Iraq: Misreading a battle (debate "cheapened" by Bush)

Iraq: Misreading a battle

The Boston Globe

Published: June 22, 2006

The bloodiest U.S. battle of World War II was on the mind of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, when he defended President George W. Bush's Iraq policy over the weekend. The comparison doesn't fit. Americans were united behind a common policy in World War II, and the administration needs to acknowledge that its war in Iraq has confused and divided the country.

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A massive German offensive surprised the U.S. First Army in Belgium on Dec. 16, 1944. But General George Patton's army moved up from the south, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's forces counterattacked from the north. Nineteen thousand Americans died - the worst U.S. toll of the war - as the allied armies thwarted Hitler's last attempt to avoid defeat. Nobody had to take a poll during that battle; it was over in a month.

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Pelosi was speaking against an administration-supported resolution that expressed support for Bush's conduct of the war. The Democrats have difficulty uniting behind an alternative to the Bush war policy. But the debate over the war is cheapened by the administration's insistence that anything less than full support is synonymous with "cut and run." The savagery of the Iraqi resistance was shown by the murder of two U.S. soldiers this week, but it is not a threat to America on par with the Nazis, who controlled most of Europe.

The U.S. election campaign this year ought to be dominated not by the faux patriotism of 2002 and 2004, but by a debate free of demagoguery over how to extract U.S. troops without leaving Iraq in chaos. The Battle of the Bulge, bloody and hard-fought, was far less complicated than the ethnic, religious, economic and ideological divisions exposed by the conflict in Iraq.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/22/opinion/edbattle.php