| |
We've Lost in Iraq; Time to Finesse a Pullout
Published on Friday, November 10, 2006 by Newsday
|
|
We've Lost in Iraq; Time to Finesse a Pullout
|
|
by James Klurfeld
|
| |
Nobody in any official position is going to come out and say this, but the United States has lost the war in Iraq. Everything from here on in is about how we get out of this mess with the least damage. That's not an unimportant issue, but it's far from the issue of whether we can obtain the objectives we set when we went into Iraq 3 1/2 years ago.
How do I know this? The American people told us on Tuesday. The message of the Election Day voting is crystal clear: The people want the war to be over.
President George W. Bush's greatest mistake wasn't in not sending enough troops to make certain that Iraq would be secure after the successful invasion (although that certainly was a major blunder). And it wasn't in justifying the war based on the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction (although that, too, turned out to be a mistake, big-time). And it wasn't the decision to disband Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army and destroy all remnants of the Baath party (although those those moves also contributed to the fiasco).
Bush's single biggest mistake was in not leveling with the American people from the very beginning, letting them know that an invasion of Iraq could be bloody, difficult and require considerable sacrifice.
Never, not once, did Bush come to the public and say what Iraq was going to cost us in terms of blood and treasure. Never, not once, did he say the American people would have to sacrifice by sending loved ones overseas into harm's way for a sustained period and that those of us at home might have to pay higher taxes to support the effort.
Bush went to war based on a best-case scenario. Baghdad would fall, the civil servants in Iraq would pick up the pieces, oil revenue would pay for it all, and the men and women of the U.S. armed forces would be welcomed as liberators and home by Christmas. Remember Bush in his flight suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the sign behind him saying "Mission Accomplished"? He believed it.
But once it became obvious that things weren't going so well, once the body bags began to arrive back home, once the insurgency started to grow, and reservists were sent back to Iraq, and back even again, the public wasn't ready. Bush had exaggerated the reasons for going to war and underplayed the potential costs.
The war's supporters in the administration might have argued that they could not go to war if they were too frank about its potential costs. But that's just the point.
And when it turned out that this nation couldn't accomplish its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq in a year or two or three, the people finally said, "Enough already." They had been sold a bill of goods. It's the one lesson from Vietnam that had validity this time: You can't fight a war unless you have public support.
Frankly, I was surprised that the voters' rebellion didn't happen sooner, certainly in 2004. Now the president seems to have gotten the message, or at least realized the need to acknowledge that the Republican "thumpin'" he referred to was caused, in large measure, by disillusionment with the war.
I won't even try to argue that it would be worthwhile to make Iraq a stable nation, whatever that would mean, even if it takes another five or 10 years, as some foreign policy experts have said. That might be true, but it's irrelevant. It's not going to happen because the American people are not willing to pay the price. End of debate.
How we get out of Iraq now does matter, of course. Just leaving could create a vacuum that the likes of al-Qaida would quickly fill. A regional war involving Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran is not in our interests, either. That's the debate now: how to get out with the least damage. But have no doubt: The first troop to be withdrawn from Iraq was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
###
|
 Printer Friendly Version
E-Mail This Article
|
|
|
