It’s amazing just how divorced from reality the man in the White House still is. After an election in which the chief issue was ending the debacle in Iraq; after the release of a report by a group of Washington insiders calling for a complete change of direction (an end to the war and the involvement of Iraq’s neighbors in stabilizing the region); the appointment of a new defense secretary and some other administrative shuffling (Mike Lupica’s line from yesterday captured this perfectly: “This is the way sports owners do it with bad teams, as a way of showing some kind of movement to the fans when there is none in the standings.”), our president has announced a plan that is really nothing but more of the same.
Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.
Now let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad’s nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations — conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad esidents.
This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them — five brigades — will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.
As I said, more of the same. Call this the “Used-car-lot” policy — you know, take an old clunker, polish it up, repaint it, hide the cracked axle or the rotting quarterpanel, all with the idea that some poor sucker will overpay and drive it off the lot. Only we’re the poor suckers and the used car in this case is a major death trap that already has taken the lives of 3,000-plus Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
But let’s consider the plan, as outlined in a White House fact sheet available at the White House Web site:
The President’s New Iraq Strategy Is Rooted In Six Fundamental Elements:
1. Let the Iraqis lead;
2. Help Iraqis protect the population;
3. Isolate extremists;
4. Create space for political progress;
5. Diversify political and economic efforts; and
6. Situate the strategy in a regional approach.
The so-called new strategy, of course, sounds a lot like the old one, only it has been given a new gloss of paint and has is being undergirded by a rather disingenuous mea culpa on the part of our fearless leader. The president now admits that mistakes were made and that he is responsible:
The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.
He says a change in direction is needed, a new way forward — but as Michael Goodwin writes in The Daily News, it is a step backwards. But not for the reasons that Goodwin outlines. (Goodwin believes we have to win in Iraq, but that we shouldn’t send in more troops until the Iraqis prove their commitment to ending the violence — an approach that is preferable to the president’s but only because it probably would mean not sending in the troops.)
This is not about troop levels or the war on terror. It is about civil war in Iraq, a war we help ignite through our own arrogance and shortsightedness. The issue from the beginning was the idea that we have a right to pre-empt threats that may or may not exist — which is another way of saying we can attack whomever we want when we want if we can convince ourselves that a threat exists. It doesn’t have to exist; we just have to believe it exists. Put another way, the president believes the nation should act like the crazy guy on the corner.
But that’s old news. What we have now is a civil war fast devolving into total anarchy, a vortex of violence and hatred in which we are acting as match to gasoline, further inflaming the situation, with American soldiers caught in the crossfire. To send more troops in is not only foolish, but it is negligent and quite possibly criminal.
Enough is enough, Mr. Bush. Bring the troops home.
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Hank Kalet 