Distributed by American Committees on Foreign Relations, ACFR NewsGroup No. 633, Monday, November 20, 2005.
Irresponsible on Iraq
Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B06
A SERIOUS congressional debate about Iraq is essential at a time when public support for the mission is falling and the danger of failure seems great. Aggressive challenges to the Bush administration's military and political strategy -- even calls for an immediate withdrawal of troops, such as that made by
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) on Thursday -- must be part of that democratic discussion. Yet what we've mainly seen during the past two weeks is a shameful exercise in demagoguery and name-calling.
Democrats accuse President Bush of deliberately lying about the grounds for war three years ago. Vice President Cheney responds by calling accusations by the Democrats "dishonest and reprehensible, " while Mr. Bush claims his critics "send mixed signals to our troops and the enemy." Mr. Murtha, a 73-year-old former Marine, was said by the White House to advocate "surrender to the terrorists" and called a coward by Republican members of Congress. He replied by smearing Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush as "guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war."
It sounds like the final days of a bitter, mud-slinging political campaign. But what is at stake is not an election but a war in which American soldiers are being killed and wounded almost every day and in which one possible outcome is a major victory for the Islamic extremist movement that carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Those losses won't be stemmed, nor the dangers averted, by attack rhetoric or sound bites that deliberately distort the facts. Leaders of both parties know that, of course. Which raises the question: Is their priority to win in Iraq -- or in next year's midterm elections?
The hard truth is that those two objectives may be in conflict. The war is unpopular for many reasons, including the painful human losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, incompetent management of postwar reconstruction and the involvement of some U.S. personnel in appalling practices of torture. Mr. Murtha, deeply moved by the wounded soldiers he has visited, cited several other serious problems, including the wear and tear on the U.S. military and the steady increase in attacks by insurgents.
Yet Mr. Murtha, like other Democrats who advocate an early pullout, grossly misstates the nature of the conflict in Iraq. In a news conference, he contended that U.S. troops "have become the primary target" and have united Iraqis against them. In fact, far more Iraqis than Americans are being killed by the insurgents; Iraq is divided between a Shiite and Kurdish majority -- whose leaders strongly support a continued U.S. presence -- and a Sunni and Islamic extremist minority that seeks to drive international forces out so that it can try to impose a dictatorship on the rest of the country. As Democrats such as Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) have recognized, a premature American departure from Iraq would not end but greatly escalate what is now a low-grade civil war. It could allow al Qaeda to claim a triumph and establish a base for attacking the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
Mr. Bush indulges in his own surreal rhetoric, insistently describing Iraq as a Manichaean battle between foreign terrorists and Iraqi democrats, rather than the multi-sided power struggle that it is. In so doing, he hamstrings his own diplomats and generals, who are trying to forge a political accord among the various Iraqi communities and isolate the foreign and Sunni extremists through a conventional counterinsurgency campaign. Many Democrats have no better alternative strategy, which may be why their leaders spend most of their time making charges about what was said, or not, about weapons of mass destruction in 2002.
What's needed is more talk about Iraq in 2005. Though there have been successes -- including the staging of an election and a constitutional referendum -- the country is in danger of splitting into pieces, and the Bush administration has not done enough to head that threat off. New elections in December could propel the country toward a political accord that would undermine the insurgency. But reconstruction has foundered and needs to be relaunched, with emphasis on supplying electricity and jobs. Iraqi troops are improving but still are far from ready to fight the counterinsurgency war on their own. If there is to be any chance of that war being won, the United States will have to commit its own forces to the fight for years, though perhaps not at current levels. The alternative is to risk a defeat that would be devastating to U.S. security. That's a hard truth to face: It can't be done amid a partisan free-for-all.
ITEM 8: Jim Hoagland: Trusting in the Transition (Iraq)
Trusting in the Transition
By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B07
The curtain will soon go up on Act 3 of the American experience in Iraq, even as its original authors scribble away behind the scenes, trying to determine whether the war eventually ends as Shakespearean tragedy, Hollywood action
film or cautionary moral fable of hubris and its consequences.
It has had elements of all three, from the lightning march to Baghdad to an Act 2 full of unsettling gore, sinister intrigue and smashed expectations. As tragic scenes drag on interminably on the small-screen stage of nightly television, polls show the national audience glancing nervously for an exit it does not yet see.
The Senate voiced its own criticism of the Bush administration's current muddled text last week by calling on the White House to make 2006 a year of "significant transition" toward "the successful completion of the mission" in Iraq.
The 79-19 vote obviously signals Republican nervousness over Iraq policy a year in advance of congressional elections. But that is only one sign of a quickening sense here and abroad that the next few months open a decisive and new period in President Bush's beleaguered attempt to use Iraq to change the Middle East and the world.
U.S. military commanders are composing their own scenarios that point to a drawdown of 30,000 to 40,000 American troops -- from a current force of about 140,000 -- that will begin before the midterm elections. In private White House meetings Bush has hinted at numbers of that magnitude and roughly corresponding cuts in foreign coalition troops, authoritative sources tell me. Italy's coalition government, facing elections in April, will begin discussions with Washington this week on withdrawing 10 percent or so of Italy's 3,000 troops in Iraq this winter.
The signs of impending change also trigger nervousness among allies. European diplomats have begun probing U.S. officials to determine whether NATO and other allies will face new pressure to shoulder financial and other burdens that the Americans want to lighten for themselves in Iraq's year of transition.
The Europeans are aware that the administration has already put oil-rich Arab states on notice that their relations with Washington will be affected by whether they provide more aid to the permanent Iraqi government that is to emerge from Dec. 15 elections.
Last weekend's sudden, very brief visit by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to Baghdad may also reflect concern in the world organization over being asked to play a larger role in transitional Iraq. Under U.S. and British prodding, Arab League officials also have reluctantly visited the Iraqi capital to meet many of the civilians who will form a new government after the elections.
But U.S. reconstruction and pacification efforts have not moved quickly or smoothly enough to rally the support Washington now seeks from others. The United States is unlikely to get significant help on Iraq from other nations or from multilateral organizations that feel they were ignored or defied by the Bush administration in Act 1.
Americans will have to extricate themselves from a script that is largely of their own making. Their only significant help will come from Iraqis, and it will come unevenly even in the best of times.
The administration and an increasingly restive American public need to accept and focus on that reality as control shifts from American hands to the Iraqis. The transition that the U.S. Senate is saying must come is about to begin -- for better or for worse. It will not be reversed.
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That means Americans should stay out of the December elections rather than channel covert help through Jordan's King Abdullah or other Arab proxies, as happened in January. It means ending the covert control that the Central Intelligence Agency exercises over Iraq's intelligence service, which does not report to or get funds from the Iraqi government. And it means finding a way to turn Iraq into a subject of dialogue rather than conflict with neighboring Iran.
A sign that the last condition may be possible despite the increasing tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions lies in the recent political and physical travels of Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's most well-known, and therefore most reviled, politician in the West.
Chalabi was given a high-profile welcome in Tehran by Iran's Islamic revolutionaries -- even though he recently split with the Islamic parties that Iran normally supports in Iraq and will be competing against them for votes in December -- on his way to similarly laudatory high-level meetings in Washington.
For differing reasons, President Bush and the ayatollahs would, if they could, choose to have their own Iraqis in charge rather than hedge their bets with the hard-to-control Chalabi. But neither Tehran nor Washington is prepared to insult the future -- which both are slowly realizing they cannot dictate alone.
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