchill's war. Yet, for such a war with so much in the balance, our leaders have asked surprisingly little of us.
President Bush has encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives: take vacations, he once suggested. He certainly took his own advice, having taken well over 300 days off so far. Clinton took only about 150 days off in all of his eight years as president - and he wasn't even leading the free world in a struggle for civilization itself.
More Americans have now died as part of the president's so-called "War on Terror" than perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. America has now been fighting in the name of "civilization itself" for longer than it ever was during World War I and World War II. Outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that it could take "any number of years ... five, six, eight, ten, twelve years" to achieve peace in Iraq alone - much less win the "greater War on Terror."
At the same time, President Bush became the very first American president ever to grant tax cuts during a time of war. The largest corporations have gotten billions of dollars of taxes back from the government, and the wealthiest Americans annually get more money back in the form of tax refunds than the average American earns in a year. Meanwhile, the largest federal surplus ever (which Bush inherited from Clinton) quickly turned into the largest deficit ever. When President Bush's Democratic predecessor left office, American national debt lingered around 5.5 trillion dollars, and was shrinking at a faster rate than it ever had before. Years into Bush's presidency, we find ourselves with the largest national debt in history (the president's new debt ceiling is now 9 trillion dollars, which the US is expected to surpass before he leaves office).
This is perhaps ironic because Republicans have always prided themselves in their ability to reduce the size of government and maintain fiscal responsibility. Democrats, on the other hand, are oft portrayed as irresponsible, big tax-and-spend liberals. Under the current White House administration, however, it seems that the Republican party has become the party of big-spenders and no-taxers. If there's a worse way to run government during a war that supposedly threatens every civilized culture in the entire world and will supposedly drag on for ages (many in the administration are already calling it "The Long War"), I can't think of it.
Of course, they didn't plan things this way. Originally, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had wanted to wage his war in Iraq "on the cheap." He ignored the suggestions of his top generals who said that his mission would need far more troops than he had allotted. Rumsfeld even fired highly-decorated four-star general Eric Shinseki after the latter maintained that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq to secure the country after invasion and prevent an insurgency (key members of the White House administration later claimed that nobody had predicted an insurgency would arise after the invasion). Instead, a meager force of American troops went into Iraq with lightly-armored humvees and inadequate body armor.
Our soldiers resorted to bulking up their 'thin-skinned humvees' with scrap metal they found in Iraqi junkyards (which they termed "hillbilly armor"). Later on, a group of Congressional Republicans voted against sending more body armor for American soldiers because they wanted to keep the budget down. Poor military families back home passed collection plates at church asking for donations that would help cover the few hundred dollars it would cost to send their sons and daughters the life-saving vests that they had been deployed without. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want," Rumsfeld told one soldier who confronted him about it with a trembling voice at a televised question and answer session.
The White House has promised time and time again that during this conflict (in which the entire world is at stake) there would be under no circumstances a draft. Rich sons and daughters would never be called up to serve alongside their less-well-off fellow Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. "We will have an all-volunteer army" the president has loudly proclaimed. The military for its part has kept quiet, but bent over backwards not to reinstate conscription.
The Pentagon has lowered the IQ requirement and lowest acceptable test scores of enlistees, and increased the maximum age at which people can enlist (now 42 years old). And now, there are even foreigners serving in our armed forces. Still no gay people allowed, though. (It was reported earlier this year that Pentagon manuals still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder like schizophrenia, a consensus that the medical community abandoned in the 1970s.) The Reserves and National Guard have been sent to Iraq, and some of them are on their second tour of duty. Reports circulated not long ago that one recruiter was so desperate to fulfill his monthly enlistment quota, he persuaded an autistic kid to sign on the dotted line (after great embarrassment, the Army was later forced to let him go).
President Bush and his fellow powerful Republicans have viciously attacked Democrats and others who don't embrace their war endlessly. When the president is challenged (which is seldom), he backs away from his harsh rhetoric and replaces it instead with a condescending glare. People who don't agree with me aren't unpatriotic, he replies; they just "don't understand the stakes in the War on Terror."
December is coming up, and President Bush is expected to be on vacation for much of the month. If he continues taking time off at the rate he has been, by the time he leaves his second term, the president will have vacationed for more than 1 of his 8 years in office. Earlier this year, the Pentagon ordered an entire brigade of soldiers back to Iraq - before they had even made it home from their first tour. They literally turned around and boarded airplanes headed in the opposite direction. At least the president will be home for Christmas. Not everyone is so fortunate.
During World War II, Churchill ordered strict food rationing. World War I vets formed the British Home Guard to fend off the potential German invasion with pitchforks and shotguns more suited to hunting with bird-shot (while all the younger men and equipment were on the front lines fighting the Axis). Nowadays, putting yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your SUV is strictly optional and tax cuts are mandatory. President Bush thinks history will look back upon his war as just as important as the one Churchill and the rest of the world waged half a century ago. From the way this president acts, you wouldn't think so.
Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.
If this isn't civil war, what is it?
No One to Lose To
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 25 November 2006
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and give an interview headlined: "If I did it, here's how the civil war in Iraq happened."
