It's time to acknowledge the truth. President Bush's policies in Iraq have been an utter failure. I say this as someone who supported the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – and as someone who still believes these were noble and morally right endeavors.
When we undertook the decision to invade Iraq, there were good reasons to do so:
- Saddam Hussein was an ally and supporter of Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaida;
- Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant responsible for unimaginable torture, repression of his own people and a war in the Middle East that killed more than 1 million;
- Saddam Hussein refused to disclose where his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons had gone – some of which had already been used to kill thousands of Kurds in his own country;
- Saddam Hussein had a long history of efforts to develop nuclear weapons and we – all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike – were all uncertain about the status of his progress.
President Bush had rightly declared that we would fight the kind of enemy that had attacked us Sept. 11, 2001, wherever we found it. And, there was no question that enemy had an ally in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
It was a logical – if not the only – possible next front in our war on Islamofascists. And, make no mistake about it, Saddam Hussein, though hardly a pious Muslim, fit the description of Islamofascist to the T.
The war was conducted brilliantly in its first phase – the toppling of the dictator.
The second phase, we all understood, would be trickier. Bush and his spokesmen rightly predicted that Iraq could prove to be a battleground that attracted our Islamofascist enemies from around the world. That would be a good thing, they explained. Better to fight them on the battlefield of our choosing than on the battlefield of their choosing. Better to fight them over there than over here.
So far, so good.
The tragic mistake came in the execution of this second phase of the war – which today, we're told, is not a war at all, but a "situation."
Brave, dedicated, well-trained and well-armed U.S. soldiers were given new orders. They could not crush the enemy under new rules of engagement. They had to fight with one hand tied behind their back. This was more akin to a police action than a war. U.S. soldiers were court-martialed left and right. Military decisions had to be made in consultation with Iraqi leaders and politicians in Washington. When enemy strongholds were identified, we could no longer simply engage and destroy them.
Iraq did become, in a sense, another Vietnam – though U.S. casualties never rose to similarly shocking numbers. It was never about not having enough troops on the ground, as some suggested. It was a matter of not allowing them to kill people and break things – which is what soldiers do.
The mantra for the Bush administration became "stay the course."
When progress is measured in years and billions of dollars and rising casualty figures, "stay the course" is a losing slogan – as we all found out on Election Day.
Bush had become Lyndon Johnson in 1968. And now, having orchestrated the Democratic takeover of the Congress, he is Richard Nixon in 1972.
America is now waving the white flag again. Now it's just about finding a way out of Iraq – an "honorable" retreat. Bush missed the opportunity to do what he set out to do – or told us he set out to do. He refused to defeat the enemy by any means necessary. He refused to go for the jugular and achieve victory over the Islamofascists. And, in war, anything short of victory is defeat.
No matter what you might think about our entry into this war in Iraq, the undeniable reality today is that we are fighting al-Qaida – the terrorist group that attacked this country Sept. 11, 2001, killing 3,000 Americans, destroying the World Trade Center and even damaging the Pentagon itself, something no enemy in America's history had ever accomplished.
That's who we are fighting in Iraq now. Just as Bush and his spokesmen had promised, they came from around the world to engage America – not in an attempt to defeat our troops on the battlefield, which they understood they could never do, but simply to make our stay there costly and uncomfortable. Their goal was the same as the North Vietnamese Communists' goal – bleed America in a dragged out conflict of low intensity so that opposition forces back home make it impossible to stay.
That's exactly what happened.
Now, it's just a waiting game for our enemies. They have won. The die is cast. The opportunity to destroy the Islamofascists on the battlefield of our choosing has been squandered.
With this bad experience behind us, it is unlikely we will choose to fight them again on any other foreign battlefield.
And that means only one thing – we will be forced to fight them here.