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The truth on Iraq

It took the generals to paint the grim, accurate picture of this war. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld offered nothing but the usual spin.

By Times editorial
Published August 6, 2006

Americans have finally heard an official account of what's happening in Iraq that reflects the grim reality - and it didn't come from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Sandwiched between the top two generals responsible for carrying out his orders, Rumsfeld answered a Senate committee's concerns with the same befuddled bromides he has spouted since the beginning. It was left to the generals to finally level with Americans.

"The sectarian violence (in Iraq) is probably as bad as I've seen it," Gen. John Abizaid, commander of military operations in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said nothing to lessen that concern. "We do have the possibility of that devolving to a civil war, but that does not have to be a fact," he said. "We need the Iraqi people to seize this moment."

Instead, the Iraqi people are increasingly seizing every opportunity to turn against their neighbor. Putting our soldiers in the middle of a civil war between religious and ethnic factions is not something the American people are willing to accept. Already more than 2,500 American soldiers have died in the chaotic violence that has lost clear purpose. Polls show that most Americans already doubt there will be a satisfactory conclusion to the war.

Only Rumsfeld persists in his simplistic world view that has long since been belied by reality. With logic reminiscent of the Vietnam War, Rumsfeld justified the continued risk to our military this way: "If we left Iraq prematurely, as the terrorists demand, the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they'd order us and all those who don't share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines."

That's some domino theory. This comes from a defense secretary who said he still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction long after it was proved otherwise, who said six months ago that Iraq would not be a long war, who said a year ago that the insurgency couldn't be defeated by the American military but only by the Iraqi people.

Asked whose side America will be on in an Iraqi civil war, Rumsfeld had a disconcerting answer. "I'm reluctant to speculate about that," he said.

How about this for an answer, something we are not going to hear from Rumsfeld: America is on the side of its military, which is being exhausted in a war it wasn't adequately prepared to wage. America is on the side of its soldiers, who are dying and suffering grievous wounds in increasing numbers for a cause few at home understand. America is on the side of an effective response to terrorism, which has been undermined by the terribly flawed calculations of its own secretary of defense.

[Last modified August 6, 2006, 06:37:52]