If bad news items were family holiday spats, then it would be Christmastime at the in-laws’ in Iraq.
Two soldiers were killed in Al Anbar province Monday, upping the American military death toll to 786 (573 in hostile action).
And according to a report by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, “The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.”
Monday, a suicide bomber killed Izzedine Salim, the president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Salim isn’t the first council member to die in an attack; Aquila al-Hashimi also died in one September 2003.
President Bush lamented, “The terrorists know that a free Iraq will be a major defeat for the cause of terror, so they are trying to shake our confidence and will.”
However terrorists would view a free Iraq aside, these attacks are certainly aimed at shaking coalition forces’ “confidence and will.” But what’s increasingly murky is what exactly a “free Iraq” would actually look like, or how the coalition is going to build it.
Still unclear is who will receive what governing powers several weeks from now during the much-touted transfer of power to local control.
Worse, more than a year after “major combat” operations have ended, the Bush administration has announced no long-term Iraq strategy, including the conditions for pulling out.
The United States at least has some medium- to long-range plans for the region; the Pentagon announced recently that it would transfer 3,600 troops from the Korean border — about 10 percent of the standing American force there — to Iraq.
If nothing else, reassigning soldiers from the last front of the Cold War to the principal front of the increasingly loosely defined war on terrorism, and from one ‘Axis of Evil’ nation to another, exemplifies a shift in military priorities.
But if obvious inferences are the best indicator that the American public — not to mention the world — has of the American objective in the region (at least, in terms of anything more specific than “the freedom of the Iraqi people”), it’s no surprise that the Iraqi occupation seems like an increasingly disenchanting proposition.
So, the coalition should announce to whom they’ll transfer power several weeks from now immediately, and then announce a long-term plan for Iraq. This plan will serve several purposes to benefit coalition forces and Iraqi civilians alike. At the least, it will provide a psychological certainty for everyone in the region. The present vacuum of ambiguity is a breeding ground for the fear and cynicism that terrorists feed on. (And given the recent troubles in Iraq, there’s little space for more of either.)
But more broadly, the clarity of specificity might quell some of the international community’s concern about the United States’ military policy, not to mention doubt about the future of the 21st century’s foreign policy powderkeg.