Bush Says U.S. Is Winning in Iraq, Sacrifices Ahead

Bloomberg.com: U.S.

All the talk is about troop levels, a timetable for troop withdrawals, and the cost of the war. We're also talking about torture, limits to surveillance in the United States, and democratization in Iraq. Before you try to reach a judgment about any of these issues, ask yourself about the author of the situation we are in now. Ask yourself you have confidence in this leader, who is trying so hard to vindicate himself. He says that we are winning the war in Iraq, and he asks you to have confidence that he is right. But we have no reason to believe anything this man says. He says that to give up his project in Iraq now would be an act of recklessness. The act of recklessness right now is to believe that our president knows what he is doing.

Ask yourself these questions as you decide whether or not to believe Mr. Bush. The questions are not designed to be fair to the president. They highlight what he has actually done, as opposed to what he thinks he has done.

What do you think of a president who, a year and a half after 9/11, attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

What do you think of a president who authorizes the NSA to spy on American citizens without judicial oversight?

What do you think of a president who thinks it is alright to imprison the citizens of other countries in secret? Who wants to mistreat prisoners in order to force them to give us information?

Here is the most troubling question of all. What confidence can you have in a leader who does not understand the relationship between political and military problems? Who cannot coordinate political and military initiatives in order to solve problems in both areas? Bush has outlined a strategy for victory, as he calls it. The only path to victory, even on his own terms, requires a high degree of competence and sophistication in the handling of political and military processes in Iraq, in the region, and in the entire world. Yet Bush and his team have shown nothing but incompetence and simple mindedness ever since Bush announced that he wanted to overthrow Hussein by force.

He cannot ask for our loyalty and confidence now, and expect to get it. He has no record to stand on. In three years he has managed to make our country an object of fear, contempt, and hatred in one country after another. The entire world stood ready to help us take on our enemies in the fall of 2001, for our enemies were their enemies. Everyone not already against us was already for us. No one questioned our leadership, or doubted our willingness to fight. All counted themselves lucky to be fighting alongside us.

Now survey the state of the world at the end of 2005. The people of no country, not even Great Britain, want to fight with us now. People suspect us of dirty politics at every turn. No one has confidence in our judgment, or in our ability to fight any war - the one in Iraq or the one against Al Qaeda, to a successful conclusion. No one thinks any longer that our success and their success are linked.

Now the president asks for our support as he continues along the path that he has set out. He does not deserve our followership any more than he deserves to be our leader. He has proven his incompetence, his dishonesty, and his inability to accomplish what he says he is going to accomplish. We have to find a way to make this man irrelevant. If we go the way he says we ought to go, if we follow him as we have followed him in the past, we will keep failing.

Mr. Bush may be curiously right about one of his arguments. He says that to turn our back on Iraq now would be disastrous. We can say with some confidence that anything we do under his leadership is going to be disastrous. Yes, our failures under his leadership may be irreversible, so serious that we will crash no matter what we do. But the fight isn't over yet. We may find better leadership, and our opponents may make serious mistakes, too. If we continue to fight under incompetent leadership, though, we will find a collapse at the end of this path that no one could have conceived during the period of unity after 9/11.