War and remembrance

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, Nov. 05 2006
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/editorialcommentary/story/443FC1A5D669089D8625721C000F09FD?OpenDocument


Politicians, pollsters and the public agree: The central issue in Tuesday's midterm elections will be the war in Iraq, in all its ugly manifestations.

This is as it should be. The awful shame is that after Tuesday, George W. Bush still will have a job. So will Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and most of the rest of the arrogant and mendacious architects of the chaos.

"Chaos" is a word used advisedly. The U.S. military's Central Command has an "index of civil conflict," portrayed on one of the PowerPoint slides so beloved of briefing officers, as a continuum ranging from a yellow zone on the left marked "peace" to a red zone on the right marked "chaos." A copy of the slide obtained two weeks ago by The New York Times shows Iraq sliding steeply into the red.

No one doubts it. Not the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives of the 2,826 American service members who have given their lives — 105 last month alone, eight of them since Halloween. Not the 20,600 U.S. wounded. Not the families of the 239 deceased service members from coalition countries or the families of the Iraqi dead who may number in the hundreds of thousands.

What is there to show for 44 months of war? We have become a nation that sanctions "alternative" forms of interrogation, torture in all but name. We are a nation whose president can order his own wiretaps, without benefit of the courts, and ignore the Congress with "signing statements" that claim to redefine the meaning of legislation. We are a nation that sacrifices young soldiers and Marines and refuses to sacrifice itself.

Abroad, we are loathed across the Muslim world. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein is on trial in an endless farce. Kurdish northern Iraq is stable, kept that way by its own deadly Peshmerga militia. Southern Iraq is a Shia theocracy, an incipient satellite of Iran, kept stable by an army loyal to Shiite mullahs, not to any foreigner's notion of a unified Iraq. In southern Iraqi cities like Basra and al Najaf, hotel phones are answered in both Arabic, the language of Iraq, and Farsi, the language of Iran. And Central Iraq, north and west from Baghdad, is in the throes — and not the last throes, either — of a sectarian war.

To the extent that Iraq is governed at all, it is governed by a democratically elected parliament. That is an achievement, to be sure, but one diminished by the utter fecklessness of Iraq's leaders. The nation's first democratically chosen prime minister couldn't govern, so he was replaced by Nouri al-Maliki, who won't govern. He is in charge of an army, many of whose soldiers won't fight, and a police force infested with Shiite thugs whose idea of legitimate police procedure involves electric drills and beheadings. Huge sections of Baghdad and central Iraq are under the control of competing Sunni and Shia militias. Last month the United States moved 12,000 extra soldiers into Baghdad to quell the violence, but two-thirds of the Iraqi troops who were supposed to help were no-shows.

The United States has poured $319 billion to bring us to this fix, selling the debt to foreign nations. Billions of dollars has enriched U.S. contractors, but have done little to rebuild Iraq's battered infrastructure. The country's power supply has just reached pre-war levels; many of its hospitals and schools still are unfinished, and in Baghdad power is on for only six hours a day. The job of repairing the oil infrastructure was handed to Halliburton Co., Vice President Cheney's old firm, and still the job is undone. And it won't get done. All the money is gone, the job is unfinished, and Stuart Bowen, the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, says much of it was squandered or unaccounted for. The Bush administration's response was to eliminate Mr. Bowen's job.

It's time to try something different in Iraq. It's time to sit down with Mr. Maliki and his government and create a sense of urgency. Pull U.S. troops back over the horizon, enlist international help and let Iraq become Iraq's responsibility. It will be ugly and violent, but it's already ugly and violent. The U.S. presence, tragically, is prolonging the agony.

But before then, it's accountability time. Mr. Bush would have us forget how this whole thing got started: the erroneous weapons of mass destruction issues; the incompetent intelligence-gathering; the trumped-up rationales for xenophobia of all colors and stripes; the war-without-pain argument; the inadequate troop strength and inadequate body armor; the lack of an exit strategy.

Tuesday is the moment of reckoning. Remember the president's congressional accomplices and enablers, some of them arrogant bullies, some of them blind mice. Remember those who didn't challenge his specious reasoning and used patriotism to fan the flames of war. Remember those complicit in the profiteering. Remember those who clucked about our brave troops and denied them body armor, who cashed checks from contractors and watched the war gut the U.S. Army. Remember those who stood, silent — fearful of being branded as soft on terror — as the moral authority of this nation sank into bestiality and brutality at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

This election is about Iraq, all right. Remember what this nation stands for.