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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Tuesday, September 9, 2003

EDITORIAL
Bush: Persevering in Iraq won't be easy

Clearly, President Bush would much rather have been bouncing along the flight deck of an aircraft carrier as he did four months ago, helmet tucked under his arm, delivering an ebullient "mission accomplished" in Iraq message.

His somber televised address Sunday night was carefully crafted to emphasize a stalwart "right on course" message while quietly acknowledging major policy reversals that certainly resulted from serious miscalculations on the part of his administration going into the war in Iraq.

Bush's belated concession that the United States can't succeed in pacifying Iraq alone and badly needs United Nations help is a stunning retreat from the swaggering "Top Gun" who didn't need help from Europeans. Reminding them now that it's suddenly their "responsibility" to hazard sons and euros in Iraq is hardly the humble, apologetic approach likely to win a quick change of heart from them.

Bush has yet to explain how Iraq specifically fits into a war on terrorism, but he has substantial leeway, since 70 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two years ago Thursday.

But Americans are increasingly uneasy about the explosive cost of the war and its effect on the budget and the deficit. Given the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure, Bush's request for $87 billion (for Afghanistan as well as Iraq) is an underestimate. But at least he's no longer evasive on the subject.

Perhaps Bush's address was most notable for its omissions, such as any mention of the collapse of the Middle East "road map to peace" and the very dangerous standoff over North Korean nuclear weapons development.

It was our hope that Bush would have settled the Korea question before attacking Iraq. Our forces may now be stretched so thin as to preclude some options.

One of Bush's smartest moves, we thought, was a refusal at the beginning of his term to put his credibility on the line in the Middle East. As he said at the time, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis were ready to make the kinds of concessions required for peace. For reasons yet unexplained, Bush changed his mind and, we'd guess, now regrets it. He's left holding the bag from a peace plan that may never have had a chance.

While Bush said that defeating terrorists in Iraq and rebuilding the country will "take time and require sacrifice," he didn't say how long American troops would remain in Iraq and how much the operation will ultimately cost. He also didn't mention the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bush is correct that the United States must stay the course in Iraq. American foreign policy was staggered for a generation by its debacle in Vietnam; the effect of a pullout from Iraq might well be even worse.

Had Bush been patient enough to assemble the kind of anti-Iraq coalition that his father put together in 1991, we might have avoided the dreadful risk that now looms.