Discorso Bush all’Accademia
Navale: miglioramento in Irak, strategia per la vittoria.
Articolo di cronaca WSJ
sottolinea reticenze e contraddizioni,
mentre editoriale WSJ (più sotto) dà credito e
appoggio a Bush.
- Bush netto sul fatto che USA non si ritireranno senza
la vittoria, - ma “meno chiaro è se il discorso può arrestare
l’erosione della fiducia del pubblico nella gestione dell’Irak”. - Bush:
- ha ammesso errori nell’addestramento ed equipaggiamento
delle forze irachene, che ora sarebbero superati – senza dire quali - 80 battaglioni pronti a combattere a fianco di truppe
USA, + 40 in grando di dirigere combattimenti. Più di 12 basi militari passate
agli iracheni. - Ha detto che la resistenza è composta dai sunniti
scontenti di non dominare più l’Irak, dai saddamisti, e dai terroristi alleati
di Al Qaeda, i meno numerosi ma più letali. - Bush ha taciuto sulle prove fornite dai gruppi pro-diritti
umani sull’uso di routine della tortura da parte delle forze regolari irachene, - ha taciuto sulle accuse sunnite circa rapimenti e
uccisioni di centinaia di sunniti negli ultimi mesi da parte delle forze di
sicurezza, sciite e curde, fatti che rischiano di portare alla guerra civile. - Funzionari USA in Irak hanno espresso allarme crescente
per l’uso delle forze di sicurezza irachene come milizie settarie da parte dei
partiti sciiti e curdi. - Si ritiene inoltre che sciiti e curdi gestiscono reti
di prigioni segrete in tutto il paese, nelle quali i sunniti sono detenuti e
interrogati, spesso con la collaborazione delle forze di sicurezza. - Loren Thompson, CEO del Lexington Institute: progressi
nella creazione di forze armate disciplinate, ma non nella formazione di forze
armate che si pongano al di sopra delle divisioni settarie [=etnico-religiose]. - Bush ha lodato influenti religiosi sunniti per aver
incoraggiato i sunniti ad arruolarsi, ma la sua tesi che gli iracheni sono
divenuti militarmente autonomi è parziale. - Ė vero che a Tal Afar c’erano più iracheni che
americani (mentre a Falluja gli iracheni servivano solo da appoggio), ma si
trattava di ex guerriglieri curdi, non reclute addestrate dagli
americani, e anche lì gli attacchi alle roccaforti degli insorti (che peraltro
avevano in gran parte abbandonato la città) vennero pianificate e condotte
dagli americani. - Il capogruppo democratico alla Camera, Nancy Pelosi, ha
chiesto il ritiro in tempi brevi, ma i democratici sono stretti tra il timore
di essere attaccati come “molli” e la loro base pacifista che sta alzando la
voce. J. Biden, candidabile alle presidenziali, ha definito il discorso di Bush
“un passo positivo”.
‘Complete Victory’
Editoriale
WSJ, sostenitore della guerra senza riserve, plaude alla linea Bush pro
“vittoria completa” per battere il “disfattismo sull’Irak che ultimamente ha
conquistato tanti politici ed élites americani”.
- Se si può discutere se all’inizio la guerra fosse
“scelta o necessità”, ora è necessità, USA non possono abbandonare il campo. - Ci sono oggi oltre 120 battaglioni di polizia ed
esercito iracheni pronti per il combattimento, impegnati sul campo. - Mentre a metà 2004 nessun battaglione “possedeva” il
proprio campo di battaglia, ora è vero per 33 battaglioni (ad es.
pattugliamento del viale Haifa a Baghdad). - E 45 battaglioni da 750 uomini sono ora in grado di
dirigere operazioni di combattimento per
proprio conto. - Secondo il Gen. Martin Dimpsey del Multinational
Security Transition Command (Min-sticky) quest’anno nessuna unità irachena ha
ceduto in battaglia, come era successo nella primavera 2004. E 4.000 ex
ufficiali dell’esercito hanno risposto ad una recente campagna di reclutamento. - Restano nelle FFAA irachene problemi di divisioni
“settarie” e di lealtà, che il governo da eleggere saprà risolvere. - Una completa autonomia operativa non vi potrà essere
senza un rafforzamento dei ministeri Difesa e Interni per rafforzare catena
rifornimenti. - Altro punto debole gli approvvigionamenti, fonte di
corruzione nel gov. ad interim 2004. La coalizione ha puntato eccessivamente su
armi di seconda categoria dei paesi ex-Patto di Varsavia, ora NATO. Ma USA si
può fidare a dare agli iracheni armi di prima qualità made in USA, come fa con
Giordania, Egitto e Arabia Saudita. Un’idea: le unità USA che si ritireranno
lascino in Irak un certo numero di Humvee, tanto dovrebbero essere ritirati, e
offrono più protezione dei pickup iracheni.
Speech Offers No Timeline
For U.S. Exit, Focuses on Effort
To Rebuild Mideast Nation’s Army
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and JOHN D. MCKINNON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 1, 2005; Page A4
WASHINGTON — President Bush sought once
again to convince Americans he has a victory strategy in Iraq. But the
speech was as notable for what he left out.
