After last week’s bizarro fest, in which Bush and Allawi wanted America to know how stable and secure Iraq is, it was good to hear someone acknowledge that the insurgency in Iraq is getting worse, not better.
Of course, this person runs the risk of drawing Bush’s wrath. After all, to notice publicly that Bush and Allawi are completely wrong about conditions in Iraq is, according to the Bush campaign, tantamount to aiding and abetting the insurgency itself. So who was this weak-kneed observer whose un-American remarks embolden our enemies? That would be Colin Powell.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that the insurgency in Iraq is getting worse and that the U.S. occupation there has increased anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries, but he said successful elections in Afghanistan and Iraq would turn the situation around.
While the idea of legitimate democratic elections remain a pipe dream, it’s encouraging to hear someone in the Bush administration acknowledge the obvious, even if it’s the one official who’s been consistently ignored since Bush took office and even if it completely contradicts everything his administration colleagues have been arguing.
And in case there’s any doubt about whether the insurgency is, in fact, getting much worse, consider the latest data.
Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq’s Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.
Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital’s Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.
In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq’s interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.
Also, as long as we’re on the topic, be sure to check this devastating analysis from Retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, who served on the U.S. Central Command planning staff for operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and was a strategic policy planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff specializing in Middle East/Africa affairs.
From a purely military standpoint, the war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. This administration failed to make even a cursory effort at adequately defining the political end state they sought to achieve by removing Saddam Hussein, making it impossible to precisely define long-term military success. That, in turn, makes it impossible to lay out a rational exit strategy for U.S. troops. Like Vietnam, the military is again being asked to clean up the detritus of a failed foreign policy.
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Americans must understand it is highly probable that Iraq is already lost. Americans must stop believing the never-ending litany of “happy thoughts” spewing forth from the Bush campaign and start thinking about our men and women dying wholesale in Iraq.
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If the Bush administration remains in power, failure in Iraq is a virtual certainty. “Staying the course” during a crisis spiraling rapidly downward will cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives, will continue to sap the operational readiness of this nation’s armed forces, and will continue to strengthen Al Qaeda’s hand. To paraphrase FDR, it’s time to change horses. The one we’re on is about to drown.