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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, April 12, 2004

EDITORIAL
Iraq chaos: Freedom can't be force-fed

The Bush administration's grand design in Iraq has begun to falter, not for any immediate shortcoming on the part of the American military, but because in the end it is impossible to impose democracy on people who are unready or unwilling to seize it.

As insurgency spreads — "The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw — the opportunity to do the right thing, that is, for a departing American force to turn peace, democracy and sovereignty over to a grateful Iraqi nation, may be slipping away.

June 30 remains firm as the date for the coalition to hand over civil power, but it's an arbitrary date. No coherent or viable political entity stands ready to take over.

Parallels with Vietnam

While there are huge gaps in any comparison of Iraq and the American tragedy in Vietnam, one of the most puzzling parallels is that while a strong majority of South Vietnamese in the 1960s, and Iraqis now, genuinely welcomed the promise of modernism and democracy, they proved unwilling to fight for it with the ferocity shown by the opposing forces of backwardness.

America's "best and brightest" thought the answer to ending the communist insurgency in South Vietnam was "regime change" — the 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. Nearly a decade later, the United States withdrew ignominiously from what had become the quintessential quagmire.

American commanders in Iraq, as in Vietnam, find themselves trying to impose a military solution to what began as a political problem. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt is surely right that his coalition military forces have "the flexibility, the capability to move anywhere in this country and put down that violence" just as they had for most of those years in Vietnam. But military superiority is only part of the equation.

American troops once again find they don't understand the culture, and can't distinguish combatants from civilians. Soldiers who had envisioned kicking soccer balls with Iraqi kids are now calling in airstrikes on them.

Orwellian militaryspeak is back. Generals who in Vietnam spoke of destroying a village to save it now talk about killing "enemies of the Iraqi people" who are, indisputably, Iraqi people. Some of those people we sought to "liberate" have become "thugs and vandals."

Attempts to regain control of rebellious cities like Fallujah, Ramadi and Kut involve such overwhelming firepower that while the outcome may not be in doubt, the cost in "collateral damage" escalates exponentially.

If we kill too many innocent Iraqis and blow up too many mosques, eventually we will turn the whole population against us. The rebels remain a small minority in Iraq, but the insurgency is spreading from a handful of foreign and Baathist diehards to surprising cooperation between Shiites and Sunnis.

And the majority is losing heart. Iraqi police, intimidated or attacked by their countrymen, are abandoning their posts or even switching sides. Several members of the Iraqi Governing Council and Cabinet resigned and denounced the American operation in Fallujah.

People in Washington are keen on finding out what the president knew and when he knew it before 9/11, and why he was so bent on invading Iraq.

An equally pressing question is how on Earth the Bush administration came by the notion that the post-war occupation of Iraq could be effectively completed in 90 intense days.

Clearly, Gen. Eric Shinseki was right: The United States should have deployed an overwhelming occupation force in Iraq. The best way to defeat an insurgency is not to let it begin. The Iraqi majority could have begun in safety to build their new nation.

A huge mistake certainly was disbanding the Iraqi army, by which we put 500,000 armed Iraqi soldiers on the streets with smoldering bad attitudes.

Deliver on promises

This newspaper warned that the invasion of Iraq was unwarranted and likely to end badly. Yet having conquered Iraq and deposed the odious Saddam Hussein, we've insisted that America cannot do Iraq on the cheap, as we seem to have tried to do in Afghanistan.

American credibility demands that we deliver on President Bush's worthy if extravagant promises.

What's singularly depressing about the deteriorating situation in Iraq is that it falls in the midst of an American presidential campaign. Imperative for the White House is a willingness to admit mistakes, to make necessary adjustments, to recognize the need to make Iraq an international undertaking, and to value more highly the blood of innocents as well as American soldiers.

All of these will require wise and brave leadership.