Dying to save a GOP
Congress
OpEd by Frank Rich, NYT, Sunday, October 29,
2006
If you happened to be up around dawn on Tuesday, you could witness the
death rattle of our adventure in Iraq live on CNN. Zalmay Khalilzad, the
American ambassador, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the American commander, were
making new promises from the bunker of the Green Zone, inspiring about as much
confidence as Jackie Gleason and Art Carney hatching a get-rich-quick scheme to
sell a kitchen gadget on “The Honeymooners.”
“Success in Iraq is possible and can be
achieved on a realistic timetable,” said Mr. Khalilzad. Iraq can be
“in a very good place in 12 months,” said General Casey. Even a child could see
how much was wrong with this picture.
If there really is light at the end of the tunnel, why after three and a half
years can’t we yet guarantee light in Baghdad? Symbolically enough, television
transmission of the Khalilzad-Casey press conference was interrupted by another
of the city’s daily power failures. If Iraq’s leaders had signed on to the
12-month plan of “benchmarks” the Americans advertised, why were those leaders
nowhere in sight? We found out one day later, when the prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, mocked the very idea of an America-imposed timetable. “I am positive that
this is not the official policy of the American government, but rather a result
of the ongoing election campaign,”
he said, adding dismissively, “And that does not concern us much.”
Give the Iraqi leader credit for a Borat-like candor that almost every American
in this sorry tale lacks. Of course all the White House’s latest jabberwocky
about “benchmarks” and “milestones” and “timetables” (never to be confused with
those Defeatocrats’ “timelines”) is nothing more than an election-year P.R.
strategy, as is the laughable banishment of “stay the course.” There is no new
American plan to counter the apocalypse now playing out in Iraq, only new
packaging to pacify American voters between now and Nov. 7. And recycled
packaging at that: President Bush had last announced that he and Mr. Maliki
were developing “benchmarks” to “measure progress” in Iraq back in June.
As Richard Holbrooke, the broker of the Bosnia peace accords, has observed, the
only real choice left for the president now is either “escalation or
disengagement.” But there are no troops, let alone money or national will, for
escalation. Disengagement within a year, however, is favored by 54% of
Americans and, more important, 71% of Iraqis. After Election Day, adults in
Washington will step in, bow to the obvious and pull the plug. The current
administration strategy — praying for a miracle — is not an option. The current
panacea favored by anxious Republican Congressional candidates — firing Donald
Rumsfeld — is too little, too late.
The adults in charge of disengagement will include the Bush family consigliere,
James Baker, whose bipartisan Iraq Study Group will present its findings after
the election, and John Warner, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman,
who has promised a re-evaluation of Iraq policy within roughly the same time
frame. Democrats will have a role in direct proportion to the clout they gain
in the midterms.
One way or another the various long-shot exit scenarios being debated in the
capital will be sorted out: federalism and partition; reaching out somehow for
help from Iran and Syria; replacing Mr. Maliki with a Saddam-lite strongman.
There will be some kind of timeline, or whatever you want to call it, with
enforced benchmarks, or whatever you want to call them, for phased withdrawal.
(Read “Out of Iraq:
A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now” by George McGovern and William R. Polk for a particularly
persuasive blueprint.) In any event, the timeline will end no later than
Inauguration Day 2009.
In keeping with the political cynicism that gave birth to this war and has
recklessly prolonged it, the only ones being kept in the dark about this
inevitable denouement are our fighting men and women. They remain trapped,
dying in accelerating numbers in a civil war that is now killing so many Iraqi
civilians that Mr. Maliki this month ordered his health ministry to stop
releasing any figures.
Our troops are held hostage by the White House’s political imperatives as much
as they are by the violence. Desperate to maintain the election-year P.R. ruse that an
undefined “victory” is still within reach, Mr. Bush went so far at Wednesday’s
press conference as to say that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq. He explained his rationale to George
Stephanopoulos last weekend, when he asserted that the number of casualties was
the enemy’s definition of success or failure, not his. “I define success or
failure as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to defend themselves,” the
president said, and “as to whether the unity government” is making the
“difficult decisions necessary to unite the country.”
Unfortunately, the war is a calamity by both of those definitions as well. The
American command’s call for a mere 3,000 more Iraqi troops to help defend
Baghdad has gone unanswered. As we’ve learned from Operation Together Forward,
when Iraqis do stand up, violence goes up. And when American and British troops
stand down, murderous sectarian militias, some of them allied with that “unity”
government, fill the vacuum, taking over entire cities like Amara and Balad in
broad daylight. As for those “difficult decisions” Mr. Bush regards as so
essential, the Iraqi government’s policy is cut and run. Mr. Maliki is not cracking
down on rampaging militias but running interference for their kingpin, Moktada
al-Sadr. Mr. Maliki treats this radical anti-American Shiite cleric, his
political ally, with far more deference than he shows the American president.
The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us
Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds and “Mission Accomplished,” is trivializing
the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy’s “sophisticated” strategy, he said
in last weekend’s radio address, is to distribute “images of violence” to television networks, Web sites and
journalists to “demoralize our country.”
This is a morally repugnant argument. The “images of violence” from Iraq are
not fake — like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the
friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon
spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of
violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a
year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is
magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to
belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for
the mismanagement of the war. Mr. Bush’s logic is reminiscent of Jeffrey
Skilling’s obtuse view of his innocence in the Enron scandal, though at least
Mr. Skilling has been held accountable for the wreckage of lives on his watch.
It is also wrong to liken what’s going on now, as Mr. Bush has, to the Tet offensive.
That sloppy Vietnam analogy was first made by Mr. Rumsfeld in June 2004 to try
to explain away the explosive rise in the war’s violence at that time. It made
a little more sense then, since both the administration and the American public
were still being startled by the persistence of the Iraq insurgency, much as
the Johnson administration and Walter Cronkite were by the Viet Cong’s tenacity
in 1968. Before Tet, as Stanley Karnow’s history, “Vietnam,” reminds us, public
approval of L.B.J.’s conduct of the war still stood at 40%, yet to hit rock
bottom.
Where we are in Iraq today is not 1968 but 1971, after the bottom had fallen
out, Johnson had abdicated and America had completely turned on Vietnam. At
that point, approval of Richard Nixon’s handling of the war was at 34%,
comparable to Mr. Bush’s current 30. The percentage of Americans who thought
the Vietnam War was “morally wrong” stood at 51, comparable to the 58 percent
who now think the Iraq war was a mistake. Many other Vietnam developments in 1971
have their counterparts in 2006: the leaking of classified Pentagon reports
revealing inept and duplicitous war policy, White House demonization of the
press, the joining of moderate Republican senators with Democrats to press for
a specific date for American withdrawal.
That’s why it seemed particularly absurd when, in his interview with Mr.
Stephanopoulos last weekend, Mr. Bush said that “the fundamental question”
Americans must answer is “should we stay?” They’ve been answering that question
loud and clear for more than a year now.
What we should be thinking about instead are our obligations to those who are
doing the staying. Kevin Tillman, who served with his brother in Iraq and
Afghanistan, observed in an angry online essay this month: “Somehow back at home, support for the
soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with
crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying
Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.”
If we really support the troops, we’ll move past Mr. Bush’s “fundamental
question” to one from 1971 posed by a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran, John Kerry,
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man
to die for a mistake?”
