Rethink on Iraq

Editorial

18 October 2006

YESTERDAY the carnage continued — as it has for the past few weeks. After the explosion of a car bomb in the Iraqi market town of Suweira, what followed were the screams of the maimed and the moans of the dying. George W. Bush’s ill-planned campaign to take control of Iraq in the name of bringing democracy has brought them bigotry, kidnappings and daily murders. Every day the horror continues and every day it grows worse.

It is now, however, the continuing American death toll (60 so far this month) that is influencing ordinary US voters as they prepare to vote in next month’s mid-term elections. Their concerns are all the greater since, at one time, the vast majority supported Bush’s policies in Iraq. They believed him when he told them from the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 that hostilities were over. A few even believed him when he said that the insurgents who had sprung up so unexpectedly would be defeated. His support wavered a bit when he later announced that, far from coming home after such a magnificent victory, US troops would be needed in Iraq for a long time. By the time Bush announced this summer the need to tough it out in order to defeat a clearly strengthening enemy and bring order to a country obviously descending into chaos, only a minority of Americans supported his Iraqi adventure. The glitter of the two Bush victories — the successful constitutional referendum and the subsequent general election and the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein — has long since faded.

When Republican legislators, some of them fearing for their seats in November, began to back away from their president, the White House knew it had a problem. Now if press leaks are correct, the bipartisan task force, headed by James Baker and mandated by Congress to look at US policy in Iraq, is set to damn the administration’s optimistic assumptions and suggest either outright withdrawal or working with Syria and Iran to try and bring peace to Iraq. From the president’s point of view, James Baker is family. Baker served Bush’s father as his Secretary of State. He shared the senior Bush’s regrets that the first Gulf War did not oust Saddam. He doubtless initially shared the joy at Saddam’s final downfall. For this close friend now to censure White House Iraq policy and propose outright retreat or working with two neighboring countries which the president has accused of sponsoring terrorism, is highly significant.

It is so significant because Bush has always cast his intervention in Iraq as a part of the fight against terrorism. To even suggest that he now work with two “terrorist” countries in order to sort out the mess that his own policies have created in Iraq is humiliating. Meanwhile, no amount of face-saving spin-doctoring can conceal that a withdrawal would be a defeat. Bush’s place in history will not be that of the heroic, vengeful scourge of international terror but of the blunderer who used his superpower might to destroy a military minnow and then had no idea what to do.