Too Little, Too Late

Throughout the last thirteen months of warfare in Iraq, a common criticism is that the Bush Administration had no plan and no strategy for dealing with the chaos. It was as if the White House and the Pentagon were in a permanent holding pattern, praying that they could keep the situation relatively under control until the magic date of June 30, scheduled to be the supposed “handover of sovereignty” to Iraqis. After that, whatever happens can be passed off as somebody else’s problem.

This endless dithering, based primarily on the hope that things would eventually get better, has taken its toll. Polls routinely show that a clear majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s Iraq policy, and indeed it is painfully clear that there is no policy, just stalling for time. After weeks in which he has largely let his staff do the talking – and after months in which the situation in Iraq disintegrated into a truly catastrophic quagmire – Bush himself went before the cameras last night to lay out his long-awaited plan for getting us out of this mess.

The address can be summed up in four words: too little, too late.

In his speech, with one eye firmly fixed on Election Day, Bush outlined his “five steps” to handing over power to Iraqis and getting out. As he put it, “We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.” In the midst of the cheerleading, listing the accomplishments while glossing over the setbacks, it is interesting to note that while Bush laid out goals, he did not in any way mention the process in making them happen aside from the vaguest of generalities. It’s as if all these things are expected to happen by themselves.

Bush claimed that despite the post-June 30 presence of 138,000 American soldiers, with more to come if needed and with no withdrawal timetable of any sort, “the occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.” This one is simply laughable. American troops will be able to go where they want, when they want, and will not be answerable to any supposed Iraqi government. So in other words, the occupation will continue, no matter what it’s called. (Indeed, post-speech reaction in Iraq shows that the Iraqi people realize this all too well.) And when you get right down to it, the new Iraqi government will have almost no power to speak of.

The speech contained some moments of unintended humor, such as when he insisted that “at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations,” conveniently forgetting that the Administration was dragged kicking and screaming into doing so, finally bypassing the UN entirely when that body refused to provide a blank check for war.

He also attempted to blame the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal on “a few American troops,” and in a desperate effort to just make the whole thing go away, he proposed tearing down the Saddam-era prison in favor of one yet to be built. (It was, indeed, the only tangible proposal in the whole speech.) But the “anything goes” policies emanating from the highest ranks of the Pentagon which formed the basis of the abuse were quietly ignored.

What was not mentioned was quite significant: the never-found WMD arsenal (which, if you recall, was the ostensible reason for the invasion), the fact that the vast majority of Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and, of course, the numerous policy failures which allowed the situation to degenerate as far as it has. Then again, Bush is notorious for never, ever, admitting that he or anyone around him have ever been wrong about anything, so that one was probably too much to hope for.

But most depressingly, Bush continued to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is composed simply of a ragtag collection of “terrorists” and Saddam Hussein’s “elite guards,” rather than what it really is – a broad-based nationalist uprising aimed not at bringing back the bad old days but at throwing the Americans out. By doing so, and by seeing the conflict purely in black and white terms rather than as a complex state of affairs, he sows the seeds for more and bloodier failures.

“We must keep our focus,” Bush said, but that focus has been terribly lacking throughout this whole nightmare. The White House and the Pentagon had one goal in mind on invading Iraq: overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But once that was accomplished, there was no plan to deal with what would happen next. We have seen the consequences.

The thing we need right now is a clear sense of direction from the Bush Administration, one based not on phantom deadlines or re-election bids, but on a realistic plan to get us out of the military and diplomatic disaster which threatens to be the true legacy of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, that sense was nowhere on display last night.