Mr. Bush said that the number of battle-ready
Iraqi army and police battalions has grown markedly — but didn’t address
accusations that Shiite and Kurdish security forces are torturing and killing
Sunni civilians. He said continued progress means "we will be able to
decrease our troop levels" — but declined to offer a general timetable
for when. He said U.S. forces are "learning from our experiences [and]
adjusting our tactics" — but outlined no new administration strategy.
What as new in Mr. Bush’s address at the
U.S. Naval Academy was his detailed deconstruction of the opposition that
U.S. forces face, and his unusually frank admission of problems in training
Iraqi forces to counter them. He acknowledged the "sincere"
arguments of political adversaries seeking withdrawal of U.S. troops, while
vowing "America will not run in the face of car bombers as long as I am
your commander in chief."
Less clear was whether the speech can stop
the erosion of public confidence in the
administration’s handling of Iraq, which has rattled fellow Republicans looking
ahead to U.S. midterm elections. Democrats edged even further away in the wake
of the speech, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi embraced a prompt troop
withdrawal.
In the first of a quartet of presidential
speeches that White House aides plan for the run-up to the Dec. 15 Iraqi
election, Mr. Bush re-emphasized the importance of the war effort and the
administration’s belief that it had a strategy to win in Iraq. He focused on
the status of the U.S.-led effort to create new Iraqi military and security
forces capable of effectively battling the country’s insurgents, which both
parties see as a prerequisite for any eventual American military withdrawal.
Mr. Bush acknowledged that administration
missteps in the training and equipping of the Iraqi forces contributed to
lingering shortcomings in their effectiveness. But he said those mistakes had
been fixed.
"Over the past 2½ years, we’ve faced
some setbacks in standing up a capable Iraqi security force, and their
performance is still uneven in some areas," he said. "Yet many of
those forces have made real gains over the past year, and Iraqi soldiers take
pride in their progress."
Mr. Bush said 80 Iraqi battalions are now
able to fight alongside the U.S., with 40 more able to take a lead role in
combat. He said the U.S. had turned over more than a dozen military
facilities to the Iraqis, who were also assuming full security
responsibility for growing portions of the country.
The opposition, he explained, consists
principally of "rejectionists" unhappy that Sunnis no longer
dominate Iraq, "Saddamists" loyal to Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime
and terrorists aligned with al Qaeda. The terrorists, he added, are
"the smallest, but the most lethal."
Yet Mr. Bush appeared to gloss over
shortcomings in the Iraqi security forces playing a greater role in taking on
the insurgents. Human-rights groups have offered evidence that the new
forces routinely use torture, but Mr. Bush declined to address the accusations.
He also declined to address widespread Sunni accusations that members of the
overwhelmingly Shiite and Kurdish security forces have kidnapped and killed
hundreds of Sunni men in recent months, a development that is increasing
tensions between the groups and raising the specter of civil war.
American officials in Iraq have expressed
mounting alarm that Shiite and Kurdish political parties effectively use the
security forces as sectarian militias. Both Shiites
and Kurds are also believed to run networks of secret prisons across the
country where Sunnis are held or interrogated, often with the tacit or
active cooperation of Iraqi security forces in such areas
"If you define success in terms of
creating a more disciplined military that will stand and fight, then we’re
making progress," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of
the Lexington Institute, a think tank here. "But if you define it as a
military that has risen above sectarian loyalties, then we’re not making
progress."
Mr. Bush credited influential Sunni
clerics for encouraging more Sunnis to join the security forces and help it
become a "truly national institution." But military experts
questioned whether Iraqi forces had improved as much as Mr. Bush suggested.
In his remarks, Mr. Bush compared the roles
played by Iraqi forces in coalition-led assaults on a pair of insurgent
strongholds. He noted that, when coalition forces swept into Fallujah last
year, American forces did virtually all of the combat and used the Iraqis
mainly as backup. During the recent battle in Tal Afar, by contrast, Iraqi
forces outnumbered American ones and "primarily led" the assault,
Mr. Bush said.
But experts warned against extrapolating too
heavily from the Tal Afar assault. They noted that Iraqi forces used in the
attack were battle-hardened Kurdish fighters, not new recruits trained by
Americans. Iraqi forces played an active role, but the experts said
American commanders planned the overall assault and sent U.S. forces into areas
where the insurgent presence was believed strongest. And the overall level of
combat was far fiercer in Fallujah than in Tal Afar, which insurgents had
largely deserted, they noted.
Mr. Bush’s speech heartened Republican
lawmakers, who have been eager for the White House to go back on the offensive
after weeks of sharp Democratic attacks. A few Democrats offered qualified
praise, with Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, a potential 2008
presidential candidate, calling the address "a positive step."
But other Democrats panned the speech as a
White House effort to gloss over its problems. Instead of specific measures of
success or a timeline for withdrawal, it simply provided "more
generalities," said Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.), a former Army Ranger who
emerged as the Democrats’ point person on the speech. "We have to have a
sense of how long it will take," he said.
