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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/24/2003 10:24 AM (GMT -6) |   |
McCain: More Troops for Iraq
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A17
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said after visiting Baghdad last week that President Bush needs to level with the public about the need for more U.S. troops as well as dramatically more spending to make postwar Iraq peaceful enough for democracy to unfold.
McCain said that, when he returns from the Middle East, he plans to mount a heavy campaign on the issue in meetings with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials and during hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"We need to tell the American people directly, and I think they'll support it," McCain said from Islamabad, Pakistan. "We must win this conflict. We need a lot more military, and I'm convinced we need to spend a lot more money."
When Bush returns next weekend after a month at his ranch in Texas, one of the first political firestorms he will confront is a broad effort by Democrats on Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail to convince the public that the administration's plans for postwar Iraq need rapid revision.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said last week that the administration had "vastly underestimated" the policing and the work on Iraq's infrastructure that would be needed.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said commanders have assured him that the level of U.S. troops in Iraq is adequate. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell asked the United Nations to encourage members to send more troops to Iraq as part of a U.S.-led coalition, and Bush said he expects more foreign troops to arrive in Iraq.
Aides said Bush plans to ask for more funds for Iraq in a supplemental budget request later this year. He has refused to give any range for how much might be needed.
Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Friday during a visit to The Washington Post that the amount will depend on the flow of oil, the security situation and the level of international contributions.
"I think the president will be comfortable coming forward with his proposal when he feels confident enough in the numbers that we feel we can give it a good justification," Bolten said. "We thought the only responsible thing to do was wait until we had a clearer picture of what the answers to those questions would be."
The skeptics' case has been bolstered by the continuing casualties among U.S. troops and by the administration's admission -- after the bombing Tuesday of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad -- that foreign-fed terrorism has become a grave threat in Iraq.
McCain, who is leading a bipartisan House and Senate delegation throughout the Middle East, said Friday that he estimates the United States needs to add $13 billion to $15 billion for reconstruction alone, "as quick as we can spend it."
He said the failure to restore basic services more widely could lead to more violence.
"When it's 125 degrees and people don't have electricity and water, they get very unhappy," he said. "Time is not on our side."
A Newsweek poll released yesterday found that 60 percent of respondents thought the United States was spending too much in Iraq and should scale back, and that 69 percent were concerned the United States would be bogged down for many years in Iraq without making much progress.
The telephone poll of 1,011 adults was conducted Thursday and Friday, after Tuesday's bombing of the U.N. offices, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/24/2003 3:54 PM (GMT -6) | | Will tax-cutting GOP pony up for much-needed troops and aid?
http://www.workingforchange.com/art...FTOKEN=86907594
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Washington Post Writers
WASHINGTON -- Can we now please admit that the Bush administration's policies in Iraq are a terrible failure?
The terrorist truck bomb that blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad this week also blew up the pretensions of an arrogant strategy that assumed the United States could do nation-building on the cheap. It was an approach that assumed we needed little support from traditional allies, only a limited number of American troops and relatively modest expenditures to rebuild a shattered country.
Perhaps even more disturbing than the administration's indifference to the truth or falsity of the various claims it made before the war is the fact that it seemed to believe its own propaganda. President Bush and Vice President Cheney really thought that if they wished it, it would come -- "it" in this case being not only a quick victory in the war but also a rapid rallying of Iraqis to the American standard afterward.
Last March on "Meet the Press," moderator Tim Russert asked Cheney: "If your analysis is not correct and we're not treated as liberators but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, bloody battle with significant American casualties?"
Cheney replied: "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
The vice president said he knew this because he and the president had met with "various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. ... The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."
Please look at those sentences again. Note that for its reading of the situation inside Iraq, the administration relied on people who spent their lives outside Iraq. The administration believed the outsiders because the outsiders said what the administration wanted to hear -- and, perhaps, because the administration had no clue as to how people inside Iraq might react.
It's astonishing that Bush and his advisers never seemed to take seriously the obvious possibility: that many, perhaps most, Iraqis -- especially the Shiite Muslim majority so oppressed by Saddam Hussein -- could be perfectly happy to have the United States get rid of their dictator and then want U.S. troops to leave immediately.
And will anyone in the administration ever be held accountable for putting down Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff before the war? Shinseki told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early March that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required to occupy a postwar Iraq.
Two days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described Shinseki's estimate as "way off the mark." Cheney was also dismissive. In his "Meet the Press" appearance, he insisted that "to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement."
It's now clear that the courageous 139,000 American troops in Iraq are insufficient to guarantee security -- including their own. Shinseki was right. Wolfowitz and Cheney were wrong. Will Wolfowitz and Cheney ever apologize to Shinseki?
And consider our president's statement on July 2 in response to a question about attackers targeting our troops. "Bring 'em on," our president declared. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." Mr. President, they're bringing it on.
What's required? It's obvious we need more troops in Iraq. Since the administration downplayed the cost of the occupation before hostilities started, that may be hard to sell to the American people now. Since we don't want to bear the whole burden of this enterprise ourselves, we desperately need much more help from allies. We'll soon learn how much crow the administration is willing to eat to make that happen.
And we need to spend a lot more money to put Iraqis to work, to fix Iraq's oil facilities and to repair its electric power system. Will the administration and its neoconservative allies ever admit that their big government policies abroad are inconsistent with their tax cuts for the rich at home?
Now that we have invaded Iraq, we cannot afford to let the place go to pieces. The administration can hold fast to its arrogance. Or it can acknowledge its mistakes and chart a new course.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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