The real "State of Denial"


It's not about Bush "lying," it's about failure to go full bore
RIch Lowry has a different take on Bob Woodward's new book.

The most important aspect of Woodward’s book isn’t this “news,” but the insight it gives into how the U.S. government has arrived at such a middling, uninspired campaign in Iraq — just enough not to win and just enough not to lose. As State Department adviser Philip Zelikow thought after a visit to Iraq in 2005, in Woodward’s words, “There was too much barely coping, just getting by and making incremental improvements.”

We have been barely coping because we have never made a decision to go all-out, partly due to the restraining influence of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. Oddly, given the way he has become a hate-figure for Democrats, it is Rumsfeld who is perhaps closest to the Democrats’ preferred Iraq strategy as any other major figure in the Bush administration.

Rumsfeld is not interested in trying to win the war outright, so much as handing the effort over to the Iraqis. According to Woodward, “Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and come up with solutions.”

He has tried to head off anything more robust than letting the Iraqis fend for themselves. In October 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to describe the U.S. approach in Iraq as the classic counterinsurgency operation of “clear, hold and build” — referring to the clearing of Iraqi insurgents from a territory and then its securing and rebuilding. Rumsfeld was outraged. Woodward writes that Rumsfeld believed, “It was wrong to say that the United States’ ‘political-military strategy’ was all about what the U.S. would do and not what the Iraqis would do.”

That is what the Democrats should capitalize on. Not that the Bush Administration did too much, but that they haven't done enough. We've been so busy tiptoeing around that we haven't shown what Americans are supposed to do, getting the job done.

Democrats are the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. These were Presidents who took stands and did what it took to accomplish the goals.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - October 4, 2006 at 06:00 PM  Tag


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