George A. Lopez

For a brief time during the Presidential campaign in 2004, President Bush proclaimed “I am a war president”.  When focus groups revealed that the hearts of Americans, increasingly concerned with a war going badly in Iraq, did not warm to this notion the phrase was dropped from campaign rhetoric.

But with his speech this past week on the new direction of United States armed forces in Iraq, President Bush has solidified his place in history as a war president. In fact, the President has redefined the connection between politics and war in this epic quagmire.  The terrible irony is that his actions will increase contentious politics in the US but lead to the abandonment of politics for war in Baghdad.  In neither locale should these realities have been selected as the preferred outcomes.

In defining the course of US action in Iraq as a neighborhood by neighborhood aggressive war against extremists, the President has polarized the internal US debate about the war.  His administration will fight in Iraq through the next election season, seeking military victory, even if none of the metrics about military progress sustain such a claim.

The President’s supporters – be they Republicans or not – will be those willing to accept the linkage between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. They will demand those who stand opposed to this escalation plan for Iraq to have a better plan.  Then they will scathe their opposition as not committed to victory in the war on terror. Doonesbury will have a field day with this cleavage.  But Americans do not deserve such divisiveness.

Even more tragically, the President seems unable to understand the complex relationship between politics and war in Iraq.  By ramping up the war and the US role in it, he closes rather than opens the door for political solutions. US forces engaged in more aggressive killing and raids – even against extremists and foreigners – will likely lead to even greater war and anarchy. 

What Iraq most needed from the US was some way in which the Americans could apply its massive diplomatic leverage to alter political realities for that nation.  One option, summarily rejected by the President was to involve all regional partners to Sunnis and Shiia alike – meaning Syria and Iran respectively, and other nations – to a regional peace and reconciliation conference.  Another option would be to bargain for and help to sustain a 30 day ceasefire in order to draft new legislation regarding oil and regional autonomy rights.  

As long as the Sunnis continue to believe that the US has no interest in them playing a significant role in the economic and political future of their country, they will continue to fight the US and the Iraqi government.  Our goal should be to establish more direct dialogue with Sunnis and the insurgency and invent new incentives to have them choose more politics, not more war.  But the President has now committed our troops to stand beside a predominantly Shiia armed forces in order to crush Sunni resistance, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Some will suggest that the soundness and wisdom of the Bush approach to routing Baghdad’s extremists will come as US and Iraqi forces turn their attack to Sadr City and the Mahdi Army. Seemingly in pursuing his strategy, Mr. Bush believes that we can bring more stability and solid governance to the capital by a military confrontation against a well trained and committed militia army of some 40,000 strong. 

Bush has rejected the alternative of a tough political confrontation in which we pledge to protect cleric al-Sadr and push him to sort through his own supporters regarding those willing to be part of a political process from those who want continued vigilantism. Bush’s characterization of Iran as a trouble making agent, rather than enlisting them as a potential ally for helping to create such Shiite self-policing is shallow, ideological politics at its worst. 

Instead, Mr. Bush prefers US marines facing months of gruesome bloody fighting that our forces have not seen for a generation. And this does not even calculate what happens if in the midst of our assault on the Mahdi army, our Iraqi army counter-parts choose to change their fighting loyalties.

A rather scary foreshadowing of what lies ahead for the US military and Iraqis came in the days preceding the President’s speech. US FOX News reported heroic Iraq army and US forces actions and a CNN videolink showed footage of this “Battle for Haifa Street” near the Green Zone.  The operation, which involved anywhere from eleven to fourteen hours of some of the most intense fighting that Baghdad has seen, killed at least fifty “insurgents” claimed the stories.

Meanwhile, international news agency reports – later confirmed by varied US sources, including the Washington Post – stated that the ‘battle’ seemed to have begun when local Sunnis fired on a Shiite death squad discovered in the neighborhood and a gun-battle ensued.  Soon US troops joined the fight on the side of the Shiia.  As the fight raged, US troops called in attack helicopters and F-15 strike planes.  Large segments of the street were destroyed as were the “insurgents” and their houses.

Every dimension of this encounter – which will soon be replicated dozens of times in light of the President’s announcement this week – spells disaster for US goals and Iraqi lives.  In order to make the coordination and effectiveness of the new policy work, US forces will have to purge and purify areas where the Iraqi army of mostly Shiia will actually fight – meaning we will attack in Sunni areas first.  This will be read by those Sunnis only as massacres by their kin in the capital, thus depriving the US and the Iraqi government of any political points such action may gain.  And it will reinforce a willingness of more Sunnis to fight to the death they believe imminent.

The most bitter irony of this sad new policy, of course, unfolds for the US armed forces. The very street by street, high casualty counter-insurgency war that US commanders made certain to avoid in taking Baghdad in 2003 is now what their President has ordered them to conduct.  These forces know that the bigger the ‘footprint’ of such action left by US superior firepower, the greater the hatred and resistance against the US.  And in the fog of such war, atrocities and war crimes will be impossible to avoid.

President Bush has created a significant turning point in the US involvement in Iraq and in the character of that war. The President has thrown down a political gauntlet in the US that will deepen the divide between his dwindling supporters and his foes.  But worse yet, he has stripped the Iraqis of political motivations, pressures and incentives to forge solutions to their future. Instead, total war awaits them.

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George A. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  He writes frequently about Iraq.

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