Pressident Bush has signaled he wants to send a "surge" of troops into Iraq, specifically Baghdad and Anbar province. According to a poll released by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomburg Communications, only twelve percent of the public favor sending in a larger contingent of American troops to Iraq. On top of this the majority think we need to get out.
Colin Powell says sending more troops won't do any good at this point. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reportedly don't think more troops are a good idea. Nor does the Baker-Hamilton findings, which lays out more or a regional summit approach to getting out of this mess.
Many conservatives are drawing back from Bush. Joe Scarborough, a former
Newt Gingrich -era Republican from Florida, now an anchor on MSNBC, called Bush
"delusional" on the matter on his Iraq policy . George Will has been looking for daylight from this morass of a policy in Iraq for a couple of months. The majority voters in November clearly didn't signal in any, shape or form this "stay until the job is done" attitude
that is coming out of the White House. Just about every sitting Democrat who ran for office was reelected. And the war in Baghdad was the big issue. I could be wrong, but it doesn't look like a mandate for more of the same. Plus General Abazaid, the top general in Iraq, announced he's leaving in the Spring.
So, what the hell is going on?
I'm beginning to wonder--and fear --that Bush might be turning into Richard Nixon. Not the Nixon who went to China in early 1972 and negoiated the SALT treaty with Breznev in Moscow, but the Nixon who isolated himself in the White House and ordered the "Christmas Bombing" of Hanoi in December, 1972. This was against the recommendations of most in his own party and didn't change the outcome of the war.
This talk of a "surge" in troop levels could be the right thing to do. But, given that just about everything Bush has tried has backfired over there, I remain skeptical. I think we should be drawing down combat forces, redeploying them to Kuwait and Kurdistan. At the very least we should not be sending greater numbers of men and women over there so the government there will become more dependant on American power.
It's clear Bush is headed into some kind of bunker of the mind against the over whelming evidence that he gambled and lost on getting in and getting Iraq into "our column". " I feel sorry for the guys who are stationed over there trying to do a nasty freaking job in a hostile country--perhaps a quarter of them are going to come back with serious mental illnesses, no matter if that get hit by the enemy or not. (It also looks as if the desk-bound tough guys who run the VA will turn their backs on many of these brutalized men. Call it "Agent Orange II". Same story, different war.)
Dubya seems out there on a limb, with just the American Enterprise Institute and
the Weekly Standard die-hards, Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, really behind him. I
just don't think Bush's ego is going to be allow him to come around and say,
"these guys my dad listened to we're right and I was wrong so now let's change
the damn course and start getting out of the way of this ugly crazy civil war we
have unleashed."
It's not in him to change the course, to admit he should have perhaps finished the job in Afghanistan before launching this war in Iraq at a breakneck pace. That would look weak. This President doesn't want to look weak. The question is, does he have a workable plan or is he just another LBJ, buying time until the next person can take over the White House and deal with all this.
I just hope the next president not only has ears, but will use them.
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