JB

It's official, the war is not over. It has turned into what Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of allied forces in Iraq, calls "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" whose fighters, drawn from Saddam Hussein's most unyielding loyalists and foreign terrorist groups, are increasingly organized. The United States will have to keep a large number of troops in the country for the foreseeable future, at the cost of billions of dollars. In case you are wondering, the Bush Administration also revealed yesterday that the deficit is predicted to be 455 billion dollars, by far the largest in the country's history. And with a weak economy, and continuing military obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan, matters are not likely to improve anytime soon.

I was a war skeptic, and one of the reasons for my skepticism was that I thought that winning the peace would be more difficult than winning the war. Let me repeat what I said in January:

But before going to war, you must ask: How many casualties are likely to your people and to the other side, and what collateral consequences will occur? How will this affect your strategic situation, five, ten, twenty years from now? While the war with one enemy is going on, what will your other enemies do in response while you are preoccupied? If you do manage to win, how long will you have to occupy your former enemy’s country? How much will the occupation cost? What new wars and conflicts will your occupation provoke? If you don’t ask these sorts of questions, you are just being foolish. This is exactly what the great military strategist Sun Tzu said two thousand years ago. He who reduces uncertainty before going into battle wins, he who embraces uncertaintly loses. That is what I meant by my previous post. The problem is that right now we are not reducing uncertainty. We are embracing it.

There is some evidence that the war with Iraq will not be as painless or quick as the President hopes, but put that aside. Even if the war is painless and quick, as I hope it will be, there is good reason to think that the occupation following the war will be particularly difficult and complicated. Jim Fallows has offered a good summary of the problems, and I recommend it to Gary and to anyone else who is interested. I don’t think one can make a decision about going to war without taking these issues into account. I fear that the Bush Administration is not being sufficiently realistic about these issues. I think there is a lot of wishful thinking going on about about American invulnerability, and about America's ability to remake Iraq any way it wants.

The Administration has been boastful, arrogant, and reckless. It has been reckless with the American economy, through its dogmatic insistence on greater and greater tax cuts. It has been reckess with foreign policy, by refusing to swerve from its policy of attacking Iraq, exaggerating the nature of the threat, dissembling about the real reasons for war, and refusing to explain in any honest fashion how long the war would cost and how long the occupation of the country would last. Now its recklessness in the latter arena is compounding its recklessness in the former. For the Administration is well on its way to seriously compromising both the domestic economy and its foreign policy goals.

In both cases, the Administration's strategy has to been to entangle the country in a policy that, once begun, will be difficult to undo. The tax cuts are politically difficult to undo, for any attempt to restore fiscal discipline will be met with outraged cries that the government is raising taxes, whether that accusation truly makes sense, given the strange way the tax cuts were actually structured. Perhaps equally important, by invading Iraq and taking it over, we have made it very difficult, if not impossible for ourselves to leave soon. For if there is chaos now, there is sure to be even more chaos if we abruptly depart.

What is most galling, I think, is that although the Administration's tough talk was designed to make Americans feel that they were being made safe in the wake of 9-11, it is clear that the Administration's policies have not made the country safer. The economy is sliding downhill. Insufficient funds have been appropriated for homeland security. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction may demonstrate not that the weapons were never there, but that they were smuggled out of the country and into the hands of terrorist groups during the chaos that came with the war. This is, of course, something that the Administration was repeatedly warned about, but which it dismissed, just as it dismissed the costs of the war, and the length of the occupation that would inevitably follow it. But wishful thinking of this sort does not make Americans safer from the threat posed by 9-11 or the war on terror in which we now find ourselves.

Being a decisive leader is not the same thing as being a good leader. Decisive action may make a person appear tough and principled, but it may just be a cover for recklessness, stubbornness and the refusal to listen to reason. These are characteristics that leaders can do without. For that sort of leadership, willfully blind to consequences, engaged in wishful thinking, and disgusing its real motives, may cause enormous problems for the country down the road. I have long believed that this President, and this Administration, are not providing strong leadership, but rather reckless leadership. That recklessness is becoming more apparent every day, as the economy worsens, the deficits soar, and more and more Americans die in a war that the President stated was officially over as he strutted like a popinjay up and down the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Good government is not a crap shoot, nor is it best achieved through bluffing. It is a sign of the President's failure of leadership that all he has to offer now is what he has always offered-- tough talk, vague generalities, and attempts to change the subject. Such forced machismo rings increasingly hollow as the casualties mount, the predicted duration of occupation lengthens, the forces necessary to our self-defense are stretched to the breaking point, and the long term economic health of the nation is endangered by a massive redistirbution to the wealthy and the powerful.

America deserves a better government than this.