IT WAS wrenching to listen to President Bush's news conference yesterday. He's struggling to do the right thing. But he's getting terrible advice. He's still counting on a political solution in Iraq. Ain't going to happen. And you can take that to the blood bank. Our famously loyal president has one grave flaw: He's a poor judge of character. He trusts the wrong people. Then he sticks by them.
Harsh, but fair. President Bush likes to be a nice guy, but sometimes he's too nice to get the job done. President Lincoln was also a man of great character, but he had no qualms about firing his top people until he got the results he wanted.
Next, Peters talks about the release of al-Sadr's top assassin, facilitated by the Iraqi government.
As a former intelligence officer, that told me two things: First, Iraq's prime minister is betting on Muqtada to prevail, not us. Second, Muqtada, not the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is now the most powerful man in Iraq.
At his news conference, Bush was asked about another statement made by Maliki just hours before. Our troops had conducted a raid in Sadr City, Muqtada's Baghdad stronghold. The Iraqi PM quickly declared that "this will not happen again." He was signaling his allegiance to Muqtada. Publicly.
Oh, Maliki realizes his government wouldn't last a week if our troops withdrew. He doesn't want us to leave yet. But he's looking ahead.
This is exactly the point. Everyone can see the handwriting on the wall. America may be fantastically powerful, but we're deeply unreliable. Al-Sadr may not be nearly as strong, but he's as dependable as the sunrise. He will be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.
If we fail to kill him, Al-Sadr will be the future of Iraq. We'll be as tired of looking at him in 2050 as we are looking at Fidel Castro now. He'll be every ounce the thorn in our side as Castro or Saddam was. All he has to do is wait.
And after we've killed Muqtada and destroyed his Mahdi Army, we need to go after the Sunni insurgents. If we can't leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies.
The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: "We can't kill our way out of this situation!" Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven't done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.
I don't really think this point requires any elaboration. I fear it may be too late in the game to pull the gloves off. We're already pretty gunshy of bad PR. In a perfect world, this makes sense. In the politically weak kneed 2006 we find ourselves in, seeing this option is unlikely, at best.
Good comments.
Great piece by Peters..... Hope our strategists are listening.
Everyone can see the handwriting on the wall except Bush and Rumsfeld
I agree with him about when the turning point was ,capturing that leader and then releasing him because AlSadr said so. When I read that I said what the Hell is going on! If Bush wants to get everyone to get along and not hurt anyones feelings, fine, say so but dont call it a WAR because it is not.
It seems to me we better make a choice as to what we are trying to accomplish or better how we are trying to achieve what ever it is we are trying achieve and explain it a lot better than Bush is doing because when we release the enemy we capture because the enemy says so this is insanity.