Someone Tell the
President the War Is Over
By FRANK RICH, OP-ED
NYTimes on the Web, August 14, 2005
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on
an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the
country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over.
"We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch.
What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own
allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of
Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll -- a match for the 32
percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968.
(The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41
percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as
L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election,
commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has
lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged
standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment
shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are
so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay
soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill
O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is
chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin
to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a
job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped
expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this
sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war
strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late
tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global
struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your
landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict
this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with
the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's
historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that
Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the
war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths
and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had
high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence
that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive.
He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he
able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a
single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted
State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were
"highly dubious."
It was on these false premises -- that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and
about to inflict mushroom clouds on America -- that honorable and brave young
Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists
from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the
start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who
had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern
Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk,"
received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio
district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading
now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call."
The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no
avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and
their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia,
instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in
Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his
Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from
reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win
a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the
blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end.
That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in
politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before
there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to
Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a
battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because
it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan.
It was easier to take out Saddam -- and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a
slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig -- than to shut
down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a
doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early
last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as
I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he
learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions."
But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr.
Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the
general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would
be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that
security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been
before 9/11 -- "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps
reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly
created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of
this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put
out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of
those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as
he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly
set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring.
Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's
quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now
is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum
and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war
in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary
deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not
another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles
Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts,
not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing
now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field
the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security
situation in Iraq.
What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never
clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's
March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in
this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated
claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then
throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster,
but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the
difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from
continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet"
about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice
president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes."
The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there.
Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of
the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who
struck us four years ago next month.
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