Iraqarama

   Round and round it goes

where it stops nobody knows

I.       The Iraq Study Group released its suggestions about the future course of Iraq.  One can hope the administration is paying attention and willing to change course.  But many statements they have made preemptively as well as their past history indicate they will be loathe to do so. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of their myopia was evident when George Bush visited Vietnam a few weeks ago.

            If anyone ever thought that the Administration had any coherent plan in Iraq or any hope or intention of finding one, they were surely dealt a blow by the President’s comments then. He stated essentially that we must stay the course in Iraq as we stayed the course in Vietnam.  This is in line with his previous statements that we would still be in Iraq when he left office two years from now.

            To prove it, he praised Vietnam’s economic progress and implied its success today is somehow tied to the massively failed American attempt in the Vietnam War to prevent it. Though the lesson of our involvement Vietnam is precisely opposite to the one he claims it proves, the President used Vietnam’s growing prosperity today as a cautionary tale as to why we need to stay the failed course in Iraq!  To use our failed war there as some sort of perverse validation of the same stay the course policy in Iraq that led to our defeat in Vietnam is bizarre. This is muddle mindedness taken to an extreme.

The inanity of George Bush comparing Vietnam favorably to Iraq is correct in only one sense – again exactly opposite what he intended – they have both been debacles of incomprehension, incompetence and will on the part of our political leaders. Just like Vietnam, Iraq was an unnecessary war based on classic misperception, studied dishonesty and elaborate and self-deceiving exaggeration. 

Unfortunately there has persisted a small school of thought in this country (which has included the President and his cabinet) that we could and should have won the Vietnam War.  This debate has some virtue as a discussion of military tactics perhaps, however as an historical debate it is an absurdity that begs the underlying issues.  Because of course, Vietnam was a war, just like Iraq, that should have never been fought in the first place.  Both wars were based on an apprehensive few of our policy makers who, frightened of our position and place in a fast moving and dangerous looking world, overreacted to small provocations, couldn’t identify and distinguish a world wide threat from a regional one, or separate a civil war for national self-identity from the international backdrop against which it was playing out.  In response they were willing to send others to war to assuage their own fears and misjudgments.  This is the lesson of Vietnam that should have been learned to prevent Iraq.  And yet it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.  And though history has vividly proven that we should have never fought the war in Vietnam there are those in this administration who have always failed to believe it.  The question to ask about Vietnam is simple.  After all, we lost the Vietnam War and won the Cold War anyway.  So, conversely, even if we had won in Vietnam how would it have shortened the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union?  Of course it wouldn’t have.  Clearly Vietnam was peripheral to the Cold War the same way Iraq is peripheral to the war on terrorism.  But also like Iraq once it was erroneously begun it became a self-perpetuating end in itself and its proponents never had the spine to admit it.

Vietnam was sold as a vital, virtual, proxy war against communism when communism was perceived as a monolithic red wave of inexorable force which transcended national borders.  Iraq was sold as a part of the war on terrorism which we are supposed to believe is similarly monolithic and uniform in its thinking.  All Arabs and Muslims (just like commies before them) are pretty much alike even when they hate each other and would kill each other if they could.  The root contention used to start both wars was an absurdity based on a fraud stemming from an accumulation of errors, fantasies and prejudices that were then stubbornly and self-destructively pursued in spite all the obvious accumulating evidence as to the lack of wisdom of their instigation. 

Both wars have been monuments to a dangerously foreshortened view of the world held by our policy makers which is totally unbefitting the greatest economic and military power in the world.  Certain subjective minded people in high offices in this country are grossly unfit for their jobs.  Nobody has a right to be this wrong this long in the face of such copious evidence to the contrary.  In their fear, duplicity, naiveté and wild aggression they tend to blur all the vast complexities of history and culture in the world into a single purblind choice of black and white and us vs. them. 

Moreover, when an administration ignores its own experts and more knowledgeable advisors who caution otherwise and cherry pick intelligence to support preconceived prejudices and undigested lessons of history, and then builds their policy around shallow catch phrases and slogans rather than insight applied to any coherent long range purpose, it can only result in policies preordained to fail. 

