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The "Defeat in Iraq" President---didn't have to be a defeat, but he 
engineered it beautifully.




  
      
   OP-ED COLUMNIST
Bush Upbeat as Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 24, 2004


  

George W. Bush was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. (for a while)

As he explained in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to 
the White House":

"My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven 
wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the 
mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win."

How is it that he ultimately came to see the fiasco in Vietnam so 
clearly but remains so blind to the frighteningly similar realities of 
his own war in Iraq? Mr. Bush cannot explain our mission in Iraq and has 
nothing resembling an exit strategy, and his troops - hobbled by 
shortages of personnel and by potentially fatal American and Iraqi 
political considerations - are certainly not fighting to win.

As the situation in Iraq moves from bad to worse, the president, based 
on his public comments, seems to be edging further and further from 
reality. This is disturbing, to say the least. The news from Iraq is 
filled with reports of kidnappings and beheadings, of people pleading 
desperately for their lives, of American soldiers being ambushed and 
killed, of clusters of Iraqis being blown to pieces by suicide bombers, 
and of the prospects for a credible election in January tumbling toward nil.

The war effort has deteriorated so drastically that the administration 
is planning to take more than $3 billion earmarked for crucial 
reconstruction projects and shift them to security programs designed to 
ward off the increasingly deadly insurgency. A classified National 
Intelligence Estimate prepared for the president contained no really 
good prospects for Iraq. The best-case scenario was a country with only 
tenuous stability. The worst potential outcome was civil war.

The intelligence estimate was prepared in July, and the situation has 
only worsened since then.

Even Republicans are starting to voice their concerns about the 
unfolding disaster. When asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" whether the 
U.S. was winning the war in Iraq, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska 
Republican, said, "No, I don't think we're winning." He said the U.S. 
was "in deep trouble in Iraq" and that some "recalibration of policy" 
would be necessary to turn things around.

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said on "Fox News Sunday": 
"The situation has obviously been somewhat deteriorating, to say the 
least." He said "serious mistakes" have been made and that most of them 
"can be traced back to not having sufficient numbers of troops there."

These are not doves talking. These are supporters of President Bush who 
support the war in Iraq and believe it can be won. But they're also in 
touch with reality.

President Bush does not share their sense of alarm. He acknowledged that 
"horrible scenes" are being shown on television and the Internet, but he 
was unmoved by the gloomy intelligence estimates. According to Mr. Bush: 
"The C.I.A. laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be 
lousy, life could be O.K., life could be better."

Que sera, sera.

The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an 
upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly on 
Tuesday. Iraq, he said, is well on its way to being "secure, democratic, 
federal and free."

If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to 
Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to 
reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve 
political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes 
about Iraq.

This is scary. With Americans, Iraqis and others dying horribly in the 
long dark night of this American-led war, the world needs more from the 
president of the United States than the fool's gold of his empty utterances.

Perhaps someone can dislodge the president from Karl's clutches, shake 
him and tell him that his war is a tremendous tragedy with implications 
far beyond the election in November.

At the moment there is no evidence the president understands anything 
about the war. He led the nation into it with false pretenses. He never 
mobilized sufficient numbers of troops. He seemed to believe the war was 
over in May 2003. And he seems not to know how to proceed now.

The tragic lesson of Vietnam is staring the president in the face. But 
he'll have to become better acquainted with the real world before he can 
even begin to learn from it.