After a Year

It has been a year since Bush declared major combat actions over and he continues to take a lot of criticism from the democrats for that statement, and for the Mission Accomplished banner. Like most of the democratic attacks, I find this based more on their spin than on what Bush actually said. Democrats spin Bush’s statements into something that they were not, and then when reality does not match their spin, they criticize Bush for being wrong, or even lying.

The simply fact is that Bush was correct. The major combat phase was over. This was not just a semantic statements, it was a policy statement with significant implications for control over the operation was transferred from the Defense Department to the State Department.

As for the Mission Accomplish banner, the criticisms fail to understand that wars are not composed of a single mission. There are many, many missions in a war. Removing Saddam was a very significant mission, and it was completed. Also, the mission of the Lincoln was over, and they were returning home. In short mission accomplished, is not the same thing as saying the war is over.

Contrary to the Spin, Bush was very clear in his speech that the war was not over. In fact he say that their would still be “dark days ahead.”

Now frankly there would be some good and more productive grounds to criticize Bush for the last year. While the military did, and continues to do, an outstanding job, I think the state department has made some critical mistakes in Iraq. The standoff in Fallujah being a good example. All too often the State department puts the brakes on the military, assuming that with just a little more negotiation they can solve any problem. Thus rather then let the military go in and solve the problem, they stopped our troops and thus the stalemate for the last month, and this is a example of the problems we have faced. Rather than deal with problem, we have tried to negotiate our way around them, and in the process have all too often only made things worse.

As I have said many times before, the democrats, and now Kerry, do have a chance to effectively challenge Bush on the war, by taking a stronger stance. However, they seemed locked in by their hatred of Bush, and their support of the UN, to a strategy of trying to accuse him of lying, and getting out of Iraq and turning it over to the UN.