Dr. Forbush Thinks

What’s Next?

I was listening to David Gergen give a talk to the World Affairs Council a few weeks ago. For those of you who do not know who David Gergen is, he is a former advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He knows his stuff, and he knows people who know what is happening in the current Bush administration, even with their code of secrecy.

So, it was quite interesting to hear him tell us what we already know about Iraq in the light of someone who has been in these types of situations before. He could have told us about all the mistakes that the Bush administration has made, but he chose to tell us about “Plan B.”

As everyone knows, Plan B is what you do when Plan A fails. As most of us agree at this point Plan A, the preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq has failed. The latest sign of this failure is the Bush administration’s excitement about not only Saddam Hussein’s hanging, but also his effort to get the Iraqis to hold hands in peace. You know that you have failed when you are excited about your enemy encouraging the country you occupy to make a Coke commercial.

Since most of us agree that the US’s plan A has failed in Iraq. Hopefully today’s election will send that signal to the leadership of our country, by giving us a few new leaders with new ideas. And, we have been promised that by Christmas we will have a new bipartisan report on the options in Iraq. So, what are our options in Iraq?

Obviously the new report has several options, and unfortunately the Bush administration will select what should be done in Iraq. Hopefully the administration will really listen to the experts on this issue, instead of pretending to listen and then going off to do what they want to do anyway. If history is any evidence, the Bush administration is bound to “stay the course.”

But, if the president really means that he is willing to “not stay the course, because it really wasn’t the plan,” then there will be some new options on the table. According to David Gergen, the most likely option is to increase the number of troops in Iraq by 100,000. That is almost doubling the number of troops that are already there. This is almost certainly the only way that Iraq can be won, David points out. And, since this is the most likely option we should realize that this is why the Republicans did not want to reveal this plan before the election. This will most certainly be an unpopular decision. But, in an effort to prevent loosing even more seats in congress the Bush administration wisely chose to wait until after the election to reveal this study.

My question however is, “How do we know that 100,000 troops are enough?” I am guessing that 250,000 troops might have worked in the beginning when there were only a few bad apples to take care of. These troops could have been used to preserve order and prevent the looting that we know began the spiral out of control in this country. But, now the situation is much worse. We may be in a situation where 500,000 troops are needed to crack down on violence through out the country. And, once that is done we may be able to use 250,000 troops, alongside another 250,000 Iraqi troops plus the regular police force just to maintain order.

But, even with this forced effort to crack down on violence, there must be a way to give ownership of Iraq back to the Iraqis. The symbolic government that the US has created in Iraq is being viewed as lazy and corrupt. Lawmakers who may legitimately fear for their lives are not showing up for government sessions. The government has been having trouble conducting business, because they haven’t been able to even get a quorum to show up.

We need to ask ourselves that if the lawmakers are not motivated to get their own government functional, then why should we care? Well, like Colon Powell said before the invasion, “It’s the Pottery Barn rule. If you break it you bought it.” It looks like George W Bush crushed this one, and the American people own the rubble.



Listen to David Gergen at the World Affairs Council on October 10, 2006.

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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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