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The Real Debate About Iraq
June 14, 2006
Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will spend the day debating the Iraq war. Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), however, appears unwilling to address the administration's strategy in Iraq directly. Instead, Boehner has crafted a resolution that focuses on the "war on terror" — Iraq isn't even mentioned until the eighth paragraph. But in attempting to divert the debate, Boehner stumbled into the real issue. The Iraq war is undermining the ability of the United States to defeat international terrorists. In a new survey released today, the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine polled more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts, conservatives and liberals; 84 percent said America was not winning the "war on terror." The message is clear: to effectively address the threat of international terrorists, America must change course in Iraq. The Center for American Progress has a plan.
- The data tells the story of the current war on terror. The pessimism of the experts surveyed is backed up by empirical data. Using the Bush administration's own statistics, the problem of international terrorism is worse now than it was in 2001. According to State Department data, the number of significant international terrorist attacks tripled to 650 in 2004. (The 175 international terrorist attacks in 2003 was itself a 20-year high.) Another Bush administration agency, the National Counterterrorism Threat Center, f ound that 3,192 incidents of international terrorism occurred last year, resulting in the "deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people." While the threat of international terrorism is diffuse, our military resources are concentrated in Iraq.
- A lesson can be learned from the current mess in Afghanistan. The consequences of the administration's focus on Iraq, instead of the broader threat of terrorism, is on display in Afghanistan. In The New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid describes a resurgent Taliban: "As recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, and horses. … There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years." The problem, according to the Washington Post's William M. Arkin, is that, "The Bush administration naturally searched for an al Qaeda-Iraq connection to match its flawed assumption about its roots. And though it paid lip service to nation building, the task was seen as secondary to the big war."
- Redeployment of American troops will define success in Iraq. Boehner's resolution frames redeployment as a defeat in the war on terrorism. Not so. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) explains, "Getting out of Iraq will define success in Iraq." Iraqis, including the new prime minister, agree and are saying that Americans must begin to leave. Nearly nine in 10 Iraqis approve a timeline for U.S. withdrawal (PDF), and 70 percent of the Iraqi public supports the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces by the end of 2007. Once redeployment is complete, we will be able to refocus our military and strategic resources to combat terrorism effectively.
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