Credibility is a casualty of US retreat in Fallujah
WASHINGTON
But now it's happened again, in Karbala the week before last under murky circumstances, and again a few days ago in Najaf and Kuf right out in the open. The scar on US credibility is now serious enough that it triggers the same question John Kerry famously asked before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago -- how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? The engagements fought by the Marines in the north and the Army in the south against different collections of extremists were, we were told, fights of necessity with the specific aim of decisive victory. In each case, the end result was the opposite; the English word for it is retreat, a retreat from both territory and stated purpose. Soldiers are grumbling, conservative cheerleaders for the war are grumbling. The truth is that everyone should be grumbling because President Bush has put the country's credibility on an altar of expediency. Since it all started less than three months ago, the memories of why it started are still fresh enough to make the way the fighting ended jarring. In Fallujah, Sunni extremists attacked a US convoy, killing four American contract employees whose corpses were burned, mutilated, and then hung from a bridge. When US forces entered, they were met with force, and a weeks-long siege involving heavy fighting ensued. In Baghdad and then in the Shi'ite south, a crackdown on a supposedly minor extremist figure (his newspaper was shut down and a senior aide detained) produced attacks on US troops, seizures of several towns, and another set of sieges involving heavy fighting with the man's private militia. In Fallujah, US commanders and their civilian superiors back here saw the fighting as an opportunity to smash one key element of the 14-month insurgency, especially after intelligence reports came in that foreign fighters had become involved as well. We were fighting, we were told, to achieve an important victory. Against the murderous units of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia, we were also told that the purpose was victory. Specifically, the same people here and there said the aims were to kill or capture Sadr and to crush his militia, one of several in the country that threaten stability and American lives simply by existing. In each case, however, we ended up by giving up and retreating after lengthy discussions mediated by Iraqi political and religious figures who threatened to publicly denounce the Americans if we did not halt our offensives and withdraw. For our trouble and lives, we got a fig-leaf "peace" with the very people who killed Americans and would do so again in a second. In the first of his promised series of speeches on this mess last week, Bush said of the ugly deal in the north: "We're making security a shared responsibility in Fallujah. Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force which is now patrolling the city." Less than 48 hours before the even uglier deal in the south, Bush pretended that US forces were "systematically dismantling the illegal militia." He also pretended that this impending victory had the support of the Shia community's genuine leaders who "have called on the militia to withdraw from these towns." Bush's phony description of Fallujah is belied by every single report from the scene, including from US officials privately communicating with Republican and Democratic figures in Congress. His absurd comments about the south were belied by events he knew then to be occurring. The most important of all the Shia figures, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in fact told both sides to get the heck out of Dodge. Today, murderers are a part of the "security" force in Fallujah. In the south, Sistani's top people now talk openly of giving Sadr a role in the new Iraq they plan to dominate. Bush's final fib was to note that the "terrorists" consider Iraq "the central front in the war on terror." He says it all the time to further a reelection strategy to confuse these very different situations. Two days later, Bush's domestic security officials begged to differ. They have credibility problems of their own, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller reminded us that the central front is a place called the United States, the enemy is called Al Qaeda, and the threats that should worry all of us have bupkus to do with Iraq. They never did.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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