It's Time to Face Harsh Reality in Iraq
_____________________________________________________________
by Jay Bookman*
Published on Monday, October 16, 2006, by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution
It's over.
American troops are still fighting and dying in Iraq and will be for months to come as we try to extricate ourselves from this mess, but it's over.
The U.S. Army may be planning ways to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2010, but it's over. It's just over.
What we're doing in Iraq cannot be sustained, not militarily and not politically, and after the election a lot of people are going to start saying so. They'll say so if the Democrats take control of one or both chambers of Congress, and they'll say so if Republicans remain in control.
Because it's over, and everyone knows it.
In Baghdad, 65 percent of Iraqis now support an immediate pullout of U.S. forces from their country, according to a U.S. government poll. A second poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that 71 percent of Iraqis want us gone within a year, and more than 60 percent of Iraqis support attacks on the U.S. troops who are fighting and dying to try to protect them.
That number says it's over. It is impossible to win a counterinsurgency in which 60 percent of the people you're supposed to be helping want to see your soldiers dead.
Our allies know it's over, too. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is being forced from office largely because of his support for the war. And last week, Britain's top general publicly advocated withdrawal of British troops from Iraq for redeployment to Afghanistan, where they are badly needed and victory is still possible.
"I am a soldier speaking up for his army," Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt told the press. "I am just saying, 'Come on, we can't be here forever at this level.' "
Here at home, public support for the war has disappeared as well. In a Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Bush is handling Iraq. In a CNN poll, 62 percent oppose the war.
The most telling numbers, though, come from a poll by the Institute for Southern Studies, based in Durham, N.C. Its survey of 13 Southern states found that 56 percent of Southerners believe that U.S. troops should be partially or completely withdrawn from Iraq, which is about the sentiment of the nation as a whole. Eighty-nine percent of Southerners say they are a little to very saddened about the war; only 12 percent say they are proud of the war.
When you've lost even the South, it's over. Pretending that we can sustain our effort in Iraq for several more years with such meager support here at home is sheer fantasy.
Our best political leaders, Republican and Democratic alike, know that, too. U.S. Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, returned recently from Iraq and said that if trends aren't reversed in two or three months, it will be time to change course, with all options on the table. James Baker, the Republican chairman of a bipartisan commission expected to issue its report on Iraq after the election, says the same.
"I think it's fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of 'stay the course' and 'cut and run,' " Baker said.
And of course, the facts on the ground say it's over as well. U.S. troop levels are at the highest level since the invasion. We've scavenged soldiers and Marines from other parts of Iraq to focus on Baghdad, and we now claim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops trained and ready to help.
Yet with all that, the number of attacks in Baghdad keeps rising, the number of U.S. deaths continues to increase, the civilian death toll is still soaring and the Iraqi government is incapable of taking action. Last week, Shiite and Kurdish members of Iraq's Parliament passed legislation creating a process for splitting the nation into pieces. They know it's over, too.
President Bush, of course, continues to bluster. "When you pull out before the job is done, that's cut-and-run as far as I'm concerned," he said last week. Our president can't even work up the courage it would take to acknowledge his mistakes. He lacks the guts. By clinging to the fantasy that this is still workable, he and his dwindling circle of supporters may hope to dump the blame for its collapse on those who force a change of course, but it's not going to work. He chose this war. He chose the means by which it was fought. Congress and the American people gave him everything he asked, and it's over. Now, men and women better than he is will step in and try to clean up his mess.
*Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor.
© 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
###
commondreams.org |
