Bush's folly in Iraq is taxing US armed forces, the economy, and democracy.
By Pat M. Holt from the October 05, 2006 edition
ARLINGTON, VA. – The conventional wisdom says that President Bush's recent campaigning has brought on a tilt toward Republican congressional candidates in fall elections. But all the other indicators point the other way.
The latest National Intelligence Estimate of the war on terror reports that "anti-US sentiment ... is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies." One reason is the lack of success in stabilizing and pacifying Iraq. The implication is that the US is losing the war in Iraq.
In one sense, the Army is plainly losing the war. It is shorter of manpower and equipment now than when it invaded Iraq in 2003. The 3rd Infantry Division, which led the invasion of Baghdad and which has already served two tours in Iraq, has been alerted to prepare for a third tour. (It has also been told to prepare to go to the Korean peninsula if another conflict breaks out there.) But there is no equipment with which to train. What was not destroyed or worn out in Iraq was left there for the replacements.
Besides the equipment shortage, the division's 2nd Brigade has only about half of the roughly 3,500 soldiers it is supposed to have. Fort Stewart, Ga., where the 3rd Infantry Division is based, has been receiving about 1,000 soldiers a month, of whom 400 are just out of basic training. This is the result of an intensified recruiting drive, but it will be a year, perhaps longer, before they are combat ready.
The Bush administration wanted to fight the war on the cheap. It did not want to ask the public for sacrifices, such as paying higher taxes. On the contrary, it fought in Congress to keep taxes low, thereby making the richest 1 percent of the population even richer. There was no talk of rationing. And there was certainly no talk of a draft to provide more manpower for the Army.
Mr. Bush has said that if the generals in charge in Iraq ask him for more troops, he will provide them. But authorizing more troops is different from having them on the ground well trained and well equipped.
Not only is the Bush policy weakening the Army, it is also weakening the economy. Most traditional economic indicators are favorable: the stock market is up, inflation is reasonably under control, employment is good, and retailers are expecting a good Christmas season. But the national debt is sky-high, as is the deficit in foreign trade and the international balance of payments. It should not be forgotten that what ended the cold war, leaving America the winner, was the collapse of the Soviet Union, largely brought on by excessive spending, mainly on missile defense.
Vice President Cheney said in a television interview last month that critics of the war in Iraq are encouraging terrorists. President Johnson said a similar thing about the war in Vietnam.
In the same interview, Mr. Cheney said that even if the Bush administration had known before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it would have "done exactly the same thing."
The implication is that the weapons of mass destruction did not matter. If that is so, then why did the administration make such a fuss about them? Why did it damage the credibility of its secretary of state by sending him to mislead the Security Council so grievously? Was the whole purpose of this war to get rid of Saddam Hussein? And are we going to be told at some time in the future that it did not matter if Iran had nuclear weapons; what mattered was getting rid of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Bush has repeated as though it were a mantra that the world is better off without Mr. Hussein. To say his presence or absence affected the world is to vastly overestimate the influence of this tinhorn dictator. To say Iraq is better off is getting closer to what can reasonably be argued. But even with respect to Iraq, given what has happened since the US invasion, it would not be surprising if many Iraqis soon believe that they were better off under Hussein.
Indeed, just 61 percent of Iraqis now say that ousting Hussein was worth the hardships they might have suffered, according to a survey conducted last month by http://WorldPublicOpinion.org .
Another question follows: Will this war leave the United States stronger or weaker, with greater or lesser international prestige, than it had before 9/11? Bush talks about spreading democracy. But in fact, through his assault on the Bill of Rights in our own Constitution, he is weakening democracy.
• Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Michael Winship Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 10/10/2006 - 10:55am.
The most interesting electronic mail of the last couple of weeks hasn't been the sorry collection of Instant Messages sent by former Rep. Mark Foley to male pages, his billets-fou to the post-pubescent. (As Robin Williams said on David Letterman Monday night, "Time to get our boys out of Congress.")
Rather, it's e-mail from a Marine, now identified as Colonel Pete Devlin, the Marine Corps' head of intelligence for Iraq. Based in the western al-Anbar province, Devlin wrote informally to friends and family back here in the States. His correspondence was forwarded to the website Marine for Life and subsequently cited by Time Magazine and other media.
"There's really not much to write about," he begins. "More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it... It's like this every day... not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno."
He praises his fellow Marines: "All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here -- all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a 'Band of Brothers' who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps." A startling notion.
Even more surprising, he has good things to say about Iraq's struggling, endangered police force. "All local guys," he writes. "I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are far better at finding them than we are -- and they are finding them." But, he adds, "If we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp."
Devlin's greatest scorn is reserved for pundits and touring dignitaries. He describes high-ranking visitors as "more disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and 'battlefield' tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no effect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here."
He adds that the greatest outrage is "practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender -- Bill O'Reilly -- what a buffoon."
Such candor raises the specter of whether Colonel Devlin will continue to have a career in the military much longer, but he's not a man whose opinions and expertise should be taken lightly. As the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum noted [F6 note -- my next post, a reply to this post], he's the same guy who wrote a classified report in August stating that any chance of the American military securing al-Anbar is, at best, remote; the first time a senior military official officially has filed so pessimistic an assessment.
According to another Marine intelligence officer quoted by the Washington Post, Devlin "has the reputation of being one of the Marine Corps' best intelligence officers, with a tendency to be careful and straightforward... Hence, the report is being taken seriously as it is examined inside the military establishment and also by some CIA officials."
To be fair, compared to the rest of the country, Anbar province, which makes up about a third of Iraq's landmass, is the Iraqi Wild West, center of the Sunni Triangle and an al-Qaeda stronghold, an area so lawless even Saddam Hussein's heavy fist couldn't keep it under control. He had to settle for maintaining an uneasy truce there.
But placed in the context of all the bad news coming from the entire country, plus recent remarks calling for a "change of course" by such GOP stalwarts as former Secretary of State James Baker and Virginia Senator John Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, what Devlin has to say is painfully pertinent.
American casualties mount. As Bob Woodward said in that "60 Minutes" interview last week, insurgents, on average, are hitting coalition troops every 15 minutes. "It's getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week," he said. "That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces... The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse."
In August, 3000 Iraqi civilians were killed, up fifty percent from the year before. According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, "This year's violence was the worst since liberation, and probably the worst over all since 1991," the year of the first Gulf War and Saddam's subsequent attacks against the Shi'a and Kurdish uprisings.
The report continues, "The Iraqi government continues to flounder in attempts to rein in militias, ensure fair distribution of the nation's future oil revenue, rehabilitate former low-level Baathists into public life and rebuild the economy."
So the situation described by Colonel Devlin in Anbar extends countrywide. While you have to concur with his admiration and respect for the courage of our troops, the data also seems to confirm his dour prognosis.
The Brookings report concludes, "On balance, the data suggest that while Iraq is not lost, the United States and its allies there are hardly winning either." Though further violence will follow upon withdrawal or redeployment -- whichever you want to call it -- on balance, our presence does more harm than good.
The time has come to pay attention to the sign posted in Baghdad's Firdos Square shortly after Saddam's statue toppled. "Your mission is accomplished," it read. "Now go home."
Put another way, there's this, from a farmer described by Col. Devlin in his e-mail as "The Most Profound Man in Iraq."
Asked by reconnaissance Marines who were searching for Syrians if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area, he replied:
"Yes. You."
Time to go. Strongly worded e-mail follows [the post to which this post is a reply, plus my next post, a reply to this post].
Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes a weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.
Copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers (emphasis added)
Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. -- including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died -- were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since been relocated for their safety.
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