Here's another guest poster -- call it reality, "I told you so", whatever you want ...
October 17, 2005
News Analysis
Administration's Tone Signals a Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 - For most of the 30 months since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has argued that as democracy took hold in Iraq, the insurgency would lose steam because Al Qaeda and the opponents of the country's interim government had nothing to offer Iraqis or the people of the Middle East.
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Mr. Bush's own way of talking about the future, in Iraq and beyond, has undergone a subtle but significant change in recent weeks. In several speeches, he has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia." While he still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions.
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For an administration that has recalibrated and re-explained its strategy in Iraq many times in the past 30 months, this latest turn may be a recognition of changed realities.
A year ago, Mr. Bush interpreted his re-election as the nation's embrace of his strategy and its willingness to bear the cost in lives and money to get Iraq on its feet. But now, the pressure is building for a pathway out. The passage of the constitution, some of Mr. Bush's political aides say, would be bound to fuel those calls.
The change is clear in what Mr. Bush is saying - but also in what he and his aides are no longer saying.
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"Those who argued at the time that the acceptance of democracy in Iraq would be easy, and who drew on our experience with Japan and Germany, were wrong," he said. "First of all, Germany and Japan were homogeneous societies. Iraq is not." He added that the German and Japanese populations were "exhausted and deeply shocked by what had happened," but that Iraqis were "un-shocked and un-awed."
Now administration officials are beginning to describe the insurgency as long-lasting, more akin to Communist insurgencies in Malaysia or the Philippines, but with a broader and more deadly base. Even conservatives who supported Mr. Bush's decision to go to war say the change in tone is welcome.
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Others take a harsher view. Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Bush's new tone reflected "the fact that their whole theory about how this is going to work out isn't working, and almost certainly isn't going to work." He added, "The theory that democracy is the antidote to insurgency gets disproven on the ground every day."
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# posted by el diablo : 1:36 AM
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