OPinionated-EDitorial

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If hell didn't exist, we'd have to in-
vent it. We'd need a place to send the
public officials who are playing poli-
tics with the lives of the men and
women sent off to fight George W.
Bush's calamitous war in Iraq.
The administration and its allies
have been mercilessly bashing Demo-
crats who argued that the U.S. should
begin developing a timetable for the
withdrawl of American forces. Re-
publicans stood up on the Senate floor
last week, one after another, to chant
like cultists from the Karl Rove play-
book: We're tough. You're not. Cut-
and-run. Nyah-nyah-nyah!
"Withdrawl is not an option," de-
clared the Senate majority leader,
Bill Frist, who sounded like an actor
trying on personas that ranged from
Barry Goldwater to General Patton.
"Surrender," said the bellicose Mr.
Frist, "is not a solution."
Any talk about bringing home the
troops in the Senate majority lead-
er's view, was "dangerous, reckless
and shameless."
But then on Sunday we learned that
the president's own point man in Iraq,
Gen. George Casey, had fashioned the
very thing that ol' bolld-and-guts
Frist and his C-Span brigade had
ranted against: a withdrawl plan.
Are Karl Rove and his liege lord,
the bait-and-switch king, trying to
have it both ways? You bet. And that
ought to be a crime, because there are
real lives at stake.
The first significant cut under Gen-
eral Casey's plan, according to an ar-
ticle by Michael Gordon in yester-
day's Times, would occur in Septem-
__________
When war is part of
a campaigh strategy.
__________

ber. That, of course, would be perfect
timing for Republicans campaigning
for re-election in November. How's
that for a coincidence?
As Mr. Gordon wrote"
"If executed, the plan could have
considerable political significance.
The first reductions would take place
before this fall's Congressional elec-
tions, while even bigger cuts might
come before the 2008 presidential
election."
The General's proposal does not
call for a complete withdrawl of
American troops, and it makes clear
that any withdrawls are contingent

on progress in the war (which is going
horribly at the moment) and im-
provements in the quality of the fledg-
ling Iraqi government and its securi-
ty forces.
"The one thing you can be sure of is
that the administration will milk as
much political advantage as it can
from this vague and open-ended pro-
posal. If the election is looking ugly
for the G.O.P., a certain number of
troops will find themselves waking up
stateside insted of in the desert in
September and October.
I wonder weather Americans will
ever become fed up with the loath-
some politicking, the fear-mongering,
the dissembling and the gruesome in-
competence of this crowd. From the
Bish-Rove perspective, General
Casey's plan is not a serious strategic
proposal. It's a straw in the political
wind.
How many more casualties will be
enough? More than 2,500 American
troops who dutifully answered Presi-
dent Bush's call to wage war in Iraq
have already perished, and thousands
more are struggling in agony with
bodies that have been torn or blown
apart and psyches that have been per-
manently wounded.
Has the war been worth their sacri-
fice?
How many still have to die before
we reach a consensus that we've
overpaid for Mr. Bush's mad adven-
ture? Will 5,000 American deaths be
enough? Ten thousand?
The killing continued unabated last
week. Iraq is a sinkhole of destruc-
tion, and if Americans could see it
close up, the way we saw New Or-
leans in the immediate aftermath of
Katrina, they would be stupefied.
Americans need to understand that
Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq was a
strategic blunder of the highest mag-
nitude. It has resulted in mind-bog-
gling levels of bloodshed, chaos and
misery in Iraq, and it certainly hasn't
made the U.S. any safer.
We've had enough clownish debate
on the Senate floor and elsewhere.
We've had enough muscle-flexing in
the White House and on Capital Hill by
guys who ran and hid when they were
young and their country was at war.
And it's time to stop using generals
and their forces under fire in the field
for cheap partisan political purposes.
The question that needs to be an-
swered, honestly and urgently (and
without regard to partisan politics),
is how best to extricate over,
stretched American troops -- some
of them serving their third or fourth
tours -- from the flaming quicksand
of an unwinnable war.