OT: "Plan: We Win " (editorial)
- From: Bruce Morgen <editor@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:36:19 -0500
Editorial
Plan: We Win
Published: December 1, 2005
We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely
loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him.
There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the
1990's. Now it's his son's turn.
It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they
needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his
mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq
safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's
commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the
reality of the war.
Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet
another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America
lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at
midmorning on a weekday to catch him.
The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in
Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been
driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was.
The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that
everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his
policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.
On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly
optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas,
including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you believe a
nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian
militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now
wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue
militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like
Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Mr. Bush's vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi forces well enough to
free American forces for more of the bloody and ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that
accomplish little beyond alienating the populace.
What Americans wanted to hear was a genuine counterinsurgency plan, perhaps like one proposed by
Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a leading writer on military strategy: find the most secure areas with
capable Iraqi forces. Embed American trainers with those forces and make the region safe enough to
spend money on reconstruction, thus making friends and draining the insurgency. Then slowly expand
those zones and withdraw American forces.
Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of
staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the
terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure";
and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an
engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."
That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar's
son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam
and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969
Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and
Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon
admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it),
and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.
A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.
_____
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01thur1.html?th&emc=th>
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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