Editorial: Voters motivated by Iraq

Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006 | 7:06 a.m.

In a televised speech Wednesday morning, President Bush at last struck a tone on Iraq that the nation has been waiting to hear for at least two years.

Bush announced the long overdue resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and said he was looking forward to hearing recommendations "on a way forward" by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. He also said he would actively seek to find common ground with Democrats.

It's too bad that it took an outpouring of support for Democrats in Tuesday's election to force such conciliatory words from the Republican president.

Imagine if Bush had adopted such a tone when it first became obvious that his administration's war in Iraq had been planned only through the initial invasion. Imagine if he had been honest about having no plan for subsequent phases of the war even as resistance and tragedy were mounting by the day.

Instead, Bush railed at Democrats when they expressed alarm about terrorists pouring across porous borders, about the number of U.S. troops who were falling because of a lack of armor and about an occupation that provided such little security that thousands of Iraqis were being tortured and murdered by insurgents.

The president encouraged attacks on Democrats' patriotism when they pointed out that the U.S.-led coalition seemed helpless to stop a slide toward civil war in Iraq, that the war was diverting attention from the fight against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan and that there were credible reports that the war was actually increasing the threat of terrorism around the world.

The conduct of the war by Rumsfeld cried out for change, but only Congress took action by urging the formation of the Iraq Study Group. Formed earlier this year, the group is led by Republican James Baker, a former secretary of state, and Democrat Lee Hamilton, a former member of the 9/11 Commission. Its task is to recommend a new course for U.S. policy in Iraq.

Bush himself held fast to a dual policy of demonizing critics and rallying his base to amplify his slogan, "Stay the Course." Despite his falling approval ratings, Bush kept to this mindless slogan, even as more information was uncovered confirming that the stated reasons for the war were false.

Seizing on unconfirmed information from a handful of unreliable sources, Bush in 2002 proclaimed that Iraq, not al-Qaida, should be the focus of the war on terror. When his reasons for this premise - that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to use them against the United States, and that Saddam Hussein's Baath Party was working in concert with al-Qaida - were disproven, many Americans came to a chilling realization: The president had sent U.S. forces into harm's way without doing his homework.

It was this realization, more than any other, that sent voters to the polls on Tuesday. Empowering Democrats in Congress was their way of saying that we must have change in Iraq.

More information about the Bush administration's negligent planning came out Saturday, when a department at George Washington University released a once top-secret federal document it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The document - prepared by the Defense Department, the CIA and other agencies in 1999 - is a detailed assessment of how an invasion of Iraq should be handled. Nearly all of today's problems in Iraq were foreseen in the assessment.

Yet the Bush administration paid no attention to the assessment's warnings or recommendations, and failed on its own to comprehend the scope of its intentions. And so Iraq is where it is today - falling into a monstrously bloody civil war and with its U.S.-backed government a den of corruption.

Bush has nominated Robert Gates - a former CIA director, current president of Texas A&M University and a member of the Iraq Study Group - to replace Rumsfeld. If Gates is confirmed by the Senate, we believe he should interpret Tuesday's election results as a mandate for immediate changes in U.S. strategy and tactics in Iraq.