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It now seems clear that President Bush can't erase the Iraq credibility gap on his own. He has been trying to rebuild consensus for the war for months, in a series of speeches and strategy papers. But the poll numbers keep going down. His job approval ratings have fallen below 40 percent in all the latest polls, with Post-ABC News at 38 percent, CNN-USA Today-Gallup at 37 percent and Fox-Opinion Dynamics at 36 percent. Support for the war has crumbled even more sharply. The latest Post-ABC poll found that 58 percent of the country now feels the war wasn't worth fighting, compared with 27 percent back in April 2003.
Perhaps Chuck Hagel from Nebraska would be the best choice for Rumsfeld's successor, but since the oafish bull-headedness at the top of this administration admires loyalty more than competence, Rumsfeld will have to pull his own plug, or as Ignatius says:
Rumsfeld is a stubborn man, and I suspect the parade of retired generals calling for his head has only made him more determined to hold on. But by staying in his job, Rumsfeld is hurting the cause he presumably cares most about. The president, even more stubborn than his Pentagon chief, is said to have rejected his offer to resign. If that's so, it's time for Rumsfeld to take the matter out of Bush's hands.
The administration needs to look this one clearly in the eye: Without changes that shore up public support in America, it risks losing the war in Iraq.
Ignatius is one of the few commentators in the MSM without an obvious ax to grind and has vast knowledge of the region. L. Paul Bremer rather than Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush deserves the lion's share of the butcher's bill, but they gave this incompetent the leeway to parlay military victory into political defeat. Unless GWB gets smarter soon, his party may become a casualty of the Middle East mess.
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L. Paul Bremer rather than Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush deserves the lion's share of the butcher's bill, but they gave this incompetent the leeway to parlay military victory into political defeat.
What should they have done differently? Who should have been in charge? While a military victory was always inevitable, given the shoddy state of Saddam's army, was there anyway that the military victory could have been parlayed into a political victory?
Methinks the problem is not so much with mistakes that were made after the military victory as with the fact that Iraq has always been a difficult country to govern, even when relatively easy to defeat. In other words, the military victory did not really do much to resolve the underlying issues that are causing the current problems in Iraq, so the implication that Iraq was handed to Bremer on a silver platter and he screwed it up is not, I think, the correct reading of the situation.
The military war and the ensuing political/guerilla war I think are really two separate beasts, and I don't think that victory in the former necessarily affects the prospects for victory in the latter. So it's not necessarily an issue of "parlaying" it, I would argue.
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