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team's failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out if it's time to break with the administration's use of euphemisms like "sectarian conflict." How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq coverage, went back recently and described "the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy."
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America's troops should be in the middle of somebody else's civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, "people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy." In Iraq, "you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force." But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that's like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war's end.
The president's comparison to how Vietnam turned out a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie," told me: "In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there's no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with."
The questions are no longer whether there's a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 25 November 2006
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and give an interview headlined: "If I did it, here's how the civil war in Iraq happened."
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team's failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out if it's time to break with the administration's use of euphemisms like "sectarian conflict." How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq coverage, went back recently and described "the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy."
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America's troops should be in the middle of somebody else's civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, "people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy." In Iraq, "you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force." But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that's like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war's end.
The president's comparison to how Vietnam turned out a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Bright Shining Lie," told me: "In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there's no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with."
The questions are no longer whether there's a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Time for Plan C in Iraq
Lost in the Desert
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 November 2006
Iraq now evokes that old Jimmy Durante song that goes, "Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
It's hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can't win and we can't leave.
The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president's fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.
The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation.
(Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.")
Even Henry Kissinger has defected from the Plan A gang. Once he thought the war could work, but now he thinks military victory is out of the question. When he turns against a war, you know the war's in trouble. He also believes leaving quickly would risk a civil war so big it could destabilize the Middle East.
Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is "trapped in Iraq" and can't leave until the Iraqis can create a "secure environment" - even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)
The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush's crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that's viewed as legitimate. He has gone from "can do" to "don't know." He talked to The Times's Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: "Will we attain those? I don't know."
At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can't have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can't have more because we don't want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.
He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.
This is a poor menu of options.
As Peter Beinart wrote in The New Republic this week, "In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving." Noting in the same magazine that "we are approaching a Saddam-like magnitude for the murder of innocents," Leon Wieseltier worried that the problem may be deeper than the number of our troops; it may be Iraq itself. "After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.... We are at the mercy of Iraq, where there is no mercy."
Kirk Semple, The Times's Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Capt. Stephanie Bagley, the daughter and granddaughter of military policemen who was enthusiastic a year ago about her job of building a new Iraqi police force. But that was before the militia so inexorably began to infiltrate the police, presumably with the support of some leaders in Iraq's dysfunctional government. Now, with the police begging the Americans not to make them patrol Baghdad's mean streets and showing her their shrapnel wounds, she just wants to get her unit home safely, without losing another soldier. She said her orders were to train a local force to deal with crimes like theft and murder, not to teach them how to fight a counterinsurgency.
Aside from telling Israel to be nicer to the Palestinians, as if there lies Iraq salvation, James Baker will mostly try to suggest that the US talk to Iran and Syria. Yesterday, after the Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, an opponent of Syria, was assassinated in Beirut, President Bush said he suspected that Iran and Syria were behind the murder.
Maybe Mr. Baker had better find Plan C.
The Pentagon is trying to decide whether we should Go Big, Go Long or Go Home.
Go figure.
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 November 2006
Iraq now evokes that old Jimmy Durante song that goes, "Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
It's hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can't win and we can't leave.
The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president's fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.
The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation.
(Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.")
Even Henry Kissinger has defected from the Plan A gang. Once he thought the war could work, but now he thinks military victory is out of the question. When he turns against a war, you know the war's in trouble. He also believes leaving quickly would risk a civil war so big it could destabilize the Middle East.
Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is "trapped in Iraq" and can't leave until the Iraqis can create a "secure environment" - even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)
The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush's crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that's viewed as legitimate. He has gone from "can do" to "don't know." He talked to The Times's Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: "Will we attain those? I don't know."
At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can't have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can't have more because we don't want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.
He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.
This is a poor menu of options.
As Peter Beinart wrote in The New Republic this week, "In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving." Noting in the same magazine that "we are approaching a Saddam-like magnitude for the murder of innocents," Leon Wieseltier worried that the problem may be deeper than the number of our troops; it may be Iraq itself. "After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.... We are at the mercy of Iraq, where there is no mercy."
Kirk Semple, The Times's Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Capt. Stephanie Bagley, the daughter and granddaughter of military policemen who was enthusiastic a year ago about her job of building a new Iraqi police force. But that was before the militia so inexorably began to infiltrate the police, presumably with the support of some leaders in Iraq's dysfunctional government. Now, with the police begging the Americans not to make them patrol Baghdad's mean streets and showing her their shrapnel wounds, she just wants to get her unit home safely, without losing another soldier. She said her orders were to train a local force to deal with crimes like theft and murder, not to teach them how to fight a counterinsurgency.
Aside from telling Israel to be nicer to the Palestinians, as if there lies Iraq salvation, James Baker will mostly try to suggest that the US talk to Iran and Syria. Yesterday, after the Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, an opponent of Syria, was assassinated in Beirut, President Bush said he suspected that Iran and Syria were behind the murder.
Maybe Mr. Baker had better find Plan C.
The Pentagon is trying to decide whether we should Go Big, Go Long or Go Home.
Go figure.
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