It's still "stay the course" in Iraq, just without saying those words.
Yesterday, President Bush called on Americans to gird themselves for "the sacrifices that are yet to come."
Only, just military personnel and their families are sacrificing for this already discredited plan.
The president spoke warmly yesterday of Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki as a man of energy and initiative.
Yet it's still "stay the course" in supporting al-Maliki's corrupt government that's too beholden to warlords and their death squads.
It's still "stay the course" in failing to give al-Maliki the tools he needs - including the power to issue blanket amnesties and repeal the most egregious U.S. occupation diktats - in order to make progress on the political sine qua nons of ethnic compromise required to keep Iraq together.
It's still "stay the course" in pretending to recognize Iraqi sovereignty while calling the shots and not giving up the idea of long-term military occupation.
President Bush had a golden opportunity Wednesday to make clear that America doesn't have long-term designs on Iraq's oil, territory or military bases - and he blew it.
Even worse, when asked point-blank by a reporter whether America wanted permanent military bases in Iraq, Bush lent that idea credence.
He said it was a matter for future negotiation with the Iraqi government.
Either the president's advisers don't know what most Iraqis know - that the suspicion that America has continuing designs on Iraqi land and oil still drives much of the insurgency - or they don't care.
The president said yesterday that he wants to level with Americans about a hard slog ahead.
But reality still is not on offer.
That's because reality is inconvenient. It slows things down.
In February 2003, one month before America attacked Iraq, an Army War College team issued their detailed findings of two months of strategic military thinking about what Iraq's reconstruction would require.
The 84-page report was a font of clairvoyance - from its clearheaded perception of the dangerous sectarian divides to the burgeoning violence and terrorist opportunism that would face U.S. forces if Iraq was not quickly secured.
The expertise was there. It just wasn't listened to.
That's because if the recommendations for detailed post-war planning laid out by authors Conrad Crane and W. Andrew Terrill had been followed, they would have delayed the war.
And delaying the war wasn't acceptable to a White House and a Pentagon eager to move on Baghdad quickly, even if that meant without sufficient troops or a realistic sense of what it would take to win the peace.
After 9/11, America took a long, hard look at what was hindering understanding of our adversaries - and one of the most acute needs was in area studies and languages. Virtually every expert who looked at the failures in intelligence, in imagination and in diplomacy that had carved the path from Afghanistan in 1979 to the al-Qaida attack of 2001 focused on the critical lack of Arabic, Farsi and Pashto speakers at all levels of the U.S. military, intelligence and foreign-policy establishments.
The 9/11 commission report noted that the FBI was hopelessly behind in translating terrorist documents because of a shortage of Arabic speakers. In 2002, only six people graduated from U.S. colleges with a degree in Arabic.
This problem was not new but, finally, it was no longer "stay the course."
Earlier this year, the White House announced a $100 million-a-year program to create civilian and military corps of strategic language speakers. The U.S. military is focusing new efforts on promoting foreign language fluency and cultural awareness.
Yet it takes years to train foreign language speakers.
In the meantime, the Iraq war has added to the strains on a national security and spy structure already short of fluent Arabic speakers.
Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages. This is one of a series of columns looking at policy problems in the nation's post-9/11 response.
© 2006 The Plain Dealer
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