Dear Mr. Bolten,
It was with great interest and disappointment that I read your September 5 replyto Senate Democrats’ September 4 communication to President Bush. I had hoped that you would acknowledge the failures of the overall strategy and specific tactics the President and Pentagon have adopted so far in Iraq, and reassure not only Harry Reid, but also the American people that the Administration was committed to repairing the worsening situation there.
You discussed three elements of the Democrats’ proposed course in Iraq, saying that they “reflect” well-established Administration policy. If that is indeed the case, then this underscores the need for a Sectretary of Defense at the Pentagon more capable of implementing Administration policy.
You say that the Administration policy is, and has been over the last “several” years, to use our forces in Iraq to counter terrorism, train the Iraqis, and to provide logistics and force protection, as Senator Reid recommends. What we have seen, however, have been repeated offensives on major cities (especially Fallujah), units charged with manning security check-points unrelated to U.S. operational bases, units carrying on day-to-day security patrol, and units charged with reconstruction tasks such as re-opening of schools that ought to be in the hands of an Iraqi-led government with financial assistance from the U.S. We see that force protection efforts have not been substantially increased in effectiveness, in part because units are asked to move in patrols conducted away from bases and training centers, where IEDs and other invisible threats are the defining characteristic of the operating environment. When will we begin to see the Administration rhetoric carried out on the ground in Iraq?
We hear reassurances that Iraqis are increasingly “taking the lead” in fighting enemies of the Iraqi or American governments, but we see virtually no increase in the number of Iraqi fighting units who are able to operate independently. This failure may stem in part from a lack of resources dedicated to training and security, in part from a poor understanding of how to create a sense of ownership among Iraqis operating in their security forces, and in part from a difficult political environment in Iraq exacerbated by the presence of an unpopular foreign occupying force. How will you create an environment where training efforts have sufficient resources and operate in an environment where a greater success rate can be achieved?
On the second point of the Democrats’ recommendations, you insist that the Administration is already working with Iraqi leaders to disarm the militias, develop a broad-based and substainable political settlement, and to amend the constitution to achieve a fair sharing of power and resources among Iraq’s diverse population. Yet, the militias not only remain armed, but are employed as security forces by the Iraqi government today. The Constitution continues, unamended, in the form with which Sunni leaders long ago expressed irreconcilable dissatisfaction. The installation of Prime Minister al-Maliki has done little to curb the sectarian violence in Iraq, which may not be surprising since he helped resist U.S. efforts to include more Sunni leaders in the drafting of the Constitution originally.
On the third point, you state that the relatively recent International Compact for Iraq is the best way to approach a political and economic reconstruction of Iraq. This may well be, though I would caution that this same administration has been overconfident about numerous approaches it has chosen or supported in Iraq in the last three years, which have borne out poor results. We can certainly support this Compact in the short term, amending it as needed, and keeping other options open should they be required.
This brings us to the fourth point, the only one where you and the Administration admit to a difference with Senate Democrats. You state that the Administration’s policy calls for redeploying troops from Iraq as conditions on the ground there allow, in contrast with the President’s statement that there can be no redeployment at all while he is President. While clarification would on this point would be instructive to both the Congress and the American people, we must object to either view on a variety of grounds.
First, is that it is short-sighted. While it may be that continued occupation style deployment in Iraq is the best tactic for avoiding a situation where anti-American terrorists use Iraq as a safe haven and training ground in the power vacuum created there by our invasion, there are other very important tasks that our nation and our military must face besides closing a single, relatively small country to terrorist operatives. While our military forces are tasked with closing Iraq to terrorist operatives, Islamic militias in Africa and elsewhere wrest power from secular governments and create more attractive safe-havens and training grounds. The threat of continued genocide lurks in the Sudan. Iran and North Korea expand their pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities. And, as Senator Reid pointed out, there remains not a single non-deployed Army brigade that is combat ready in the United States. Furthermore, while terrorists have proven themselves to be adaptable and ready to train and operate in diverse climates, from that of the liberal Democracy in the U.S. and Britain, to Arabic Democracies and republics such as Jordan and Turkey, to autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and pre-9/11 Afghanistan, this administration has been inexcusably negligent in building up the human intelligence resources and military special forces necessary for small-scale interdiction that will be necessary to fight terrorism in the coming decades, partly due to its tunnel-vision for continuing the Iraq occupation.
Second, it is by no means clear that a continued occupation is the best tactic for avoiding a terrorist-friendly Iraq. It may be that an over-the-horizon quick-response force as envisioned by Congressman Murtha, together with an enhanced field-intelligence operation will be the best avenue for keeping terrorists at bay in Iraq. Certainly, the occupation forces are not managing to secure Anbar Province from whatever forces choose to operate there, and that encompasses nearly a third of the Iraqi nation. When the chosen course proves not to be working, it is at least worth entertaining a change, and the American people are hoping that you will focus your efforts on that more so than ridiculing Congressman’s Mutha’s suggestion on the grounds that he pointed out that not all troops must be re-deployed to the Gulf region, and that some could even be re-deployed to as far away as Okinawa until and unless there came a need to recall them to the theatre.
You say that any “premature” phased re-deployment program would cause disastrous consequences on U.S. security, without taking into account that continued deployment in Iraq is already causing such consequences. You say that such a policy would “embolden” our terrorist enemies, without explaining how important the emotional state of those enemies is to our security, what our on-going policy’s effects are on the emotional state of those most susceptible to being recruited by those terrorist enemies, or how much the balance is worth compared to the value of American and Iraqi lives. You say that such a policy would betray the hopes of the Iraqi people, but the Iraqi peoples’ expressed hopes are exactly that the Americans will discontinue the heavy-footprint occupation we are now engaged in there. You say that phased withdrawal will “shatter” the confidence you say exists among regional allies in the Middle East, despite the fact that our Middle Eastern allies have never expressed anything but disappointment with our Iraq policies as they stand now.
Worst of all, you claim that a policy aimed at improving our success – or at least repairing our failures – in Iraq will mean that “the sacrifices of American troops would have been in vain.” Those sacrifices will never have been in vain, regardless of the outcome, those men and women having made them in good faith service to the nation that asked it of them. Continuing our current policy will not validate the sacrifices we asked of those men and women, but it will create new sacrifices. It is of greatest importance that we ask that sacrifice only where necessary and where some good may come from it, not merely as a means of validating past failures on the part of their leaders.
Again, it is disheartening to read that Secretary Rumsfeld continues to carry the full confidence of the President. In your letter, you claimed certain strategies on the part of the Administration were well established policy. If those strategies are indeed policy, then we must ask where the failures came in implementing those strategies. If not with the Secretary of Defense, then where must we direct our attention to remedy our inability to implement those strategies? You say that successes and failures are a part of every war. This is so, but it is not a reason to embrace those failures, nor to support the policies which have been responsible for them. Likewise, winners and losers are a part of every war. This is no reason for us to continue policies that put us at risk of being losers in this war.
Sincerely,
smijer
Dear Josh,
What smijer said.
Alice