Iraq was and is a killing field. Estimates are that Saddam executed more than 300,000 Iraqis during his reign. We let that happen. Presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton lacked the moral fortitude to stand up to this murderer. It was more convenient for Americans to ignore what was happening on the other side of the globe than do what needed to be done and commit our military to getting rid of Saddam.
Unfortunately, the only President willing to take on Saddam is George W. Bush. While Bush should get a small amount of credit for getting rid of Saddam the fact is that Bush did it for the wrong reasons. And his management of the war effort has been absolutely incompetent.
America suffers today because the Republican leadership in Washington is more interested in the game of politics, gaining and keeping power, than in the art of leadership. George Bush, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich and Denny Hastert don't have a clue how to govern.
The leadership of the Republican Party consistently prioritizes partisan politics over public policy. As a result, our conduct of the war in Iraq has been a disaster. Tom Friedman has an excellent column on this subject in today's New York Times. Friedman writes,
One benchmark the Bush team has been urging the Iraqi government to meet is to rescind its broad “de-Baathification” program — the wholesale purging of Baathists after the fall of Saddam — which has alienated many Sunnis and hampered national reconciliation.
But while the Bush team has been lecturing the Iraqi Shiites to limit de-Baathification in Baghdad, it was carrying out its own de-Democratization in the Justice Department in Washington. We would feel that we had failed in Iraq if we read that Sunnis were being purged from Iraq’s Ministry of Justice by Shiite hard-liners loyal to Moktada al-Sadr — but the moral equivalent of that is exactly what the Bush administration was doing here. What kind of example does that set for Iraqis?
And this wasn’t only a Washington problem. Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s outstanding “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which details the extent to which Americans recruited to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were chosen, at times, for their loyalty toward Republicanism rather than expertise on Islamism. “Two C.P.A. staffers said that they were asked if they supported Roe v. Wade and if they had voted for George W. Bush,” he wrote.
But this degree of partisanship — loyalty over competence — was destructive in a much bigger way. It also deprived the Bush team of the support it needed when things in Iraq didn’t turn out to be as easy as it expected.
Only a united America could have the patience and fortitude to heal a divided Iraq — and we simply don’t have that today. Why? Because George Bush and Dick Cheney asked everyone to check their politics at the door when it came to Iraq, because victory there was so important — everyone but themselves. They argued that the war in Iraq was the central front of the central struggle of our age — an unusual war, a war against terrorism and the pathologies that produce it — but then they indulged in the most rancid politics as usual at home.
They actually thought they could unite Iraq, while dividing America.
As much as I would like our efforts in Iraq to succeed and as much as I would like to believe that we could leave Iraq united, free from terror and on the road to democracy, that just isn't going to happen. Why? Because George Bush and his advisors are incompetent. No matter what we do in Iraq, no matter how hard our troops fight and work to stabilize that country, we will lose because George Bush is President of the United States. It is time to end America's role in this disaster and bring the troops home. The Iraqi people ought to start praying for mercy. Things are going to get much worse for them. George Bush ought to start praying for forgiveness. He's responsible for the mess.
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