Dangerous signs
Toolbox
Published: January 17, 2007
President Bush's new Iraq strategy is following the usual pattern. It contains a goal that, in theory, everyone might support: strengthening an Iraqi government that could halt sectarian violence and establish unity, security and services for the Iraqi people. But just as in the past, plans for reaching this goal began to fall apart almost as soon as they were announced.
Soon after Bush delivered his speech calling for increased troop levels, reports emerged about the inability of U.S. officials to reach agreement with the Iraqis about how to structure the new pacification forces. Other unwelcome signs pointed to additional problems. One of these was the execution of Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law.
Barzan Ibrahhim al-Tikriti was head of Saddam's secret police, and he was convicted along with Saddam of crimes relating to the slaughter of Shiites in 1982. But when the trap door opened, and he fell to his death at the end of a rope, his head came away from his body, turning an act that was meant as an exercise in justice into another grisly spectacle of violent death. Americans and Iraqis might well ask: Can't these guys do anything right?
Other unsettling developments include reports that the new contingents of troops brought in to pacify Baghdad will include two brigades of Kurdish fighters. The Kurds have been the most proficient military forces among the Iraqis and have enjoyed 16 years of relative independence from Arab Iraqis. In fact, they have been engaged in their own campaign to expel Shiite Arabs from mixed regions near Kurdistan. To pit Iraq's Kurds against the restive Sunni and Shiite Arabs, on behalf of a Shiite-dominated government, promises to complicate already complex sectarian divisions within the country.
Threatening words and gestures directed against Iran by the Bush administration may be the most worrisome signal coming from Washington now. A commonsense dictum, oft-repeated with regard to Iraq, says: The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Taking the war to Iran would enlarge the hole in which the United States now finds itself into an all-consuming pit.
Instead of a new strategy, Bush appears to have decided he would take his existing strategy and magnify its flaws. His is the sort of stubbornness one expects from someone who is convinced that he is right, all evidence to the contrary be damned. Ignoring evidence to the contrary even becomes, in his mind, a sign of his resolve.
There was a telling detail in a news story last week about Bush's meeting with members of Congress before announcing his new strategy. Someone asked Bush why his new plan would succeed when previous plans had not.
"Because it has to," Bush was reported to have said.
That response indicated several things: that Bush is not willing actually to discuss the issues, that he has no grasp of the issues, that he is acting mainly on faith. That he wishes his plan to succeed, or believes it should, is an irrelevance to the forces of history.
Given the fact that Iraq policy appears to be in the hands of someone intent on making it worse, Congress must take steps. One step would be legislative action barring military action against Iran. Someone needs to rein in the U.S. government. It will have to be the American people.
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