'Who Lost Iraq?' Hawks Begin to Blame Bush
Sixty percent of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq, Reuters reports. With even the generals who advise President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair saying that Iraq is virtually in a civil war (no surprise to me -- I was reading such reports last February), what I found most interesting are the "Monday Morning quarterbacking" of early hawks. If Bush doesn't escalate American involvement to satisfy hawks, I predict they will abandon him in time with recriminations like the Who Lost China? debate in 1950. Of course, such an egocentric question implies that another sovereign nation is "ours" to win or to lose. The point is that Bush's current "stay the course" policy satisfies neither hawks nor doves.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a strong supporter of the war, tells The Washington Post that "the Bush team has only itself to blame for setting unrealistic expectations."
"One of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. " 'Stuff happens,' 'mission accomplished,' 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders.' I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be." Such statements, he said, have "contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach." Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) offered a similar assessment. "I think we undersold how hard the war would be," he told reporters this week. "I think we oversold how easy it would be to create democracy. I think we missed by a mile how much it would cost to rebuild Iraq."
We should have sent in more troops from the beginning, Senator McCain told CNN. He calls for ""significant troop increases for a long period of time," and an immediate expansion of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. But there isn't public will for that now. With National Guard troops exhausted, my guess is that it would take a draft to fulfill McCain's proposal, which would be very unpopular with the public.
"Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago," writes Bill Quick on the Daily Pundit blog. He calls Bush a terrible president in wartime, lacking a warrior's temperament, and a leader's skills.
"The rationale I signed onto," writes Andrew Sullivan -- to create a beachhead for democracy in the Middle East -- has been all but lost, and what's left is the desires of "Rumsfeld and Cheney to try to terrify a bunch of 'barbarians' with brute force."
"...the Bush administration's general incompetence and brutality has, of course, done the precise opposite (of what was originally designed). It's actually emboldened the enemy, made the West look weak, and lost us potential support in the vital center of Muslim opinion. Send too few troops into Iraq and of course the Islamists think we're unserious."
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is sharply critical of the Bush administration's military tactics, though he is thankful and expresses optimism that Iraq will overcome its current difficulties. He has outlined an Iraqi reconciliation plan. If such plans show no progress by December, and civil war continues to rage, the rationale for American involvement diminishes, and continuing our current role cannot be justified, Harold Meyerson writes in The Washington Post.
Here in North Carolina, Republican Congressman Howard Coble says "people in my district who stood in line to vote for President Bush aren't happy about Iraq," the High Point Enterprise reports (via NCInsider). The "lack of a post-entry strategy gnaws at me." If the Iraqi government won't "shoulder more of the heavy lifting" for its own security, he believes American troops should withdraw. It's hard to imagine the patience of the American people for a big commitment to Iraq surviving beyond 2008. And yet the consequences of American withdrawal from Iraq need to be thought through methodically. Sullivan says he can't take the anti-war Democrats seriously until they "propose a positive strategy for defeating Islamist terror at its roots, or call for democratization of the Arab Muslim world."
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a member of the Kurdish minority, denies that Iraq is in a civil war. In early August he pledged that Iraqi forces "will take over security of all provinces in the country by the end of the year. U.S. forces currently are responsible for the security of 17 of Iraq's 18 provinces," the Associated Press reported. We'll hold him to it.
Even if Democrats take over Congress and overwhelmingly vote to force the president to withdraw from Iraq lock, stock and barrel, the U.S. wouldn't be out of there in large numbers until the end of 2007 at the earliest, unless Bush decides to voluntarily withdraw troops.
If the world situation just gets worse and worse over the next couple of years, another quagmire in which we are eye-deep in the big muddy as we were in Vietnam, with no good way out, there's always Joel Achenbach's solution: get into a fetal position, and "meet life's many challenges by curling into a ball and moaning. Despair isn't a psychological weakness, it's a coherent strategy in a world gone mad. Things have nowhere to go but up when you make the courageous decision to abandon all hope."
