Thursday editorial: Mr. Bush’s basement
Anyone who has moved out of a home knows the embarrassment of cleaning out the basement and the attic, hauling years of accumulated junk into the light of day, wondering why that sofa or lamp ever seemed like a good idea.
As George W. Bush enters the last six months of his presidency, something similar is taking place on a larger stage. Hardly a day goes by that some dreadful policy, pronouncement or scandal doesn’t resurface in comments by the presidential campaigns, or for long-delayed review by congressional committees, or in a book by some former staff member who suddenly has seen the light.
There’s a staggering amount of junk in this yard sale. Pity anyone who has to convince people to buy it.
The Iraq war, of course, is the monster in the basement, so hideous that the president is leaving it behind for the new occupant of the White House. It’s been stuffed out of sight in recent months in hopes that a nation with a famously short attention span will think it’s a surging success.
Twenty-nine U.S. soldiers and Marines died as part of that success in June, down from 101 in June 2007. Twenty-nine is up from 19 in May, but year-to-year, 72 fewer deaths is “progress” — so long as your son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother wasn’t one of the 29, and so long as you overlook the $3 billion-a-week price tag, and so long as Iraq is actually starting to become a functional democracy, about which the jury is still decidedly out.
One of the other issues hauled to the curb last week was a so-called “security agreement” between the United States and Iraq that would allow U.S. forces to remain in the country after the infamous 2003 U.N. mandate — the one based on the imaginary weapons of mass destruction — expires in July.
Iraq’s government wants certain guarantees, which is pretty nervy considering that it hasn’t implemented the laws governing how oil revenue will be shared or reforming elections that were part of the deal for “progress” that led to last year’s troop surge.
The fact that Iraq hasn’t figured out how to split oil revenue hasn’t kept it from trying to maximize that revenue. The New York Times reported Monday that a team from the State Department helped the Iraqi government cut deals with five Western oil companies to develop more oil fields. If Mr. Bush hadn’t assured us otherwise, you’d almost think the war had been fought over oil.
Also: By January, the Iraqi government is supposed to take control of the so-called “Sons of Iraq,” the 80,000 Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents who began cooperating with U.S. forces in early 2007. U.S. Army commanders have been paying them each $10 a day for their cooperation in fighting the group calling itself “al-Qaida in Iraq.”
What happens when the money stops and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated leaders take over the Sunni-oriented program? Hint: It probably won’t be “progress.”
Unlike the commander in chief, the United States Army tries to learn from its mistakes. An Army study group this week published a 696-page report analyzing what went wrong in the early days of the Iraq war when an easy military victory became a quagmire of a post-victory occupation and insurgency. The consensus of the 200 top officers interviewed: The commanders, particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander, blew it.
“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime, Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq,” the report said.
This has been reported before by retired generals and journalists who interviewed military and civilian leaders. All of them criticized Gen. Franks for having been intimidated by Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff. What is significant — and in many ways reassuring — is that the Army now is facing up to its own mistakes.
Even after it became apparent that Gen. Franks, CIA Director George Tenet and L. Paul Bremer, who headed the U.S. transitional authority in Iraq, all had made crucial miscalculations, Mr. Bush famously awarded them the Medal of Freedom.
That was in December 2004, a month after Mr. Bush was re-elected to a second term. It seems so very long ago.
(5 votes, average: 3.4 out of 5)
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I’m beginning to get the idea that your support for President Bush is waning.
His administration has been far from ideal but your constant carping over every detail, over and over and over again, would lead us to believe you think Gore or Kerry would have been better. You will deserve Obama.