Much That Is Hidden

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Nailhead, vol. IV
From the Chattanooga Times editorial page:

A disingenuous defense of war

With public dissatisfaction rising over the war in Iraq as November’s midterm elections approach, Republicans urgently want to deflect the negative fallout at the polls. To achieve that, President Bush has to begin pitching election-year spin for his "stay the course policy." His hastily convened news conference last week served that political purpose, but little else. Indeed, his disingenuous defense and lack of candor about the roots and spread of the sectarian violence and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq should repel voters rather than secure their support.

The thrust of the president’s defense of his war policy is that a pullout — his misleading description of opposing calls for phased withdrawal — would leave freedom-loving Iraqis in the lurch, promote chaos in the country, send the wrong signal about U.S. reliability in the Middle East and embolden terrorists.

In fact, there’s a stronger argument to be made that it is the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the war that has already achieved each of those tragic milestones to some degree. The continuation of its failed war policy is simply an invitation to deeper quagmire without any benefit or prospect for improvement in Iraq.

With the United States bogged down in the war, Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground and, if not directly destabilizing other areas in the Middle East, at least emboldening Iran and Syria to unleash Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran also feels free to defy U.N. demands to halt its nuclear program, further plummeting U.S. prestige in the Muslim world (for those inclined to wonder what difference that makes waits the question, “Do we want to be right, or do we want peace?”).

Election-eve sloganeering won’t change all this; only a fundamental shift in policy holds out any hope for improvement in Iraq. Bush’s spin on the war may generate short-term political relief before the November voting. But in reality, it’s just a pitch to keep pursuing a policy that is imploding at a frightening pace.

The indices that measure the state of Iraqi life and the effect of the war over the past 18 months in Iraq confirm that: insurgent attacks, civilian deaths, police deaths, American deaths, and the numbers of wounded all around have all soared. Oil and electrical production still remain below prewar levels, joblessness and despair among Iraqis are higher, and 82 percent of them now think the first answer to their troubles is an American withdrawal.

Both the Sunni insurgency and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence — now a virtual civil war with ethnic cleansing increasing on both sides — are more violent and deadlier than ever. July was deadlier than June. June was deadlier than May, and so on going back into last year. U.S. Defense Department statistics confirm that, and this nation’s top three generals earlier this month acknowledged that Iraq is sliding into civil war.

All this is the result of a war policy that was inadequate to begin with, that has never been improved, and that has failed to get Iraqis to create a government that will rein in the sectarian death squads embedded in the Iraqi police and the wide-spread corruption in the Iraqi military.

The Bush administration ignored its generals’ prewar advice to put several hundred thousand more troops on the ground to preempt the predictable sectarian violence that would occur when Saddam's ruling Sunni minority that had massacred majority Shiites was toppled from power. Instead, it went to war in Iraq on the cheap and horribly unprepared for the long term, and has remained unwilling to do anything more than incremental tinkering.

Now this nation’s soldiers, treasury, and image abroad as well as in Iraq are paying the price. Bush’s defense of that is more disingenuous rhetoric rather than a logical argument to rally support for his policies.

Voters must wonder how following the Bush stay-the-course direction will improve matters. They should consider that it's a phased withdrawal (which would force Iraqis to choose between defense of a prospective federalized democracy or a disastrous, all-out civil war) that would provide the clarifying effect that the president has said he seeks.