Can this be considered better late than never?
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.
As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."
Nope. Because, as you might expect, he still hasn't gotten the whole message:
But in a wide-ranging session in the Oval Office, the president said he interpreted the Democratic election victories six weeks ago not as a mandate to bring the U.S. involvement in Iraq to an end but as a call to find new ways to make the mission there succeed. He confirmed that he is considering a short-term surge in troops in Iraq, an option that top generals have resisted out of concern that it would not help.
To "accomplish" this (cough-cough), Mister Bush is seeking another $100 billion above the $70 billion already allocated this fiscal year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making for a total of $600 billion, or, the Post says, more than the inflation-adjusted $549 billion spent on the Vietnam War.
The President also has agreed to expand the military overall - perhaps adding another 70,000 troops - a process that will take years. Some Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, have been proposing an increase in troop strength since at least 2004 while the Administration officials, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have vigorously resisted, arguing for a lean force made effective by "restructuring." Holding firmly to this philosophy, Rumsfeld ran roughshod over naysayers like then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bush told the Post:
There's no question the military has been used a lot. And the fundamental question is, 'Will Republicans and Democrats be able to work with the administration to assure our military and the American people that we will position our military so that it is ready and able to stay engaged in a long war?' "
For many of us the questions not being asked are whether adding to troop strength can be achieved without a draft. And why the U.S. needs a larger military in the first place given that it is spending more for its armed forces than the next 20 countries on the planet combined. America has a massive military-industrial-congressional complex that eats up half of the federal government's discretionary spending, wastes vast sums on weapons systems of questionable utility to back up an imperial foreign policy that has weakened American security and emptied the nation's treasury in support of actions based on lies.
The fundamental question, Mister Bush, is not, definitely not, whether Democrats will work with Republicans in military matters. It is rather how many Democrats will be willing to stand up against accusations that their party is weak on defense and challenge the obsolete and tottering paradigm of U.S. foreign and defense policy.
