Can 4,000 Or 120,000 Iraqis Battle The Insurgents?

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Can 4,000 Or 120,000 Iraqis Battle The Insurgents?
Sarah Whalen
January 30, 2005

As columnist George Will critically noted on the Sunday news shows, the US is presently losing its war in Iraq. We control little of that country, we are loathed there and about the neighborhood, and Iraqi infrastructure under our control is barely operational.

Prayer? Virtually every member of the Bush administration is availing himself of it right now. On their knees. Heads bowed low, pressing into the earth.

Praying that the Iraqi elections will go well, the insurgency will cease, and the Americans can declare victory and get out. Or something.

Much ado was made about President George Bush’s numerous and pointed religious references in his inaugural address last week. America is, after all, a secular nation, we are constantly assured. And we are also constantly assured that secularism is the key to success in Iraq. Or the new Iraq.

Funny. Didn’t Saddam Hussein long ago say exactly the same thing?

Bush also said something curious, that "an angel still rides the whirlwind and directs this storm." Ah. Would that "storm" have begun with Operation Desert Storm? The original reference to the angel of the whirlwind, as Bush himself acknowledged, was in a letter Virginia statesman wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the American Revolution. One wonders what Page and Jefferson would think about America today, a country that has dipped its terrible, swift sword into a pool of Iraqi blood and oil, and now holds it aloft, scepter-like, not as a beacon of enlightenment but as a scythe of death and destruction, now menacing what neocons call "the tyrannies’ of the Persian Gulf.

Only one thing’s off - something Jefferson would have understood quite well: We’re running out of American blood to spill in Iraq.

And Iraqi blood is running a bit thin, while the insurgents seem impassioned as ever.

The Bush administration admits the insurgents are Iraqis, and not merely foreign opportunists from Al-Qaeda enclaves. US Sen. Joseph Biden made the point to Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who was most decidedly not on her knees last week when she appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to discuss the fact that Bush has nominated her to be American’s new secretary of state.

But maybe she should have been. On her knees, head bowed low, pressing into the earth.

Instead, she was at first wheedling and manipulative with Sen. Biden, and then suddenly without words. Biden asked Rice whether the Bush administration’s plans in Iraq, including the invasion, occupation and what Rice called "the stabilization phase," were "adequately resourced." Did and does the US have enough "boots on the ground" to not just occupy more than little parts of Iraq, but to impose democracy throughout the nation?

Rice replied that she would have recommended no changes in "force structure," including troop numbers.

Biden then reminded Rice that last October she’d publicly declared, "The Iraqi security force will number 125,000 by the end of the year. There will be 145,000 security forces by February, and 200,000 by the time of the permanent election." Biden said he’d warned her "earlier about the need to level with the American people. When you say," he explained to Rice, "we have 200,000 trained security forces...the impression of the average American is we’ve actually trained up people who can do the job." And by "people," we mean "Iraqis." How many Iraqis, Biden querried Rice, "do you think are trained who can shoot straight, kill and stand their ground? I don’t mean in a uniform. I mean real, live guys."

Rice replied: "The number right now is somewhere over 120,000."

"If you speak to the folks on the ground," Biden snapped back, referring to US Gen. Petraeus and armed forces personnel, "they don’t think there’s more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces. I strongly urge you to pick up the phone or go see these folks."

Iraqis don’t seem to yet have the same passion for defending our democratic ideals from supposed Al-Qaeda challenges. Voting? They may. But true revolutionary change? That involves picking up a gun and fighting, not for Yankees to go home, but for freedom to reign. And apart from the insurgents, Iraqis haven’t wanted to do that, which may show not that they are cowardly, but merely smarter than us.

Oh, God....

Pick up the phone, Dr. Rice. Go see those folks. And pray, on your knees, head bowed low, pressing into the earth. It’s a position every person in the Bush administration is now assuming as the chess pieces move about the board toward part of the war game that is tomorrow’s election.