|
|
Americans’ patience wearing thin on Iraq
Posted By Adam Robertson
Congressional Democrats vowed not to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on his Iraq policy. Likewise, the American public, wearied by the growing U.S. military death toll and almost no sign of progress in the war, is running out of patience.
This sentiment was clearly reflected in the November elections that drove President Bush’s Republicans out of power in Congress. After his defeat, the American president appointed a new secretary of defense and new military commander in Iraq charged with implementing a new “strategy”.
But despite Bush’s repeated calls for patience with the war while additional troops arrive in Iraq to implement his new strategy, opinion polls show that pessimism runs deep and that most Americans favor a deadline for troop withdrawals from the war-ravaged country.
"The ... question now is whether the U.S. has the patience to at least play out its current strategy and accept the fact that any hope of success must be measured in years of U.S. actions, not months," said Anthony Cordesman, an expert of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to a Reuters article, the way U.S. citizens changed their opinion about Iraq since the 2003 invasion has historical precedents: support was strong for the first two years of the wars in Vietnam and Korea and then fell steadily in the absence of fast progress.
No signs of progress emerged after Bush launched his new plan, under which a “surge” of 28,000 extra soldiers is being sent to curb violence in Baghdad, using the methods laid down in a new blueprint for fighting rebels in the war-torn country.
When the U.S. Army and Marine Corps began working on what the army calls the “counterinsurgency manual”, the first in two decades, its initial draft said success required "extreme patience." The final version, issued in December, was less categorical: it prescribed "substantial" patience.
Despite the so-called security crackdown that began in Baghdad in January and has since been extended to other cities, daily attacks continue to claim the lives of Iraqi civilians. The U.S. military death toll also hit 3,352 at the start of May.
However, on May 1 Bush vetoed a Democrat-backed bill that would have linked $124 billion in military funds to deadlines for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, an idea the American president rejected as a “recipe for defeat.”
In an attempt to reach a compromise with the Democrats, Bush, for the first time, sent his senior aides to Capitol Hill this week. Negotiations are expected to continue until early next week, but it’s unclear whether an agreement can be reached.
However, the discussions show that Bush is finally listening to the American people.
"It has taken almost four and a half years, but it appears the president finally is willing to consider what most Americans and members of Congress have long known: we must change course in Iraq and move toward a strategy that will make our country more secure," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a statement on Friday.
Although the war spending bill Bush vetoed was backed by only four Republicans, some experts say it’s only a matter of time before others, under pressure from their constituents, would follow suit.
"Next year, even Republicans will run out of patience," predicted Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary who is now a security expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.
|
|
