The Washington Post must be reeling from the onslaught of reader comments to the Broder column this morning. They're looking for reinforcement from the Beltway crowd. The deputy editor of The Washington Post sent out this e-mail to a bunch of elite "opinion makers":
Is Harry Reid right? Is the Iraq War lost?
The Washington Post's Outlook section wants to hear how people in the know would answer this ringing question. So we're asking a variety of people around town and in the political/military/media/diplomatic community to tell us what they think. We'd love it if you could send us no more than 50 words from the senator, starting with a blunt "yes" or "no" and then explaining why, for publication in this Sunday's Outlook.
You can send responses directly to this e-mail. I'll need your reply by 2 p.m. Thursday, April 26.
Look forward to hearing from you soon, and many thanks.
Best,
Warren
_______________
Warren Bass
Deputy Editor, Outlook
The Washington Post
How much do you want to bet the recipients of this e-mail are the same "opinion makers" who aided and abetted the Bush administration into going into this war in the first place? I can't wait to see the line up in Sunday's paper, to find out how many of them are the same people who have been wrong on this war for the entirety of the four years we've been in it. Those who forwarded the false claims about WMD and Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. Those who warned Democrats that running in opposition to the Iraq war in 2006 would hurt them, that opposing this president would cripple the Democrats.
The 2006 election should have been enough for The Washington Post editors to understand that the American people have stopped listening to the constant stream of blathering from Beltway "opinion makers." We are fully capable of making up our own minds based upon the evidence we see before us every day on the evening news and in the morning paper.
Yes, Mr. Bass, the war is lost. It was lost before it started, when the administration blithely ignored the advice of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki for the need for "hundreds of thousands" of troops to achieve their goal, and fired him for his public candor. Those troops were needed for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement. They were needed to patrol the borders with Syria and Iran to intercept the flows of foreign terrorists, money, and weapons. Those troops were not present, and those actions were not taken. The result has been a disastrous, bloody, civil war for which we were utterly unprepared.
The war was lost when the Bush administration shut the international community out of the invasion, out of the reconstruction effort and out of any attempt to negotiate a peace among Iraqi factions. The war was lost when a small group of planners in the Pentagon ignored the expert advice from State Department for the post-invasion plan, believing that the Iraq people would welcome the invaders as liberators.
Four years, 3334 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives later, with no end in sight and no clear vision from the administration of what "victory" would even mean, any rational person would have to conclude that this war is lost. That group of rational people includes General David Petraeus who has said
"There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency of Iraq," Petraeus told a news conference, adding that political negotiations were crucial to forging any lasting peace.
This administration is not interested in political negotiations. As Gen. Petraeus has said, there is no military solution to this war, and a military "solution" is all that the Bush administration can offer--the escalation, which has served primarily thus far to make our troops in outposts even more vulnerable to attack. The result has been the highest rate of American deaths since the war began, as reported by the McClatchy news service.
Yes, Mr. Bass, the war is lost. The Beltway crowd, which I would remind you has been wrong on every aspect of this war to date, might not recognize it yet, but the rest of the nation most certainly does. Harry Reid was just the first person, recognizing what is at stake for the nation every day that this war continues, to say it out loud. He will most certainly not be the last.