After sitting through a House Armed Services Committee meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a group of generals last week, Colorado Rep. Mark Udall laid out the current challenge in Iraq.
It isn’t the Downing Street Memo, which suggests the Bush administration lied to Congress to justify a war.
It isn’t Vice President Dick Cheney’s preposterous statement that the Iraqi insurgency is on its last legs as terrorist attacks remain constant.
It isn’t even Rumsfeld’s assurance that recruiting and force levels are OK when soldiers enter third tours of duty and a pair of retired four-star generals predict that the war “will break the Army.”
Those contradictions are important. But what will determine victory in the Iraq war is leaving the place more stable and less of a threat to U.S. security.
“The enormous irony,” said Udall, a Democrat, “would be if we end up with a containment strategy for Iraq two, three, four years from now, which is what we had with Hussein.”
Whether or not you agree the Iraq war, that is now the litmus test for success. If a “free” Iraq has more terrorist potential than it had with Saddam Hussein, the invasion will have failed to make the U.S. safer.
Colorado Rep. Joel Hefley, the state’s Republican representative on the Armed Services Committee, expects any postwar Iraqi government to be preferable to Hussein’s regime.
“Saddam hated us,” Hefley said. “He paid suicide bombers. He was decidedly our enemy.”
So, too, is a terrorist hotbed where someone else pays suicide bombers and improvised bombs dictate behavior as much as the rule of law.
That’s what Iraq is today – a hybrid of anarchy and order.
“I think the American public doesn’t know how much good is being done,” Hefley insisted. “There are no more killing fields. Hospitals operate. The electrical grid is almost complete.”
Hefley and Udall both look to a new Iraqi constitution and a newly trained Iraqi security force to take the place of American dictates and personnel. Both men see good morale among the troops. But the two part company as soon as you ask whether the political message from the White House matches reality on the ground around Baghdad.
Hefley doesn’t the think the generals or Rumsfeld sugarcoated anything at last week’s hearing.
Much of what Udall heard “is not even close to what (lower level) generals and analysts say.”
Udall sees the Bush administration “fending off penetrating questions.”
The most penetrating is what constitutes victory.
“We’re having the conversation we should have had before the invasion,” Udall pointed out.
Jonathan Alderman, a University of Denver international relations expert, thinks the U.S. will be more secure without Hussein because the Iraqi dictator controlled an army and had designs on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
A June Washington Post/ABC News poll, however, showed that for the first time, a majority of Americans feel the Iraqi invasion has not made them safer.
“It’s a big question,” Udall pointed out. “The administration has always said, ‘It’s better to fight them over there than to fight them here.”‘
When you no longer believe the Iraq invasion was a pre-emptory strike, everything changes.
DU’s Alderman expects little of Western democracy in Iraq. He talks instead of ethnic and religious fiefdoms interspersed with terrorist pockets.
Sooner than later, predicts Alderman’s DU colleague Arthur Gilbert, the contradiction of glowing predictions and grinding war will take its toll.
“Dedicated minorities,” Gilbert explained, “can play a huge role in an unstable country.”
Large enough, perhaps, to leave us at that place where our dead and wounded soldiers will have sacrificed in vain:
No better off than we were before.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
