A year after President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that read "Mission accomplished," the mission in Iraq is anything but.
The celebratory mood of May 2003 — with the president declaring the end of major combat activities and thousands here cheering the return of the Lincoln’s crew to Naval Station Everett — has slipped into one of growing doubts and fears as casualties mount in a very unstable Iraq.
According to a count by the Associated Press, more than 1,300 Iraqis were killed in April, and 136 U.S. troops died during the same period, the bloodiest month for U.S. forces since the invasion in March 2003. At least 738 U.S. troops have died in the war since it began. With hopes for stability resting on handing over sovereignty to an amorphous Iraqi authority on June 30, optimism for a quick conclusion isn’t running high.
With 135,000 U.S. troops already in Iraq and calls for increasing that presence, the armed forces are stretched thin. Many of those troops are National Guard reserves who never expected this kind of extended deployment. Commitments in Afghanistan, South Korea, Haiti and elsewhere leave the Pentagon with little flexibility to respond anywhere else. There have even been rumblings in Congress about reinstituting the military draft.
The picture needs to change. Soon.
The patience of an alarmed U.S. public is growing thin. Missteps by the Bush administration, from its unwavering insistence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction to its many miscalculations in post-war planning, have just about depleted its credibility at home and abroad.
If real stability can’t be brought to Iraq in the coming months, the administration may be forced to do the unthinkable: admit its mistakes and ask for help from the rest of the world. The president’s unshakable belief in his course of action, a sign of strength to many, is only arrogance if it continues after that course has failed.
In a rare press conference last month, the president couldn’t come up with a single example of a mistake he has made. His refusal to admit fallibility suggests a stubbornness that could be blinding — a frightening thought, given the stakes.
President Bush went into Iraq with single-minded resolve, and the results have been far short of satisfactory. If that doesn’t change soon, a more open-minded approach, perhaps one that trades control over Iraq’s future for a broader sharing of the risk, will be in order.
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