There hasn’t been any price for opposing Bush’s policies for a long time. There is no better evidence of this than the fact that the Democrats did not lose one House seat, one Senate seat, or one Governor’s seat. It didn’t matter what part of the country you were in, not a single incumbent opponent of Bush was defeated anywhere. But it wasn’t until we could see the proof of this that the true debacle that is Iraq began to come into clear focus. I say ‘begin’ because as far as I am concerned very few people really get it, even now. I don’t even see a full recognition of the magnitude of the shift from my fellow bloggers. But the military is starting to get it.
Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the new poll for the four papers (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times). In another startling finding, only 41% now feel it was the right idea to go to war in Iraq in the first place.
And the number who feel success there is likely has shrunk from 83% in 2004 to about 50% today. A surprising 13% say there should be no U.S. troops in Iraq at all.
This comes even though only about one in ten called their overall political views “liberal.”
The annual mail survey was conducted Nov. 13 through Dec. 22. Among the respondents, two in three have deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Nearly three-quarters of the respondents think today’s military is stretched too thin to be effective.
Nothing has really changed in Iraq that would lead to a dramatic cratering of military support for the effort. What changed was that we had an election, and the Democrats won in every region of the country, while the Republicans lost. This has had an effect on a subconcious level. When Bush followed up his losses by immediately cashiering Donald Rumsfeld, it just cemented the message. Iraq is a disaster and will only bring defeat to anyone that associates themselves with it.
In spite of this, the President continues to think we can turn Iraq into a ‘a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror’. But we cannot accomplish those things. The military senses that they have ‘no clear mission’ and they are resisting the call for a surge of new troops. It’s ironic that the military feels this way because making Iraq into ‘a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror’ would seem to be a fairly clear mission.
The problem is that there is no prospect, no strategy, that has a chance in hell of accomplishing that mission in any reasonable amount of time, at any reasonable cost, and anything like the current troop levels (which are, in any case, unsustainable).
We’re back to 1972, looking for ‘a decent interval’. We’d like to pull out our troops and not have the government in Baghdad collapse for a couple years after we are gone. But, unlike in Vietnam, we don’t have anyone to negotiate with. No one can prevent the implosion of Iraq. Not the Iranians, not the Saudis, not the Syrians, nor the Turks, not even the Iraqis can prevent the collapse of Iraq.
The administration is struggling to come up with a strategy that can stave off defeat. One idea, the 80% solution would have us take the side of SCIRI in an intramural fight among the Shi’a and have them wipe out the Sunnis. That policy is obviously a non-starter with our Sunni allies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. The mere fact that we appear to be considering it is staggering. It should come as no surprise that the Saudis responded by threatening to fund al-Qaeda in Iraq and (essentially) recalling their ambassador. There may be more to al-Turki’s departure than just displeasure over the 80% strategy, but I do not think it is a mere coincidence.
If we try to pursue our occupation of Iraq under our current leadership we will lose our regional allies. We’ll break our army. We’ll bankrupt the nation. And we’ll have nothing to show for it because we invaded under false pretenses and ‘fixed’ intelligence.
There is no avoiding negative consequences for our blunder into Iraq, but there will be no negative consequences for those that oppose Bush’s plans to stay and even escalate in Iraq.
We will eventually be seen as either the people that saved America or the people that tried to save America. And the more people, especially you politicians, that join us the better our chances of saving American will be.
