Voters have no choice on Iraq

September 10, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

It would appear that the Vietnam War is an issue in the current election, but the Iraq war is not. Sen. John Kerry's service in Vietnam is subject to debate, though the lack of service of the president and the vice president apparently is not. But the ongoing war in Iraq has been ruled out of bounds.

The senator asserts that he would have voted for the war resolution even if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the president brags about his own success in the war. That means half of the American people who think the war was a mistake have little to choose between the two men.

In fact, the war has been a catastrophe -- and not the catastrophic success that the president, in a curious turn of phrase, calls it. It was ill conceived, badly executed and disastrously followed up. The neo-conservative intellectuals who had determined on the war before the World Trade Center attack had argued that the seizure of Iraq would change the balance of power in the Middle East, end the crisis in Palestine and frighten off the terrorists. Indeed, immediately after the attack on the WTC, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz tried to use it as an excuse for an Iraq invasion. The former was convinced that the war could be won with a relatively small number of troops. The commanders who wanted twice the number were shouted down and dismissed.

The American people were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would use them on us soon unless we took action. The dissenting intelligence was suppressed and ignored; we were told the Iraqi people would welcome us with open arms and throw flowers at our tanks.

No one among the brilliant intellectuals (Wolfowitz, etc.) seems to have known enough about the history of Iraq to have predicted that the various factions would immediately start fighting one another. No one understood that if the United States destroyed order, security, industry, fuel, water and food supplies, the Iraqis, ill at ease with a foreign occupying power, would quickly grow restless and rise up against us -- which they did a year ago. Both Shiites and the Sunnis want us out of their country. They don't trust Americans to respond to the chaos they created, and on the basis of the facts of the situation, they have no reason to.

''Hey, we got rid of Saddam Hussein for them, didn't we?'' pro-war Americans shout. ''Aren't they grateful for that?'' Indeed they are, but they are not grateful for the chaos in their country. Most Iraqis were better off under Saddam. They had jobs, food, water, electricity, stability and order in the streets. They blame the chaos on the United States -- and with good reason. They wish we would go home and mind our own business -- a not unreasonable demand.

Now, American troops are at risk whenever they leave their bases. Some sections of the country (the Sunni west) and some cities (the Shiite ones, like Najaf) are off-limits to the troops. When they ride in much of the country, they are targets for roadside bombs (like the one that killed seven Marines last week) and rocket-fired grenades. Foreigners risk kidnapping and decapitation. There is no power in the country to prevent such murders. The United States destroyed the power and has not replaced it.

More than 1,000 Americans are dead and close to 10,000 wounded. There is no exit strategy, no escape route. We must stay there, the president tells us, until a stable Iraq is established. But he doesn't say how this will happen, and the weak performance of our puppet government there suggests that it won't be able to do the job.

Bush's suggestion that the ''insurgents'' are mostly Arab troublemakers who have sneaked into Iraq is laughable. He has created in Iraq a nation of terrorists who will come back to haunt us. He has maneuvered the United States into the Big Muddy and has no idea how to get us out without a serious loss of prestige. That, if anyone remembers, was Henry Kissinger's argument for continuing the Vietnam War four more years.

Unless Kerry can come up with a better plan now, he will not deserve to win the election.