Fixing the Iraq Mess

Now that the Democrats have won the House and the Senate, they should have President Bush's attention. Perhaps he will realize that he is in over his head in Iraq. Now is the time for Bush to take some actions that are long overdue.

1. Make sure that Secretary of Defense Gates listens to the suggestions of his field commanders, and follows through on some of them. Rumsefeld may have listened, but I don't see much evidence that he followed through on any of them.

2. Commit some more forces and better equipment to Iraq. The added troops will have some different objectives, but they are still needed. We need to show strength and determination, not weakness.

3. Locate and eliminate the bad guys. Start with Moqtada al-Sadr, and either jail or eliminate him. When is followers rise up, they are the bad guys we have been looking for; take care of them. If a replacement for al-Sadr appears, get rid of him, too. There are plenty of moderate leaders that can stand up for the Shiites.

4. Get the guns out of Dodge, or at least out of Bagdad. Disarm everyone but the Iraqi police. It's bad enough that we let the defeated soldiers keep their arms and pillage the arsenals, but our sloppy book-keeping has let U.S. weapons intended for the security forces disappear, probably into enemy hands. To the maximum extent possible, the disarmament should be accomplished by Iraqi police, not by U.S. troops.

5. Demand that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki order all his police to extinguish the "kundara game". [Mahmoud Mashadani, speaker of the Iraqi assembly stated, "Any law or decision that goes against Islam, we'll put it under the kundara!" Kundara means shoe, and now any Iraqi that sees or hears something he does not like, he threatens to put a kundara down someone's throat, or to hit someone with a kundara.] It's all part of the chaos.

6. Identify the police units, both Shiite and Sunni, that are acting as death squads; disarm and disband them. Select a few elite Iraqi police that have a demonstrated ability to identify and capture terrorsis; turn over local law enforcement to them. Gradually shift our troops' roles to an advisory capacity.

7. Avoid even the hint of a specific "timetable for US withdrawal." That notion is as silly as telling the firefighters at a forest fire to turn off their hoses and go home at 4:30.

8. Set specific objectives for the Iraqi government to accomplish in terms of security and control, and set dates for their completion. This is not a timetable for our withdrawal, but one for Iraqi government actions.

9. Give some consideration to the proposals to open discussions with Iran and Syria concerning the possibility of limited assistance in the establishment of order and security in Iraq. But beware, however, that both of those countries have their own agenda for Iraq, and they will not hesitate to deceive us as to their real intentions.

I know that just about anybody can raise one or more objections to some or all of the above proposals. And perhaps not all of them should be implemented. But some should be. The fact is that we have to stop throwing up barriers to action. We have to implement some actions that have the lesser drawbacks and move forward. It's not adequate to just say, "stop doing that." We must also say, "do this instead."

President Bush should not be looking for "victory" in Iraq, but rather for "success" in Iraq. The victory comes later, with the downfalls of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah.