[Dialogue] Toil and Trouble

[Harry Wainwright]

April 9, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist


Toil and Trouble 


By MAUREEN DOWD
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/mau
reendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

WASHINGTON

Maybe it was because I was sitting in the back of the Senate chamber with
three war protesters - grim-faced, chanting women dressed in black hooded
cloaks, white makeup and blood-red hands - that I felt as though I were
watching a production of "Macbeth" rather than a hearing on Iraq.

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair," the witches in the play said. "Hover
through the fog and filthy air."

Many words hovered Tuesday in the Senate - including some pointed ones by
the woman and two men vying to be commander in chief. But the words seemed
trapped in a labyrinth leading nowhere.

The Surge Twins were back, but the daylong testimony of David Petraeus and
Ryan Crocker before two committees seemed more depressing this time. As the
Bard writes in "Macbeth": "From that spring whence comfort seemed to come,
discomfort swells."

They arrived on the heels of the Maliki debacle in Basra, which made it
stunningly clear - after a cease-fire was brokered in Iran - that we're
spending $3 trillion as our own economy goes off a cliff so that Iran can
have a dysfunctional little friend.

Not good news, given Ahmadinejad's announcement that his scientists are
putting 6,000 new uranium-enriching centrifuges in place.

I like General Petraeus's air of restrained competence and Ambassador
Crocker's air of wry world-weariness. But now they seem swallowed up by the
fresh violence and ancient tribal antagonisms that they were supposed to be
overcoming. 

The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same - a post-Surge Pause or
"consolidation and evaluation," as the general generically puts it - and no
answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.

The way forward, General Petraeus said, should be "conditions-based."

Even in a place as prosaic as the Senate, this news spurred existential
angst.

Senator Evan Bayh summed up the Dada nature of our plan in Iraq: "We'll know
when we get there, and we don't know when we're going to get there."

A confused Chuck Hagel asked the pair: "So, where's the surge? What are we
doing? I don't see Secretary Rice doing any Kissinger-esque flying around.
Where is the diplomatic surge? ... So, where is the surge? What are you
talking about?" 

Condi is too busy floating trial balloons about being John McCain's running
mate to bother about the fact that she was instrumental in two historic
blunders: 9/11 and Iraq.

It's hard to follow the narrative of our misadventure in Iraq. We went in to
help the Shiites that we betrayed in the first Gulf War shake off their
Sunni tormentors. But then, predictably for everyone except the
chuckleheaded W. and Cheney, the Shiites began tormenting the Sunnis. So we
put 90,000 Sunni Sons of Iraq - some of the same ones who were exploding
American soldiers - on our payroll so they'd stop shooting at Americans and
helping Al Qaeda. Our troops have gone from policing a Sunni-Shiite civil
war to policing a Shiite-Shiite power struggle, while Osama bin Laden plots
in peace as Al Qaeda in Iraq distracts us and drains our military resources.


Even some senators got confused.

John McCain seemed to repeat his recent confusion over tribes, mistakenly
referring to Al Qaeda again as a "sect of Shiites" before correcting himself
and saying: "or Sunnis or anybody else." 

And Joe Biden theorized that "The Awakening," made up of Sunnis, might
decide to get into a civil war with Sunnis, presumably meaning Shiites.

But Senator Biden asked a trenchant, if attenuated, question of Mr. Crocker
about Al Qaeda: "If you could take it out, you had a choice, the Lord
Almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there and said, 'Mr.
Ambassador, you can eliminate every Al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, or every Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq,' which would you pick?" 

Given the progress beating back Al Qaeda in Iraq, the ambassador replied, he
would pick the hiding place of bin Laden.

"That would be a smart choice," Mr. Biden noted.

Senator John Warner asked the essential question - the one that makes it
clear that W. and Cheney hurt the national interest: Is the war making us
safer here at home?

General Petraeus avoided answering. But he acknowledged that the "fragile"
gains there are "reversible." "The Champagne bottle," he told Senator Bayh,
"has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator."

You know you're in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

"Why is it," she asked, "after all we have given - 4,024 American lives,
gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people,
but it's the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?"

She warmed to: "He got a red-carpet treatment, and we are losing our sons
and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating
is my point."

Ambassador Crocker dryly assured the senator from California that he
believed that Dick Cheney had also gotten kissed on his visit to Iraq. 

 

 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> Copyright
2008 The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>  

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