[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: A War Without Reason

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A War Without Reason

October 18, 2004
 By BOB HERBERT 



 

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the
final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of
a mushroom cloud." 
- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002 

There should no longer be any doubt that the war in Iraq is
an exercise in lunacy. It was launched with a spurious
rationale, the weapons of mass destruction, which turned
out to be a fantasy relentlessly stoked by obsessively
hawkish middle-aged men who ran and hid when they were of
fighting age and the nation was at war. 

Now we find that we can't win this war we started. Soldiers
and civilians alike are trapped in the proverbial briar
patch, unable to move around safely in a country that the
warmongers thought would be easy to conquer and then
rebuild. 

There is no way to overstate how profoundly wrong they
were. 

Our troops continue to die but we can't even identify the
enemy, which is why so many innocent Iraqi civilians -
including women and children - are being blown away. The
civilians are being killed by the thousands, even as the
dreaded Saddam Hussein is receiving first-class health care
(most recently a successful hernia operation) from his
captors. 

Last week, in a story that read like a chapter from an
antiwar novel, we learned that members of an Army Reserve
platoon were taken into custody and held for two days after
they refused to deliver a shipment of fuel to Taji, a town
15 miles north of Baghdad. They complained that the trip
was too dangerous to make without an escort of armored
vehicles. Several of the reservists described the trip as a
"suicide mission." 

The military said that was an isolated incident, but there
is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the troops,
many of whom feel they are targets surrounded by hostile
Iraqis -insurgents and ordinary civilians alike - in a war
that lacks a clearly defined mission. 

Even the heavily fortified Green Zone, which contains the
U.S. embassy and the headquarters of the interim Iraqi
government, was penetrated by suicide bombers last
Thursday. At least five people, including three Americans
who had been providing security for diplomats, were killed
in the attack. 

As the pointlessness of this war grows ever clearer, the
president's grand alliance, like some of the soldiers on
the ground, is losing its resolve. When John Kerry, in the
first presidential debate, mentioned only Britain and
Australia as he mocked Mr. Bush's "coalition" in Iraq, the
president famously replied, "You forgot Poland." 

Poland has 2,400 troops in Iraq. But on Friday the prime
minister, Marek Belka, announced that he will cut that
number early next year, and then "will engage in talks on a
further reduction." 

Mr. Belka has a political problem. He can't explain the war
to his constituents. And that's because there is no
rational explanation. 

As for the rebuilding of Iraq, forget about it. Hundreds of
schools were damaged by U.S. bombing and thousands were
looted by Iraqis. It's hard to believe that an
administration that won't rebuild schools here in America
will really go to bat for schoolkids in Iraq. Millions of
Iraqi kids now attend schools that are decrepit and, in
many cases, all but falling down-lacking such essentials as
desks, chairs and even toilets, according to the United
Nations Children's Fund. 

Military commanders are warning that delays in the overall
reconstruction are increasing the danger for American
troops. A senior American military officer told The Times,
"We can either put Iraqis back to work, or we can have them
shoot [rocket-propelled grenades] at us." 

The president and his apologists never understood what they
were getting into in Iraq. What is unmistakable now is that
Americans will never be willing to commit the overwhelming
numbers of troops and spend the hundreds of billions of
additional dollars necessary to have even a hope of
bringing long-term stability to Iraq. 

This is a war that never made sense and now we are seeing -
from the troops on the ground, from our allies overseas and
increasingly from the population here at home - the
inevitable reluctance to forge ahead with the madness. 

The president likes to say he made exactly the right
decision on Iraq. Each new death of a soldier or a
civilian, each child who loses a parent to the carnage,
each healthy body that is broken or burned in this war that
didn't have to happen, is a reminder of how horribly wrong
he was. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/18herbert.html?ex=1099114037&ei=1&en=cdd4216f7f649209


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