Posted by Joerg Wolf in
US Foreign Policy on Wednesday, January 17. 2007
Scott Pelley interviewed President Bush for the CBS News' program 60 Minutes. Excerpts of some of the most interesting parts mixed with relevant quotes from Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, Rachel Kleinfeld, David Rothkopf and Richard Clarke about presidential gambling, Iraqi gratitude, and moral responsibility towards Iraqis:
Time for withdrawal from Iraq? Any mistakes in Iraq policy?
BUSH: ... You know, some of my buddies in Texas say, “You know, let them fight it out. What business is it of ours? You got rid of Saddam. Just let them slug it out.” And that's a temptation that I know a lot of people feel. But if we do not succeed in Iraq, we will leave behind a Middle East which will endanger America in the future.
PELLEY: Instability in Iraq threatens the entire region?
BUSH: If the government falls apart and there is sectarian enclaves and violence, it'll invite Iran into the Shia neighborhoods, Sunni extremists into the Sunni neighborhoods, Kurdish separatist movements. All of which would threaten moderate people, moderate governments, and all of which will end up creating conditions that could lead to attacks here in America.
PELLEY: But wasn't it your administration that created the instability in Iraq?
BUSH: Well, our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran. My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability.
PELLEY: It's much more unstable now, Mr. President.
BUSH: Well, no question decisions have made things unstable. But the question is can we succeed. And I believe we can. Listen, I'd like to see stability and a unified Iraq. A young democracy will provide the stability we look for. I will tell you that if we just isolate ourselves from the Middle East and hope for the best, we will not address the conditions that had led young suiciders to get on airplanes to come and attack us in the first place.
PELLEY: You mention mistakes having been made in your speech. What mistakes are you talking about?
BUSH: You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.
PELLEY: The troop levels . . .
BUSH: Could have been a mistake.
President Bush seems to admit mistakes more candidly than before, but does not consider the Iraq war lost. He focuses on what is likely to happen, if the United States gives up. Many Democrats seem to think that Iraq is already lost, and the United States only has the choice of accepting defeat (incl. all of the negative consequences for US national security) now or accepting it later. Senator Joe Biden, is quoted in the Washington Post in early January:
"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."
Many commentators, for example this paper from Maine, compare President Bush with a gambler, who is faced with an unending string of bad hands, but keeps on playing in the hope to finally win. Likewise, former Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke wrote in The New Republic in December:
In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman documented repeated instances when leaders persisted in disastrous policies well after they knew that success was no longer an available outcome. They did so because the personal consequences of admitting failure would be very high. So they postponed the disastrous end to their policy adventures, hoping for a deus ex machina or to eventually shift the blame. There is no need to do that now. Everyone already knows who is to blame. It is time to stop the adventure, lower our sights, and focus on America's core interests. And that means withdrawal of major combat units.
Regardless of what President Bush's motives might or might not be, the question remains: Is the so-called new Iraq strategy promising? Is the "surge" big enough to make a difference? How long to wait for any progress?
And what about moral responsibilities to Iraqis?
Do the Democrats and others in favor of withdrawal take into consideration the fate of Iraqis, if the US would withdraw ASAP?
The Democrat Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa, made this comment on the Daily Show: "We created a culture of dependency. It's time to say to Iraqis, it's your country, you fight for it, you die for it."
I don't know the right words to comment on such a callous statement, so let me instead quote one commentator at OneGoodMove, which hosts the video with Tom Vilsack's comments:
Holy crap, how callous can you get? Last time I checked, more Iraqis were dying than Americans. What a strategy. Pull the US out of Iraq, in order to force the rest of the world to clean up America's mess. And you wonder why America is so hated worldwide. This Tom Vilsack is horrible. He gives Democrats a bad name.
I think Vilsack's statement is worse than President Bush's response to Pelley's question: "Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?" Bush responded: "That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?"
Anyway, back to the moral response issue: Rachel Kleinfeld, Executive Director of the Truman National Security Project, considers Iraq a lost cause and asks at America Abroad what a practical and moral response would be. In another post ("The Human Face of Iraq"), Dr. Kleinfeld raises concern that Iraq could witness a partition massacre like India experienced:
Given that an India like partition-massacre is likely to occur when we leave, I am frustrated by how little conversation I hear on any side of the political spectrum about whether we have a responsibility to the citizens of Iraq. We may well be serving that responsibility (and the same responsibility to our own troops) by pulling out--but I want to hear us talking about it in a serious way.
Dr. Kleinfeld's resettlement idea to create more ethnically homogeneous areas does not seem practical. She ends with a warning and a rather optimistic note about what a smaller troop level could achieve:
Any major troop pull out will still leave a security vacuum, and that vacuum is so serious that it might pull us back into the country in a few years--to separate warring Saudi and Iranian proxy fighters, to fight an entrenched terrorist group that is using a Sunni area to stage attacks, and what have you. We can't underestimate the security problem of leaving Iraq in chaos. But preventing that situation could be achieved by a smaller troop level than we have now.
And David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, argues: "Even If We Leave Now, We'll Be Back!" Summary at AMERICAN FUTURE
Iraqi Gratitude?
The CBS interview with President Bush continues:
PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?
BUSH: That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?
PELLEY: Well, that the United States did not do a better job in providing security after the invasion.
BUSH: Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude, and I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.
What "gratitude level" can the US expect given the huge number of casualties, the chaos and insecurity?
The Washington Post just reported about the coordinated detonation of two bombs during the after-school rush at a Baghdad university killed at least 60 people Tuesday and wounded more than 140 in what university officials described as one of the deadliest attacks on academia since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The spate of killings, which also included a bombing outside a Sunni Muslim shrine in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of central Baghdad, made plain the difficulties facing U.S. and Iraqi troops poised for their latest effort to tamp down rampant violence in the capital. It coincided with a report from the United Nations that said 34,452 Iraqi civilians died violently last year -- an average of 94 per day -- an estimate nearly triple the death toll provided by three Iraqi government ministries.
According to a Johns Hopkins Survey between 392,979 and 942,636 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. Some have questioned the reliability of this survey, although it uses the same method like survey on Darfur and Congo. Those casualty estimates were not questioned.
Related: Iraqi Fulbrighters Speak about their Concerns and The "Blame America Last" Argument.
About Iran: PELLEY: Your military officers say that Iranian agents today are killing American troops on the ground in Iraq. Is that an act of war on the part of Iran against the United States?
BUSH: I think what they're saying is, is that the Iranians are providing equipment that is killing Americans. Either way it's unacceptable. As I said in my speech the other night, we will take measures to protect ourselves. We will interrupt supplies. We will find people that if they are, in fact, in Iraq killing Americans, they'll be brought to justice.
PELLEY: Is that an act of war against the United States on the part of the Iranian government?
BUSH: I'm not a lawyer. So act of war is kind of a . . . I'm not exactly sure how you define that. Let me just say it's unacceptable.
The interview also includes some tough questions concerning Maliki's dependence on Muqtada al-Sadr, the Saddam execution, about congress maybe not funding the "surge," about the perception of dishonesty, and the current lack of support from the American people. CBS News provides the full transcript and a 20 minute video of traveling with the president to Camp David and Fort Benning.
(Emphasis in bold added)
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