4th and Long
President Bush's Commitment of more troops to Iraq isn't just unpopular-it's a last-ditch gamble against tough odds
Nearly lost in all the clamor surrounding President Bush's decision to send an additional 21,500 American soldiers to Iraq is just how seismic a shift he is making. In one fell swoop, Bush is effectively repudiating many of the basic tenets that have been the foundation of his Iraq strategy-namely, that political progress would eventually quell the violence and that most Iraqis support America's efforts to build a democracy there.
It wasn't hard to miss. In his subdued prime-time address to the nation, Bush glossed over the minirevolution in his administration's approach. Notoriously reluctant to admit mistakes, Bush offered a bland, passive apology. "Where mistakes have been made," he said, "the responsibility rests me with." Yet documents released by the White House describing the new policy are surprisingly specific about how much has changed. The primary threat is no longer just a Sunni insurgency; it is now "violent extremists from multiple communities." Political progress alone will not lessen the violence; "political and economic progress are unlikely absent a basic level of security." Even more dramatic, the White House concedes that Iraqis don't all support its democracy-building efforts; instead, they are "increasingly disillusioned" by them.
Bush may have undersold his policy makeover, but any sales job may have been doomed from the start. He faces a war-weary public numbed by the relentless violence in Iraq, as well as a political climate already consumed by the 2008 presidential contest.
The Bush plan has been widely derided as "too little, too late." With the additional soldiers, the U.S. presence in Iraq will not quite top 155,000. For the first three years of the war, military experts complained that there simply weren't enough troops to pacify Iraq. "As of a year ago, the surge would have added combat power to your force relative to its challenge," says Wayne White, formerly the State Department's top intelligence expert on Iraq. "Since then, we've had a virtual sectarian civil war opening up a second front."
Now, many U.S. military officials are skeptical that additional forces can accomplish much when dozens of bodies are turning up daily, victims of sectarian death squads. A senior Pentagon official compares it to a situation where "you have a house on fire and you're dumping 140,000 gallons of water a minute on it to put it out-but you still have a gas line going into the building feeding the fire. Well, you can pour on an extra 20,000 gallons a minute, but first you have to turn the gas off."
No holds barred. White House officials came to a very different conclusion. "You can't get the necessary political deals in the absence of personal security," says a senior U.S. official. So, instead of mostly training Iraqi forces to provide security, Bush now wants U.S. forces to provide security for the Iraqi people, putting the troops at greater risk. Most of the additional U.S. soldiers will be headed to Baghdad, where some will be stationed with Iraqi forces at about 30 joint security posts around the capital.
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