II.       The vast majority of Americans understand by now that the war in Vietnam was a serious and pointless fiasco.  Unfortunately, the preponderance of people and policy makers who still mindlessly believe otherwise have either found a home in this administration or are its policies biggest supporters.  Whether, neoconservatives or chicken hawks or hardliners or diehard supporters of a robust military response to every provocation - or whatever else you choose to call them – in the last fifty years these weak kneed imperialists have authored the majority of America’s greatest defeats.  They consistently see enemies where none exist and see conflicts as “inevitable” that history has clearly proven weren’t. 

Mercifully most of their worst ideas have been avoided.  After all, they were the same ones who said we should have invaded the Soviets after World War II and China in connection with Korea, and Iran in connection with Iraq.  Unfortunately we haven’t always successfully been able to resist their pusillanimous, chicken little policies.  Therefore, right wing ideologues have given us the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran-contra, etc.  Hawkishness – meaning forward leaning militarism in lieu of logic, diplomacy and building international consensus in foreign affairs - has never proven its worth.  Ideological hawks are notoriously ruthless and belligerent in pursuit of their delusions, are dismissive of criticism, lack the intellectual rigor to admit or learn from their mistakes, haven’t a nuanced view of the world, are afraid of diplomacy, deride internationalism, have a tenuous grasp of law (both domestic and international) and the virtue of free and open democratic debate in developing policy consensus at home.  Each and every one of these negative tendencies has been on full display in the war in Iraq even more than they were in Vietnam. 

            Of course, the very nature of the unsophisticated subjectivity of mind of these ideological cold warriors not only means that they are incapable of critical analysis of the cause of their own failures but they are also rendered incapable of appreciating other policies’ successes.  Therefore, the obvious truth that we won the Cold War through a patient, intelligent and carefully conceived policy of containment, thereby avoiding World War III in the process, is a subtlety lost on shortsighted and fearful minds such as theirs unable to seine a concept that fine.  Instead of amending their errors to emulate constructive behavior, they comfort themselves by nurturing insane fantasies that Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra were valid, just and entirely efficacious exercises of American might and would have surely worked except for the ignorance and inconstancy of the sovereign American people.

Of course, while it is appropriate to say that aggressive action is not appropriate in every instance, it certainly does not follow that it won’t be necessary in any.  What we really need in office are people astute, brave and broad minded enough to be able to tell the difference between a necessary and a gratuitous and counter productive use of power.  To be the most powerful nation in the world, with all our great firepower and the world’s best military, carries with it an enormous responsibility.  We require the patience, capacity, tenacity, restraint and depth of understanding of our leadership using all the reins of power and the natural creative resources of democracy carefully and appropriately.  Too frequently in the past, reflecting their incapacity and shallowness, our leaders have failed us and have not risen to the high level of competence these demands require.

At base, as the soul of democracy, the American people are patient and wise enough to tell when war is necessary if only they are only given the true picture even if our leaders are not.  When wars are to be fought the casus belli ought to be clear and the guiding lights visible to all.  When an administration feels it has to selectively lie and cook the intelligence and rely on secrecy and guile in order to deceive and politicize and rush the electorate hastily into a war of its own choosing, it’s a pretty good bet that the war is unjust and shouldn’t have been fought in the first place.  Any war that begins with a lie will inevitably end in failure. For a democratic government to lie to its own people guts the genius and severs the very sinews of the democracy it is there to serve.

According to these standards, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that the same people who were so intellectually dishonest and incurious to solace themselves that Vietnam was a near win, a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by a failure of “will” of the American people rather than a massive failure and misjudgment of our policy makers, would be the same ones quick and anxious to make the same mistakes in Iraq.  Those who fail to learn the lessons of history doom everyone else to repeat them.

III.    If there is any comparison to Iraq to be gleaned from Vietnam it is that for the US it will be much better to leave Iraq to the Iraqis than for us to stay and absorb all the resultant costs with no appreciable national benefit to the United States.  With benefit of hindsight we are far better off that we lost Vietnam rather than won, just as it will be better for the US to leave Iraq to solve its own problems rather than occupy it for fifty years to create an artificial reality as we have seen evolve in Korea. Vietnam left to the Vietnamese is better for America than if we had won there.  Though it may not be a perfect government at least it is peaceable one and it costs us nothing to let them be.  Primarily, for the US, any war undertaken for anything less than absolute necessity represents cost without benefit.

