Speech revealing of who and what’s wrong

When he found a hole in the dike, the little Dutch boy in the children’s story knew enough to put his finger in the hole. He stopped the flow, kept the hole from getting bigger and saved the town from being flooded.

Note that the little Dutch boy did not call his playmates over and show them how to bail water back over the dike, all the while letting more water pour in through a hole that was getting bigger.

Judging by their illogical military strategy and abysmal results, President Bush and his top generals have less on the ball than the little Dutch boy. Bush reiterated his devotion to this nonsense in his speech at Fort Bragg last evening.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., is ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Few if any people in America can match the breadth and depth of his foreign policy knowledge and experience. He’s been to Iraq four times since last September. He’s told everyone who would listen that, off the record, soldiers and officers repeatedly told him we do not have enough troops on the ground in Iraq to do what needs doing.

Job 1, of course, is stopping the steadily increasing infiltration of hostiles across Iraq’s unsecured borders. Biden says NATO was prepared to send 5,000 troops to help secure those borders — a big assist, given how stretched our military is right now. But no, the Bush administration refused the help.

Bush claims adding more troops would discourage Iraqis from taking the lead. Given our meager progress in developing viable, dependable Iraqi security forces in meaningful numbers in a year and a half of trying, that argument is a nonstarter. Before we get all concerned about them taking the lead, let’s just see if we can get them to not disappear when the shooting starts.

Bush’s contention that adding troops would send a message we intend to stay in Iraq forever is patent nonsense. Building four or more large, hardened U.S. military bases and the world’s largest embassy in Iraq, on the other hand, sends that message in unmistakable terms. (Lack of comment on these points in the major media today is more indication, as if any were needed, of how accommodating they’ve become to Bush and the Republican establishment.)

After claiming that, thanks to our efforts, Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained “for a variety of missions,” Bush declared, “Like free people everywhere, Iraqis want to be defended by their own countrymen, and we are helping Iraqis assume those duties.”

Biden pointed out in an interview on Air America today a curious aspect of how we’re helping. Germany, Egypt and others have offered to train Iraqi security forces in their respective countries. That would allow us to leverage our limited ability to step up training of a sizeable Iraqi military. But no, the Bush administration refuses to send Iraqi trainees to other countries.

Why? It’s just one more instance of Bush’s bad thinking leading to bad policy, yielding bad results.

As expected, Bush used the Fort Bragg promo as an occasion to weld in the public mind the notion that his blunder war in Iraq was and is, part and parcel, a war against international Muslim-extremist terrorism.

This is history-twisting spin and blatant political butt covering. Worse, it’s further evidence of how dangerously shallow Bush’s intellect is.

By many accounts from within Iraq, al Qaeda and other extremist-Muslim terrorists have been joined by substantial numbers of another kind of insurgent over the past year. The newcomers are mostly Iraqis whose primary motivation is getting foreign occupiers out of their homeland. By some accounts, there are probably more of them than there are Zarqawi types.

Money’s no object: A few months after invading Iraq, Bush passed the hat around to other countries, seeking financial help for rebuilding the country. Some countries chose only to write off Iraq’s debts. Contributions from the rest totaled about $13 billion. Biden told Air America today that of that amount, only $3 billion has actually been forthcoming. Yet, Bush didn’t even mention it in his speech. Nor did he mention that his Iraq fiasco is costing U.S. taxpayers about $1 billion a day, $300 billion so far, with no end in sight.

Reports today indicate Bush’s speech has given him a bump up in the polls. Few have bothered to balance that cheery news with the insight that a nose count last night indicated most Americans who chose to watch Bush’s speech identified themselves as Republicans and Bush supporters.

Bottom line: In everything besides getting himself re-elected, Bush’s thinking is faulty and his results stink. Far from being in its final throes, the insurgency by all accounts is bigger and stronger than ever. Daily attacks against our troops and others in Iraq are at an all-time high, as is the death toll. Meanwhile, Bush’s coalition of the willing has degenerated to, basically, the British, a small number of Poles and our own stretched-thin forces.

Given all the good, common-sense reasons for sending in more troops, we suspect “the sober judgment of our military leaders” has been to fix their policy around what Bush has made clear he wants. Whatever the genesis of their sober judgment, we favor sending Gens. Myers, Abizaid, Casey et al to the showers and bringing in those responsible for our successful, mortality-free operations in Central Europe of a few years ago.

If Bush were to ask our advice, we’d counsel this: Try an experiment, Mr. President. For, say, six months, figure out what you think ought to be done or not done. Then, do the opposite. If at the end of six months things are going much better, continue to do the opposite of what you at first think ought to be done.