Irresponsible on Iraq

Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B06

A SERIOUS congressional debate about Iraq is essential at a time when public support for the mission is falling and the danger of failure seems great. Aggressive challenges to the Bush administration's military and political strategy -- even calls for an immediate withdrawal of troops, such as that made by

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) on Thursday -- must be part of that democratic discussion. Yet what we've mainly seen during the past two weeks is a shameful exercise in demagoguery and name-calling.

Democrats accuse President Bush of deliberately lying about the grounds for war three years ago. Vice President Cheney responds by calling accusations by the Democrats "dishonest and reprehensible, " while Mr. Bush claims his critics "send mixed signals to our troops and the enemy." Mr. Murtha, a 73-year-old former Marine, was said by the White House to advocate "surrender to the terrorists" and called a coward by Republican members of Congress. He replied by smearing Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush as "guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war."

It sounds like the final days of a bitter, mud-slinging political campaign. But what is at stake is not an election but a war in which American soldiers are being killed and wounded almost every day and in which one possible outcome is a major victory for the Islamic extremist movement that carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Those losses won't be stemmed, nor the dangers averted, by attack rhetoric or sound bites that deliberately distort the facts. Leaders of both parties know that, of course. Which raises the question: Is their priority to win in Iraq -- or in next year's midterm elections?

The hard truth is that those two objectives may be in conflict. The war is unpopular for many reasons, including the painful human losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, incompetent management of postwar reconstruction and the involvement of some U.S. personnel in appalling practices of torture.

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An excellent editorial commentary from the Washington Post. While I deeply resent this administration for sending 150,000 American troops on a fools errand in Iraq, summarily pulling makes no sense whatsoever. Like the child in the glasswares section of the department store who inadvertantly knocks a glass bowl off the shelf..."we broke it, we bought it." We're stuck with both the bill and the shattered fragments.

All of this could have been predicted. The first Bush administration was wise enough to know better. The sectarian divisions that led to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship are routed in centuries of enmity. The idea that we could cowboy our way to overcoming these fierce tribal differences was naive and juvenile - the error of an incompetence president.

As I noted before the war began, there was no need to rush to war. Saddam Hussein was fully contained. His military capacity was but a shambles. He was no threat to his neighbors. He had no WMDs. He was not a security risk to the United States. During the ten years before he was toppled from power, he was effectively powerless - left spending his illbegotten oil revenues on building palaces and erecting statues. He was a pathetic tyrant for whom time was running out anyway. Going to war was unnecessary and a terrific mistake.

But making another mistake won't fix the first one. We are truly stuck. We must keep it together until we are certain that Iraq is stable and peaceful. Unfortunately, that means many more deaths of American soldiers and hundreds of billions more U.S. tax dollars spent. Even more unfortunate, the Republicans in the White House and Congress have proven themselves unworthy of power, while the Democrats wring their hands with fear of uncertainty about what lies in the election year ahead. We are a nation starved of true leadership.