By Brigitte L. Nacos
As already revealed during the White House’s pre-speech
public relations push, President Bush’s new Iraq strategy is a slap in the face of the Iraq Study group and the U.S. commanders
that rejected a military escalation of the war. The Baker-Hamilton bipartisan
group is out of business and the generals are being replaced by more agreeable
commanders. The President ignored also the growing anti-war sentiments of the
American public and members of Congress. But unlike the Iraq Study group and
the generals, public opposition and dissent in Congress will not go away.
Indeed, the President’s announcement that he would send some 20,000 more troops
to Iraq did not change the anti-war
attitudes as a
post-speech Washington Post/ABC News poll and the reactions in Congress
demonstrated. Yet, the President stuck to the neo-conservatives’ impossible
dream of using more military power to turn Iraq into a western-style democracy and a model for the Middle
East. In reality, more U.S. soldiers and more direct involvement
in fighting insurgents in Baghdad could put “U.S. military commanders in
exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during
the spring 2003 invasion of the country,” as Thomas E. Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson write in the Post.
Neither opposition in Congress nor in the general public will stop the President from going ahead with his latest plan. "We're not going to baby sit a civil war," Sen. Barack Obama told the Today Show this morning. He said that Democrats in Congress would not undercut troops already in Iraq but would explore ways to restrict the president from expanding the mission. But the White House made sure that this will not happen: it was reported today from Baghdad that some of the additional troops have already arrived in Iraq and thus were en route before the President addressed the nation. And regardless of Senator Obama’s distaste for American involvement in another nation’s civil war, the President said last night that joint American-Iraqi units will fight all insurgents and militias, Sunnis and Shiites. If so, American fighting men and women will be put into the middle of Iraq’s bloody civil war. In that case, Senator John McCain and others may well be right to argue that far more than 20,000 additional troops would be needed to accomplish this mission.
All of this strengthens the argument that things in Iraq cannot be turned around militarily but only by political changes. Unless Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders cooperate and convince their respective groups to follow their lead, it is difficult to imagine a brighter future for Iraq.
Contrary to the Iraq Study Group’s suggestion, the President
rejected diplomatic contacts with Iraq and Syria and warned these
two countries in particular that their support for “our enemies in Iraq ”will not
be tolerated. There is no doubt that Tehran and Damascus have their hands in the violence in Iraq. But with
the U.S. military stretched
to its limits and more troops sorely needed in
Afghanistan,
one wonders whether it is wise to increase tensions with and threats against Iran instead of at least giving diplomacy a
chance to establish whether some common ground exists on
Iraq’s future.
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