BBC Analyst Jon Leyne, based in Baghdad, offers his scenario for the challenges facing President Bush as he prepares to address the nation tomorrow night on Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4628695.stm
Leyne notes that in recent days, Administration spokesmen have been delivering clearly contradictory messages....from statements by the VP that the insurgency is in its last throes, to General Abizaid saying that things are bad and may be getting worse (and unmentioned, Rumsfeld's admission that we could be in Iraq for 12 years or more.)
He says the Administration's current hopes clearly rest on some sort of political resolution -- the drafting of a Constitution (already long delayed), a possible October referendum and December, 2005 elections. The US has been pressing moderate Iraqis to help bring resistant Sunnis into the process in an effort to undermine the resisters and even talking in secret with leaders of the uprising.
More below the fold.....
However, he then notes....none of this has had any measurable effect on the uprising (which seems to be getting more widespread and bloodier each day. The Iraqi people live daily with general living conditions worse than they faced under Saddam's rule as regards electricity, clean water, trash pickup, not having infrastructure destroyed by terrorist attacks and hundreds of their countrymen blown up each WEEK in suicide bomb attacks and accidental fatalities caused by understandably antsy coalition troops.
While well over 100,000 Iraqis have been trained for police and military duty, but this too, Lyne notes, has been dogged by poor training and lack of equipment (and continued terror bombing attacks against recruits and threats to anyone suspected of being involved.) Meanwhile, as many have noted, US troops often have ill-disguised contempt for the quality of Iraqi troops and it is clear that there is little likelihood that a competent military/police force is going to be in place any time soon.
As a result, Lyne concludes, the Bush Administration really has only two valid options:
1- Prepare the American public for a very long haul or
2- Start working on an exit strategy with the humiliation it would entail (not to mention the intense criticism which would immediately flow over the decisions which led us into this quagmire in the first place) and the very real risk of a protracted civil war and regional instability.
We'll know Tuesday night whether Bush and his team have gotten to this point. It seems inevitable that it will come at some point, but these guys have lived so long in a fervent belief that they are on a royal cause "to promote freedom and democracy" that they are blind to the fact that they have made our nation weaker, encouraged terrorism, intensified anti-American feelings worldwide, weakened our economy, bolstered croneyism and corruption, and in fact abandoned and/or weakened many of the key principles of our system of both democracy and law.
I for one will be very surprised if we hear anything more than another "stay the course" repetition of the falsehoods and misleads which got us to this place from the beginning.