All the revisionists who fantasize of how we could have “won” in Vietnam (just as with victory in Iraq) don’t specify what winning would be.  In general all talk of winning in Vietnam or losing China and the winning and the losing of Iraq is merely the rhetoric of blowhards and fools.  The only result if we had “won” in Vietnam, like we “won” Korea, would be that we would still have troops there today and costs without end.  We had never sought to “win” (i.e. have the south conquer the north) in Vietnam but only to tie (which was one of the reasons we lost) and return Vietnam to the status quo of the 1954 borders.  Any other course would have not been in our national interests even according to the 1960’s.  Any revisionistic idea that we ever had anything to win in Vietnam misrepresents history.

Even the successfully waged first Gulf War of 1991 was a war in pursuit of the status quo, to reverse a wrong – the invasion of Kuwait – not a vain attempt to aggressively reengineer a region. Yet now we have the same people who deceived us into Iraq claiming that it may well be necessary for us to garrison troops in Iraq for ten or fifteen years to help clean up the mess that has resulted from their own misguided incursion. How eternal and open costs to the American taxpayer to clean up a gratuitous mistake we ourselves created constitutes “victory” for the United States is hard to fathom.  And yet in Iraq this is precisely the only opportunity we have left to fight for. 

            The final telling and negative sign of the similarity of the two wars is that the very same arguments given as to why we had to stay the course in Vietnam (for nine years and over 50,000 Americans dead) are precisely the same as those being used to argue why we must stay the course in Iraq.  These include: we must win because we can’t “afford” to lose; defeat would be embarrassing to our leaders who would suffer a loss of political prestige; there will be a bloodbath; the domino theory will allow the enemy (monolithic Islamic terrorism) to spread across the region unabated; it’s become too complex to extricate ourselves easily so we must stay; we owe a debt of penance to the Iraqis to atone for our incompetent invasion; we have invested too much in Iraq already not to invest more, regardless of return; our President gave his word to the Iraqis and he is determined to be more honest with them than he has ever been with us, etc., and on and on. 

All of these arguments were either proven wrong, irrelevant, or speak to results that were bound to happen anyway whether we stayed longer or not, when they were first used in Vietnam just as they are today in Iraq.  If Vietnam is really the antecedent of Iraq that the President suggests, then history teaches that staying the course will result in even more catastrophic losses in Iraq and daily diminishing returns, with no benefit to us or to them by our continued occupation.

            In truth, no one has any idea what will happen in Iraq or whether our staying there indefinitely will help build a future political settlement or impede it. The argument that we need to keep our troops there to keep the situation from further deterioration is entirely spurious when you realize that every day our troops have been there the situation has deteriorated.  Although one has sympathy with the American forces on the ground who have invested so much wanting to continue their mission; idle rhetoric aside, no one anywhere can actually point to any evidence that our occupation of Iraq is leading toward any overriding good or achievable policy aim for the United States.  To the contrary there is voluminous, overwhelming evidence which may be amassed to prove the reverse.  Nor does it follow that adding more troops at this late point has a purpose.  It is never a good idea to pour more good troops after bad policy. 

            Increasingly it becomes hard to justify such overwhelming costs as we are daily absorbing in Iraq when no one can point to any apparent benefit either to ourselves or to the Iraqis by continuing our occupation.  In fact, the bulk of the evidence tends to point to our occupation being the chief constituent component of the continuing deterioration of Iraq and the increasing destabilization of the region, rather than a secret course designed to induce increased stability there. Barring any clear evidence that staying in Iraq will actually help the Iraqis, to maintain this policy as if we had any actual, dependable control over events there is questionable in the extreme. 

IV.      To achieve any clarity in this debate we must forget Iraq entirely for a moment and start asking ourselves what is the best course for the United States of America.  Here there is no doubt.  Clearly the answer is that the sooner we leave Iraq the better it will be for America’s reputation, the American taxpayer, the American military and peace and security in the area.  Those who argue that we will have not achieved any of our long term political goals in the region (“victory” in the word of the president), however nebulously and meretriciously and incompetently they have been pursued, are correct.  But since those “goals” were never genuinely achievable or well thought through in the first place what we have really lost in failing to achieve them?

