Facing The Unknown
Still more violence in Iraq--and lots more questions
"Rose-colored glasses." With so much uncertainty, there has been the predictable talk of quagmire and calls for pulling the plug. But they have been relatively few, and mostly muted. Most Americans, polls show, are still willing to try to get things right in Iraq. It won't be easy. "The work that must be done in Iraq," warns Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "will test our national fortitude." Wolfowitz, in his testimony last week, sounded a similar theme. "I'm not here to paint a rosy picture or to view this through rose-colored glasses," he said. "There are enormous problems."
Voters, clearly, are waiting for some kind of resolution of those problems. A slight majority of Americans now disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq, but they nevertheless believe that he can do a better job than John Kerry. In Indianapolis, where Senator Lugar was once the mayor, Lucinda Kahl, 41, is among the nearly 60 percent of Americans who, according to polls, think the nation is now bogged down in Iraq. "Things are going very bad," she says, sipping on a hot chocolate at a Starbucks. "I don't think we need to put any more troops there, and I think we need to get out the ones we already have there."
Such sentiments could change--quickly--depending on how things go in Iraq. A recent Washington Post -ABC News poll found that 54 percent disapprove of the way the president is handling Iraq, while 45 percent approve. That should worry the White House, though those same respondents, by a 47-to-42 margin, said that they would vote for Bush over Kerry if the election were held now. But having sold the war once to the American people, Bush today finds himself having to sell it over and over again. April was the single most deadly month in Iraq, with 105 American troops killed in the first 22 days.
Bearing burdens. While it is unlikely to prove militarily significant, the violence has changed things. The kidnappings and attacks on westerners are forcing contractors like Siemens and General Electric to suspend some projects and pull workers out, making it difficult for Bush to deploy his most potent weapon--the billions of dollars Congress appropriated to help rebuild the country. Even if the violence abates and the Brahimi plan is put in place, it may be hard to win the support of many ordinary Iraqis. Baghdad will have no control over U.S. troops and few reliable security officers of its own.
For months, U.S. officials had been boasting that there were more Iraqis than Americans working to secure the country. Those assurances provided a glimmer of an exit strategy. But the uprisings have punctured that vision. Most of the Iraqi guards have little training and even less motivation. Many now say the Pentagon leadership insisted, for political reasons, first on using a smaller force than necessary after the war and then on a faster shift to Iraqi security forces than was responsible. Says Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq analyst at the CIA now at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy: "The administration's determination to generate numbers has come at the expense of quality security forces that can actually do the job." Adds Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle: "The cost, both in terms of human life as well as in resources, has become deeply troubling. . . . There is no way that this country ought to be called upon to bear the burden and the responsibility as single-handedly as it has."
Any new money the Pentagon seeks for Iraq would come on the heels of the $87 billion Congress approved last year to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration has consistently said that that money would be enough for the rest of the year and that there would be no request for additional war funding until January, conveniently, right after the election. But the recent violence has changed those calculations. Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says keeping those 20,000 troops in Iraq for another three months will cost roughly $700 million. The Pentagon, he added, may overspend by some $4 billion by the end of the year. Another thing no one in the administration anticipated just a year ago.
With Kevin Whitelaw and Marc D. Allan
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