We got our first less-than-subtle clue about the Bush White House’s approach to security in Iraq about a month ago.
Faced with a growing insurgency and a January deadline for national elections, American commanders in Iraq say they are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas, especially Falluja, the restive city west of Baghdad now under control of insurgents and Islamist groups.
A senior American commander said the military intended to take back Falluja and other rebel areas by year’s end…. The American commander suggested that operations in Falluja could begin as early as November or December, the deadline the Americans have given themselves for restoring Iraqi government control across the country.
What an incredible coincidence. U.S. forces will seek to quell the insurgency, but only after a certain something happens in early November, and after the insurgents have had more time to seize more control over more areas of Iraq. Let’s see, what’s going to happen on, say, November 2?
Less-than-subtle clue #2 came today.
The Bush administration plans to delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.
Although American commanders in Iraq have been buoyed by recent successes in insurgent-held towns such as Samarra and Tall Afar, administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallouja and Ramadi — where the insurgents’ grip is strongest and U.S. military casualties could be the highest — until after Americans vote in what is likely to be an extremely close election.
“When this election’s over, you’ll see us move very vigorously,” said one senior administration official involved in strategic planning, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“Once you’re past the election, it changes the political ramifications” of a large-scale offensive, the official said. “We’re not on hold right now. We’re just not as aggressive.”
In a just world, this would be grounds for impeachment. Bush is effectively putting the war “on hold” because he’s worried about how casualties will look on the evening news. As Atrios put it, “Bush believes his re-election is more important than the lives of our soldiers and the situation in Iraq.”
Bush is literally running a war based on a political campaign’s calendar. Going after the “bad guys” aggressively leads to more to casualties, which leads to lower poll numbers, which leads Bush to favor inaction. We’ll get the terrorists, Bush says, but only at a time that’s convenient for his campaign. Politics always comes first. Always.
And as Matthew Yglesias noted (to his credit, several weeks ago) in The American Prospect, this is not just a disgusting display of putting politics above security, it’s also a recipe for making Iraq even more dangerous.
First and foremost, of course, the president must keep the body count low if he wants to win. Iraqi deaths and shifts of public opinion are the stuff of the inside pages of our newspapers. Dead Americans make page 1 and the evening news. When enough die, it may even lead the news, or make the local news. It wouldn’t be prudent to let that happen. So Bush has adopted policies designed to keep the death count low, primarily by avoiding ground combat in the Sunni triangle. Good campaign tactics, needless to say, but, as ever, the Bush team seems better at winning elections than winning wars. By delaying any assault on the wily Salafi terrorists (read: Democratic campaign operatives) lurking in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi, and Baquba until after November, we give them more time to dig in, prepare defenses, and strengthen their forces before the attack.
An important point comes next, so it gets a paragraph of its own: This plan will get people killed. If an assault is to be mounted, it should be done as soon as possible, before the adversary has been given months to prepare for it. The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists. We’re waging war as an extension of an electoral campaign, exposing our soldiers to harassing attacks right now and to a more difficult fight later on in order to help secure the president’s re-election.
If this makes it sound like Bush is a callous coward, it’s probably because that’s the most appropriate label available.
It’s behavior that fits a pattern. This is a president who was happy to see others conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam in order to better serve his convenience. But he was young then. He’s a president who treats the civil servants in the Treasury Department not as professional economic analysts but as producers of crude campaign propaganda, sending out letters lauding his tax cuts on the government dime and ordering officials to gin up misleading analyses of Kerry’s proposals. But that didn’t get anyone killed. What we see now is the latest step in a progression of selfishness and arrogance that grows ever more dangerous as time goes on. Can anyone produce a single good reason why the recent National Intelligence Estimate (the whole thing, not just a few key passages pertaining to sources and methods), which makes a gloomy forecast about Iraq, was classified — other than that its conclusions were politically awkward for the president? Or why Mike Scheuer’s letter to Congress exposing dangerous understaffing at the CIA’s bin Laden unit was similarly kept secret? While politicians may win re-election by producing a state of gross public ignorance about the course of events, this is not how democracies win wars.
But the president who imposed steel tariffs that his advisers said would hurt the economy, put forward an “ownership society” agenda opposed by his own economists, and signed a campaign-finance bill he believed to be unconstitutional — all for the sake of his quest for re-election — could hardly be expected to do otherwise.