It’s hard to criticize the Bush administration’s Iraq policies when the White House does not appear to know what its Iraq policies are.
On Wednesday, U.S. officials announced that the administration would go to the United Nations seeking another resolution on Iraq. As was reported on the front page of the Washington Post, the White House will seek support for it’s “new plan for Iraq and [to] ensure that the first postwar Iraqi government does not fail for lack of international recognition.”
Fine. Got it. We’ll go to the U.N. and seek a new resolution.
Not so fast. The very next day, the State Department announced that we may not seek a resolution after all. As State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters yesterday, “[W]e’re not foreclosing any options should further Security Council action be deemed useful, but we’ll make a judgment on that as we move forward.” (I think that diplomatic-speak for “we have no idea what we’re going to do next”)
Similarly, the administration has been going back and forth on whether the U.S. will send more troops into Iraq.
In recent weeks, the White House has insisted that the administration is committed to reducing force numbers, bringing home as many as 25,000 troops by May. Yesterday, however, at a media briefing in England, Bush suggested the opposite is true and that his administration may actually increase the number of troops.
“I said we’re going to bring our troops home starting next year?” Bush said. “What I said is that we’ll match the security needs with the number of troops necessary to secure Iraq. We could have less troops in Iraq, we could have the same number of troops in Iraq, we could have more troops in Iraq, what is ever necessary to secure Iraq.”
As the Washington Post noted, Bush’s answer “appeared to take even top aides by surprise. As the president spoke, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice glanced pointedly toward the press corps assembled inside Britain’s Foreign Office, as if to suggest that there might be some clarification coming.”
It has to be difficult working for a guy who doesn’t know his own administration’s foreign policies and makes things up as he goes along.
The Chicago Tribune reported today that Bush’s answer was not actually a reversal of the administration’s earlier statements about reducing the number of troops in Iraq.
“The president was asked a question and gave a logical answer, but there is simply nothing to suggest that the number of American forces would need to increase,” one senior administration official said.
Nothing except the words of the president.
I know the crisis in Iraq is difficult, but I think I’d have some confidence in the administration’s ability to handle the situation if the White House didn’t offer competing answers to the same questions.