Bush admits mistakes in the past
but signs on for more in the future
Friday, January 12, 2007
Editorial from The Daily Star
In the earliest days of the invasion of Iraq, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who has recently been appointed as the top US military commander in Iraq, would repeatedly pose a riddle to a Washington Post reporter embedded in his unit: "Tell me how this ends." Four years later, the answer to Petraeus' puzzle remains as elusive as it was in the earliest days of war.
US President George W. Bush has again suggested that Iraqis will witness a happy ending to the four-year war. The president has unveiled a "new way forward" for Iraq, a strategy that draws heavily, although not entirely, from a field manual on counterinsurgency prepared by Petraeus. The manual wisely advises that battling insurgents requires the kind of patience and intelligence hitherto unseen in US military strategies.
However, much has changed since Petraeus left Iraq and returned to the United States in September of 2005. US troops are no longer only facing an insurgency, but are confronted with the additional challenge of extinguishing the flames of sectarian conflict. To date, there is no handy US Army manual that would instruct officers on how to counter a civil war.
Preventing the slide into all-out civil war is something that ultimately only the Iraqis can do. What is frustrating is that American interference in political decisions in the country has given Iraqis little room to achieve reconciliation. Senior military officers in Iraq used to jokingly refer to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's penchant for micromanaging Iraq's affairs as the "7,000-mile screwdriver." That characterization, while humorous, is a grim description of the ongoing tendency of US officials in Washington to dictate the course of events in Iraq, often in a way that has disastrous unforeseen consequences.
Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of Bush's address to the nation on Wednesday is that he admitted that he has made mistakes in Iraq. And whether for fear of personal failure, or out of a genuine sense of responsibility to make amends for the tremendous harm that he has caused the Iraqi people, Bush refuses to admit defeat. This stance is preferable to that of his Democratic opponents in the US Congress, who seem content to wash their hands of the entire Iraq affair and walk away. Bush at least acknowledges that as a direct result of the US decision to invade, Iraqis are now living in constant terror and dying in their hundreds every day. Americans therefore have an obligation to at least try to fix what they have broken.
The problem is that Iraq cannot be healed with more troops and more military might. And Bush's plan relies heavily on a prime minister whom few Iraqis consider trustworthy or evenhanded. Most importantly, Bush's failure to map out an exit strategy leaves the conundrum posed by Petraeus four years ago unanswered: How the war will end?
