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Better late
than never? After ignoring
military, diplomatic and cultural experts? US lowers expectations for what can be
achieved in Iraq: “The Bush administration is significantly lowering
expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United
States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned
during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in
Washington and Baghdad. The United States
no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry
or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or
economic challenges, U.S. officials say. "What we
expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on
the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003
invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation
we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300853.html Or too late, you should
have listened to the warnings, not lied and even if that failed (which it did) planned
for this before you rushed to war?
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over By Frank Rich, NYT,
Sunday, August 14, 2005 Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years
after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn
that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay
the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you
mean we, white man? A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let
alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's
handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a
match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early
March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged:
41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as
L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election,
commencing our long extrication from that quagmire. But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor;
Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor
fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the
recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed
forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't
tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press. The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox
News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann
Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture
akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out
of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who
helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On
this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.) As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough,
Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers,
have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary
calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is
what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using
euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to
keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost. That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in
Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002,
that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of
the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths
and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had
high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on
evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from
conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than
a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium
a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence
Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi
pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious." It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and
about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young
Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from
a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the
start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had
served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio.
Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk,"
received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative
Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush. These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just
Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory
"a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page
begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up
in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator
George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan,
the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and
decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift
from reality as Mr. Bush would
need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a
grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7. Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the
war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the
start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within
hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All
Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because
the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better
targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier
to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk
"war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig -
than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive." But just as politics are a bad motive for
choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early
last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles
me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the
"essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have
"politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had
disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke
the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the
truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq.
To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the
country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central
front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that
might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it. The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a
piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the
commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush
declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside
bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke,
the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a
timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next
spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections,
but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority
now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick
Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006. Nothing that happens on the ground in
Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to
meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist
body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again
regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was
asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in
the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required
to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the
security situation in Iraq. What
lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly
defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March
1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case,
with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about
the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the
wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this
administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more
human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent
into civil war and its devolution into jihad central. Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no
decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be
taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the
insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the
decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of
identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made
us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago
next month. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html Gen. Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, was
‘dressed down’ by the POTUS for his
comments about troop levels. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/14/wirq14.xml US struggling to get updated armor to troops http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/international/middleeast/14armor.html?hp&ex=1124078400&en=c79db06067b55db0&ei=5094&partner=homepage Marines use donkeys in Afghanistan’s rugged
terrain: after helicopter downing, Hummers
failing, Marines return to low-tech rentals http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-afghan-us-donkeys,1,1037590.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines |
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