The President's Strategy in Iraq isn't working. Why not?

Apparently nobody in America guessed that this wouldn't work, at least, nobody who's 'credible' enough to get on TV.

So yes, it comes as a big surprise to everybody, but now the war is going wrong, and American politicians and media are full of questions. Why is it all going wrong? Why can't the President tell us what the strategy is? Why can't 'the Democrats' come up with an alternative? Don't we have any choices beyond 'stay the course' vs. 'exit strategy'? How can American heroes be losing to Arab cowards? What is the big thing that cannot be said?

Except for Knight-Ridder, for the first two and a half years of the war, American media didn't notice anything much was wrong. In about August of 2005, the media began reporting that the war in Iraq was in trouble. That month we saw the first pictures of the coffins sneaking home in the night. About that same time stories appeared about soldiers muttering under their breath. Shortly after that, Katrina blew in, then John Murtha spoke up. Criticism and negative comments on the war suddenly became commonplace. Suddenly everybody agrees that the war was a mistake, except for the Bush Gang and its most loyal minions.

So why is the war going so wrong, and what can we do about it?

On this subject, we're not getting any answers in the national debate.

The President, of course, is not admitting that anything's wrong. Standing his ground, after getting caught in a lie, seems to be the only skill he really has. His mummy must have just loved him to death.

On the other hand, the High Democrats - the Democrats who are credible enough to get on TV - give two explanations for what went wrong:

1) we didn't send enough troops, and
2) Paul Bremer shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi army.

For example, here's Bill Clinton:

The mistake that they made is that when they kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure of Iraq... We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders," said Clinton.

As the borders were unsealed, "the terrorists came in".

Clinton said it would have been better if the US had left Iraq's "fundamental military and social and police structure intact".

There are a lot of problems with this story. It's all in the past. It doesn't say anything about what we should do now. It misrepresents the insurgency, which was never primarily terrorists who came in. But this general idea - that there was a vacuum of authority - represents current military thinking. On how to fight the war, the High Democrats are in agreement with the Army command. Army planning predicted an insurgency and recommended more troops. They were overruled by Rumsfeld and General Franks. When the insurgency started, General Wallace observed it and tried to respond. He was overruled by Rumsfeld and Franks and threatened with firing.

But Kerry made this argument during the campaign and it didn't get him anywhere. It just says that we didn't pay the true cost of fighting the war in Iraq. So what? Nobody who's been awake the past 30 years thinks America is ready to hear about the true cost of anything. We didn't want to come up with 400,000 troops three years ago and we sure don't want to come up with the 1,000,000 or so it would take today. Americans aren't scared enough to install a draft. The High Democrats are left with no alternative to calling for withdrawal. Most of them don't want to take responsibility for that, so they are demanding that Bush come up with an 'exit strategy'. Just six months ago, politicians like Joe Biden were calling for more troops. Now, like everybody else, Biden wants to start talking about how to get out.

In addition to how many troops are in Iraq, we might talk about what the troops are doing, but except for Kucinich, the Democrats are not saying there is anything we might actually do different in Iraq. The actual conduct of the war is too hot of a topic for anybody in scientific politics. So America's choices seem to be

1. lose now ('exit strategy'), or
2. take a lot more losses and lose later ('stay the course' ).

These options have failed to convince the American people, so it's stalemate.

posted by no impunity at 02:01 pM