Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

So the debate about the war grinds on here. Thanks to John Murtha for his courage and forcefulness. Here's a note I wrote to my spouse about Murtha's stand:

Hi Leslie,

I read a little more about Representative Murtha's remarks, and the White House's reaction. We can just pray now that we really have reached what people call the tipping point on this matter.

The trouble is, pulling out requires people who are adept at dealing with the political situation in Iraq. The administration has proven itself equally incompetent in both political and military matters over there. So we would be pulling out with no plans or preparations for our subsequent policy in Iraq, or elsewhere.

If we can start to look to Congress for leadership, that's great. But people certainly aren't accustomed to looking there.

Steve

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Take yourself back to September 11, 2001, and to the week that followed. What did you think about the future then? We all had different thoughts, in the midst of our shock and unity. Our thoughts about the future were certainly different from those we had on September 10. I've remembered my main thought many times since then: We need someone like Winston Churchill to lead us now, and I don't see any Winston Churchills around. Everyone hoped for the best from President Bush, but instead they got the worst.

Our unity at the time was a good thing. We needed it, both for comfort and to fight back. Now we're divided, so divided that it's hard to recall from day to day how cohesive we were in the days that followed September 11. Good leadership would have taken that cohesiveness and shaped a powerful force to deal with our enemies. Everyone wanted to serve, to do what was necessary. We wanted to do our part. The energy was palpable. I wanted to be an intelligence analyst, because I knew I'd be good at that. The entire country, and the rest of the world with us, was ready to go to work to defeat our enemies.

We dissipated that energy and broke that unity in Iraq. The desire to serve is gone. We don't know what's going to happen, and we certainly don't want to fight any more wars. We still need good leadership. Could you have predicted this unhappy division at this point in the war, this level of divisiveness just four years after the towers went down? What kind of leadership must it take to waste the patriotic response that welled up after the initial attack? If the response had dissipated gradually over the course of a generation or two, one could understand that. People who were too young to remember September 11 might not have the same instinctive feelings about it. But everyone who remembers what happened that day might have been united by that experience. Instead, we're fighting with each other now, just fifty months later. That's due to poor leadership, and terrible mistakes.

More significantly, could you have predicted that one of the main divisive issues would be whether or not we can torture our prisoners of war? The issue speaks for itself. Congress wants to pass a resolution that would prohibit torture: cruel and inhuman treatment, as the current phrase goes. The president and the vice-president say that they need freedom to use methods that will help us obtain information we need. Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner rightly calls Richard Cheney the vice-president for torture in a speech he delivers in England. Who could imagine, on September 12, 2001, that we would stumble on an issue like that only four years later? We cannot fight our enemies when we expend so much energy on an issue like this. We don't need to torture our prisoners, or mistreat them in ways that look like torture, in order to defeat our enemies. The only real motives for torture are revenge and a sense of control, not information. Our leaders believe that the resolution in Congress will tie their hands, make it so much more difficult to prosecute the war successfully. But we all know, again instinctively, that we can succeed in this war without treating our prisoners brutally. We all know it, and we're dismayed that our leaders have brought us to this point.

I've been saying this for so long now, and we must act on it: we need new leadership. We haven't ever tried to ignore our president before, certainly not in wartime, but we need to do that now. We need to find leadership elsewhere. Yes, our president holds a lot of power, but most of it depends on our willingness to follow. Absent that willingness, the president can't lead. We know now that he's unable to lead, and that he does not deserve our loyalty. It's not unpatriotic now to say, "Thank you very much, but we'll find our leaders elsewhere." We have to do it if we want to survive the war, let alone win it. I'd like to say that no mistake is so serious that it's irreparable, but I'm not sure about that. At least we can try to repair this mistake, but we have to do it soon. We can't wait.