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Jewish World Review August 29, 2005 / 24 Av, 5765 Declare victory and start packing By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Victory means exit strategy," a critic of the President said, "and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
That presidential critic was not some left-liberal Democrat. It was then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas in 1999 talking about President Clinton's war in Bosnia. Funny how time has a way of making politics and politicians go flip-flop.
I'm sure that President Bush is thinking hard about an exit strategy for the U.S. to honorably pull out of Iraq, but he's not sharing it with the rest of us.
If anything is making more sense at this point, it's the George Aiken option: Declare victory and come home.
That's what the late Vermont Republican Sen. Aiken suggested to Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon as Americans sunk deeper into Vietnam's quicksand.
But Bush, in recent speeches designed to pump up his sagging approval ratings, gives us bromides instead, like, "We're going to stay until we get the job done," which also begs the questions: What is "the job"? and What is "done"?
In a recent Newsweek poll that showed 61 percent disapproval for the President's handling of the Iraq war, only 26 percent agreed with his wish to keep American troops there for "as long as it takes." If not, how long?
The question, then, is not whether to leave but when and how. Leaving too soon would be a dishonorable abandonment of our good-faith commitment to the Iraqi people. But staying too long could actually make bad matters worse.
A new reality appears to be sinking in among all but the President's most devoted followers: Our mission has changed. Can we make it better? Or have we done about all we can do? After spending $300 billion and losing more than 1,850 American soldiers, among thousands of other lost lives, has the American presence become an impediment to the process it is trying to shepherd through?
Bush's recent speeches inaccurately cast the war as an us-versus-them battle with terrorists. In fact, the U.S. increasingly looks like an outside force caught in the crossfire of a developing civil war between multiple Iraqi factions, principally emerging out of the old Baath Party and the ethnic factions of Kurds, Shiites and Sunni Muslims.
Everyone agrees that Iraqis need to figure out their own future, for better or worse. But our experience there suggests that our well-intentioned efforts to keep Iraq united and give equal importance to the interests of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds actually has encouraged those factions to make even bigger demands on us and the nation-building process.
"If Iraq in August 2005 qualifies as the political equivalent of a clapped-out, self-abusing dependent," Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations and another Vietnam veteran, recently wrote, "then the Bush administration ought to be recognized as being an enabler."
Bush refuses to announce a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal, but his administration has imposed a timetable on Iraqis, pushing them to set up a new constitutional government and security forces and, one hopes, accelerating the day when Americans can begin an honorable troop withdrawal.
But, at least, it would put pressure on the Iraqis to work out their disputes while giving Americans an achievable exit strategy more specific than any the President has offered so far.
But, whether Team Bush or Congress goes for a Feingold-style timetable, the administration is facing a very real timetable in terms of next year's midterm elections and, two years after that, the next presidential campaign.
Nervousness among incumbent congressmen of both parties is one reason why Bush has taken to the road in recent days, if only to re-sell the war with warmed-over bromides. To a lot of us Americans, the Aiken strategy is looking better every day.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