Yet the demand for a more rapid drawdown of
U.S. troops also leaves Democrats with a quandary. Insisting on a timeline
allows Republican critics to paint them as soft on defense; cooperating with
Mr. Bush’s approach risks inflaming the party’s increasingly vocal, antiwar
base.
Democrats i recent days have conceded
privately that they have already used many of their best political weapons,
citing the Senate debate last month over a timetable resolution and the call by
Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a normally hawkish Vietnam veteran, for a
pullout.
December 1, 2005; Page A16
Our reading of history is that the
American people will accept casualties in a war, even heavy casualties, as long
as they think their leaders have a strategy to win. So we were glad to see
President Bush yesterday begin what the White House says will be a
consistent effort to counter the defeatism toward Iraq that has lately taken
over so many American politicians and elites.
Mr. Bush addressed the U.S. Naval Academy,
and his aides released a strategy document called "Victory in
Iraq." Not subtle, we know, but war demands Presidential repetition
more than nuance. And a victory strategy is the only antidote to the rush
to the exits that more and more Members of Congress are seeking as they look at
the opinion polls.
The speech had Mr. Bush’s familiar, albeit
even more forceful, pledge "that we will never accept anything less than
complete victory." (The Middies loved that line.) And it also laid out the
stakes for Americans if we did withdraw too soon and leave Iraq a mess.
"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq," he said,
"they would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our
own borders."
Or as military analyst Andrew Krepinevich put
it to us yesterday, whether Iraq was a "war of choice" or a
"war of necessity" at the beginning, it certainly is the latter now.
Our adversaries the world over — from North Korea to Syria’s Bashar Assad to
Iran’s mullahs — are watching to see if America has the will to win in Iraq.
But yesterday’s speech was most notable
because for the first time in months Mr. Bush dug into the details of the U.S.
military strategy, especially the training of Iraqi forces. There are now
more than 120 battle-ready Iraqi police and Army battalions "in the
fight" and ready to assume more responsibility as long as there is a
stable Iraqi government to lead them, he said.
And he justifiably pointed to the early fall
offensive that cleaned up Tal Afar and allowed its residents to vote in
the October Constitutional referendum. Iraqi forces led that fight, and they
have stayed as part of a "clear, hold and build" strategy that
is sure to be repeated in other parts of the Sunni Triangle. While no Iraqi
battalions "owned" their own battlespace in mid-2004, some 33 do now.
This includes the units patrolling Haifa Street and other once
troublesome neighborhoods in Baghdad.
None of this is to deny that Iraqi forces
continue to have sectarian and loyalty problems. But there is every reason
to believe that the Iraqi government to be elected later this month can work
those out over time. In fact, getting Iraqi battalions to complete
operational independence certainly won’t happen until there are stronger
ministries of defense and interior to facilitate their supply chain. The
current bottom line, however, is that about 45 Iraqi battalions of about 750
men each are able to lead combat operations on their own.
Mr. Bush was also candid in admitting that the
U.S. changed strategy on Iraqi security force training in 2004 after several
missteps. "Progress by the Iraqi security forces has come, in part,
because we learned from our earlier experiences and made changes in the way we help
train Iraqi troops," he said.
This puts him ahead of a press corps that
still focuses on past failures. In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly,
for example, James Fallows purports to explain "Why Iraq Has No
Army." But the public affairs office of the Multinational Security
Transition Command in Iraq (or "Min-sticky") says Mr. Fallows not
only didn’t visit but didn’t even contact them while reporting the article or
at anytime during at least the past nine months.
Min-sticky commander General Martin
Dempsey told us from Baghdad yesterday that not a single Iraqi Army or
police unit has folded in battle this year the way some did during the spring
2004 violence. He added that about 4,000 former Iraqi officers have
responded to a recent recruitment drive, a sign that they see their future
residing with a democratic Iraq and not their old Baathist masters.
One area that could still use improvement is procurement
policy. This was hampered by apparent corruption during the 2004 interim
government. But the Coalition may also have relied too much on second-rate
weaponry from the old Warsaw Pact members that have joined NATO over the
past decade. While this may make sense in some cases, the U.S. doesn’t view
such other regional allies as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as unable to
operate our advanced weaponry.
As the "central front in the war on
terror," as Mr. Bush puts it, Iraq should have top-of-the-line U.S.
equipment whenever possible. One idea would be for U.S. forces departing
next year to leave behind some of their Humvees, which would probably be
retired in any case and which provide far better protection than the
pick-up trucks that many Iraqi Security Forces now use.
The larger story here is that there are
reasons for optimism in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad leads
the best diplomatic team since the liberation in 2003, Iraqi forces are getting
into the fight, all ethnic groups are participating in the democratic process,
and Iraqi political leaders are emerging who can lead a newly elected
government. As Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman wrote Tuesday on these pages,
for America to leave now would be to abandon free Iraqis just as they are
beginning to stand up.
The car bombs will continue, of course, as
will the kidnappings. And there will be further American casualties. But this
is all the more reason for Mr. Bush to stay engaged with the American public in
making the case for the war, explaining both the progress and the setbacks, and
never failing to lay out the path to victory. If we can make one more immodest
proposal: How about a Presidential visit to address the new Iraqi Parliament
early next year?