Recently President Bush was interviewed on NPR. The interview helped illustrate the clear rift between the public faces of the vice president and the president. Cheney implies that things are going swimmingly in Iraq and Bush, facing a hostile, oppositional Congress, has finally started to get more realistic.
A few days after the interview, the Brookings Institute in Washington released a report that detailed the catastrophic consequences of the US-led invasion in Iraq. The report explains that in order to quell the current civil war, troop numbers will need to be increased to 450,000. While the president is becoming more realistic in his rhetoric regarding the war, he has not yet acknowledged the results that growing hostilities and unease regarding recent militant handling of foreign policy will lead to here at home.
In the NPR interview, President Bush explained that the “situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people – and it is unacceptable to me.” Asked whether there is a “conflicting message” between Bush and Cheney, Bush said that Vice President Cheney is “reflecting a half-glass-full mentality.” A week later, Cheney told Newsweek, “I think we have made significant progress,” and Bush calls this optimism. Of course, it looks a lot like delusion, but ever since Bush forgot about his Massachusetts prep-school/Yale education in exchange for appealing to the common voter, his words don’t quite match up to the English language we know and embrace
Unfortunately for Cheney’s optimism, according to a recent Brookings Institute paper entitled, “Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War,” the U.S. has put itself into a position where it needs to develop plans to deal with catastrophic civil war in the region. The conflict will “kill hundreds of thousands, [and] create millions of refugees” not to mention “disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.” Herein, I would say that this is one of the first times that I am in near agreement with the president. However, I would word “the situation in Iraq is unacceptable,” more strongly.
The study, called “unremittingly bleak” by the Independent, goes on to suggest that ending an all-out civil war would require a force of 450,000 troops, which is three times the number of troops that are already there, and slightly over a third of the U.S. military. When asked on Meet the Press two weeks ago, before the release of the aforementioned report, if he believed adding 20,000 troops would increase U.S. capabilities, but not stabilize the country, Sen. John McCain said that he was “concerned with it.”
What I am concerned with, and what hasn’t been much talked about by Washington, is the breaking point of American popular opinion.
Over the winter semester, I took a geology class. There, I learned that in plate tectonic theory, a fault will stick, but as pressure builds up over the course of years, so much pressure builds up and it un-sticks. The fault edges scrape together while correcting themselves at several meters per second, and an earthquake ensues. If enough pressure builds up, the earthquake is catastrophic, and it destroys the area built upon it. Like the fault, American criticism, cynicism, and outrage have been stuck for quite some time.
We allowed Washington to take us to war and we re-elected a war-hungry president and Congress. Iraq is quickly going to hell, slipping between the cracks of government corruption and complacency among the citizenry. It is only a matter of time before, faced with strategically handling the growing doomsday scenario in Iraq, the draft gets discussed a little more seriously and American complacency begins to unravel. Will it be too late for America’s military aged youth to escape cleaning up the problems created when they were too young to vote?
It is only a matter of time before, like the fault, we become unstuck, and there’s an earthquake of revolt.
The can of worms this reckless foreign policy has opened is much bigger than the chaos is has created abroad. We need to prepare for the potential unrest that we face here at home when American youth will be forced to deal with the mistakes of an older, stagnant generation.