This is the Associated Press story from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. It’ll be interesting to see what The Daily Oklahoman feeds us tomorrow instead of this.
Newsview: Bush nears admission of errors
By TOM RAUM
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERWASHINGTON — President Bush came as close as he ever has to admitting mistakes on Iraq Wednesday, acknowledging setbacks and uneven results in the training of Iraqi troops in his latest defense of the war 2 1/2 years after he first declared victory.
And while he vowed U.S. troops would not be withdrawn to satisfy “artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington,” his Naval Academy speech in Annapolis, Md., could help set the stage for a reduction in troops next year.
That’s because Bush emphasized progress, if initially halting, in the training of Iraqi troops who will one day replace U.S. forces. Any U.S. reduction, the president said, will be driven by “the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders.”
Democratic critics focused on the fact that Bush’s speech, and an accompanying 35-page document entitled “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” broke no new ground, mostly restating administration aims put forth in 2003.
Bush “once again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
But Bush’s speech, the first of several he’s expected to make in the run-up to Dec. 15 elections to seat a permanent Iraqi government, appeared to reflect an administration repositioning to highlight exit preparations – if not exactly an exit timetable – and to more closely define the nature of the enemy.
“I think he’s sharpened his language a lot today. Obviously, things haven’t been flowing in his direction lately,” said Frederick Barton, an Iraq specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Barton said that Bush’s intended audience, besides the military, the broader American public and Iraqi voters, included members of Congress who have grown increasingly skeptical of the Iraq mission – including “reluctant members of his own party” who sit on committees with jurisdiction over defense spending.
Bush’s approval rating is at the low point of his presidency, at 37 percent in a recent AP-Ipsos poll, with a majority of Americans – 53 percent – saying they believe the war was a mistake. Republicans on the ballot next year are becoming increasingly restive
Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee and a strong supporter of the military, called two weeks ago for the withdrawal of all 160,000 U.S. troops from Iraq over the next six months, igniting protests from the White House and Republican congressional leaders.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who earlier suggested Murtha spoke for himself, said Wednesday, “I believe that a majority of our caucus clearly supports Mr. Murtha.”
Also, the Senate has voted overwhelmingly to require the administration to send Congress regular reports on the war’s progress and has suggested that 2006 be made a key year of transition toward Iraqi self-protection.
Thus, the debate over troop withdrawal was very much on the agenda during Bush’s speech. The president said those advocating withdrawal now are “sincerely wrong” and would “send a signal to our enemies that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends.”
At the same time, Bush declared that progress was indeed being made on training Iraqi forces to replace U.S. troops.
“The training of the Iraqi forces is an enormous task and it always hadn’t gone smoothly,” Bush conceded.
But, he said, “many of those forces have made real gains over the past year and Iraqi soldiers take pride in their progress.”
He cited statistics, saying there were “over 120 Iraqi army and police combat battalions” in the fight against insurgents, with each battalion typically consisting of 350-800 troops. Of those, about 80 battalions are fighting alongside coalition forces and “about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight,” Bush said.
Michele Flournoy, a senior Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, said there’s no question that the performance of Iraqi units has improved – but probably not to the extent that would allow a major U.S. troop withdrawal anytime soon. Still, withdrawal “is forcing its way onto the agenda,” Flournoy said.
“From the administration’s perspective, there are huge political pressures to begin some redeployment before the 2006 elections so a measure of victory can be declared,” she said.
Republican supporters of the president insisted he wasn’t about to declare victory for political expediency – and then leave.
“Democrats ignore the real progress on the ground, caught up in the headline of the moment” said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Our commander in chief remains committed to completing the mission in Iraq.”
One Democrat, Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado, said that Bush’s Annapolis speech “begins to address the Senate’s call for a successful exit strategy with measurable benchmarks. I look forward to hearing more.”
Unfortunately, President Bush’s “plan” for Iraq is as illusory as his reasons for going there in the first place. Remember, our original “plan” was for everyday Iraqis to greet us with cheers and flowers in the streets of Baghdad and for us to hand the country over to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iranian spy and Jordanian embezzler who hoodwinked Dick Cheney, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz into believing there were A-Bombs being handed over to Osama bin Laudin. This 35-pages of utter bullshit is the exact same plan: dream of a good ending made in Hollywood and then insist it’s the truth. Unfortunately, it just isn’t the truth. The truth is that Iraq presents a problem far too subtle and complex for our village idiot from Crawford, TX, to understand. There is no black and white, good and evil going on in Iraq. The bad guys refuse to wear black hats so that our cowboys know who to gun down in the OK corral. Sure wish “W” could get that hint.
So, let me see if I can do a little better, even if I’m not exactly Kissinger.
First, putting aside the issue of whether we were cynically lied to or whether the administration was just simply fooled by Chalabi and the Iraqi exiles, we went in for the reason of making sure there were no weapons of mass destruction being bandied about by a brutal dictator and offered to Osama bin Laudin (who, by the way, is still in Pakistan, our ally, walking around). OK. That’s a done deal. There are no weapons of mass destruction there, as we learned to our everlasting shame and disgrace. Next, they are not being bandied about by the brutal dictator who is now in the dock being tried for crimes against humanity. Last, there never were any operational ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda, so that wasn’t going on either.
