And so we are going to send more Americans to die in Iraq,
escalating a disastrous, ill-conceived war.
Ignoring the advice of generals, ignoring the advice of allies,
President Bush is preparing to send 21,500 more troops into the cauldron that
Iraq has become.
This is not even the escalation that the neocon warriors
have clamored for. In his ramp-up address last week, the president said that we
have failed in Iraq so far “for two principal reasons: There were not enough
Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of
terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops
we did have.”
The neocons who have been urging more troops have
recommended 50,000 or more. A slow phase-in of 20,000 or so has been considered
too small. But now Senator John McCain and others seem satisfied with the
20,000.
The reason, of course, is that we don’t have enough troops for a major escalation.
And so we will escalate this war with the troops we have, in
a country that we know little about and whose citizens do not want us there.
The president
continues to talk about “our enemies in Iraq.” But most of those “enemies”
are Iraqis. Even some Republicans who have previously supported the president
are worried. Virginia’s John Warner told the New York Times after the Bush
speech: “I’m particularly concerned about the greater injection of our troops
into the middle of sectarian violence. Whom do you shoot at, the Sunni or the
Shia?”
We will be propping up a government that increasingly
appears to be a big part of the problem: Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki
has not been willing (or able) to bring Shiite militias under control. “In
earlier operations,” the president said, “political and sectarian interference
prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home
to those fueling the sectarian violence.” Now, the president says, we have Maliki’s
pledge: things will be different.
And yet the night before the Bush speech, New York Times
reporter John Burns, stationed in Baghdad, gave this assessment on the
NewsHour: “Mr. Maliki did not want more American troops. He wanted American
troops pulled out of Baghdad to the periphery of the city. He wanted his troops
to control the city. He doesn’t like much the idea of more American troops
embedding, as transition teams or advisers, if you will, with Iraqi military
units.”
Writing in the Times on January 10, Burns and Sabrina
Tavernise said that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government is worried that “the
power they won at the polls, after centuries of subjugation by the Sunni
majority, will be progressively whittled away as the Americans seek deals with
the Sunnis that will help bring American troops home.”
And, worse, Burns’ January 11 Times story carried this
headline: “US and Iraqis Are Wrangling Over War Plans.” The Bush plan to secure
Baghdad, wrote Burns, “faces some of its fiercest resistance from the very
people it depends on for success: Iraqi government officials.”
Burns cited disagreements between Iraqis and American
planners over such things as who will be in command and how US troops will be
protected. The problems are so serious, wrote Burns, that some of the Americans
in Iraq are afraid they “could hobble the effort before it begins.”
“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government
that is actually part of the problem,” one military official told Burns. “We
are being played like a pawn.”
“For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18
months covering the Vietnam
War for the Washington Post,” wrote Robert Kaiser in
Sunday’s Post, “it is a source of amazement to realize that my country has done
this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict
and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language
few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn’t understand, whose expectations for
life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans.”
“Both times,” wrote Kaiser, “we put our fate in the hands of
local politicians who would not follow US orders, who did not see their
country’s fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough
of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted. In Vietnam as in
Iraq, US military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political
objectives.”
This is not a new
course.
And these are not new people planning the course. The same
people who pushed us into war — ignoring dissenting advice, shaping the facts
to fit their ideology — are the people planning the escalation (and ignoring
the dissenting advice and shaping the facts to fit their ideology).
Our allies see that. Even British leaders were not soothed
by the Bush speech. The British government is sticking to its plan to withdraw
its troops.
We are going to gamble that a policy that has failed
disastrously over the past four years will work now, if we simply continue it
for a bit longer. And we are gambling with the lives and blood of Americans and
Iraqis.
We are increasingly alone in this fight. And most alone of
all are the men and women America has sent to Iraq, and the Iraqi people who
are helpless as their tragedy grows.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.
