Colin Powell, who seems to have been at odds with the White House’s foreign policies from the beginning, now appears to believe Iraqi insurgents are winning.
For months the American people have heard, from one side, promises to “stay the course” in Iraq (George W. Bush); and from the other side, equally vague plans for gradual withdrawal (John Kerry). Both plans depend heavily on building significant Iraqi forces to take over security. But the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq — which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, Newsweek has learned.
The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told Newsweek last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents’] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.”
But it’s worth noting that Powell isn’t the only general coming to this conclusion.
The New York Times had a disturbing item over the weekend in which the paper documented discussions with 15 top U.S. leaders in Iraq, many of them military generals. Alas, despite Dick Cheney’s confidence that Iraq is a “remarkable success story,” American officials see a country that’s slipping away.
Senior American military commanders and civilian officials in Iraq are speaking more candidly about the hurdles that could jeopardize their plans to defeat an adaptive and tenacious insurgency and hold elections in January.
Outwardly, they give an upbeat assessment that the counterinsurgency is winnable. But in interviews with 15 of the top American generals, admirals and embassy officials conducted in Iraq in late October, many described risks that could worsen the security situation and derail the political process that they are counting on to help quell the insurgency.
This is a terrible tragedy that the Bush White House wants to pretend isn’t there. Once again, you can’t fix a problem when you refuse to acknowledge its existence.