Last week, George Bush and the Republican party faithful shifted their defensive rhetoric on the war -- again. But the strategy, or lack thereof, remains the same.
For several weeks, leading Republicans tried to tar opponents of the administration's failed war policy as un-American by making two words --"withdrawal" and "timetable" -- synonymous with "Benedict" and "Arnold."
This tactic evaporated, however, when a freshman member of Congress, Jean Schmidt, thoughtlessly questioned the courage of Rep. John Murtha, a decorated combat veteran. Schmidt unwittingly made it impossible for the
president and his surrogates to continue questioning the patriotism of their critics.
Now, the Bush administration's new mantra is that anyone who disagrees with continuing an open-ended war in Iraq is advocating failure -- throwing in the towel on "the mission." I take some pride in the Republicans' new
sidestep, because I've been arguing for weeks that we critics of administration policy aren't "anti-war" -- we're anti-failure. Bush and his handlers know that, in the words of George C. Scott's General Patton, "Americans love a winner."
Unlike the real Patton, however, they have not set us on a course to win. George Bush and his congressional loyalists are still missing the plain truth: establishing a timetable for redeployment is a winning plan in Iraq.
Rep. Murtha is exactly right in arguing that the military has accomplished all it can and should in Iraq. The threat of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction has been definitively eliminated; Saddam Hussein has been removed from power; and this month, Iraqis will elect a government. The one remaining hurdle -- suppressing the insurgency and enabling a stable, democratic Iraq -- can only be cleared when we withdraw our forces.
Insurgencies feed on popular resistance to foreign occupation. In Iraq, the insurgency has maintained a constant level of intensity. This does not represent a failure on the part of our military. It is simply a reality of counter-insurgency warfare and is unlikely to change in the near term. In September, General Casey argued that "the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency." General Abizaid agreed,
explaining that "[r]educing the size and visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy."
The president needs to listen to his generals. So does Congress. We don't control the will of the Iraqi people. All we can control is the calendar.
The best path to victory in Iraq -- to giving Iraqis a free and independent nation -- is leaving. The American and Iraqi people need to know that we are leaving because, after the December elections, we will have achieved our goals and met our responsibilities. We are leaving in part to show the world that we did not come to conquer and possess, but to set Iraq free from a tyrant. The challenges that remain are for the Iraqis to meet. We will leave them with a republic which, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, is theirs -- if they can keep it.
I am proposing a transfer of counter-insurgency operations to the Iraqis within six to eighteen months of the December elections. The American military should continue to lend air support, logistical support and quick
reaction forces to help the Iraqi army meet the transition to home rule. We can and should remain active in the hunt for murderers like Zarquawi. Transferring counter-insurgency operations to Iraqis will allow us to focus our special operations on high value targets in and around Iraq while freeing up conventional forces to meet the world's many other threats.
Redeployment will not succeed, however, if we do not radically overhaul the reconstruction process in Iraq during the period of transfer of operations.
Thus far, reconstruction has been an unmitigated failure. Today, roughly half of all Iraqi households are still without clean water, the average household is without electricity for ten hours each day, and (outside of Baghdad) only eight percent of households have access to a sewage system. The reconstruction fiasco has created a drag on Iraq's economy - nearly half the country is under-employed or unemployed - and fertile ground for political instability, terrorism and insurgency.
To fix this mess, we need to do two things in the lead-up to the transfer of counter-insurgency operations:
First, remove reconstruction command authority from civilian officials and place it directly in the hands of the United States military.
Second, transfer as many of the reconstruction contracts as possible to Iraqi firms.
American and multinational corporations operating in Iraq have been awarded "cost-plus" contracts that assure them a profit and provide no economic incentive to finish the jobs they've been hired to undertake. As a result,
enormous sums of money have been diverted to security services and generous salaries for American businessmen working in Iraq, but Iraq's infrastructure is still in ruins.
Iraqi firms have proved that they can get the job done quicker and cheaper. In Karbala and Kut, two Iraqi firms spent a total of $185 million to build twin water treatment facilities. By contrast, a partnership between two London-based and California-based companies spent $200 million to build just one water treatment plant.
When we transfer reconstruction authority from civilian officials to American military officials, and when we put an end to cost-plus contracts by shifting the bulk of the reconstruction to Iraqi firms, we will effectively give a boost to the Iraqi economy and speed up the restoration of Iraq's infrastructure.
General Casey noted that the insurgency is "not something that we're going to defeat militarily. The people that are supporting and doing these attacks are going to hopefully be drawn into the political process. And that will take some of the air out of the insurgency. So it's a combination of the political, the military, the economic and the communications that's ultimately going to defeat this."
As a Democratic candidate for Congress, I am running on an anti-failure platform. President Bush may want victory, but he is dead wrong about how to achieve it.
A few days ago, the Bush administration revealed its own drift when it had the United States Agency for International Development advertise an RFP for a $1 billion contract to provide social and economic stabilization in ten Iraqi cities.
We don't need to spend another billion dollars denying reality. We need to reconstruct and re-deploy. Only then can we win this war and turn to the important questions facing us at home, and abroad.
Please visit my campaign website, where I have explained in further detail my position on homeland security, the war in Iraq, and other important issues of public concern. We are standing at a crossroads. The decisions we make today will determine what kind of country we live in tomorrow. I'm working hard to challenge the Bush administration's failed Iraq policy, but I need your support. Every small bit of help counts.