Driving Votes: Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

The war in Iraq is spiralling out of control. Last week was the deadliest week for U.S. troops since the war's inception: 64 killed. Although the President continues to characterize the resistance to the occupation as a "small minority" of the Iraqi people, it is beginning to look more and more like the broader population supports it. A recent poll co-sponsored by news organizations from four countries shows that 39 percent of Iraqis believe that the United States was wrong to invade their country. A minority, to be sure, but this suggests that over a third of the country would prefer to live under one of the most brutal dictators of the modern age than to suffer the chaos that the occupation is failing to contain. The President has repeated ad nauseum that he does not pay attention to polling numbers. Perhaps he should begin to.

From the beginning, the Bush administration was determined to fight this war on the cheap. The naivite of such thinking should have been a lesson learned from the last invasion. Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism advisor to the National Security Council whose recent book openly criticizes the administration's negligence in averting the attacks of September 11, 2001, recently told The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that the war in Afghanistan was fought with a force far too small to capture the leaders of Al Qaeda. One of the reasons, Clarke maintains, was that "Rumsfeld wanted to have a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with airpower, to win decisive battles."

Not only did Osama bin Laden manage to escape Afghanistan, but since then, the country has deteriorated into a lawless battleground ruled by warlords and heroin traffickers. The Bush administration has predictably failed to stabilize the country, partly because within only a few months of laying the groundwork for an interim Afghan government, it removed an already insufficient presence of U.S. military specialists in order to bolster its force in Iraq.

Rumsfeld took the rapid advance of U.S. forces into Bagdhad as incontrovertible vindication of his economical approach to warfare. But it wasn't the invasion itself that most of his critics were concerned about; it was the occupation to follow. The Bush administration reacted to such concerns with characteristic willful blindless. When Eric Shinseki -- who should know, having headed up the NATO effort in Bosnia -- told Congress in February of last year that the occupation of Iraq would require "several hundred thousand troops," Rumsfeld called the estimate "far off the mark." Paul Wolfowitz listed several reasons for disagreeing with the assessment. Among them was his conviction that the Iraqi people would welcome a U.S. occupying force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible." He also voiced his expectation that countries that had opposed the war would flock to Iraq to assist in its reconstruction.

Neither prediction has come anywhere close to fruition. And judging by recent remarks by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, it is equally unlikely that the administration's belated courtship of the United Nations will bear fruit. The Bush administration's foreign policy has been, and remains, set upon a foundation of little more than wishful thinking. The same can be said for its domestic economic policy.

The two are not unrelated. Bush's fixation upon cutting taxes for the rich has drained the government's coffers. His avowed justification for doing so -- job growth -- has long been shorn of all credibility. And yet, as Paul Krugman observed in today's New York Times, the President "used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations." Tax cuts and the ballooning deficit have made the war in Iraq a military fiasco that we cannot afford and yet must continue to pay for. If the political quagmire is the war's main plotline, the economic quagmire is its subtext.

There are many reasons why U.S. forces in Iraq are overwhelmed by the enormous -- one might say Utopian -- project before them of turning a hostile population ruined by war and riven with crime and civil unrest into a "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East. But one of them is that the Bush administration believes that it can do "nation-building" Republican-style, that is, by handing over as much of the task as possible to private profiteers, and relying on an underfunded, overburdened government agency to deal with the inevitable social fallout. But in this case, that government agency is composed of teenage reservists who never expected to be stationed abroad, let alone to fight, the social fallout is in the form of terrorism, and the burden can be fatal.

Sixty-four American soldiers killed in a single week. How much will tax relief for the wealthy end up costing the rest of us?