The End of the War in Iraq

Bombing Attacks on Iraqi Forces Kill 38 in North - New York Times:

Four suicide bomb attacks struck Iraqi police and an army base in a 16-hour wave of insurgent violence in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday and Sunday, killing 38 people and wounding scores more. One American commander said the violence continued a trend in the past few weeks of insurgent attacks intensely focused on Iraqi security forces.

The attacks came as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld echoed remarks by his advisers in recent months suggesting that the insurgency could last as long as a dozen years and that Iraq would become more violent before elections later this year.

The rate of insurgent attacks remains steady, but the typical attack has grown more lethal, Mr. Rumsfeld said on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'They're killing a lot more Iraqis,' he said.

Bush administration officials have been at odds with military leaders over the strength and resiliency of the insurgency. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said last week that the insurgency was undiminished, seemingly countering a remark days before by Vice President Dick Cheney, who asserted it was in its "last throes."

With polls showing that support for the war is dropping, President Bush is expected to use a prime-time speech on Tuesday at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., to press his case for a large continued military presence in Iraq and explain why the administration's strategy will eventually work.

The success of Iraqi forces is the linchpin of the United States' exit strategy from Iraq, as many battle commanders contend that the country will slip into a civil war if the United States withdraws large numbers of troops before Iraqi forces are ready to take over.

"There's only one way for the insurgents to win: that's to drive us out before the Iraqis are ready to assume the battle space," General Abizaid said Sunday on the CNN program "Late Edition." "If that's what happens, they could win. But it's very, very clear to me that we're going to stay the course."

It's getting too easy to take pot shots at these guys. Rumsfeld says that the insurgency could go on now for another dozen years. Cheney says that the insurgency is in its last throes. Cheney's remark is even more laughable than Bush's much ridiculed Mission Accomplished visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln. No one in this administration has any credibility, and the interesting is, the officials themselves don't seem to know it. It doesn't matter what they say now - a dozen years, last throes, gonna be hard work - no one believes anything they say anymore. Crying wolf about WMD did it for them, but they're acting like they still have sheep that will follow them.

Did people follow President Bush nine months ago, during the election, because they're stupid, as some people think? Two other possibilities come to mind. They voted for Bush because they're scared. A related reason is that they recognized Bush is pursuing a bad policy, but judged that Kerry would be worse. They would have liked someone better than Bush, but they found Kerry not acceptable. Still another possibility is that people gave more weight to domestic policy than to the war, and they liked Bush better in that area. An election compiles well over a hundred million individual decisions, so even with lots of polls we won't be able to make sound generalizations about why people voted the way they did.

Here is something that becomes more and more clear as this war drags out to its uncertain end. It'll end someday, and the Republicans will take credit for it. Someday Iraq will find some sort of peace, under some sort of government other than the one they had when we invaded, and the Republicans will call it a success. Victory may have taken longer than we expected, and it may have cost more than we predicted, but we stuck it out, and our policy is vindicated. The Iraqis have a freely elected government, they'll say, and it wouldn't have happened without us. If the current pattern holds, the Democrats won't even have an answer.

So tell me this: If the Israelis, with all their advantages, haven't been able to stop a campaign of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings for decades, how do we think the Iraqis can stop the same kind of warfare? Israel is a very small country, a little slice of land where most people live in an area smaller than the size of Connecticut. It's military is highly capable, its intelligence services unmatched in their ability to gather information and conduct undercover operations. Yet the war in Israel has continued year after year after year. The United States has not been able to deal with the same kind of warfare in Iraq. How do we expect the Iraqi armed forces to do what we can't?

You might say that the Iraqi forces can obtain better intelligence than we can. People are more willing to give information to the Iraqi soldiers than they are to the American forces. Well let's see about that. The Israeli example suggests that in a country divided deeply along ethnic lines, no amount of intelligence leads to decisive victories or defeats.

Let's not hear any more references to an Iraqi civil war in the future tense. The latest phrase is that the country will slip into civil war if we leave before the Iraqi armed forces are ready. The civil war has already started. We could not prevent it. The Iraqi forces can't prevent it. The so-called coalition, back when it existed, couldn't prevent it. So the argument that the country would slip into a civil war were we to leave has no weight. The only future oriented questions now are when the civil war will end, and how.

Yes, pulling out now means a defeat for us and victory for the other side. So far, that by itself has been enough to stamp out suggestions that we set a timetable for withdrawal. The Democrats demand a timetable, the Republicans say that we will not pull out before the Iraqis are ready to take over. To do so before that would mean defeat. And that's the end of the discussion. What sophisticated policy planning we have in this conversation! The administration's policy for over a year now has been to prepare the Iraqi forces to take over from the American forces, and the enemy has only become stronger and more effective during that time. The enemy becomes stronger, and the vice-president says that the insurgents are in their last throes. What total incompetence.

