The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society where the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
Do you understand what this article is saying? The Bush White House is finally admitting that every reason they gave for the U.S. invading Iraq is a lie. They said that the U.S. will be welcomed with flowers and rosewater--at first they were, but now the soldiers are welcomed with roadside bombs. The Bush administration said that Iraq would become a secular democracy and a beacon for the Middle East. Now the administration is admitting that:
"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."
So instead of a democracy, we are turning Iraq into another Islamic republic--and Iraq is already a beacon to the Middle East, only this time one of beckoning terrorists to fight against the U.S. occupation rather than inviting democracy. And as for Iraq's reconstruction being paid for by Iraqi oil money?
Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for rebuilding Iraq — and its $20 billion investment — have fallen the farthest, current and former officials say.
Pentagon officials originally envisioned Iraq's oil revenue paying many post-invasion expenses. But Iraq, ranked among world leaders behind Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves, is incapable of producing enough refined fuel amid a car-buying boom that has put an estimated 1 million more vehicles on the road in the postwar period. Lines for subsidized cheap gas stretch for miles every day in Baghdad.
Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 2.5 million. Iraq's pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day.
In short, the American taxpayer with this boondoggle of a reconstruction bill.
What does President Bush have to say?
Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the postwar chaos and escalating insurgency. "Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we're helping Iraqis succeed," President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
Frank Rich wrote a powerful New York Times editorial saying that President Bush may not realize that the Iraq war is now over for the United States and that the U.S. has lost. Rich says that:
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
What Bush, Cheney and the rest of the PNAC officials that reside in the White House is that you cannot cherry-pick intelligence and analysis for running both the war and the post-war occupation. President Bush and he PNAC people had very specific reasons for getting into Iraq with the Project for a New American Century. They wanted to develop Iraq as an American protectorate to be used to project American military power throughout the Middle East. The PNAC plan was certainly thought out and detailed. The problem was that the Bush White House never took into account any analysis that contradicted their rosy war plans--they marginalized the dissent and naysayers regarding the Iraq invasion. And now as each of these contradictions are revealed as becoming true, the Bush White House is slowly realizing they have stepped into another Vietnam. Frank Rich continues with his editorial saying:
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
We are now viewing the "Vietnamization" of Iraq. With President Bush's poll numbers steadily dropping over this past year, the Republicans are scared that the American public will blame them for this debacle called Iraq in the 2006 midterm and possibly the 2008 presidential elections. So we are starting to see the beginnings of an exit strategy being played out. First, the administration lowers their expectations for Iraq again--as noted with the Washington Post article. Then the Bush White House will declare that Iraqi security forces will be sufficiently prepared to defend their country against the terrorist elements--possibly by the end of this year, or the beginning of 2006. Finally, Bush will declare victory in Iraq, and start a timetable of pulling the troops out before November 2006, hoping that the American public will rally around their victorious president and keep the Republicans in control of all three branches of government. Frank Rich concludes saying:
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
What a disaster.
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