By Thomas P. Champion
Here’s the problem: no matter how skillfully Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid manage the newly Democratic Congress, their ability to pick up the pieces will be cruelly limited as long as George W. Bush continues to ignore the message of the 2006 election, the will of the people, the rule of law, and the dictates of common sense.
As long as the Bush regime continues to lie about nearly everything – and official Washington (including the media) treats those lies as if they were a legitimate basis for discussion and debate – things aren’t going to get much better.
Take Iraq (please): Having rejected the obvious way out offered by the Baker-Hamilton Council of Elders, Bush and Co. are now busy pre-selling a “new” Iraq policy that would include:
- an apparently temporary increase in troop strength around Baghdad (don’t say “surge” – that’s just Pentagon jargon elevated to Bushspeak);
- new military leadership;
- a jobs program for unemployed Iraqis; and
- a new emphasis on small-unit counterinsurgency tactics.
We’ve already started hearing about some of the more obvious flaws in this approach, including the facts that: there wouldn’t be enough troops to make a difference; nobody’s willing to talk about exactly how long we’d maintain the new troop level; it won’t work unless Iraq’s own legitimate security forces get vastly better incredibly fast; or that we also need more troops in Afghanistan – where they might actually make a difference.
We’ve even started to hear the entire plausible objection that this “new way forward” is a cynical construct designed to give Bush the ability make the claim that “We’re making progress, but we must give our new approach time to work” (and keep making it until he leaves office).
But the very worst thing about the “new way forward” is that it is still predicated on a set of lies and deceptions about Iraq – its government, people, and prospects – and about the nature of our options there.
If you want to know how bad things really are, you need look no further than the video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, which appears to have been carried out not by nonsectarian, independent agents of the central Iraqi government, but by members of a Shiite militia controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr. As Frank Rich notes in the Sunday New York Times (reg. rqd.), this guy is a classic Islamic fundamentalist terrorist thug, whose “Mahdi Army” has clashed repeatedly with U.S. forces, killing the son of Cindy Sheehan along with dozens of other Americans.
The government of Prime Minister Maliki cannot rein in, or even criticize, Sadr because he is too important to the ruling Shiite coalition – yet this is the government that Bush’s “new way forward” is designed to uphold.
Sure, it might still be possible for the United States to impose a military solution on Iraq (and dethrone Sadr and the other new mini-Saddams). But we would have to reinstate the draft, raise taxes, put our economy on a war footing and assemble a massive aid plan (our prior efforts having been squandered in an orgy of corruption and profiteering).
Does anyone really think our nation is up for all that? And short of that all-in approach, does anyone really think we can “win” in Iraq?
We can and should think outside the box on counterinsurgency, but we also need the same kind of creative thinking on the wider political (partition, anyone?), diplomatic and military fronts. Everybody but Bush and his dead-enders understands that, by the Bush definition, we can’t “win” in Iraq.
Our inability to achieve a neo-con “victory” is in no way due to our fighting men and women. They have performed heroically in an appalling situation, and the best way to honor their sacrifice is to get them the hell out of there, and fast.
We can be smart, we can be tough, we can be creative – but we must be going.
