[Mb-civic] The Soldiers Speak. Will President Bush Listen? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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February 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Soldiers Speak. Will President Bush Listen?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When President Bush held a public meeting with troops by satellite last
fall, they were miraculously upbeat. And all along, unrepentant hawks (most
of whom have never been to Iraq) have insisted that journalists are
misreporting Iraq and that most soldiers are gung-ho about their mission.

Hogwash! A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers
overwhelmingly want out of Iraq ‹ and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to
John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne
College, it asked 944 service members, "How long should U.S. troops stay in
Iraq?"

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush's position that they should stay as long as
necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled
out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw
"immediately."

That's one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq
has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don't buy into it ‹ and
having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington
about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes
military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only
26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those
foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency
is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

So what would it take to win in Iraq? Maybe that was the single most
depressing finding in this poll.

By a two-to-one ratio, the troops said that "to control the insurgency we
need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions." And since
there is zero chance of that happening, a majority of troops seemed to be
saying that they believe this war to be unwinnable.

This first systematic look at the views of the U.S. troops on the ground
suggests that our present strategy in Iraq is failing badly. The troops
overwhelmingly don't want to "stay the course," and they don't seem to think
the American strategy can succeed.

It's tempting, but not very helpful, to repeat that the fatal mistake was
invading Iraq three years ago and leave it at that. That's easy for a
columnist to say; the harder thing for a policy maker is to figure out what
we do next, now that we're already there.

I still believe that while the war was a dreadful mistake, an immediate
pullout would also be a misstep: anyone who says that Iraq can't get worse
hasn't seen a country totally torn apart by chaos and civil war. Mr. Bush is
right about the consequences of an immediate pullout ‹ to Iraq, and also to
American influence around the world.

But while we shouldn't rush for the exits immediately, we should lay out a
timetable for withdrawal that would remove all troops by the end of next
year. And we should state clearly that we will not keep any military bases
in Iraq ‹ that's a no-brainer, for it costs us nothing, but our hedging on
bases antagonizes Iraqi nationalists and results in more dead Americans.

Such a timetable would force Iraqis to prepare ‹ politically and militarily
‹ to run their own country. The year or two of transition would galvanize
Iraqi Shiites to find a modus vivendi with Sunnis while undermining the
insurgents' arguments that they are nationalists protecting the motherland
from Yankee crusaders.

True, a timetable is arbitrary and risky, for it could just encourage
insurgents to hang tight for another couple of years. But we're being killed
‹ literally ‹ because of nationalist suspicions among Iraqis that we're just
after their oil and bases and that we're going to stay forever. It's crucial
that we defuse that nationalist rage.

For now, we've become the piñata of Iraqi politics, something for Iraqi
demagogues to bash to boost their own legitimacy. Moktada al-Sadr, one of
the scariest Iraqi leaders, has very shrewdly used his denunciations of the
U.S. to boost his own political following and influence across Iraq; that's
our gift to him, a consequence of our myopia. And many ordinary Iraqis are
buying into this scapegoating of the U.S. Edward Wong, one of my intrepid
Times colleagues in Baghdad, quoted a clothing merchant named Abdul-Qader
Ali as saying: "I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes ‹ it is
America. Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the
troublemaker in the middle is America."

Will a timetable work? I don't know, but it's a better bet than our present
policy of whistling in the dark. And it's what the troops favor ‹ and
they're the ones who have Iraq combat experience. It's time our commander in
chief stopped stage-managing his troops and listened to them.

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