Friday, August 05, 2005
Editorial: A dubious exercise as the inept wage war
Even if one believed the Iraq war is just, none but the delusional could defend the series of blunders that has led to the escalation of death.
From the RoundTable blog
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President Bush's top aides attempted to persuade him to drop the oft repeated "war on terror" phrase and replace it with "global struggle against violent extremism." He vetoed the idea.
It matters not what Bush calls his war, rather that he has executed it so ineptly that thousands of U.S. and Iraqi lives have been sacrificed to no justifiable end.
Even if one were to suspend reality and agree that Bush was correct to invade Iraq, it is impossible to see anything but incompetence in how this war is waged.
Two-plus years into the war, the administration still deploys Marines into the desert in lightly armored vehicles designed for amphibious assaults. Fourteen Marines on Wednesday died when a huge bomb destroyed their vehicle.
Six other members of their Ohio-based Reserve unit were ambushed and killed Monday. One woman in their hometown asked, "How many lives are enough?"
President Bush should abandon his vacation and head to Brook Park, Ohio, and attend the military funerals of those Marines. He should see, and allow the public to see, the flag-draped coffins of just a few of the 1,828 service men and women killed in Iraq.
When he rises to eulogize those Marines, he needs to tell America again exactly why he sent them to fight.
He can explain the strategic decisions that failed to quell rebel factions intent on blowing up members of Iraq's congress, U.S. military personnel and Iraqi children.
He can talk about the blunder made in disbanding Iraq's army and the incompetence in fusing together an inept, partly corrupt police force that he just decided last month needs more hands-on guidance and training.
The president can then speak of the democracy that the Iraqi people would embrace if granted self-determination, and how that meshes with their determination and their nature to form a government in which Islamic clerics will be invested with supreme power. Or how the envisioned pluralistic society that offers freedom and equal protection to all its citizens will fade when women, by law, become subservient.
When Bush finishes explaining all this to the families of the fallen Marines, he can return to Crawford and conjure more rhetoric that runs antithetical to all that has yet occurred.
The president might continue suspending his reality long enough to believe in his own catch phrase. The rest of the nation should not.
