The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq - New York Times
The New York Times

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December 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq
By
FRANK RICH

IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the
high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.

The report
of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood
holiday release. There was a feel-good title, "The Way Forward,"
unfortunately
chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its
last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy
. There was a months-long buildup, with
titillating sneak previews
to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day,
starting with a
President Bush cameo
timed for morning television and building to a "Sunshine Boys"
curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on "Larry King Live.
"

The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has
lately been
recruited by Wal-Mart
to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman's
vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan
presidency, and "The Way Forward" had a nostalgic dash of that old
Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder
gushingly quoted
one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that "immigration, Social
Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long"
might benefit
from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an
unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.

Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is
Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990's he famously coined
the
phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe the erosion of civic standards
for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is
defining reality down. "The Way Forward" is its apotheosis.

This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run
from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly
unique.
Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon
of realism by Washington last week simply for
agreeing with his Senate questioners
that we're "not winning" in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor
than Mr. Bush's "
absolutely, we're winning
" of late October, it's hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual
reality is that we have lost in Iraq.

That's what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as
he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage
in his
parting memo
listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public
expectations for success be downsized so we would "therefore not 'lose.' "
By putting
the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration
must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we've done. The
illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.

The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how
the country Mr. Bush called a "
grave and gathering danger
" in September 2002 has devolved into a "grave and deteriorating"
catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the
president knew this
already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from
diagnosis to prescription.

Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are
completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional
Iraqi troops
would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers.
And if reconciliation among the country's warring ethnicities could be
mandated
on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to
persuade Iran and Syria to "influence events" for America's benefit. It
would also
be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.

The group's coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters,
equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse
to timelines)
or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example:
Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more
military
advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there's no reason to believe
they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who
came
before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities
of the existing units are suspect as it is.

By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn't plotting a way
forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact
a charade
of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain,
for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game
can
be found in a single sentence: "We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in
Iraq, as stated by the president: 'an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain
itself,
and defend itself.' " This studious group knows that even that modest goal,
a radical devaluation of the administration's ambition to spread democracy
throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi
government's ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group's
members
visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb)
daring to leave the Green Zone
. The
Bush-Maliki rendezvous
10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.

The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however
evanescently, come not from "The Way Forward" but from its critics on the
right who want
significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a
Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that
a
true counterinsurgency campaign would "
require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well
as heavily armed Iraqi police,
" not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John
McCain.

Since these troops don't exist and there is no public support in either
America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can't satisfy the hawks
even
if he chooses to do so. Since he's also dead set against a prompt
withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many
"reviews" he
conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to
keep us from thinking we've "lost," until the whole mess is deposited in the
lap of the next president.

But
as Chuck Hagel said last week
, "The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can't quite
calibrate." It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to
suppose
that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group's
insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for
the sake
of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission.
Meanwhile the violence metastasized.
Eleven more of our soldiers
were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists
in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The
mass
exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled "
the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world
" by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur's.

THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968,
L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with
a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war's violence boiled over
soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in
our coalition of the willing - Thailand, the Philippines, Australia - had
balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of
American
policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of
South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government
that
American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan
group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the
White
House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.

But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike
the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president,
unlike
ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced
he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the
idea
of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in "Vietnam: A History," it
was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of
all-out
war, for an easy escape: "The frustrating talks were to drag on for another
five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there
previously.
And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal
upheavals in a century."

The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now,
they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that
we
have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may
salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service
to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and
promotes pipe dreams of
one last chance
for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more
delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.