You Can’t Referee a Civil War

President Bush, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), and other Republican allies are calling for patience despite four years of failed policy in Iraq. McCain erroneously and irresponsibly claims that Democrats are denying soldiers the means to prevent an American defeat. Yet it was not a Democratic president or Congress that sent our soldiers, ill-equipped to fight and ill-prepared to remain for four years, into the middle of a civil war. No, that was a Republican president and Congress that made perhaps one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in our nation’s history.

We won the war. The Iraq military essentially dissolved during the invasion, and a power vacuum followed. Various groups soon began fighting to fill the vacuum and have been fighting ever since. President Bush and his Republican allies are now asking our soldiers to continue refereeing a complex civil war indefinitely. But you cannot referee a civil war, because you inevitably become a target, and inevitably look as though you are taking one side against another. It is time our soldiers stop being asked to do the impossible.