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Sun. Aug 24, 2003

Reassessing Commitment

Reassessing Commitment – A couple of editorials in two of our country’s “leading newspapers” read as though they were fired in the same kiln, reaching similar conclusions and asking the same hardened questions about the Bush administration’s post war commitment.

We’ll start with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and “Time to Unite”: “Sometimes tragedy forces people to see things in a changed light. Perhaps Tuesday’s truck bombing at United Nations headquarters in Baghdad will have that galvanizing effect—on the Bush administration, on its critics in countries such as France and Germany and most of all on the Iraqi people.”

“The most obvious lesson of Tuesday’s bombing is that the terrorism and instability enveloping Iraq threaten the international community as a whole—not just American soldiers but U.N. humanitarian workers, too [...] A grieving U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan put the matter succinctly Wednesday: ‘The pacification and stabilization of Iraq is so important that all of us who have the capacity to help should help.’ ”

“The second lesson is that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy is in trouble and needs some changes.”

Which brings us to the latest from the sometimes schizophrenic Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, who seems in “warblogger” mode today with “Fighting ‘The Big One’ ”: “We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don’t believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.”

“You’d think from listening to America’s European and Arab critics that we’d upset some bucolic native culture and natural harmony in Iraq, as if the Baath Party were some colorful local tribe out of National Geographic. Alas, our opponents in Iraq, and their fellow travelers, know otherwise [...] In short, America’s opponents know just what’s at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America’s ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.”

“So, the terrorists get it. Iraqi liberals get it. The Bush team talks as if it gets it, but it doesn’t act like it. The Bush team tells us, rightly, that this nation-building project is the equivalent of Germany in 1945, and yet, so far, it has approached the postwar in Iraq as if it’s Grenada in 1982.”

I was asking back in May, “Where Was The Plan?” Three months later, not only is the answer still “I dunno,” but the question is now at the forefront of major media. And it’s bleeding over to political candidates, which, thankfully, may finally get the Bush administration’s attention.

This morning on Face The Nation, potential candidate Wesley Clark earnestly asked why we haven’t created a team of 20,000 translators to meet that obvious shortcoming, drawing on many willing individuals in the Arab-American community? He also wondered why the Bush administration hasn’t put forth a $50 Billion special appropriations package to deal with the painfully obvious infrastructure issues in Iraq.

I wonder why the Bush administration hasn’t at least made a Big PR Noise about additional commitment, rather than just offering heaping servings of “stay the course.” Moving beyond noise to substance, if you think that running a half trillion dollar budget deficit next year is perfectly okey-dokey, then what’s 10% more to rebuild Iraq? Don’t the Iraqi people deserve it? More pointedly, it could be the price tag on Bush’s reelection.

Clark kept it to specifics, but I heard a more general question, one I’ve asked myself. Why hasn’t the Bush administration even talked about enlarging the effort to rebuild Iraq in any way? It’s as if they are stubbornly committed to doing the job solely with the resources already at hand, and their main public message has been one of “as long as it takes.” By itself, it’s a good message, but in the context of the reality on the ground, it sounds like a bull-headed insistence on sticking to a plan that clearly lacks resources … no matter how long it takes.

If you intend to do it solely with the resources at hand, you’ve got about 14 months to make some major progress in a visible way, yet everyone else tends to talk of our involvement in terms of “years,” not months. However, in 14 months, the American people are going to pass judgement on this job.

Even a hardened Republican ought to realize, this is no time to be stingy, or extoll the virtues of “small government.” Simply as a matter of self-interest (oh, yeah, and the continuing safety and welfare of the Iraqi people, which is the real point of this enterprise).