Editorial: Too high a price

Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007 | 6:46 a.m.

In September 2004, 18 months into the war in Iraq, Andrew Krepinevich went to speak to two dozen generals and offered them a "strategic alternative" to beat the insurgency and the scourge of IEDs - improvised explosive devices.

Krepinevich, a West Point alumnus and retired Army officer, has been a civilian adviser to the military and to policymakers. He called for basic counterinsurgency efforts such as training troops to find ways to work with Iraqis to turn the tables on the insurgents.

As USA Today reported last week, his plan went nowhere. He met with Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, in 2005 to discuss the plan. Nothing happened.

Other analysts and consultants were saying the same thing to the Bush administration, but the White House and the Pentagon didn't want to hear it. Cheney at the time was unbelievably saying the insurgency was "in its last throes."

The military's response was to look for the bombs and spent millions of dollars on trying to develop technology that could spot and disarm a bomb. Nothing worked, and the death toll mounted.

To date more than 1,100 troops have been killed by IEDs, accounting for more than 60 percent of the combat deaths.

With former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gone and the Bush administration war effort badly failing, it was only this year that the U.S. strategy changed. Krepinevich and other civilians helped create the plan that has been credited with driving IED deaths down.

Krepinevich said the cost of not changing strategies sooner can be counted in the number of people injured and killed as well as the billions of dollars spent on a unsuccessful war effort.

"The American military is on the clock in this war, and the American people, in a sense, gave the administration several years to make progress," Krepinevich said. "Those years, to a significant extent, were wasted."

It is a terrible shame. America has paid a hefty price all because a stubborn administration refused to listen to wise advice.