(Off Topic NYTimes editorial) The Bush plan for "Victory" ?
- From: "orang37" <orang37@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 17:10:29 GMT
The New York Times
December 1, 2005
Editorial
Plan: We Win
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.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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