A “Surge” by Bush

I don’t know any troops in Iraq, or any of the 21,500 that will be deployed, so my outrage is tempered. Congressman Charles Rangel proposed a draft recently and it met with disregard by his colleagues. However, a draft would affect almost every family in the country and at the very least cause the people to speak up in a more proactive manner. The election of 2006 allowed many of us to voice our opinion at the ballot box, but Bush seems to be disregarding the people’s voice.

Bush suffers from an overcompensation of his father’s “wimp factor” label. George W. is the Ivy League educated cowboy that wants to appear strong and decisive. He is the recovering alcoholic that wants to be the righteous born again ideologue. He is the Draft Dodger and National Guard Deserter that wants to be the Commander in Chief that knows military strategy better then his generals and non-partisan advisors. He is the “C” student that thinks he knows better than the people he was “elected” to serve.

George and Barbara’s son underachieved for the first 40 years of his life and now he is the man with the grand Neo-con vision to remake the entire Middle East over a long term plan of spreading freedom and democracy. It is a bold venture, indeed, for a person with limited cultural understanding, virtually no knowledge of Middle Eastern current events or history and a general lack of intellectual curiosity.

After 9/11, many Americans, as well as myself, believed in the notion of “draining the swamp.” The terrorists needed to be rooted out and any country that harbored them was culpable. Hatred of the West and the fomenting of violence against American interests around the world were advocated by these Middle Eastern dictators and thrived in their closed minded and oppressive societies.

The solution seemed simple in theory but we feared it would difficult to implement. The coalition of the willing, lead by the US of A, would spread freedom and democracy to the heart of darkness. It would go down in history as Bush’s great “Crusade” of giving Judeo-Christian values to the “lost” Muslims of the Arab World. We all remember those ones that hate us for our freedom don’t we? Well, the country was vulnerable with open wounds in 2002, and we had already lowered the bar in 2000 to allow the remedial President to be brought into office, so many of us didn’t question of complexity of the Bush’s “Crusade.” We had been dumbed down and scared out of our wits, so we bought a simple solution for a complex problem. Oh yeah, we still get the tax cut with no spending limitations and the heavy lifting is done by the all volunteer military. Let’s Roll!

Before the Iraq invasion, many experts warned that toppling Saddam would make our security situation worse not better. Most people dismissed these skeptics without much consideration to their qualifications or any examination of their predictions. We as a nation were going with the grand vision of dominance and an arrogant disregard to the value of the realist's arguments. We’re the strongest nation in the history of the world, we can do anything if we are united. So dissenters were labeled as cowards and their views were not even part of the equation.

There were, however, supporters of the policy that had concerns about the overall implementation. These optimistic pragmatists saw the Iraq War as winnable and it had the potential to be a beacon of freedom and hope in the Middle East, but it would have to be pulled off flawlessly. The potential problems were numerous for anyone who cared to educate themselves on the issues. How many Americans knew about the Shia versus Sunni feud in 2002?

In early 2007, we find ourselves suffering from the worst of both worlds. We disregarded the majority of the world community and a minority of Americans to invade and occupy Iraq. Rather than administering the post invasion occupation flawlessly, it was wrought with errors of ignorance and arrogance from the beginning. Political spin and divisive partisanship allowed our mistakes to flounder and compound over the last 3+ years. Hurricane Katrina shed some light on how governmental incompetence can make a bad situation worse. Misguided leadership led to disastrous consequences that couldn’t be undone with an army of devoted TV pundits and spinmeisters. Would 20,000 more FEMA workers made a difference in the initial Katrina relief? I think that Katrina revealed that the problem was not a lack of resources but incompetent leadership and flawed policies.

That brings us back to Bush’s proposal to add more 21,500 troops to Iraq. 80% of those troops will be support and logistics, while 20% or roughly 4,000 will be combat forces. Most experts say that small amount won’t make any tactical difference and the most Hawkish generals and political leaders say we need 100,000 to 200,000 more troops to do the job right. We don’t have hundreds of thousands troops ready to deploy to Iraq and recruitment goals have been decimated by the ongoing conflict. A draft would be the only way to get enough troops to secure Iraq, but that is a political nonstarter.

So Bush was left with a decision of adopting his opponents view and the recommendations of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report or taking the only other feasible alternative. True to his stubborn nature of overcoming his father’s “wimp factor” he chose to go with the maximum troop surge that was logistically possible.

When I think of those 21,500 troops that I do not know, I keep hearing the echo of a young John Kerry that once pleaded “Who is going to be the last man to die for a failed policy?” They were fighting to stop the spread of communism and today’s troops are fighting to give the new government “breathing room.” Who will be the last American soldier to die for Iraqi “breathing room?”

