Editorial: Iraq war critics vindicated

Friday, Dec. 1, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

What President Bush and other Republicans in his administration have branded as a preposterous "cut and run" strategy is what the Iraq Study Group reportedly will propose next week. The group is led by James Baker, who served as secretary of state to Bush's father when he was president.

This bipartisan panel, chartered by Congress, confirmed this week that it had finally reached agreement on a report that has been in the making since April. News organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, quickly tapped their sources and learned that a central recommendation is to withdraw a substantial number of troops from Iraq.

The recommendation is in line with what most critics of the Bush administration's handling of the war have been saying for at least two years. Bush responded to those critics by deriding them as defeatists.

In October 2005 Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Bush's second-term opponent, called for 20,000 troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of that year. Two months earlier Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., had called for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by Dec. 31, 2006. Neither of those calls reflected the majority opinion of congressional war critics who did, however, generally support the concept of a "phased withdrawal" over an unspecified time.

Yet even those who called for phased withdrawal, or "strategic redeployment" (assembling U.S. combat forces out of harm's way, in areas where they could quickly respond if need be) were berated by Bush. The president said such a strategy would jeopardize the U.S. mission and that "staying the course" was the only path to victory.

But polls, and the Nov. 7 election results, clearly showed that Bush was speaking to fewer and fewer believers. People were finding it hard to even comprehend what the "mission" was anymore, and what Bush had in mind when he used the word "victory."

Now the Iraq Study Group, when it releases its report Wednesday, will essentially call for a phased withdrawal, with no specific timetable attached, as most of Bush's critics have supported. The group will also reportedly recommend shifting the role of the remaining U.S. forces away from offensive engagements and toward stepped-up training and support for Iraqi troops and police, and for aggressive diplomacy in the Middle East that would include formal talks with Syria and Iran.

Bush has repeatedly said in recent days - as it became obvious that U.S. forces are powerless to quell an escalating civil war in Iraq - that he is looking forward to the group's findings. We'll see how he reacts.

Will he say the group's members, too, are a bunch of defeatists?