Next, if we’re waiting for Iraq and the Middle East to adopt American democracy, we’re fucked because that just isn’t happening and, more to the point, we don’t want it to happen because that would mean the end to the monarchies in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and we can’t have that. Next, it won’t happen because there’s no cultural, religious or secular background for western style democracy. These guys fought Greece when Iraq was Babylonia and Europe in the Crusades and they just don’t have the same western rationalist Enlightenment stuff going on that we do. In fact, what they DO have is a culture several thousand years older than America that is richly textured and deeply established and very unlikely to be changed regardless of how many troops we keep there forever and ever amen. Instead, they have a tribal system that works well for them, no matter how disdainful we may be of their paternalism and eye-for-an-eye justice system. In Iraq, a nation created by France and Britain at the end of World War I out of nothing, there are three large “tribes”: the Kurds, the southern Shias and the central Sunnis. The religious affiliations of the Sunnis and Shias are more than just religion. It’s like describing Massachusetts as Pilgrim and Alabama as Baptist and leaving it at that. The way we’re going now, we’re going to create a Kurdistan that includes wars with Turkey and Iran to create (a la Wilson and the League of Nations and their self determination notions of nationhood) a brand new country, Kurdistan, that won’t have anything but bad blood with their neighbors and a 9th Century view of the world we cannot fathom. Whether we like it or not, there’s going to be a few years of blood feuding in Iraq and more Iraqi battalions isn’t going to fix that, it’s just going to be a different uniform and a different militia among many uniforms and militia. That’s why there was a Saddam in the first place — only a strongman propped up by U.S. money and guns was able to keep the peace in Iraq and the oil flowing to America. What we are presently doing in Iraq is building a theocracy that will — sooner or later — align with the theocracy of Iran in their hatred of everything western and the U.S. in particular. Bush just doesn’t get it. They don’t want a justice system; they want “Justice”, which they believe their imams give them. They don’t want a search for the truth, they want The Truth, which they find in the Koran. They don’t want Brittany Spears’ butt crack showing on their children and they don’t want crack smoked in their ghettos. Quel Surprise! Not everybody looks at America with unalloyed admiration for our porn, dope and political gridlock. I can say to you with great confidence that a “plan” that believes that more police and more soldiers ever more repressive of the people of Iraq will not change those dynamics and will, therefore, never work. President Bush does not have a plan, he has a wish list and no Santa to come down the chimney.
So, how do we get out?
First, we have to fight a battle here in America with the neocons. They don’t want out. They want U.S. troops in Iraq permanently so that they can threaten Iran and Syria and keep Saudi oil coming across the Atlantic. They want a Pax Americana in which we replace Alexander the Great, Rome, the British Empire. They think we will do a better job at world domination than the Caesars. It’s not about terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. It’s only tangentially about natural resources like oil. It’s about raw power. It’s the new fascism powered by the same old capitalist class that put Hitler and Mussolini into power, but with the power to change which Skull and Bones Yalee is in the White House. You may think this is hyperbole, but I really mean it.
Next, we have to demand a plan that pulls out American troops from the middle of the fray to the edges of the fighting. We should turn over Baghdad and Basra and Mosul and Tikrit to the local authorities immediately and get out of the so-called “Green Zone”. American troops should only respond to grave threats to civil order.
Next, we must stop pouring money into Iraq. That doesn’t mean I think we should stop helping them restore their infrastructure. I mean we should stop throwing dollars at the problem and send concrete and steel beams and machinery for them to work with themselves. No more American contractors. In fact, we should start the prosecution of Halliburton for war profiteering immediately and indict Dick Cheney as soon as possible.
We should throw dollars at Palestine. Simply raising the standard of living in Gaza and the West Bank will do more to tamp down terrorism than any money we could spend in any other way. If we built an American library, hospital, school and/or museum in every Palestinian settlement using local labor, we’d create friends and stem the rising tide of enemies that fuel the terrorist networks in Israel and across the Muslim world.
Next, we should bring in international peacekeepers from both the U.N. and the Arab League. Egyptian, Libyans, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanian, Saudi, Pakistani, Indonesian and other troops whose nations have cultural and LANGUAGE ties to the Mid East should immediately begin replacing U.S. troops in urban and suburban areas, beginning in Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south and moving inward toward the Sunni triangle, where the troops should be mostly Islamic and Arab League. American troops should only be called in when they want entire villages leveled because it’s gotten just that out of hand. It’s what we do best.
Next, we should construct television cable networks that broadcast Iraqi language dubbed HBO and Showtime and Playboy channel. Hey, some of them will like porn and dope! We need to pervert their children with Jessica Simpson and J-Lo and hand out marijuana seeds all along the rivers and creeks. OK. Maybe that part of the plan needs some work.
Anyway, that’s my initial take at midnight, Dec. 1, after Paseo dinner and movie night.
G’nite and Sweet Dreams