http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/04/976/Bush still telling us stories about Iraq
by David Sarasohn
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Tuesday afternoon, issuing his veto of the emergency war funding bill that included deadlines for cutting back the U.S. presence in Iraq, Bush told his story of how the surge came to be.
This surge, he declared, was the recommendation of military leaders, and any limitations on it from Congress was a matter of politicians trying to take the war over from the professionals. “Members of the House and the Senate,” he said sadly, “passed a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders … .
“That means America’s commanders in the middle of a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.”
Outside the lines of the president’s favorite narrative, this war from the beginning — even more than most American wars — has been a war designed by politicians with limited interest in military opinion. Generals who suggested that it was all going to be harder and take more time and men than the president’s story included were downgraded and ignored.
Because the president and Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — three politicians who designed everything about the war — insisted that it would be a short story, the military was never prepared for the length of the struggle, and lacked the equipment and armor and manpower that would be needed. While Bush now tells a story of military direction, in reality this has been a war of civilian planning and military improvisation.
“The real tragedy in Iraq,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., “is that it was the politicians in Washington, not the generals, who set our strategy in Iraq.”
The military was left to deal with the results.
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