What the president should have told us
Neal Boortz:
Polls show the majority of Americans don't think the war was a success. This is a product of the relentless media brainwashing and historic revisionism. Iraq can't be called anything but a success. Overthrowing a regime in a country the size of Iraq and replacing it with a democratically elected one -- all inside of two years with less than 2,000 casualties? If you had asked the Pentagon before the war began if they would consider that a favorable outcome of the war, they surely would.
The president spent time last night saying what his supporters did not need to hear and what his critics did not believe. Whatever your view of the war, you already know why we invaded Iraq, don't you? And you already know whether the war to date is a success. So instead of revisiting the justifications for the war -- isn't it a little late for that now? -- and making vague pronouncements (e.g., "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down;" operationally, what does that mean?), Mr. Bush should have articulated a specific plan for which the goal is our disengagement.
No one can doubt this president's commitment to victory. And no one can doubt our military's capacity to achieve it. We're left, then, only to understand the exact obstacles to the military component of victory, and therefore the withdrawal of American troops, and how the president plans to overcome them. Details would have been new and useful information, and they would have gone a long way toward reassuring an uneasy public.
What, for example, is the plan for dealing with Syria? That country offers itself as a staging ground for foreign jihadists who then enter Iraq and create mayhem there. In fact, according to a report in the Washington Post, the U.S. Government is aware of no case in which a homicide car bomber in Iraq was an Iraqi. The bombers come to Iraq from elsewhere, and Syria plays a key role in getting them there:
Syria has been an important base and way station for these foreign fighters. Interviews with arrested "jihadis" and transcripts of interrogations obtained from Iraqi security and intelligence show that a typical jihadi's journey from his city in Syria, Jordan, Sudan, Yemen or any other Arab country until the moment he blows himself up goes something like this: After deciding that he wants to fight the Americans in Iraq, he contacts mosques in Damascus known for recruiting mujaheddin for the holy war in Iraq. Often these recruitment campaigns are funded by senior Syrian officials.After deciding that a person is fit to conduct a "martyrdom operation," Syrian intelligence trains him on how to disguise his identity and how to handle explosives and ammunitions. Radical mullahs supplement this with heavy doses of hard-line religious teaching. The volunteer is then taken across the desert in eastern Syria, through the porous borders, into the Sunni triangle in Iraq, where he is housed by members of the former Baathist intelligence and security network. The second leg of the journey is to a safe house in Baghdad, where he is assigned a target to blow up or sent to certain areas to fight the Americans or the new Iraqi army and police forces.
Surely our Government knows, or can come to know, the location of these Syrian training bases. Accordingly, Mr. Bush should have told us last night what verifiable assurances he's received from the Syrian government that the bases will be closed promptly. If none, he should have told us when the bombing of the bases is scheduled to begin.
Specifics, Mr. President, specifics.