"there is ample precedent for the 'turning point' thesis mentioned above:
"* July 7, 2003: 'This month will be a political turning point for Iraq.' (Douglas J. Feith, then-undersecretary for Defense.)
"* June 16, 2004: 'A turning point will come two weeks from today.' (President Bush.)
"* Feb. 2, 2005: 'On Jan. 30 in Iraq, the world witnessed . . . a moment that historians might one day call a turning point.' (Donald Rumsfeld, then-U.S. secretary of Defense.)
"* June 14, 2006: 'I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?' ( Bush.)"
Bush's Triumphalist Amnesia
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, March 19, 2008; 12:52 PM
On the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, President Bush today attempted to recast it as a great success for the United States and a major blow to Osama bin Laden. But for the American people to go along with his construction will require a pretty severe case of amnesia.
The security situation in Iraq is undeniably somewhat better than it was a year ago, before Bush increased the number of American troops there to more than 160,000. But the violence nevertheless continues at an appalling level. And the political reconciliation the "surge" was intended to bring about remains a distant fantasy.
The supposed victory against bin Laden that Bush is celebrating is belied by the fact that al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before the invasion, that its Iraqi namesake is a mostly home-grown version with limited ties to bin Laden's organization, that the administration's own intelligence has concluded that the war has helped rather than hurt al-Qaeda -- and that bin Laden himself likely remains safely ensconced in Pakistan.
Looking at Iraq and seeing progress requires not looking back beyond the past 12 months or so. And even on that basis, it's hard to argue that the events of the past year have put us any closer to getting out. Furthermore, Bush's decision to arm anti-government Sunni militias may lead to even greater chaos when we do leave.
The only way the surge has been an unqualified success is one that Bush didn't mention today: It has bought him time.
Toward the end of 2006, after a Republican electoral rout and a devastating report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, it looked like Congress might force Bush to get us out of the mess he got us into. But the surge changed that political calculus, and the war will now be passed on for the next president to resolve. On that count, there is indeed cause for Bush to kvell.
Here's CNN correspondent Ed Henry's instant analysis: "Well, the bottom line is that we once again heard the president five years later bring back that swagger, basically saying 'we'll fight the enemy wherever it makes a stand', some chest-beating about the U.S. military might, the shock and awe, invoking 9/11 again as he talks about Iraq, something that his critics, just makes them go -- get very upset and really fire back at this president. He invoked 9/11 repeatedly about how a failure in Iraq could essentially bring another major terror attack on U.S. soil."
Jennifer Loven writes for the Associated Press: "Five years after launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush is making some of his most expansive claims of success in the fighting there."
Laurent Lozano writes for AFP: "Bush on Wednesday defended his decision to go to war against Iraq five years ago, vowing no retreat as he promised the battle would end in victory. . . .
"But the US commander-in-chief now leaves office in January, bequeathing to his successor an intractable military and political stalemate."
Here is the bold new claim of Bush's speech today: "The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror. For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al-Qaeda rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaeda out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his murderous network. The significance of this development cannot be overstated."
In fact, the significance is highly debatable.
Bush repeated his frequent assertion that the war in Iraq is keeping Americans safer: "Over the past five years, we have seen moments of triumph and moments of tragedy. We have watched in admiration as 12 million Iraqis defied the terrorists, went to the polls, and chose their leaders in free elections. We watched in horror as al-Qaeda beheaded innocent captives, and sent suicide bombers to blow up mosques and markets. These actions show the brutal nature of the enemy in Iraq. And they serve as a grim reminder: The terrorists who murder the innocent in the streets of Baghdad want to murder the innocent in the streets of America. Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely we will face this enemy here at home."
But most of the attacks in Iraq either involve religious and political rivals trying to kill each other or local insurgents fighting back against what they see as an oppressive occupation. See my column on the fourth anniversary of the war, They Won't Follow Us Home.
Later, Bush added: "An emboldened al-Qaeda, with access to Iraq's oil resources, could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations. . . . Our enemies would see an America -- an American failure in Iraq as evidence of weakness and a lack of resolve.
"To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack like the one we experienced that day, a day in which 19 armed men with box cutters killed nearly 3,000 people in our -- on our soil -- a day after which in the following of that attack more than a million Americans lost work, lost their jobs."
Forget the First Four Years
Karen DeYoung, writing on The Washington Post's front page this morning, explains how the emerging White House public-relations strategy is essentially to pretend that the first four years of the occupation never happened.
"For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed," DeYoung writes.
"Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies -- in particular, sharply reduced violence -- are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife."
But critics think the surge needs to be put in its proper context.
"'Like a tourniquet,' the troop increase 'has stopped the bleeding,' Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed said, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become. And even U.S. officials acknowledge that the 'surge' has not led to the political reconciliation the administration had hoped for.
"Others see the past year's successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. 'I think they have it righter than they ever have before,' Daniel P. Serwer, an Iraq expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace, said of the administration. 'But the fact is that those four other years did exist, and they condition a lot of what can and cannot happen now. There's a history here, there's a lot of blood and guts on the floor -- literally.'
