President Bush's Plan for Winning the Peace in Iraq

Last year, during the presidential election campaign, John Kerry and other very prominent Democrats accused President Bush of not having a plan to win the peace.

I've just found a blogger, Alec Rawls, who wrote, back in October, a good summary of how this complaint is both wrong and disingenuous. He also indicates how some Democratic criticism of the war stepped over the line that separates loyal opposition from treacherous aid to our enemies.

You can find Mr. Rawls short essay at his weblog, Error Theory, at the following address:

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/
2004/10/quiet-george-wins-peace.html

Here's a quote from his piece:

Kerry has repeatedly used this summer's upsurge in Iraqi violence to accuse President Bush of "rushing to war without having a plan to win the peace." As usual, Kerry gets it exactly backwards. The level of violence has actually been a result of the President's plan to win the peace.

Here's another excerpt:

When Kerry played up the Jihadist attacks this summer and used them to charge President bush with not having a plan to win the peace, the President could have explained our strategy--how we made a calculated gamble to let the enemy live today so that we could better win the peace tomorrow, when there is an Iraqi government and army to hand defeated territories over to, but spelling out our calculations would have hurt on the ground. It would have meant telling ordinary Iraqis that a calculation was made to let some of them die now, to avoid larger numbers dying should the peace not be won. By declining to discuss military calculations, President Bush put America's interests above his own partisan interests. This is a constant of George Bush's character.