Yes, concurs Bill Ransdall. "There are 20 people from my church," he says. "There's a list in the Sunday bulletin."
A third person touches on the undercurrent of unease. "Me, personally, I'm not sure from one day to the next about whether we should be in Iraq," says Virgie Mahan, leader of a group of local business boosters of the Army base. "What I do know is that these soldiers are doing what they are told, and we support them."
Skelton stands in a sky-blue shirt and yellow tie and splits the difference with his 50 listeners, dwelling not on his stance on Iraq but on his fears about the consequences of being mired there. Iraq, he says, is causing "a stretching and straining of the U.S. military like I have not seen before." That especially bothers him, he says, because today's military is so competent. "They are professional. They know their duty." But, he continues, "I fear some will not want to continue." He also worries, he says, about Afghanistan. And about North Korea. And about what happens if Islamic extremists take over nuclear-armed Pakistan.
His back to the yellow-painted cinderblock wall of the room, he circles back to the fundamental point of agreement he shares with his audience. "What it all boils down to is, we can't lose these conflicts. That's why it is so important to continue to support the troops."
Roots of Doubt
Skelton's own misgivings about the Bush administration's handling of Iraq date back to the morning of Sept. 4, 2002, when he and other congressional leaders met with President Bush at the White House. At the meeting's end, he recalls, he and Bush had a quick private exchange.
"What are you going to do once you get it?" he recalls asking the president about Iraq.
Bush responded, he recalls, "We've been giving some thought to it."
So had Skelton. That afternoon, he sent Bush a letter laying out his concerns about the duration and costs of a U.S. occupation of Iraq. In typical fashion, he quoted the Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz (on the requirement in war "not to take the first step without considering the last") and the Chinese strategic thinker Sun Tzu ("To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult").
With the benefit of two years' hindsight, the letter is strikingly accurate in foreseeing the troubles awaiting the United States.
"I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq's forces and remove Saddam," Skelton wrote. "But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it."
He was especially worried, he told Bush, about the "extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system." So, he said, he would like to know more about "the form of a replacement regime and . . . the possibility that this regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy."
Before invading Iraq, he concluded, the president should make it clear to the American people that the occupation would require money and troops "for many years to come."
There was, he says, no White House response. But in a meeting, a White House congressional liaison named Daniel J. Keniry told him, he says, "Well, Congressman, we really don't need your vote. We've got the votes." (A White House spokesman said that Keniry's recollection is somewhat different, that he told Skelton simply that he expected the Iraq resolution would pass with a large bipartisan majority.) A month later, Skelton grudgingly backed the resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. "We must have a plan for the rebuilding of the Iraqi government and society," he said in a speech on the House floor.
On the eve of the March 2003 invasion, Skelton sent a second letter to Bush. That one also expressed worry about the "great potential for a ragged ending to a war as we deal with the aftermath." But it has proven less prescient in its specifics, such as the worry that Turkey might intervene in the north or that lengthy urban combat might trigger a humanitarian crisis.
