Continued attacks against American troops by Iraqi militants got President Bush’s dander up last week. Taunting them in colorful colloquialisms, he said: “Bring ’em on,” since US troops are “plenty tough” to deal with what has increasingly become a movement bearing the marks of classic guerrilla operations.
It is now beginning to dawn on Washington that the conquest of a militarily enfeebled Iraq may indeed have been a cakewalk, but policing and pacifying it, let alone rebuilding and transforming it into a “beacon of liberal democracy” in the Arab world is turning to be a sorry debacle. What is sorrier still for the administration is that, as Americans contemplate the alarming number of casualties that their troops suffer daily there, they are now wondering, according to a nationwide poll released July 1 by the Program on International Policy, whether the putative threat of lethal weapons may have been exaggerated, or even fabricated altogether, in order to justify the war. As US soldiers in the field have confronted increasingly angry Iraqis and an emboldened armed resistance, Washington is beginning to realize that its 150,000 troops are inadequate for the task of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, “plenty tough” though they may be.
In February, weeks before combat began, Gen. Eric K. Shineski — a man who would have known what he was talking about, given the fact that he had earlier commanded NATO’s Bosnian peacekeeping force — told the Senate that to pacify and ultimately rebuild Iraq would require at least 200,000 troops. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, disputed the figure at the time, and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the top neocon honcho, scoffed at it as “wildly inaccurate.” Now Rumsfeld, with his Pentagon straining to sustain more than half the army in Iraq while maintaining other troop commitments in Afghanistan, South Korea and the Balkans, has asked other nations for help. Many governments have resisted his entreaties, including India’s, from which the administration is seeking an entire division. And European countries, with the exception of Britain, have been weary all along of the United States’ unilateralism. Effectively they are now saying: “Hey, we told you so.”
Even as he shops around for allies, Rumsfeld is not helping his case by continuing to harp on the “Old Europe-New Europe” mantra, and on the wild assertion that the upheaval in Iraq today is similar to the one that accompanied the social and intellectual formation of American democracy after the Revolutionary War. (Trust me on this one, Don, that’s way too wild.)
What it amounts to is that rotating the 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq, over a prolonged period, is a monumental affair that will occupy much of the US Army, and Washington clearly needs help — which it has already sought from 70 countries, of which only 10 complied.
As Rumsfeld passes the hat around, appealing to the international community for troop contributions, one wonders if he, along with his neocon colleagues, realizes now that taking the UN route to Iraq would have been the most sensible thing to have done in the first place.
Meanwhile, our tough-guy Texan president, characteristically resorting to slang to define foreign policy, soldiers on. “There are some who feel the conditions are such that they can attack us there,” he said in reference to “the looters, criminals and Saddam loyalists,” as he called the militants. “My answer is: Bring ‘em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the situation ... US troops are plenty tough.” Were Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, et al. around today, they would be telling President Bush: “In wars like this, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Honest.” And those of us who have marched repeatedly protesting imminent war stand exonerated today for having warned our government not only about the follies of unilateralism but the challenges of the “day after.”
It was “plentier tough,” believe me, to have called for peaceful dialogue and international cooperation than to have gone to Iraq like gangbusters, alienating the entire population of yet another little, helpless Third World country, getting its own dander up.
- Arab News Opinion 10 July 2003
