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What Direction for Iraq? Edward I. Koch Iraq will not go away.
The Democrats won a substantial victory in the November election, and it was Iraq that made it possible. The American public voted in support of "a new direction." They are entitled to have that.
What that new direction should be is now the debate.
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We have learned that two days before his "resignation" was announced and one day before the Nov. 7 election, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfled, according to The New York Times, "submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction."
Rumsfeld wrote, "In my view, it is time for a major adjustment."
The discussion now is what options are available, and which should be implemented. The revelation of the leaked Rumsfeld memo comes just days before the report of the Baker commission. The options proposed by the Baker commission will undoubtedly overlap in great part with Rumsfeld's suggestions.
According to the Times, Rumsfeld proposed "modest troop withdrawals . . . redeploying American troops from" vulnerable positions in Baghdad and other cities to safer areas in Iraq or Kuwait where they would act as a "quick reaction force," "consolidating the number of American bases" in Iraq to five from 55 by July 2007," "to punish provinces that failed to agree with the Americans by withdrawing economic assistance and security," "set a firm withdrawal date." He describes the latter as a "less attractive option."
Some experts contend that had Rumsfeld and the president made the options and discussion of them public before the election, the results of the election might have been different. We will never know. I personally doubt it, because it appears that the American public is so tired of the war that it really wants out without delay.
The public is more than signaling, it is demanding, that American soldiers be removed from harm's way and that we no longer act as the self-appointed guardian of the people of every country's right to live in safety and peace and permitted to practice Western values which are so different with respect to individual freedoms from those of radical Islam.
Indeed, Europe and even some institutions in the United States have already demonstrated their willingness to roll over like a beta wolf before the attack of the alpha wolf and beg for pardon, as they did in the case of the caricatures of Muhammad by a Danish newspaper.
There were few Western world leaders willing to applaud or stand with the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said, "We will not apologize, because we live in Denmark under Danish law, and we have freedom of speech in this country.
"If we apologized, we would betray the generations who have fought for this right, and the moderate Muslims who are democratically minded."
Indeed, the willingness to submit to threats of retaliatory terror caused many in the U.S. as well as Europe to criticize Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks denouncing Muslim violence, particularly in seeking religious conversions.
The favored use of violence was stated succinctly by the No. 1 al-Qaida operative in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who, before he was killed by an American bomb, said, "Killing the infidels is our religion; slaughtering them is our religion; until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute."
Those infidels include Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. Christians and Jews are permitted to pay tribute if they do not convert, the Muslim faith recognizing Jesus and Moses as prophets; those not believing in one God must convert or die.
The Western nations are weary of war. We should all recall how easy with the exception of England and Russia it was for the Nazis to subjugate all of Europe during World War II.
The Europeans did not have the heart in many cases or the willingness to prepare for the struggle to resist Nazi attackers and occupation. Indeed, had the U.S. not been led by FDR, we might very well have similarly succumbed, the nation then being so divided philosophically on the dangers posed by the Nazis, then facing us and the rest of the world.
So today, we are divided on the dangers facing us posed by Islamic terrorism. There are those who fight many of the defensive measures taken by the Bush administration in waging the war that could last for decades 30 or more years.
They will not willingly relinquish a single citizen's right guaranteed in times of peace relating to freedom of speech and freedom from government intrusion, e.g., security measures governing privacy, telephone conversations, records, etc.
Americans are justifiably tired of the situation in which our regional allies Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey and our NATO allies decline to join us in Iraq with boots on the ground, leaving the United States to suffer the casualties on the battlefield.
The American public is understandably fed up and believes "enough is enough." So now we must decide what to do.
First, we must acknowledge that we are witnessing a civil war in Iraq. What else can it be with Sunnis and Shia killing each other? The Times reported on Nov. 29, "In the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the American-led invasion, explosions from five powerful car bombs and a mortar shell tore through crowded intersections and marketplaces in the teeming Shiite district of Sadr City on Thursday afternoon, killing at least 144 people and wounding 206, the police said . . . Shiite revenge was swift.
"Shiite fighters fired about a dozen mortar shells into the predominately Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adhamiya in northern Baghdad, wounding at least 10 people."
So it goes, on and on.
Yet President Bush and his administration refuse to call it a civil war. It is like the Korean War with the North Koreans and Chinese, which the Truman administration refused to describe as a war, calling it a "police action."
The first item on any future agenda is to accept the truth and the facts on the ground.
We appear to be losing the war in Iraq. Henry Kissinger said on BBC television, "If you mean by clear military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control I don't believe that is possible."
I have suggested that we inform our allies we are getting out unless they come in and fight shoulder-to-shoulder with us in Iraq. That proposal, which I made many months ago, has received little support.
My second proposal is that we demand an immediate vote by the Iraqi parliament on whether or not the U.S. should keep its military forces in Iraq and under what conditions acceptable to our military command as they relate to the rules of engagement. If they refuse to take such a vote, we should announce that we are unilaterally leaving and start our withdrawal.
If they vote that we should stay, then we should set our conditions for doing so, one of which being the arrest of cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose militia continues to attack and kill American soldiers and Sunnis, and is a major part of the ongoing Iraqi civil war. Taking the parliamentary vote becomes even more critical with the release this week on CNN of "A new survey conducted by Iraqi pollsters [which] shows the daily violence is escalating Iraqi demands that U.S. troops leave.
"More than half the 2,000 Iraqis surveyed said they want all U.S. troops out now. And almost half the remainder want a withdrawal to begin immediately." Nic Robertson of CNN reported, "Members of the independent survey team [were] trained by the U.S. State Department."
Unimportant, except for the pleasure it would give Americans and the justice involved, would be the stripping of the Presidential Medals of Freedom given to L. Paul Bremer, who three years ago, disbanded the Iraqi army which, like Humpty Dumpty, does not appear to be capable of resurrection, and George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who destroyed the CIA's capability to accurately advise the president on Iraq and its possession of weapons of mass destruction. Edward I. Koch, author, lawyer, and talk-radio host, was a member of the U.S. Congress and, for 12 years, the 105th mayor of New York City.
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