How to Make a Mass Murderer Look Good

A few days ago, I turned on my TV to see grainy images of portly masked men dressed in casual leather jackets attaching a noose around Saddam Hussein’s neck. The video stopped short of showing the inevitable demise of the hated tyrant, but the internet had a plethora of images with the full death sequence complete with audio. It was a grim spectacle of victor’s justice that almost everyone in the world knew was unavoidable since the day Saddam was plucked from his hiding place by US Troops. No one doubts that the “Butcher of Baghdad” was responsible for crimes against humanity and that he should pay the ultimate price for his transgressions. What that price should be, can be debated, but the debacle of his trial and execution were symbolic of the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the war.

Whether you are for or against the death penalty, the Saddam trial hardly looked like any “justice” system that freedom loving democracies around the world enjoy. In a country that is in the midst of raging sectarian violence, the trial did nothing to heal the wounds of the past or restore order to the fractured society. The legal process was inefficient and unprofessional with threats and acts of violence against judges and attorneys. The courtroom proceedings were filled with uncontrolled outbursts and the hateful tint of sectarian prejudice. The same lack of order this “young democracy” has on its streets were also found in its legal institutions.

The execution carried out by Shiite Iraqi guards on US gallows did nothing to strengthen the illusion of due process. The executioners wore no uniforms and looked more like terrorist kidnappers then prison guards. The grainy video, both the official edited version and the unofficial phone camera feed looked eerily similar to terrorist ransom demand videos. The US military wouldn’t release Saddam to Iraqis until last minute for fear of that they would humiliate him prior to his hanging.

Once the Iraqis had Saddam in their hands, they proceeded to taught and degrade him which showed a complete lack of respect for the American concerns and also showed the depth of Shiite vs. Sunni hatred. Saddam looked dignified while the executioners and the witnesses seemed like the criminals. The US found itself in a lose-lose situation with the world blaming us for the oversight of the Saddam lynching while we didn’t even have the power to delay the execution until after the religious holiday which was our publicly stated objective.

The vast majority of Europe is against the death penalty, the Kurds wanted Saddam alive for the ongoing nerve gas crimes trial, the Sunnis think the whole trial was a fraud, and the US seemed to have little control over the situation except for the curious timing of the verdict. I’ll leave it up to the conspiracy theorist to debate whether the verdict being announced just days before the US midterm elections has any political corruption related issues, but it was certainly suspicious.

It seems like the law of unintended consequences was in full effect in this Middle Eastern fog of war. Even the execution of a vicious mass murderer didn’t garner the type of triumphant reaction that George W. Bush thought it would when Centcom first announced “We got him” Sure, there was a modest crowd of Iraqi-Americans celebrating in Dearborn, Michigan, but most Americans felt more anxiety about the current quagmire then joy of witnessing the demise of an evil dictator. If Osama Bid Laden had been executed, would the American reaction have been as equally apathetic? I seriously doubt it. There would be nationwide celebrations and a sense that our troops sacrifices in Afghanistan were worth it.

What would have to happen in Iraq to give the majority of Americans the sense that it was worth the sacrifice? It’s a very hard question to answer and I don’t think many people would agree on the same answer, much less a way to get there from where we are today. Clinton and later Bush stated that the official US policy in Iraq prior to 2003 was for regime change. Mission Accomplished.

Bush’s case for going to war was predicated on the notion that we needed to preempt a rogue nation with terrorist ties acquiring and developing WMD’s. Almost 4 years later no significant stockpiles were found, nor the ability to develop them in the near future. Mission Accomplished.

Saddam Hussein was a war criminal that needed to be brought to justice. Mission Accomplished.

Iraq should be one of the few democracies in the region. “Mission Accomplished” Does an unstable, violence ridden democracy count?

The reasons for going to war have been redefined so many times, that most of us don’t why we’re still there and what does a victory in Iraq mean? Killing Saddam should have brought us closer to an elusive victory, but in reality it just ramped up the fears of Sunni reprisals and an intensification of the cycle of sectarian violence with our troops caught in the middle.

Based on our execution of the post invasion administrating of the country and the execution of the Saddam Hussein, both the Iraqi and the American peoples have little confidence in George W. Bush executing anything successfully in Iraq. I wish I had the solution, but I know that our stubbornly cloistered and culturally ignorant leader does not. I pray that God will give him a sense of humility and the wisdom to lead the coalition of the willing to “victory.”