Poised to cut and run from Iraq
By Joe Galloway
07-15-2006
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was in Iraq this week, and he heard some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that the number of American soldiers who've been killed in Iraq in recent weeks has fallen from two or three a day to an average of only one a day.
The bad news is that the reason for the good news is that Iraqis are, for the time being, more interested in killing one another than they are in killing Americans.
And the real news in Iraq is that the number of American troops who are fighting and dying in that place has fallen to 127,000 from a high of more than 160,000 late in 2005.
Despite Bush administration's “stay the course” rhetoric and Rumsfeld's refusal to discuss any withdrawal timetable on his trip, the truth is that the administration is rushing to disentangle itself from Iraq as fast as possible.
Last December, high-ranking officers at U.S. Central Command told me that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq would fall to about 100,000 by late 2006.
That's where we're headed, even though the latest carnage suggests that Iraqi forces aren't exactly standing up as the Americans stand down. (Some of them, in fact, are almost certainly contributing to the carnage.) So even if the civil war that's now claiming hundreds of Iraqi lives each week begins to claim thousands or scores of thousands of lives each week, the American drawdown may only accelerate.
The administration's promises about Iraq have collided with partisan politics, and guess who won? With a congressional midterm election approaching, the 2008 presidential election just around the corner and Bush's approval ratings languishing in the 30s, the people who embraced this tar-baby now want to drop it as swiftly as possible.
The politicians are cutting and running from their war even as they doggedly deny that the thought has ever crossed their minds. They're now as feverish to get out of Iraq as once they were feverish to get in.
I'm reminded of an old Bengali proverb that foreign invaders found to be true during a thousand years of history: There are a thousand roads into Bengal, but there is no road out.
The ownership of a war that's being abandoned by the politicians who launched it and fouled it up beyond repair now falls to the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, who never had orders to put enough boots on the ground to get the job done. Now they'll be called upon to do even more with even less.
It's really all over but the dying and the suffering, and it's the benighted Iraqis and the American and a few remaining allied troops who are being left to do that.
Nearly 2,600 Americans have died in Iraq so far, and 18,000 more have been wounded. How many more will die before the last of them board trucks and helicopters and depart this detour in the war on global terrorism?
More than 800,000 American troops have rotated through Iraq in three and a half years of a war that the cheerleaders said would be a “slam-dunk” and “a cake-walk.”
The direct costs of that war have drained almost $400 billion from the U.S. Treasury, and the long-term hidden and opportunity costs of a war that the Bush people said would be paid for largely by Iraqi oil earnings eventually may top a trillion dollars.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon boss Rumsfeld will leave Washington in late January 2009 with Iraq hanging around their necks like a stinking, long-dead albatross.
Just as the Vietnam War haunted Lyndon B. Johnson to his dying day, so, too, will Iraq and the failures America suffered there haunt and define the Bush triumvirate.
This trio, none of whom ever heard a shot fired in anger, took us to war for all the wrong reasons; took us to war without enough troops to win the peace; took us to war in the wrong place, at the wrong time against the wrong enemy.
There will be blame enough to tar a Congress that refused to do its constitutional duty to ask the tough questions and conduct meaningful oversight while the war dragged on year after year.
Blame enough, too, for top American military commanders who forgot, or never learned, the lessons of Vietnam or the ways of counterinsurgency warfare. Having trained and equipped their forces to fight heavy armored war against other nations, they didn't even recognize the war that Sunni insurgents were waging against them until it was too late.
History will not be kind or forgiving of any of them. Nor should it be.
Joe Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder.
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