A BETTER WAR:

Will Bush Exit – or Escalate? (Pat Buchanan, November 19, 2003, antiwar.com)

Should Iraq collapse, Bush would risk defeat in 2004 and enter the history books as a failed president who had blundered into the most ill-conceived war in U.S. history.

Surely he knows this. Which is why I believe Bush and his War Cabinet may have another strategy in mind, which is this. The president intends to draw down U.S. forces to a hard core of fighters, perhaps 90,000, backed by U.S. air power, a force 15 times as large as the mobile U.S. force in Afghanistan. This force will carry the brunt of battle in a new war against the guerrillas and terrorists, and be less concerned with winning hearts and minds in the Sunni Triangle than killing enemy fighters. Operation Iron Hammer is the dress rehearsal for the new war.

An Iraqi assembly will be elected and a leader chosen upon whom the United States can rely to fight a "long, hard slog." This leader will, with U.S. training, rapidly expand the Iraq army and police forces. Unlike Vietnam's President Thieu, who was abandoned in 1973, this leader, like Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, will be able to call on U.S. firepower to win any battle against attacking guerrillas.

Goal: Convince undecided Iraqis, who cannot wish to be ruled by Saddam and the Ba'athists, or Islamic radicals, that America and her allies are going to win the war, so it is wiser and safer to cast their lot with us.

Do not rule out the possibility that Bush escalates rather than retreats, that he puts his faith in winning the war rather than consigning Iraq to the Iraqi electorate and hoping for the best. Use of bombers near Tikrit and gunships around Baghdad may be harbingers of the war to come.

Let's hope so--this strategy worked in Vietnam.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 19, 2003 7:08 PM