Copley News Service
Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Let's say you're a U.S. soldier or Marine deployed in Iraq, or his or her mother or father, sister or brother, wife or husband, son or daughter. In the last 10 days you have learned that the nation lost 122 more troops in Iraq last month, making May the third deadliest of the 50 months the U.S. has spent there and bringing the total number of U.S. deaths to 3,475.
You also have heard President George W. Bush warn the nation that more bad days lie ahead this summer as Iraqi insurgents try to defeat the U.S. troop surge in Baghdad.
“We're going to expect heavy fighting,” the president said May 24. “We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties. It could be a bloody -- it could be a very difficult August.”
But because you pay close attention to what's going on in Washington, you've also heard or read that the White House and Congress have pretty much decided that the surge isn't going to work, at least not by September, when Iraq commander Gen. David H. Petraeus is due to report to Congress on how things have gone.
You've also heard that the president already is talking about “Plan B,” or in his words, “Plan B-H,” which stands for Baker-Hamilton. James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, chaired the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that last December recommended a change of course in U.S. war policy. In January, the president rejected their recommendations in favor of surging 20,000 more U.S. troops in Baghdad.
Now, even as the last of the five combat battalions are being surged into Baghdad, the president is thinking past the surge to “Plan B-H,” which would begin drawing down U.S. troops next year to secure combat bases. Instead of confronting insurgents directly, U.S. forces would stay “over the horizon,” concentrating on training Iraqi forces and attacking al-Qaida forces. Tony Snow, the president's press secretary, says we should start thinking about U.S. troops in Iraq as we do U.S. troops in South Korea: a long-term emergency-purposes-only presence.
As a soldier or Marine or one of their loved ones, you read all that and maybe you start to wonder: “Hey, what's with this ‘bloody August' stuff? If they're already thinking past the surge, why are they sending me out on patrol all summer? If they're going to change policies anyway, why should I spend all summer dodging snipers and IEDs in 125-degree heat? If they're going to pull us back to fortified bases over the horizon later this year, why not start now?”
But because you're a soldier or a Marine, yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and try not to die. The job of questioning the administration's latest bizarre Catch-22 Iraq policy must fall to others.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., will ask Congress this month to make “Plan B-H” the official policy of the U.S. government. If Congress acts at its usual dithering pace, the question will fester all summer, while 200 or 300 more American kids and God knows how many Iraqis are killed on a mission the president already has decided to abandon.
This is beyond irrational. This is ashes-in-the-mouth unconscionable, hanging U.S. troops and their families out to dry while Congress dithers and the Iraqi Parliament goes on vacation, while Vice President Dick Cheney shreds his visitor lists and presidential candidates from both parties raise millions of dollars and beat their breasts about supporting the troops.
Last Sunday on CBS's “Face the Nation,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., got it right. If we're going to change course, “Why wait until September? We've got men and women dying in Iraq right now.”
Why indeed.
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