Brace yourselves: the worst of the war in Iraq is still to come. More fighting, more fatalities, more chaos. The year 2007 will be terrible.
President George W. Bush's stubborn decision to send 21,500 additional American troops to fight in the war can hardly change anything in a country of 29 million. With that decision, Bush disregards public opinion (seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to sending more troops), as well as several generals and Republican congressmen, and almost the entire Democratic Party.
What most surprised me about Bush's latest speech was how detached he seems from the rest of America. He has simply lost track of the country. Never have I seen Bush so drawn and stiff. He didn't connect with the audience.
But, as commander in chief, he has the last word. That is why it is so important to vote in elections. We choose those who make life and death decisions, and who, with the stroke of a pen, can radically change the way we live.
It is unacceptable, and shameful, that almost 3,000 soldiers had to die, and that three and a half years go by before the administration realizes it didn't send enough American troops to control Iraq.
Now it's too late.
If the United States wanted to win this war by force, it would have needed half a million servicemen and women, according to calculations recently made by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) after talking to several military leaders. But, even still, with the new reinforcements, the United States will only have 153,500 troops in Iraq in the next few months. Not enough to win.
That means that America cannot militarily prevent the widening of Iraq's internal conflict among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Nor can it control the al-Qaida militias that have infiltrated Iraq, or the groups there that are armed by Iran and Syria. For the United States to prevail, negotiation for a political agreement is paramount.
The war in Iraq, now, can only be won at the negotiating table, not by fighting street by street. The United States, however, does not want to negotiate with its enemies' allies (Syria and Iran). If things continue like this, defeat is a certainty.
The biggest dilemma for America in Iraq is that anything it does will have a negative effect. If the United States sends more troops to Iraq, there will be more targets for attack and more American fatalities. And if the United States pulls out its troops, Iraq's three ethnic groups and foreign militias will sink into a civil war that will result in a blood bath.
The new military strategy by the United States is to remove rebels and militias, house by house, from all the neighborhoods in Baghdad, a city of 7 million inhabitants. After that, they would transfer the control of those areas to the new Iraqi army. Such combat operations to "cleanse" Baghdad translate into a horrendous year ahead.
Things in Iraq will get worse before they improve ... if they ever do. And all this for an unnecessary war.
It is important to repeat yet again the fact that neither Saddam Hussein nor his government had anything to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terror acts. And that weapons of mass destruction were never found there.
Why is the United States fighting in Iraq? There is no convincing answer to this very simple question. Hence the problems the United States faces in Iraq. There was never a perfectly defined mission in Iraq, and, therefore, no concrete strategy to pull out nor a deadline to do so.
Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) is convinced that if the sons and daughters of the congressional representatives and White House officials who approved this war were called up, the United States would never have gone to Iraq. It is one thing to send someone else's children to fight a war, quite another to send your own.
A reader of the Internet edition of People Magazine dared ask Bush a question that no single journalist has had the courage to put to him:
"If you believe in the war, why didn't you encourage your own daughters to fight for your country? Or did you?"
"I believe Americans can contribute to the security and well-being of our country in a variety of ways," responded the president in a subsequent interview with that magazine. "That's why we have a volunteer army."
The most serious side of all this is that the war on terrorism is not won or lost solely in Iraq. The billions of dollars spent there could have instead been allocated, for instance, to the search for the real authors of the terror acts in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Does anybody know where Osama bin Laden is?