Left News and Views

Could there be anything left in the Iraqi war that this administration could misjudge? From the May 1, 2003 proclamation of “Mission Accomplished,” to the various reports detailing how President Bush and company failed to plan for managing a post-war Iraq to Vice President Cheney’s endless pronouncements that the insurgency is in its last throes, it is hard to believe they could misjudge anything else.

But, of course, there is.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that when the administration decided to send some 30,000 more American troops to Iraq in its infamous new “surge” strategy, “we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust, and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation, which, let’s face it, is not some kind of secondary issue.”

This is quite an admission from Gates – particularly in light of the fact that this problem has been at the heart of the argument against the surge policy by numerous congressional representatives from both parties in Washington.

What made it impossible for these administration bunglers to ignore any longer was the decision by Iraq’s main Sunni Arab political bloc to withdraw from the government Wednesday, blaming Shia leaders for not addressing sectarian issues.

According to Newsday, “The pullout leaves Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-dominated government even weaker than it was, serving with little more than caretaker status. Barring the possibility of a major political realignment, the government is unlikely to be able to reach significant compromises on benchmarks sought by the Bush administration and aimed at quelling sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims.”

The problem for Bush now is that even the generals he hand-picked because of their agreement with his strategy – and they are dwindling to a very few – have said that there is no military solution to ending the violence in Iraq. The only answer is political reconciliation among the three major factions that make up Iraq – the Kurds or a Sunnis or a Shiites.

Their now acknowledged misjudgments over the difficulty of achieving reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian factions, pretty much leaves them up the proverbial river without a paddle while our courageous American troops continue to die there for a cause that was lost the very day Bush declared “mission accomplished.”