Demanding Accountability for Iraq

Coalition forces are not winning today in Iraq. Everyday, we see the rising death tolls, heightened violence, and an increase in suicide attacks. More than 1,600 of America's finest have fallen, and over 10,000 have sustained devastating injuries, with no end in sight.

I don't think even the Bush administration's most die-hard believers can look at Iraq today and claim that the country resembles what they had hoped for two years after the end of major combat. But, despite the facts, the Administration and Pentagon don their rose-colored glasses and misinform the American public with unbelievably unrealistic reports.

For over a year, I’ve argued that the President should have assembled a coalition of the capable; now we’re left with only a dwindling coalition of the willing that’s increasingly unwilling to continue to help. Our allies are leaving Iraq and no new coalition partners are moving in to replace them or relieve our troops.

The continuing spiral of violence demands a sober assessment -- not more rosy rhetoric from the Rose Garden. The administration must start honestly accounting for the toll on the United States, both in fighting and financing the war, and should provide realistic timelines for stabilizing Iraq.

Instead, officials at the Pentagon tell us that the U.S. is well on its way to training up enough Iraqi forces to replace our troops or offer tragically misguided lines like Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, who last April called the spike in violence a "symptom of the success that we're having here."

Compare that to a recent assessment of Iraqi forces, which found that out of 81 Iraqi Army battalions, only three were considered ready to conduct independent operations—the others had problems in multiple categories, including training, equipment and leadership. Last month, Iraq touted a force of 88,000 police, but the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has suggested [PDF] that the number could be inflated by tens of thousands who are absent or have deserted.

Without a credible Iraqi force to replace coalition soldiers, America’s troops will shoulder the burden. Our men and women are the greatest fighting force in the world, but they are an all-volunteer military who have seen promises to return home broken time and time again. The longer the administration keeps soldiers in this bloody arena, the harder it will be to recruit and retain our young men and women in uniform.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has virtually made a hobby out of rebuffing inquiries and evading Congressional oversight, especially with my colleagues on the House Armed Services Committee. He can’t give us accurate numbers on the size of the insurgency, how much more the war will cost, or how many Iraq security forces will stand up and fight. Without these answers, there's no answer to the oft-heard question: "How much longer will our soldiers have to stay in Iraq?" I suspect our commitments are nowhere near over, yet the Defense Department does little to inform the public.

Just this week, a nonpartisan GAO study [PDF] revealed billions in wasted taxpayer dollars at the Defense Department. Literally, it’s the case of one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing—which means DOD property bought for thousands of dollars was sold online for just pennies on the dollar because the military didn’t know its own inventory or what its requirements were. Wasteful spending like this would send any corporation to the poor house, but with a majority in Congress that throws billions in supplemental funds at the Pentagon, there’s no incentive to budget responsibly.

Sharing good and bad information is the only way to prepare the public for the challenges that still remain. If support for the war wanes further, the U.S. could be forced to prematurely end efforts and leave behind a destabilized Iraq, meaning disaster for the region and disservice to our fallen Americans.

Iraq is on the verge of all-out civil war: the administration's mistakes and misjudgments have created a massive recruiting poster for al-Qaida and the Pentagon continues to misjudge what we're up against. Iraq's discontent doesn't have just one face; it’s complex and requires outreach to all segments of the political spectrum.

What’s also troubling is that our failures have international repercussions—ineffectiveness in Iraq has decimated any popularity in the Middle East and that dissatisfaction is spreading around the globe.

Really, international disapproval shouldn’t be surprising when you consider our litany of mistakes: the administration's misleading WMD assessment that got us into war initially, followed by sexual and physical abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, rescinding the internationally-accepted Geneva Convention standards that protect soldiers from torture, and a persistent failure to stabilize or rebuild the country.

Failing to admit our failures leaves us handicapped at ever getting on a path to success.

We've been in Iraq for 26 months -- long enough to see that nearly every prediction made by the administration turned out to be false. We can’t turn back the clock on how the current team in the White House and the Pentagon got us into such a mess, but we can—and we must—demand accountability about their plans for the future.