Just when you think the right’s rhetoric on the Iraq war can’t possibly become more insane, they turn around and prove you wrong.
Prior to his Tuesday evening veto of the emergency war-spending bill, Mr. Bush attended a conference at Central Command (CENTCOM) Headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
“Everyone in this room knows the consequences of failure in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said at the conference, “and then we should also appreciate the consequences of success, because we’ve seen them before.”
Nobody in that room knows what “failure” or “success” in Iraq means, much less what the consequences of either might be. And where have we seen the consequences of “success” before, according to Mr. Bush? Germany and Japan who were once our enemies but are now our friends. Only the diehards of the non-cognizant right still buy this comparison of Iraq to World War II, but that doesn’t keep Mr. Bush from still trying to sell it to the rest of us.
But nothing Mr. Bush said at the conference topped this for incredulity: “CENTCOM has built an impressive record of achievement in a short amount of time.”
Impressive record of achievement? Land o’ Goshen! Over the past five years, CENTCOM has been the first U.S. regional unified command to “not win” two wars, and to make its record even more ignominious, it has failed to achieve its objectives despite being supported by the “best trained, best equipped” military in the history of humanity.
Wishin’ Accomplished
On Tuesday, 6:10 PM Eastern Standard Time, Mr. Bush gave his post-veto speech to the nation. He must have been suffering from post-veto depression, because the speech was as flat as a Freedom Pancake. Yeah, he managed to squeeze in the standard non-binding accusation that Iraq and al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were all connected, and threw in a handful of neoconservative non-sequiturs as well. This one stood out for me: “It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing.” Heh. It made no sense to tell the enemy you were going to execute a “surge” plan, and how many troops that surge would involved, and how many of those troops would be deployed to Baghdad and how many to Anbar province. And it sure as shooting didn’t make any sense for Mr. Bush to roll out a map showing where the security stations in Baghdad are located. Talk about aiding and abetting the enemy.
So why does Mr. Bush think it makes “no sense” to announce a withdrawal date?
All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq. I believe setting a deadline for withdrawal would demoralize the Iraqi people, would encourage killers across the broader Middle East and send a signal that America will not keep its commitments. Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible.
I’m pretty sure the “terrorists” are already plotting to overthrow the Iraqi government. I’m equally certain that the Iraqi people are already demoralized and that killers across the broader middle east are more encouraged by our presence in Iraq than they would be by our absence. As for America not keeping its commitments, how about our commitments to things like the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture, duly ratified treaties and the “law of the land” under the U.S. Constitution that Mr. Bush threw out with the bathwater when Alberto Gonzales deemed them to be “quaint” and “obsolete?”
Despite what Mr. Bush and his echo chamberlains would have you believe, it is not a foregone conclusion that if a timeline were announced, the bad guys would “mark their calendars” and go underground until we leave. It’s just as likely that they would gather to take one last shot at us while we’re still around to shoot at and to make sure we don’t change our minds about leaving. But even if they did decide to hunker down for three or six or eight months, wouldn’t that give us the kind of security the Iraqi government supposedly needs to get its act together? And wasn’t that supposed to be the purpose of the surge?
Mr. Bush stated that the conditions on the emergency appropriations bill would substitute “the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.” Four years into our Iraq debacle, the judgment of our military commanders has been tragically erroneous. Many of our generals opposed the escalation plan, which was proposed not by military commanders but by Fred Kagan and Jack Keane, key members of Bill Kristol’s neoconservative cabal. Bush nominated General David Petraeus as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq because Petraeus was willing to go along with an already approved strategy.
Virtually all of the arguments for not conducting a phased withdrawal from Iraq are disingenuous fear mongering. The Mahdi Army can’t “follow us here” unless they hide in our troops’ luggage. Nobody will try to invade and occupy Iraq militarily after watching what we’ve gone through in that country. An outbreak of a general regional war in the Middle East is unlikely. The countries in that region have border skirmish militaries and none of those countries can afford prolonged, expanded wars. Even if they all decide to have a big war among themselves, our presence in Iraq won’t stop them. We can’t get Baghdad under control; how on earth could we stop, say, Iran and Turkey from having a go at each other?
The voices in the Big Brother Broadcast frame our options in Iraq as “total victory” or “surrender.” Yet they can’t provide a coherent definition of what total victory might consist, largely because such a thing is not achievable. We’re not at war with Iraq, Iraq is at war with itself and we’re stuck in the middle of it. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism; it’s the central front in the Iraqi civil war. Iraq is not going to surrender to us, and we’re not going to lay down our arms and surrender to Iraq or anyone else. The people objecting to withdrawal timelines are the same folks who fork tongued us into invading Iraq in the first place and then denied for years that we had become bogged down in an insurgency and a civil war. They didn’t know what they were talking about then and they don’t know what they’re talking about now.
Setting a deadline for withdrawal is not setting a date for failure. Settling for an open ended new “way forward” that’s really just “son of stay the course” is a sure fire recipe for more of the same kind of failure the Bush administration has given us for over four years.
And that, my fellow Americans, would be the most irresponsible “way forward” of all.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.
