Daytona Beach News-Journal January 10, 2007
Editorial: Old way backward
Bush Iraq shift spins into same rut
President Bush's speech tonight on a "new way forward" in Iraq is an afterthought to failure. Its centerpiece proposals -- an escalation of 20,000 troops and a $1 billion infusion for reconstruction -- isn't too little, too late; it's chump change getting hurled at a raging fire. That some of that change is made up of American soldiers, many of whom will be sacrificed to a lost cause, makes Bush's "new way forward" one more example of desperation posing as policy. Democrats are right to oppose the escalation.
But neither congressional Democrats nor the American public -- only 26 percent of whom approve of Bush's Iraq policies in the latest Gallup poll, and 61 percent of whom oppose an escalation -- are voicing their opposition in more than courtly, noncommittal ways. Democrats are still scared of looking like they're undermining the commander in chief, or looking less than tough on terror. And unlike the Vietnam era, when conscription was the fuse to mass protests even as Richard Nixon was drawing down troops from Indochina, a majority of the public has no stake in the war as much as in the politics surrounding the war. There are few public protests. Mostly displeasure voiced to pollsters half-way between dinner and some prime-time TV.
Or, in tonight's case, on the way to yet another speech promising that this time, things will be different.
Really? Baghdad is even now reeling from a troop "surge" that began with the second half of 2006 under the name of Operation Together Forward. Ostensibly led by the Iraqi government, Together Forward was a response to the degrading sectarian violence that gripped Baghdad following the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine. Iraqi and coalition troops were increased by more than 10,000 in the capital city alone. A curfew was imposed in the city between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. More than 32,000 combat patrols were conducted, door-to-door patrols included, netting some 400 insurgents and 43 weapons and ammunition caches, according to GlobalSecurity.org.
The results: The death toll from the Iraqi civil war more than tripled in those six months, from 5,640 killed in the first half of 2006 to 17,300 killed in the second half, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry. Most of those deaths were concentrated in Baghdad. Further making the point, Baghdad has been the scene of old-style urban warfare for the last four days as Iraqi and American troops have been clashing with Sunnis in a previously quiet part of town.
Bush's promise of more money for reconstruction is even more embarrassing. The $1 billion "extra" he proposes to spend on building schools and infrastructure over the next year is one-tenth the amount spent on the American occupation for a single month. The $1 billion is a fraction of the $28.9 billion appropriated for reconstruction and security between 2003 and 2006. The Congressional Research service found that the total amount was almost equal to the amount spent on German reconstruction between 1945 and 1952 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) and twice the amount spent on Japanese reconstruction. Yet Iraq is still a nation in ruins. Reconstruction efforts have been hobbled as much by non-existent security as by the corruption and cronyism at the heart of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers reconstruction in Iraq.
What's left for Bush is, as a headline on the front page of The News-Journal had it Tuesday, the fear factor: Without an escalation of troops and an open-ended commitment in Iraq, terror would migrate to the United States. It's the absurd restatement of Dwight Eisenhower's "falling domino principle" -- if Vietnam fell to communism, he claimed in 1954, it would be the "beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."
Eisenhower was wrong then. Bush is wrong now. He's not changing course. He's up to the same fear-inducing tricks and false pretenses he used to start the war. His smashed up credibility is old news, too. The American presence in Iraq is what's destabilizing the Middle East, not what's keeping it together. The new Democratic Congress can keep the objective on a phased withdrawal. Or it can enable Bush's latest ploys -- and look the clone of its Republican predecessor as more death warrants are signed to no end.
© Copyright 2007, News-Journal Corporation