            In addition to money and lives lost in Iraq there is the incalculable intrinsic harm that the war has done United States policy in the world.  This has been a bait and switch policy from the beginning.  It has been a dishonest war, a corrupt war, an incompetent war.  It gives the term mission creep new meaning.  The American people were sold this war as a defensive necessity – get them before they get us.  But once we were there and all the reasons given for fighting the war in the first place were proven specious, the administration invented a new set of principles for staying there anyway.  For purely domestic political purposes they recast the war as a war of democratic, imperialistic aggression. 

In fact, there has never been anything defensive about this war, it was rampant aggression from the outset.  The United States attacked an unarmed country for its own visceral satisfaction and partisan political and economic reasons.  The war in Iraq stands as a monument against everything the United States has ever stood for in the world.  It is a betrayal of the trust of our mothers and fathers.  We have already paid a heavy price for the incompetence and misjudgment of our leaders.  The longer it is continued the more harm it does to us and the less help it provides the Iraqis.   

It is literally impossible for a democracy to try to inflict democracy at the point of a gun on another nation just because it feels itself in the mood to do it.  To try to superimpose democracy on a country not ready for it is not only a self-defeating joust against the entire weight of world history but is itself a betrayal of the very democratic principles we say we are trying instill in others.  One shining aspect of our democracy has been its objectivity, tolerance and its high ideals manifested through an adherence to rule of law.  Iraq’s government may have been obnoxious but it certainly was not dangerous to us.  We could have easily (and had) contained it with the tiniest tip of the little finger of American power.  To try to impose democracy on Iraq by undemocratic means (in this case by invasion and occupation) and by plunging neck deep into a poser vacuum of our own creation, not only tarnishes those ideals but is as absurd a construction as could ever be invented.  Victory in the war in Iraq is really a defeat of our own ideals.

For once we altered the goals of the war from defensive to offensive, ironically enough, the course of events in Iraq was inevitably shifted out of our control.  In effect George Bush replaced a bogus rationale for going to war in Iraq with an unachievable goal to keep us there.  By not establishing a timetable for withdrawal on our own, the President has delivered the timetable for our entire Iraqi policy into the hands of our enemies.  He has neutered America in Iraq.  He says we are going to stay in Iraq until the Iraqis leapfrog a generation ahead in their own development and discover democracy.  Or he says we will stay until the Iraqis tell us to leave or allow us to draw down our forces.

Since when did the American people authorize the President to cede control of our policy in Iraq to a foreign power?  Is the Administration just too weak to accept responsibility for its own actions or has the weakly constituted government of Iraq and all the sectarian militias really been given veto power over our policy?  It certainly seems as if they have.  In either case American policy in Iraq is the weakest, most shiftless and destructively open ended policy every put forward by an American president.

V.      Now we have reached an uncertain crossroads in Iraq.  Nothing we have done up till now has worked.  Generally there are only two possible options remaining in Iraq, each with a myriad of details constituent to them.  These are: 1) stay the course and 2) set a timetable for withdrawal.  The people of the United States (as well as the people of Iraq) have clearly opted for some version of the latter choice.

Unfortunately, the initial evidence is that the ones who were not smart enough to keep from getting us into this war will never be honest and wise enough to get us out of it on their own.  We have too many people in power in this country who fear the results of their mistakes and haven’t the guts and wherewithal to accept responsibility for them.  They are hoping against hope that some belated vindication of their catastrophic decisions may yet arise from the ruins of our policy in Iraq. That is hardly reason enough for additional loss of American life.  

However, never underestimate the genius of the ability of our political class to dither and delay and avoid doing the right thing.  Pressure must be maintained by the American people and Congress and forces within and outside this administration to force them to it.  This administration has proven it will resist change as long as it can.  It must be made to behave honorably and clean up this mess by the end of their own watch.  Only then will proper accountability be assessed and assured.

