From "The American Conservative"
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| Tue, 09-07-2004 - 2:37pm |
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
Hour of the Generals
The “good soldiers†who lost Vietnam must tell the truth about Iraq.
By Andrew J. Bacevich.
The big news, all but lost in the welter of attention given to revelations of past intelligence failures and the continuing saga of Martha Stewart, is that the strength of the anti-American resistance in Iraq is growing by leaps and bounds. Over the past year, the insurgent order-of-battle has enjoyed as much as a fourfold increase. If we needed further proof that the war is not going well, evidence is now at hand.
A year ago, when he assumed charge of United States Central Command and acknowledged that Operation Iraqi Freedom had given way to what he candidly called a “classical guerrilla war,†Gen. John Abizaid assessed the total number of insurgents to be 5,000. But according to a recent Associated Press dispatch all but ignored by major media outlets, official estimates of the enemy’s strength have risen to 20,000—this despite the fact that over the past year American forces have killed or imprisoned several thousand Iraqis and so-called “foreign fighters.†In short, enemy recruitment is easily outpacing our efforts to reduce his numbers.
There is a sense in which this hardly comes as a surprise. Despite periodic ebbs and flows, the fighting in Iraq over the past year has progressively intensified. Overall security has deteriorated. Bush administration efforts to portray the resistance as a last-ditch effort by a handful of Saddam loyalists have long since lost all credibility. The truth is that our adversary is shrewd, resourceful, and highly motivated. By and large, we find ourselves dancing to his tune: he blows up an oil pipeline, detonates a bomb in downtown Baghdad, or assassinates an Iraqi official—and we react after the fact.
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Either the Bush administration needs to get serious about winning the war that it so recklessly sought in Iraq, or it needs to cut its losses. To persist in the present course is merely to perpetuate the existing stalemate—with good men and women getting killed and maimed, tens of billions of dollars being expended, and the United States exhausting its stores of goodwill—all to no purpose.
Getting serious means mobilizing the country for an expanded military commitment. Mobilization necessarily entails changes in domestic priorities. It also implies an urgent, costly, and politically sensitive expansion of the U.S. Army, the service bearing the greatest burden for the war’s conduct.
Cutting our losses means promptly beginning the process of disengagement. That implies bringing the troops home, leaving it to the now-liberated Iraqis to sort out their future, and mending the diplomatic fences so recklessly torn down in the administration’s rush to war.
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