Americans want their soldiers home; Congress is getting angry about the conduct of the war. It’s time for Bush to start being frank about Iraq.
This is President Bush’s legacy. Mothers don’t want their children to join the military. Who would have thought that not even four years after 9/11 and the biggest surge of patriotism the country had seen in at least a generation, the military would be having trouble getting people to enlist. By taking the country into a war that we don’t know how to win and can’t afford to lose, Bush has squandered his second term and made Americans less safe and less economically secure.
Six in 10 Americans now say some or all of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq should come home. A belated blast of media attention on the so-called Downing Street memo, British minutes of meetings in the summer of 2002 about intelligence being “fixed” around the idea of regime change in Iraq, is raising questions about Bush’s credibility at a time when his optimistic pronouncements about Iraq are being tested. Washington insiders knew war was inevitable, but that’s not what Bush was telling the country or the Congress, and now that the war isn’t going well, members of Congress are angry at having been manipulated.
Whatever the reason for the shift, there’s been a precipitous decline in support on Capitol Hill for the administration’s what-me-worry, stay-the-course policy in Iraq. The best the White House can come up with is a promise that Bush will soon start speaking out more about Iraq. What can he say--that Americans should ignore the rising casualties, everything is going well, have patience, stay the course, there is light at the end of the tunnel? Marshall Wittmann, a Texas native and senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, suggests the next time Bush is in Crawford he should drive down I-35 to the LBJ Library and listen to the tapes of conversations between President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as the Vietnam War raged.
The gap between what the American people saw on their television screens and what they heard from their political leaders back then gave rise to the phrase “credibility gap.” Bush is flirting with the same fate. He can’t be frank with the American people about Iraq. He may not even be capable of being honest with himself about the way events are unfolding. Comments from commanders in the field undercut on a daily basis the administration’s pipedream that an Iraqi army can be trained and competent to take over the security of the country.
Even Democrats who opposed the war can’t quite fathom just leaving. This is not Vietnam, a tiny country of no strategic importance. Iraq is at the nexus of terrorism and oil, and allowing it to further devolve into chaos would signal a defeat of enormous consequence. “We have to be realistic about the training of the Iraqis so that when we pull out we do not create a killing field,” says [Minnesota Rep. Betty] McCollum.
Excerpts from an article by Eleanor Clift in Newsweek, 6-17-05.)
Six in 10 Americans now say some or all of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq should come home. A belated blast of media attention on the so-called Downing Street memo, British minutes of meetings in the summer of 2002 about intelligence being “fixed” around the idea of regime change in Iraq, is raising questions about Bush’s credibility at a time when his optimistic pronouncements about Iraq are being tested. Washington insiders knew war was inevitable, but that’s not what Bush was telling the country or the Congress, and now that the war isn’t going well, members of Congress are angry at having been manipulated.
Whatever the reason for the shift, there’s been a precipitous decline in support on Capitol Hill for the administration’s what-me-worry, stay-the-course policy in Iraq. The best the White House can come up with is a promise that Bush will soon start speaking out more about Iraq. What can he say--that Americans should ignore the rising casualties, everything is going well, have patience, stay the course, there is light at the end of the tunnel? Marshall Wittmann, a Texas native and senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, suggests the next time Bush is in Crawford he should drive down I-35 to the LBJ Library and listen to the tapes of conversations between President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as the Vietnam War raged.
The gap between what the American people saw on their television screens and what they heard from their political leaders back then gave rise to the phrase “credibility gap.” Bush is flirting with the same fate. He can’t be frank with the American people about Iraq. He may not even be capable of being honest with himself about the way events are unfolding. Comments from commanders in the field undercut on a daily basis the administration’s pipedream that an Iraqi army can be trained and competent to take over the security of the country.
Even Democrats who opposed the war can’t quite fathom just leaving. This is not Vietnam, a tiny country of no strategic importance. Iraq is at the nexus of terrorism and oil, and allowing it to further devolve into chaos would signal a defeat of enormous consequence. “We have to be realistic about the training of the Iraqis so that when we pull out we do not create a killing field,” says [Minnesota Rep. Betty] McCollum.
Excerpts from an article by Eleanor Clift in Newsweek, 6-17-05.)
posted by Sid Cottingham | 3:48 PM
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