Published on Tuesday, May 1, 2007 by The Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
Bush’s Farewell Tantrum
by Paul Campos
A story in The New York Times makes it clear White House officials are giving off-the-record interviews designed to dampen expectations regarding Iraq. These officials are saying that the administration will make no interim reports on the situation until September, and that in any event people shouldn’t expect much in the way of military or political progress by then.This is a welcome dose of realism after months of optimistic statements from the Bush administration, claiming we would know by the end of the summer if the latest troop escalation was “working.” As Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of the American military in Iraq has emphasized, the kind of counterinsurgency campaign his troops are now fighting takes years to “work” in any meaningful sense, assuming it ever does.
Of course the purpose of this ratcheting down of expectations is to try to forestall the political firestorm over Iraq that gets closer with every passing month. That effort is almost certainly doomed to fail: Six months from now things in Iraq are likely to look very much as they do now. Furthermore, the odds that any marked change will be for the worse are far higher than it will be for the better (in a context like Iraq, real progress takes years under the best of circumstances, while all-out chaos is always just around the corner).
The hard political reality is that anything like “success” in Iraq, even as that term is defined down to levels that would have seemed wildly pessimistic when President Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech four years ago, will require several more years of all-out commitment. That commitment will cost, at a minimum, the lives of several thousand more of our troops, along with tens of thousands of serious injuries, and hundreds of billions more tax dollars.
And of course this immense sacrifice might very well fail to achieve even the relatively modest goals the White House is now pursuing (the word “victory” has become noticeably absent from the president’s speeches). .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/01/889/
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