"The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. While it recognizes the inclination to 'relitigate the past' when a milestone such as the fifth anniversary is reached, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, 'our focus is on the way ahead and making sure that the current situation and the future situation gets better.'"
A Democratic Response
From Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid: "As we mark this week the start of the sixth year of the Iraq war, we are proud of the warriors who have fought hard to reduce violence in Iraq in recent months. But America is not secure and the costs and consequences of the war continue to mount.
"Al Qaeda is stronger than it has ever been since 9/11, Osama bin Laden remains at large, the readiness of our Army and Marine Corps is at its lowest levels since Vietnam, and trends in Afghanistan are deeply troubling. And at the end of the surge this summer, more troops will be in Iraq than before the surge began -- that is not what Americans were led to believe would be the result of this tactic.
"America still has not heard from this Administration -- or from their Republican allies -- a winning plan for achieving the political solution we need in Iraq and hastening the day when our troops can redeploy home. Instead, we hear reckless statements about staying in Iraq for 100 years.
"The military has done its job; it is time for this administration and Iraq's political leaders to do theirs."
Opinion Watch
Fred Kaplan writes on Slate: "[I]sn't the surge working? Well, it depends what you mean by 'working.' In recent months, casualties--American and Iraqi--dropped substantially. However, three points need to be made. First, casualties are rising once more, though not to 2006 levels. Second, while the surge was certainly a factor in reducing casualties, it was far from the only factor. There were also the alliances of convenience between U.S. forces and Sunni tribesmen against the common foe of al-Qaida in Iraq (an alliance that preceded the surge); the moratorium on violence called by Muqtada Sadr and his Shiite militia (a policy that may be suspended as the Sunni militias grow stronger); and the fact that many areas of Iraq had already been ethnically cleansed.
"More to the point, as Gen. David Petraeus has said many times, there is no military solution to Iraq. The surge has always been a means to an end--a device to create a 'breathing space' of security in Baghdad so that Iraq's political factions can reach an accommodation. Without a political settlement, the surge--for that matter, the entire U.S. military presence, the blood we have shed, the treasure we have spent--will prove to be little more than a pause."
Juan Cole writes on Salon: "Each year of George W. Bush's war in Iraq has been represented by a thematic falsehood. That Iraq is now calm or more stable is only the latest in a series of such whoppers, which the mainstream press eagerly repeats. . . .
"The most famous falsehoods connected to the war were those deployed by the president and his close advisors to justify the invasion. But each of the subsequent years since U.S. troops barreled toward Baghdad in March 2003 has been marked by propaganda campaigns just as mendacious. Here are five big lies from the Bush administration that have shaped perceptions of the Iraq war.
"Year 1's big lie was that the rising violence in Iraq was nothing out of the ordinary. . . .
"In Year 2 the falsehood was that Iraq was becoming a shining model of democracy under America's caring ministrations. . . .
"In Year 3, the Bush administration blamed almost everything that was going wrong on one shadowy figure: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. . . .
"In Year 4, as major sectors of Iraq descended into hell, Bush's big lie consisted of denying that the country had fallen into civil war. . . .
"Year 5, the past year, has been one of troop escalation, or the 'surge.' (Calling the policy a 'surge' rather than an 'escalation' is emblematic of the administration's propaganda.) The big lie is that Iraq is now calm, that the surge has worked, and that victory is within reach."
Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky write in a mocking Los Angeles Times op-ed: "With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, it seems to be generally agreed by most experts that the 'surge' is working, that despite continuing casualties, we have at last reached a 'turning point.' This is certainly the view of George W. ('Mission accomplished!') Bush, Donald ('Stuff happens') Rumsfeld, Dick ('The streets of Baghdad are sure to erupt with joy') Cheney, Bill ('Military action will not last more than a week') O'Reilly and Condoleezza ('We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud') Rice."
They note that "there is ample precedent for the 'turning point' thesis mentioned above:
"* July 7, 2003: 'This month will be a political turning point for Iraq.' (Douglas J. Feith, then-undersecretary for Defense.)
"* June 16, 2004: 'A turning point will come two weeks from today.' (President Bush.)
"* Feb. 2, 2005: 'On Jan. 30 in Iraq, the world witnessed . . . a moment that historians might one day call a turning point.' (Donald Rumsfeld, then-U.S. secretary of Defense.)
"* June 14, 2006: 'I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?' ( Bush.)"
Flashback
Peter Baker and Dan Balz wrote in The Washington Post almost three years ago: "When President Bush confidently predicts victory in Iraq and admits no mistakes, admirers see steely resolve and critics see exasperating stubbornness. But the president's full-speed-ahead message articulated in this week's prime-time address also reflects a purposeful strategy based on extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly and problem-plagued military mission. . . .
"Behind the president's speech is a conviction among White House officials that the battle for public opinion on Iraq hinges on their success in convincing Americans that, whatever their views of going to war in the first place, the conflict there must and can be won." |