Do you know why people hold the Congress in such low regard right now? I haven't read any analyses, but I can venture a guess. They think members of Congress are gutless wonders because they haven't had the courage to stand up to the administration. People admire courage, even if the stand taken disagrees with their own. Congress as a body hasn't shown any courage in its relations with the White House. Individual members have. It's true too that the Republicans have a disciplined operation in both houses, so that leaves the Democrats to get organized and speak up. Hilary Clinton says that it's hard to oppose the administration when the Republicans are so shameless in their dishonest tactics. Perhaps. Then she criticizes the media for folding so easily when they're criticized by the administration. She might have directed her judgment toward her own party. The Democrats, especially since the election and even during last year's campaign, seemed unable to counter the Republicans' aggressive campaign with one equally agressive. They were outfought last year, and the Republicans are outfighting them again this year.

That opens the question, why are the Democrats so weak? Or, why do they appear so weak, if they're not in actuality? We can take up that question another time, perhaps. I don't know that much about what's going on inside the Democratic party, so it's hard to frame an answer from that point of view. The best answer, lacking that perspective, is the reluctance we have to appear unpatriotic, unsupportive of the troops, inconsiderate of the memory of the people who died on September 11.

Well, you know you won't find any restraint on that score here. The administration's policies are unfaithful to our dear American traditions: they have destroyed our tested Constitution by waging this so-called war of choice, the worst euphemism for aggressive war I've ever heard. If you want to find someone who is unpatriotic, who wears an American flag in his lapel, look to the person who currently lives in the White House. If you want to find an administration that's willing to let our brave men and women die for nothing, look at the incompetents who are still sending our soldiers to Iraq. If you want to find people who are so thoughtless that they would start a war that has nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, look to our current leaders.

We will not win this war because we do not deserve to win. We are the aggressors, and the war as it is currently playing out will stop when we leave. The so-called insurgents have three primary goals, to judge by their pronouncements and their tactics. They want to expel American forces from their country, they want to destroy the fighting ability of the Iraqi forces we've sponsored, and they want to prevent the formation of a government in Iraq by people allied with us. We know the insurgents are not strong enough to achieve these goals under current conditions. The insurgents know that, so far, they're strong enough to prevent us from achieving our goals of establishing security, building a democratic, unified government, and rebuilding Iraq's institutions and economy. No one can see a way out of this balance, but the insurgents can see correctly that time is on their side.

Does that sound like defeatism to you? Who wants to say that I'm unpatriotic, a traitor, just as people said that Jane Fonda was a traitor? Well, I read an article on Jane Fonda, following her recently published memoir, that contained a worthy reminder about what she did back in the sixties and seventies. The reminder is that Jane Fonda was right to oppose the Vietnam war, just as John Kerry was right to oppose it. She opposed it out of her own patriotic sense that her country was on the wrong path, and that she should do what she could to change our policy. The problem occurred with the means she used to voice her opposition to the war. She should not have gone to Hanoi and hooked her celebrity up to their propaganda machine. When Kerry threw his medals away in Washington DC after he returned from the war, he did something that he can be proud of. When Jane Fonda turned her visit to Vietnam into a photo-op, she made a big mistake. She acknowledges that mistake in her book, but she's right to insist the cause was good.

Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake? Who wants to be the last woman to be blown up in a country where only our stooges in the government want us around? Who will have the stomach to fight the war we should be fighting when this one finally ends? Will it end in a dozen years? Two dozen? How about if the war were to end tomorrow? What if the insurgents stopped fighting and joined Iraq's constitutional process next week? Would we have a plan for how to fight the war against Al Qaeda, the enemy that attacked us? Who would want to fight that war at this point? No, if the war in Iraq were to end tomorrow, the administration would claim success. It'd say that our victory in Iraq seals our ultimate victory over the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. They consider victory in Iraq so important in the war against Al Qaeda, so critical to success in that other war, that they don't even have a plan for conducting that other war when this one is over.

I think they expect Al Qaeda to fold when the war in Iraq is over. But how can that be? They didn't fold when they suffered a direct defeat in Afghanistan. They didn't fold when we pursued them into Pakistan. They didn't fold when we leveled Fallujah and attacked them again and again all over Iraq. Why should they fold when we withdraw our forces from that troubled place? And why should Americans want to fight another war, when this one has proven so unproductive? We'll pull out of Iraq sometime down the line, and that'll be it. We'll be back to our usual preoccupations after that, and if anyone suggests at that point that we fight the war we should have been fighting, people will say: "What war? We just finished fighting a war. And we won it. Why should we fight another one?" Ask yourself whether that response gives proper respect to the people who died on September 11.