George Bush by his every action and spoken word has so far used discussion of options in Iraq merely as a cover to stay the course.  He wants to at all costs maintain the troops in Iraq until the end of his presidency so that he can blame others for losing the war after he’s gone.  Republicans should be aware that he will destroy his own party rather than admit he’s made a mistake.  It is easier for an ideologue to maintain a failure than it is to admit one and easier for a weakling to maintain a mistake than correct the sea of errors the mistakes he’s made has created.  He the other ideologues behind this ruinous policy (just like Vietnam) can already be heard rehearsing their excuses.  For these Bush leaguers all that remains of this presidency and the war in Iraq is to try to salvage their own illusions from it, not to worry about what might be best for the country.

As if to prove his bad faith, the President over time has put forward a number of impossible and self-defeating preconditions which must be met prior to our withdrawal from Iraq.  These must be abandoned before any hope of a withdrawal of troops may commence. 

The first is that we must stay in Iraq until peace and security are established there which, since our occupation is a primary component and enabler of the unrest, cannot realistically occur until after we’ve withdrawn.  Next he says that in his view “the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done.”  Presumably this means that if the job which can’t be done (according to his own changing definitions of what that job is) isn’t done, we must stay in Iraq forever.  To reverse a quote from T.S. Eliot which says “we are only undefeated because we have gone on trying,” the Bush administration has up until now apparently embraced a theory that has it, “as long as we just go on trying we may pretend to believe that we haven’t yet been defeated.” 

The third condition the authors of this war have put forward which cannot be met

is that they categorically refuse to put forward any sort of timetable (or timetable by any other name) for withdrawing from Iraq.  Obviously, you can’t have a drawdown of troops without some sort of a timetable to effect it.  To rule out timetables is to preclude the possibility of ever withdrawing our troops or of putting any real pressure on the Iraqi government to make significant necessary changes or of ever effecting any real change of strategy in Iraq at all.  This gives us a stay the course policy by default, by another name, but in fact and in effect the same. 

Actually a loose timetable for withdrawal is precisely what we must have to change the dynamic in Iraq.  Decisiveness is the goal not the thing to be avoided.  Any thing beats this shiftless, nebulous, goalless path we are on now where the policies are phony but the deaths are real.  The only things that have ever been achieved in Iraq have been on timetable, including the election of its government.  To continue to avoid all talk of timetables is a recipe for endless drift and shows an unwillingness or inability to take decisive action to ever extricate ourselves from this quagmire.

  Meanwhile every day of indecision leads to more loss.  While the election results are still fresh in their mind it is important for this government to act expeditiously.  Otherwise, delaying another six or eight months to formulate a plan for a drawdown of troops, stretching through the next year, may easily lead to three more years of full engagement in Iraq.  Unless a schedule for drawing down our troops is securely in place prior to it, nothing will get done in the presidential election year of ‘08.  That will give us two more years of the Bush administration and yet another year for the succeeding administration to put a peace policy in place.

A timetable for withdrawal is the only ace left in our hand to play.  Admittedly it may not work but every other option has even less hope of changing the essential dynamic of dissolution so far advanced.  The Iraqis need to know that our engagement is not open ended and assurances alone won’t be enough to convince them.  Human nature being what it is, they must start to see the withdrawal for themselves before they will be forced (if ever) to make the difficult decisions to keep their country together.  No one can do this for them.

            We must take back control of our own foreign policy from forces in the Middle East who don’t wish us well.  Whether it is called a timetable for withdrawal, a phased withdrawal, a redeployment or a measured drawdown, it must begin soon, not only to reverse the negative, spreading, downward spiraling dynamic in the region but to make our own administration finally own up to its own actions and not palm them off on others to fix. It is not courageous to boldly start a war and then weakly continue it.  Since there was no national benefit to our attacking Iraq in the first place it is clearly disingenuous to claim there can possibly be any benefit which accrues to us by our staying there indefinitely.  No victory has ever been constructed from such an accumulation of losses.  It is both gutless and pigheaded to continue on a course when the course you’re on was clearly misrepresented and mistaken from the beginning.  The continuing fiasco in Iraq is not a sign of our leaders’ fortitude but of their impotence and effeminacy.

            With the delivery of the Iraq Study Group’s suggestions one can only hope that the Bush administration will finally begin to devise a clear exit strategy from Iraq.  But doubt must still remain in place until the doubt is replaced by facts.