For more than five years now, President Bush has brushed aside criticism that his invasion of Iraq was an unwise and unnecessary diversion from the legitimate war against terrorism in Afghanistan.
But the cost of that shift is being confirmed daily by a resurgent Taliban now claiming more American lives monthly in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
With the Bush/McCain troop surge now generally credited with having reduced the violence and American death toll in Iraq, a clamor is rising for a transfer of American manpower there to the original battleground, where the job was never finished.
A further complication is the drain on what some Pentagon officials have acknowledged to be a “broken” American military establishment, with regular, reserve and National Guard units all stretched beyond endurance.
Pleas from U.S. generals in Afghanistan for more troops from Iraq underscore the folly of Bush?s decision to take his eye off the prime task of chasing down and annihilating the real perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Bush and Sen. John McCain have continued to insist that Iraq remains the centerpiece of the war on terrorism. True enough, Bush?s invasion turned Iraq into just that, but the mounting casualties in Afghanistan indicate the pendulum is swinging back.
As the troop surge in Iraq has run its course and American manpower there has been reduced from as manyas 170,000 forces to the pre-surge level of 140,000, justification for the shift to Afghanistan is apparent, if not logistically so easy.
But concurrent indications in Baghdad that the propped-up Iraqi regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is growing more weary of the presence of American troops in the country gives impetus to the withdrawal proposals of Barack Obama.
In a New York Times op-ed piece Monday, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee labeled Maliki?s recent call for a timetable for getting Americans out of Iraq “an enormous opportunity” that should be seized to deal with what Obama called an “overstretched” U.S. military.
Obama wrote that “ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.”
He noted that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has said the United States won?t have the resources to finish the task in Afghanistan until its commitment is reduced in Iraq. And in a Washington, D.C., speech on Tuesday, Obama argued that “our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.”
From the outset of the American involvement in Iraq and the establishment of the new government there, Bush has given lip service to the idea that U.S. forces could stay only with its sufferance. The current negotiations with the Maliki regime on an American military presence after the year-end termination of the United Nations authorization reinforces the notion.
Beyond the obvious difference between Obama and McCain on whether American troops should go or stay, Obama emphasizes his disagreement with any permanent presence. “Unlike Senator McCain,” Obama wrote, “I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea.”
In the latest WashingtonPost/ABC News poll, 60 percent of voters say the war against terrorism can be won without winning in Iraq. But they are split evenly on setting a timetable, so the public jury seems still to be out on the question as the fall campaign approaches.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington, D.C., for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
