by Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney
Amanda Terkel and Payson Schwin / American Progress report
Today, the House of Representatives will spend the day debating the Iraq war. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), however, appears unwilling to address the administration's strategy in Iraq directly.
Instead, Boehner has crafted a resolution that focuses on the "war on terror" -- Iraq isn't even mentioned until the eighth paragraph. But in attempting to divert the debate, Boehner stumbled into the real issue. The Iraq war is undermining the ability of the United States to defeat international terrorists.
The Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine surveyed more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts, conservatives and liberals, and 84 percent said America is not winning the "war on terror." (The consensus reached "across political party lines" with 71 percent of conservatives and 90 percent of moderates agreeing that America is losing the "war on terror.")
In the survey, which will be released today, participants list the Iraq war as one of the top two reasons America is less safe, rating the administration's Iraq policies a dismal 2.7 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Moreover, 77 percent of participants said the Iraq war is having a "very negative impact" on "protecting the American people from global terrorist networks and in advancing U.S. national security goals." (Another nine percent said the impact was "somewhat negative.")
The message is clear -- to effectively address the threat of international terrorists, America must change course in Iraq. The Center for American Progress has a plan.
THE DATA TELLS THE STORY:
The pessimism of the experts surveyed is backed up by empirical data. Using the Bush administration's own statistics, the problem of international terrorism is worse now than it was in 2001. According to State Department data, the number of significant international terrorist attacks tripled to 650 in 2004 from last year. (The 175 international terrorist attacks in 2003 was itself a 20-year high.)
In 2005, international terrorist attacks spiked significantly again, although the Bush administration refused to release directly comparable numbers. Another Bush administration agency, the National Counterterrorism Threat Center, found that 3,192 incidents of international terrorism occurred last year, resulting in the "deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people." While the threat of international terrorism is diffuse, our military resources are concentrated in Iraq.
THE LESSON OF AFGHANISTAN:
The consequences of the administration's focus on Iraq, instead of the broader threat of terrorism, are on display in Afghanistan.
In the New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid describes a resurgent Taliban: "As recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, and horses. … There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years."
The problem, according to the Washington Post's William Arkin, is that "the Bush administration naturally searched for an al Qaeda-Iraq connection to match its flawed assumption about its roots. And though it paid lip service to nation building, the task was seen as secondary to the big war."
The Bush administration, specifically Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, essentially decided "to abandon the Afghanistan campaign as soon as Kabul fell."
REDEPLOYMENT WILL DEFINE SUCCESS:
Boehner's resolution frames redeployment as a defeat in the war on terrorism. Not so. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) explains, "Getting out of Iraq will define success in Iraq."
Iraqis, including the new Prime Minister, agree and are saying that Americans must begin to leave. Nearly nine in ten Iraqis approve a timeline for U.S. withdrawal, and 70 percent of the Iraqi public supports the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces by the end of 2007. Once redeployment is complete, we will be able to refocus our military and strategic resources to combat terrorism effectively.
BOEHNER STRATEGY MEMO ADVOCATES UGLY TACTICS:
Media reports say Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991.”
It looks like that’s just spin. The Progress Report has obtained a “Confidential Messaging Memo” from Boehner instructing his caucus to conduct a very different kind of deliberation. In the memo, Boehner instructs members to exploit the 9/11 tragedy, writing that linking 9/11 to Iraq is "imperative." (The 2 page memo mentions 9/11 seven times.)
The Majority Leader also encourages ad hominem attacks against anyone who takes issues with the President's strategy, calling them “sheepish,” “weak,” and “prone to waver endlessly.” The memo also encourages members to frame the debate as a choice between accepting the President's strategy and hoping terrorist threats will “fade away on their own.”
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