Bush Has No Plan for Iraq

Bush Has No Plan for Iraq

July 18, 2005

The Bush administration does not have a plan for Iraq – no strategy to defeat the insurgents, no benchmarks from which to measure success, and no timeframe for eventual drawdown of U.S. forces. Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins three days of hearing on Iraq – the committee's 27th set of hearings on the war. Congress must take the lead in shaping Iraq policy in the existing vacuum of presidential leadership.

• The Iraq war has made the world a more dangerous place: President Bush said last week that “we're fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home.” Tell that to the Spanish and British people, who have fought side by side with our troops in Iraq, yet suffered devastating terrorist attacks in Madrid and now London.
  
  
• The Iraq war is not just inciting violence, but creating new terrorists. A series of studies by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank show that the vast majority of the foreign fighters in Iraq are not former terrorists, but have been radicalized by the war in Iraq. Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke pointed to another new study by the Canadian Intelligence Security Service which "reportedly says that terrorists trained in Iraq are likely to be involved in attacks in other countries."
  
  
• The Bush administration refuses to be straightforward and honest about the situation in Iraq. On July 8, Maj. Gen. William Webster, who oversees coalition forces in Baghdad, announced that the United States has mostly eliminated the ability of insurgents "to conduct sustained, high-intensity operations, as they did last year.” Yet, over the next ten days, insurgents struck Baghdad with increased intensity. In one attack, a suicide bomber "drove a stolen truck full of liquefied gas onto the central square, opened its valves, and blew himself up, setting off a firestorm that torched 20 cars and set shops and buildings ablaze." At least 71 people were killed, another 156 wounded. Another brutal suicide attack killed some two dozen school children.