Last Wednesday at Annapolis, in a stunning admission of failure, President Bush unveiled his "plan for victory" in Iraq which will eventually, at some point in the future, transform that war-torn nation into a stable, friendly democracy. Apparently his previous "mission accomplished" speech of May 2nd 2003 was more than a few years premature. But hey, in all fairness, how could Bush have known that two months later, when he taunted the growing Iraqi resistance to "bring 'em on!", that the insurgents would rise to the challenge? After all, hadn't his phony, macho rhetoric always worked before?
And even as critics of his stay the course policy in Iraq grow louder, Bush vowed that he would not support "artificial timetables set by politicians." This struck me as an odd statement considering that the original advocates and planners of the pre-emptive invasion were mostly politicians and policy makers. But what's wrong with learning from mistakes, even if you don't admit them? Nothing. The good news about the Iraq war, according to John Burns and Dexter Filkins in the December 1st New York Times, is that certain "generals contend the war is winnable, though they do not say so with the tone of certainty that Mr. Bush mustered" in his Annapolis speech. Well, that's what we pay Bush for. Without optimism, you've got nothing but grim realism, and that's no way to win a war!
In Sunday's New York Times Op-Ed page, David Brooks asserts that, previous to this new awakening, the White House "felt compelled to assert a mastery of events they plainly did not possess." But Brooks assures us that the president's Annapolis speech demonstrates that, finally, the "views the president expressed in public resemble the views he holds in private." Brooks describes the current Iraq information coming from administration officials as being "complex and informative" as opposed to the previous "relentlessly positive…to the point of fantasy" statements of the past. But is this true? Has Bush finally pulled his head out of his ass just long enough to make some sense for a change? Has he moved over to the "reality-based" community? Not a chance. On the same Sunday New York Times Op-Ed page, Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. point out what Bush failed to mention in Brooks' "graduate-school level" Annapolis speech:
We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless — because we do not count them — Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.
And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home — no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.
It appears that Bush still thinks he can write his own war script with a happy ending. But for David Brooks this is just another example of "liberals spewing anti-Bush slogans." But the fact is that the liberals and conservatives who oppose the war have been the few voices attempting to have nuanced debates. The simple-minded arguments have mainly come from Bush, Cheney, and supporters of this administration's hysterical claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat and that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were indistinguishable.
Sorensen and Schlesinger understand that the burden for an alternative strategy is on the president's shoulders because he was the one person who made the decision to invade Iraq before other alternatives had been exhausted.
The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war's opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq's borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.
But despite that caveat, they do offer a plan for getting out of Iraq, based on John F. Kennedy's unrealized 1963 plan to withdraw from Vietnam:
Make clear that we're going to get out. At a press conference on Nov. 14, 1963, the president did just that, stating, "That is our object, to bring Americans home."
Request an invitation to leave. Arrange for the host government to request the phased withdrawal of all American military personnel — surely not a difficult step in Iraq, especially after the clan statement last month calling for foreign forces to leave. In a May 1963 press conference, Kennedy declared that if the South Vietnamese government suggested it, "we would have some troops on their way home" the next day.
Bring the troops home gradually. Initiate a phased American withdrawal over an unannounced period, beginning immediately, while intensifying the training of local security personnel, bearing in mind that with our increased troop mobility and airlift capacity, American forces are available without being stationed in hazardous areas. In September 1963, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese: "In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it." A month later, he said, "It would be our hope to lessen the number of Americans" in Vietnam by the end of the year.
President Kennedy had no guarantee that any of these three components would succeed. In the "fog of war," there are no guarantees; but an exit plan without guarantees is better than none at all.
Will President Bush ever adopt such a three-part exit strategy? I highly doubt it. It is quite possible that Bush has no exit plan because he intends for the military to stay in Iraq indefinitely. After all, Bush didn't invade Iraq in order to allow the Iraqi people to control their own oil reserves now did he? It makes me want to shout, "No more blood for oil!" But there I go again, Mr. Brooks, spewing my simple-minded anti-Bush slogans. I should be ashamed.
I've been reading the 
I always thought that 
Recent Comments