[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112005Y.shtml

One War Lost, Another to Go
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 20 November 2005

    If anyone needs further proof that we are
racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the
bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican
leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red)
Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President
Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson.
But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home
state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day
speech smearing the war's critics as unpatriotic,
the senator was M.I.A.

    Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous
engagement more than 100 miles away. There he
told reporters for the first time that "maybe
some blame" for the war's "less than optimal"
progress belonged to the White House. This change
of heart had nothing to do with looming
revelations of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had
instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with
the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts
of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for
taxpayers' money from the American occupation
authority. Or with the latest spike in
casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead
contemplating his own incipient political
obituary written the day before: a poll showing
him 16 points down in his re-election race. No
sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than
he did so again in Washington, voting with a
79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging
for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all
but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican
senators running for re-election next year. They
desperately want to be able to tell their
constituents that they were against the war after
they were for it.

    They know the voters have decided the war is
over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are
passed or defeated in Congress nor how many
Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John
Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops out.
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found
that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to
get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is
even larger than the percentage (48) that favored
a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war's
casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic
year of 1970. The Ohio State political scientist
John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs , found
that "if history is any indication, there is
little the Bush administration can do to reverse
this decline." He observed that Mr. Bush was
trying to channel L. B. J. by making "countless
speeches explaining what the effort in Iraq is
about, urging patience and asserting that
progress is being made. But as was also evident
during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to sell the
League of Nations to the American public, the
efficacy of the bully pulpit is much overrated."

    Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our
pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by
the Santorums of his own party: the expiration
date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is
Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the
decline in support for the war won't reverse
itself. The public knows progress is not being
made, no matter how many times it is told that
Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.

    On the same day the Senate passed the
resolution rebuking Mr. Bush on the war, Martha
Raddatz of ABC News reported that "only about 700
Iraqi troops" could operate independently of the
U.S. military, 27,000 more could take a lead role
in combat "only with strong support" from our
forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees
suffered from a variety of problems, from
equipment shortages to an inability "to wake up
when told" or follow orders.

    But while the war is lost both as a political
matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq,
the exit strategy being haggled over in
Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes.
Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the
administration's vainglorious mission to make
Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as
some may dimly recall, there is another war going
on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

    One hideous consequence of the White House's
Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with
the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that
the public, having rejected one, automatically
rejects the other. That's already happening. The
percentage of Americans who now regard fighting
terrorism as a top national priority is either in
the single or low double digits in every poll.
Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush
catastrophe: the administration has at once
increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq
into a new training ground and recruitment magnet
while at the same time exhausting America's will
and resources to confront that expanded threat.

    We have arrived at "the worst of all possible
worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard
Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with
whom I talked last week. No one speaks more
eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and
Steven Simon, his fellow National Security
Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming
before most others did in the 1990's, and their
riveting new book, "The Next Attack," is the best
argued and most thoroughly reported account of
why, in their opening words, "we are losing" the
war against the bin Laden progeny now.

    "The Next Attack" is prescient to a scary
degree. "If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of
jihad," the authors write, then Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi "has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq
his field of dreams." The proof arrived
spectacularly this month with the
Zarqawi-engineered suicide bombings of three
hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote
in Slate "could soon be remembered as the day
that the spillover of violence from Iraq became a
major affliction for the Middle East." But not
remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion
sown by the Bush administration, the implications
for us in this attack, like those in London and
Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were
noticed in the first place. What happened in
Amman is just another numbing bit of bad news
that we mentally delete along with all the other
disasters we now label "Iraq."

    Only since his speech about "Islamo-fascism"
in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to
make distinctions between the "evildoers" of
Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did
and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone
was still listening to this president, it would
be too little and too late. The only hope for
getting Americans to focus on the war we can't
escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth
about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is
making us less safe, not more, and that we have
to learn from its mistakes and calculate the
damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.

    Mr. Bush is incapable of such candor. In the
speech Mr. Santorum skipped on Veterans Day, the
president lashed out at his critics for trying
"to rewrite the history" of how the war began.
Then he rewrote the history of the war, both then
and now. He boasted of America's "broad and
coordinated homeland defense" even as the members
of the bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing
to chastise the administration's inadequate
efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.'s, as
opposed to Saddam's fictional ones, from finding
their way to terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about
how "we're standing with dissidents and exiles
against oppressive regimes" even as we were
hearing new reports of how we outsource detainees
to such regimes to be tortured.

    And once again he bragged about the growing
readiness of Iraqi troops, citing "nearly 90
Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists
alongside our forces." But as James Fallows
confirms in his exhaustive report on "Why Iraq
Has No Army" in the current issue of The Atlantic
Monthly, America would have to commit to
remaining in Iraq for many years to "bring an
Iraqi army to maturity." If we're not going to do
that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America's only
alternative is to "face the stark fact that it
has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare
accordingly."

    That's the alternative that has already been
chosen, brought on not just by the public's
irreversible rejection of the war, but also by
the depleted state of our own broken military
forces; they are falling short of recruitment
goals across the board by as much as two-thirds,
the Government Accountability Office reported
last week. We must prepare accordingly for what's
to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the
political party, who can look beyond our
nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq next year to the
mess that will remain once we're on our way out.
Whether it's countering the havoc inflicted on
American interests internationally by Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo or overhauling and redeploying our
military, intelligence and homeland security
operations to confront the enemy we actually
face, there's an enormous job to be done.

    The arguments about how we got into Mr.
Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also
important. But the damage from this fiasco will
be even greater if those debates obscure the
urgency of the other war we are losing, one that
will be with us long after we've left the
quagmire in Iraq.