William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Bush's Victory is Defeat

President Bush's new National Strategy for Victory in Iraq says that American troops will not be withdrawn in response to "artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington," that U.S. forces will remain in country until Iraqi national forces can take over.


"And as the Iraqi security forces stand up," the President said at Annapolis yesterday, "coalition forces can stand down. And when our mission of defeating the terrorists in Iraq is complete, our troops will return home to a proud nation."


There are two enormous issues raised by the President's newly articulated strategy. First, the President is admitting that the United States has no intention of staying in Iraq until there is no insurgency or insurgent threat, thus paving the way for the very withdrawal of U.S. forces that the American public wants. And second, that the administration evidently doesn't believe its own overblown rhetoric about the war on terror. Either that or it just can not muster the political and public support to pursue that war as it sees fit.

In 35 pages, the White House lays out "political," "security," and "economic" tracks to victory in Iraq. A lot of energy is spent describing the progress of the Iraqi military and police -- x men in uniform, x battalions today versus y yesterday, increasing ability to mount their own combat operations.


In a way, the Bush administration has painted itself into a corner, making the United States dependent on the success of the Iraqi force. The core American mission is presented as building a moderate Iraq, a stable country, and a full partner with the United States in the war on terror. That picture would have no credibility if we didn't at least rhetorically say that Iraq belongs to the Iraqis that their future and their security ultimately rest with them and not with us.


This faith in Baghdad drives the Strategy for Victory's definition of the enemy, which is neatly circumscribed In order to defer to the political sensitivities of our Iraqi partners. The Strategy defines the "enemy" as "a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists." The first two are Sunni dominated, and though the strategy says that the rejectionists can ultimately be co-opted it says that few from the Saddamist group "can be won over," and they just need to be "marginalized to the point where it [the group] can and will be defeated by Iraqi forces."

Ever since U.S. military forces rolled into Baghdad, there has been dispute over the composition of the Iraqi armed opposition to the United States and the interim Iraqi government. No doubt as well, insurgents have transformed in three years, and many more foreign fighters have infiltrated into the country as the conflict has persisted.


But since the beginning, a huge part of the insurgency has been common Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite alike, who are solely motivated by the presence of an occupation force in Iraq and by a puppet government controlled from Washington. As we saw in the bombing of the three hotels in Amman, Jordan in November, "normal" Iraqis are driven to suicide missions.

In various places, the Strategy acknowledges the existence of "indigenous religious extremists" and "militias and armed groups" -- read Shi'ite -- but in deference to the political conditions in Baghdad and the Shi'ite dominated government, these insurgents are not included as part of the enemy. What is more, there is no acknowledgement of Iraqis taking up arms in opposition to U.S. military forces, even if they are neither rejectionists, Saddamists or terrorists.

This is why the Strategy for Victory repeats in many places that the U.S. is seeking to "defeat" the terrorists and "neutralize" the insurgency. The insurgency, though the Strategy document can't say it, is Iraq.

I know the argument could be made that the "religious extremists" and militias are not necesarilty the active insurgency, that they are part of the political process, and therefore they should not be included in the articulation of the "enemy." But this argument ignores the reality of the new conditions President Bush lays out for a U.S. withdrawal, and their own warnings about setting a timetable.

The administration says that the enemy will just go to ground and wait for the U.S. withdrawal before again taking up arms if we say we plan to withdraw. Well, I guess I see the militias and the common armed Iraqis, and much of the national police for that matter, as essentially already waiting. In other words, the United States is willing to and planning to withdraw, leaving civil war and sectarian violence for the Iraqis to work out. It is as it should be, but it is an enormous admission of the limitations of our military on the ground.


Though a democratic Iraq is central to the "political" track of the administration strategy, the military focus on the ability of Iraqis to take over the American mission also calls into question the administration's rhetoric about the war on terror.

Look, it is the President who insists on labeling Iraq as "the central front in the global war on terror," as "an essential element in the long war against the ideology that breeds international terrorism." He says that "the fate of the greater Middle East -- which will have a profound and lasting impact on American security -- hangs in the balance." I don't buy either of these assumptions, but if the administration is serious in its rhetoric, isn't it strange that they are now saying that they are willing to leave Iraq before the insurgency is "defeated," that they are willing to entrust the security of THE UNITED STATES to a brand new, unknown, unproven, untested Iraqi military and police force?

Perhaps, perhaps, the 9/11 nightmare is fading, perhaps we are coming to our senses in recognizing that the "war" on terrorism is not the Cold War, when indeed our survival hung in the balance, that it is not World War II, when indeed a military enemy had the capacity to defeat us. Maybe, maybe, the administration is getting the message that the American people don't have their heart in a 50 year clash of civilizations, that there is another way to pursue terrorism.

So, here is the Strategy for Victory in a nutshell: We will leave. We no longer hope to "defeat" the insurgency. We recognize that Iraq is a messy place and that its elected government and its "national" military and police force is filled with sectarian and religious divisions. We see clearly now that Iraqi society is awash with guns and prone to violence and Iraq probably does not have a future that looks anything like Pleasantville.

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