One
War Lost, Another to Go
By
Frank Rich
Sunday 20 November 2005
If anyone needs further proof that we are racing for
the exits in
Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican
leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long
slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny
Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home state of
Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war's critics
as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.
Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement
more than 100
miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe
some
blame" for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged
to the White
House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations
of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style
torture
chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of
nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American
occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr.
Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary
written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his
re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than
he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a
Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by
all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for
re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their
constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.
They know the voters have decided the war is over, no
matter what
symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many
Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine
hero who wants the troops out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week
found that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to get out of Iraq
fast, in 12 months or less, is even larger than the percentage (48) that
favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war's casualty toll
neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970.
The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing
in Foreign Affairs , found that "if history is any indication, there
is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."
He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to
channel L. B. J. by making "countless speeches explaining what the
effort in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is
being made. But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to
sell the League of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the
bully pulpit is much overrated."
Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but,
hello, there
already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration
date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As
Mr. Mueller says, the decline in support for the war won't reverse
itself. The public knows progress is not being made, no matter how many
times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.
On the same day the Senate passed the resolution rebuking
Mr. Bush
on the war, Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported that "only about
700
Iraqi troops" could operate independently of the U.S. military, 27,000
more could take a lead role in combat "only with strong support"
from
our forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees suffered from a
variety of problems, from equipment shortages to an inability "to
wake
up when told" or follow orders.
But while the war is lost both as a political matter
at home and a
practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in
Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry
over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make
Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall,
there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and
company.
One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie
- fusing the
war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is
that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other.
That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard
fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single
or
low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush
catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of
jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment
magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources
to
confront that expanded threat.
We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds,"
in the words
of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague,
with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this
point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security
Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did
in
the 1990's, and their riveting new book, "The Next Attack,"
is the best
argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening
words, "we are losing" the war against the bin Laden progeny
now.
"The
Next Attack" is prescient to a scary degree. "If bin Laden is
the Robin Hood of jihad," the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
"has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams."
The proof
arrived spectacularly this month with the Zarqawi-engineered suicide
bombings of three hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote in
Slate "could soon be remembered as the day that the spillover of
violence from Iraq became a major affliction for the Middle East."
But
not remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion sown by the Bush
administration, the implications for us in this attack, like those in
London and Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were noticed in the
first place. What happened in Amman is just another numbing bit of bad
news that we mentally delete along with all the other disasters we now
label "Iraq."
Only since his speech
about "Islamo-fascism" in early October has
Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the "evildoers"
of
Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly
threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president,
it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans
to focus on the war we can't escape is to clear the decks by telling the
truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe,
not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the
damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.
Mr. Bush is incapable
of such candor. In the speech Mr. Santorum
skipped on Veterans Day, the president lashed out at his critics for
trying "to rewrite the history" of how the war began. Then he
rewrote
the history of the war, both then and now. He boasted of America's
"broad and coordinated homeland defense" even as the members
of the
bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing to chastise the
administration's inadequate efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.'s,
as opposed to Saddam's fictional ones, from finding their way to
terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about how "we're standing with dissidents
and exiles against oppressive regimes" even as we were hearing new
reports of how we outsource detainees to such regimes to be tortured.
And once again he
bragged about the growing readiness of Iraqi
troops, citing "nearly 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists
alongside our forces." But as James Fallows confirms in his exhaustive
report on "Why Iraq Has No Army" in the current issue of The
Atlantic
Monthly, America would have to commit to remaining in Iraq for many
years to "bring an Iraqi army to maturity." If we're not going
to do
that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America's only alternative is to "face
the
stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare
accordingly."
That's the alternative
that has already been chosen, brought on not
just by the public's irreversible rejection of the war, but also by the
depleted state of our own broken military forces; they are falling short
of recruitment goals across the board by as much as two-thirds, the
Government Accountability Office reported last week. We must prepare
accordingly for what's to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the
political party, who can look beyond our nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq
next year to the mess that will remain once we're on our way out.
Whether it's countering the havoc inflicted on American interests
internationally by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo or overhauling and
redeploying our military, intelligence and homeland security operations
to confront the enemy we actually face, there's an enormous job to be
done.
The arguments about
how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how
we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will
be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war
we
are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire
in Iraq.
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