A Wrong Reading

The Times' editorial board published an editorial yesterday about the 'Surge'. As is their prerogative, they've in the last year become more and more critical of the President in general and the war specifically.

I would say that in this effort there are some serious mis-readings and misunderstandings. From the piece:

Which brings us to that second showdown, the one now on display in the nation's capital, as the Bush administration promotes its strategy of sending 21,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq, at the same time the Democrat majority in Congress - and more than a few members of Bush's own Republican Party - insist our government needs to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, not sending more in.

The president's “surge” strategy is a capitulation to the administration's hawks, chief among them Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who was the first Cabinet member to go after Democrats swept the November elections.

That's just not correct. Rumsfeld, from day one, was a proponent of light-and-fast. As was revealed recently, his initial strategy for the invasion of Iraq called for the setting up of a Provisional Government and quick withdrawal of US troops. That view was trumped and eventually lost out to the Powell-Tenet view:

Few know that in early 2003 - a month or more before the Iraq invasion - President Bush was presented with two plans for post-war Iraq. The first, written by CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided for a long occupation of Iraq and the nation-building that the president renounced in his 2000 campaign. The second, a Pentagon plan authored by Rumsfeld's team, provided for the establishment of a provisional government before the invasion and American withdrawal within months of Saddam's overthrow. The president, convinced by Powell that "if you break it, you own it", chose the Powell-Tenet plan and ordered Rumsfeld to carry it out.

Furthermore the strategy that now--in a true Through-the-Looking-Glass moment--finds Democrats all for it, has proven a failure. The very one that both Generals Abizaid and Casey continued to argue for right through the announcements that they would be replaced in Iraq:

His light-footprint theory—that U.S. troops foster the violence—is reasonable in theory, but isn't borne out on the ground. When our troops go into neighborhoods, they do tamp down the violence. It's when they leave that the violence flares up again.

And it was Rumsfeld's chosen approach.

Continuing on, the editorial takes umbrage, it seems, at the very idea of winning anything in this fight:

In reviewing the president's newest strategy, one administration official asked this question: “Is this a war or is it not a war? If it is, you have to be willing to sacrifice ... Americans are willing to do that, as long as we have a clear strategy that offers a chance of success.”

The premise of his question and answer is that adding troops is the only way to have a chance of winning.

Winning what? That's the question this administration has consistently failed to answer. If U.S. forces prevail, and the civil strife in that country is ended, what's in it for America? Oil? The ideal of a democracy in the heart of Islam? Freedom for the Iraqi people?Please, spare us the rhetoric the Bush administration has repeatedly used to define our purpose in this conflict. Whatever lines have been drawn have been hopelessly blurred by events over the past three-plus years.

In concluding, they say: Iraq has only been a country, in its present form, since the British attempted 90 years ago to consolidate various tribes in order to preserve and protect oil fields.

Yes, Americans are tough and resilient. We will make sacrifices in support of a just and valid cause. We've done that time after time, from the battlefields of Europe to the killing fields of Southeast Asia.

What we will not do, and should not do, is continue a formless, baseless war whose only outcome will be an even longer list of American casualties.

Putting more troops into Iraq may satisfy a war president's ego, but it serves no other useful purpose. Extreme pressure must be brought on Iraqi leaders to solve their own problems. One way to do that is to start bringing American soldiers home.

To claim that the only possible outcome is simply more casualties is a simple dismissal. More than just a casual reading of the President's plan reveals that it provides an opportunity to accomplish something we've been unwilling and therefore unable to accomplish to date--stopping the violence.

It's something that they've argued for on other occasions and I fail to see how or why they would object to something designed to accomplish the very thing they want.