Call it a victory, and get out

As America awaits the return of the body of the 3,000th soldier to die in Iraq, President Bush prepares to send 30,000 more troops on a missionless mission, to fight an unseen enemy who will rely on sniper fire and roadside bombs to inflict their casualties. The time has long since passed when Bush should have declared victory and prepared to make an orderly exit, leaving the Iraqis to decide whether they wished to resolve this escalating sectarian conflict in the streets and alleys of Baghdad or in some more civilized fashion.

The American people thought they had resolved this issue with a decisive vote this November that clearly endorsed the Democratic alternative of an orderly disengagement: fewer and fewer troops in the line of fire, not more and more. Surely, the American people thought that vote was ratified by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s suggestion for a slow disengagement, emphasizing training, not combat roles for American troops, and diplomacy, not force, for America’s leadership.

America’s “leadership” has responded with a stubborn refusal to listen. Those who thought the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld marked a change of course did not listen carefully to Bush’s press conference on the day that resignation was announced: He freely admitted that he had asked for the resignation a month earlier, and decided to delay its announcement (and lie to the press about the plan before the election) purely as a matter of election tactics; he didn’t wish to appear weak before the election.

Ever-present political considerations and overweening pride are the two hallmarks of the Bush presidency. With nothing to lose politically now, Bush’s only remaining motive is overweening pride. He cannot let the right wing fringe paint him as a loser. Getting out of Iraq, he said over a year ago, was something his successor would have to deal with. He will try to send an additional 30,000 troops and try to keep them there for the remaining 24 months of his presidency.

The voices he listens to are not the American electorate or its gray eminences such as the Iraq Study Group, but the ever-present, but rarely seen, Dick Cheney, and a new player on the scene, Fred Kagan, of a right wing “think” tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Kagan was arguing for a vastly increased military and an invasion of Iraq in 2000, and seems as incapable of learning from experience as Bush himself.

Kagan’s thesis is that 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops in Baghdad and Anbar Province would get troops in those two regions at the recommended concentration for an army occupying a foreign land. That ratio might work for a country that had not already descended into a fate worse than civil war: total anarchy. But the time for a more robust occupying force expired by the summer of 2003.

In the early months of the occupation, we were seen in more neutral terms by the Iraqis. Now, the most recent poll of Iraqis, cited by the Iraq Study Group, shows that 61 percent of all Iraqis feel that attacks on American forces are justified. Given the generally good feelings that the Kurdish north, representing over 20 percent of the population, has for the American invasion that created a quasi-independent Kurdistan, this poll result suggests that over three-quarters of Sunni and Shia Iraqi Arabs, fully 15 million people, are willing to actively or passively support attacks on our troops.

We have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. We cannot now, or ever, undo that loss.

I ask those who insist that we can’t “abandon” Iraq to chaos by a slow disengagement to consider the status quo. Careful researchers at John Hopkins have estimated that since March of 2003, 600,000 Iraqis have died violent deaths. Even if this estimate doubles the actual loss, 300,000 violent deaths represents more than 1 percent of the population of Iraq. Between warring religious factions, rampant crime, and battles among sectarian factions of the same faith, Iraq is now in such a state of anarchy that an organized civil war, with battling militias, would be an improvement for Iraqi civilians.

But the Iraqi people are powerless to bring an end to the occupation they increasingly despise.

The American people are not. While President Bush stubbornly wishes to pursue a course that will lead to 5,000 American deaths and a minimum of $550 billion in direct costs of the war, he cannot legally spend money that Congress has not appropriated. Let Congress set a ceiling on funding for troops in Iraq at the current level of deployment. They can hardly be accused of not supporting troops under fire; they will simply be insisting that no more troops be deployed. If Bush refuses to abide by these spending restrictions, let us hope that Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins will abandon their unseemly silence and speak out about Bush’s attempt to prolong a war we long ago won.

Arthur Greif is an attorney practicing in Bangor.