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Posted on Thu, Jan. 11, 2007 |
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WASHINGTON — President Bush’s challenge to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take over the war in Iraq resembles efforts by past U.S. presidents to force the troubled governments of South Vietnam to step up to the task during the Vietnam war. Bush may be more successful at energizing the U.S.-backed regime in Baghdad to embrace accelerated “Iraqification” of the war than Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford were at getting Saigon to adopt “Vietnamization.” Bush repeatedly emphasized in his nationally televised address Wednesday night that Iraqis must take the lead in the fight for their homeland. “America’s commitment is not open-ended,” Bush warned Maliki. “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people.” Bush added in excerpts released by the White House: “Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people.” A senior White House official readily conceded the next, Iraqi-led phase of the 46-month campaign is likely to be costly in both lives of U.S. soldiers and taxpayers’ money. The added financial cost? At least $5.6 billion for sending up to 21,500 additional U.S. troops to join the 132,000 already there and for boosting provincial reconstruction efforts by $1 billion. The Iraqi government is being called upon to reinforce its military and police units in Baghdad and take the lead in casualty-prone raids to quell sectarian bloodshed. U.S. troops will adopt the less exposed role of combat advisers. But the risk remains that the latest U.S. effort to hand over combat responsibility to the Iraqis may yield little more than what happened in South Vietnam in the 1970s, when the United States first handed off responsibility for leading the fight — and then handed off blame for the South Vietnamese defeat after almost all U.S. forces had left. In words that resembled Bush’s Wednesday night, Ford told the nation on April 23, 1975, as North Vietnamese forces advanced into Saigon: “We can and we should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their hands, not in ours.” Ford’s comments at Tulane University came shortly before U.S. diplomats and U.S. Marine embassy guards fled Saigon, ending an 11-year U.S. effort that claimed the lives of at least 58,168 U.S. soldiers, wounded 153,303 other U.S. soldiers and cost taxpayers the equivalent of $494 billion in current dollars. Bush laid out an ambitious “to-do list” for Maliki in an address that capped a two-month White House effort to revamp failing U.S. policy in Iraq after Democrats won control of Congress in the November congressional elections on the strength of their criticism of the Iraq war. Bush called on Maliki to: • Fulfill his promise to allow joint U.S.-Iraqi military units to crush sectarian militias, including Shiite Muslim militias allied with Maliki’s most powerful supporters, such as anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. • Adopt a law to equitably apportion multibillion-dollar revenues from Iraqi oil reserves among the three major groups in Iraq — the Shiite Muslims making up about 60 percent of the population; the Sunni Muslims accounting for about 30 percent and Kurds representing the remainder. • Ease limitations banning most Saddam Hussein-era government officials and Iraqi military personnel from returning to official positions in post-invasion Iraq. • Carry out provincial elections to help bring alienated Sunni Muslims into the Shiite Muslim-dominated Iraqi national government. • Accelerate the Iraqi takeover of security responsibilities for the remainder of Iraq and Baghdad by the end of 2007. “Now is the time to act,” Bush declared. U.S. officials “will see over the next several months” whether Maliki’s government makes good on the promised changes, a senior White House official emphasized. “It is time for the Iraqis to step forward.” The White House official also tried to put some political daylight between Bush and Maliki. Bush boasted just last month that his administration was helping Maliki forge an Iraq that “can sustain and govern and defend itself” and serve as a U.S. ally in the war on terror. But Wednesday, the senior White House official lowered Iraq’s importance by describing the Baghdad regime as little more than “an experiment in democracy.” That was a phrase White House officials had not used before to describe the American effort in Iraq. |
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