1. A New Coat of Paint
Prior to the last election George Bush stated in reference to Iraq, “We are winning, absolutely.” After the elections it was clear that the nation, in as strong a voice as it can communicate through a mid term election, repudiated that assessment. Since then the administration has abandoned the rhetoric of a “stay the course” policy in Iraq. However, it is clear that they have not abandoned the policy itself.
Since the election the administration has cast around for different strategies, itself a remarkably haphazard thing to be doing three years into a war, but have largely excluded any strategy of actually withdrawing from Iraq. This, in Mr. Bush’s words, “would lead to defeat.” In a remarkable admission of the ineptitude of the President’s own cabinet they have brought in outsiders from the Baker-Hamilton commission, retired generals and ideologues from think tanks and assorted others. We are only waiting for the astrologers and soothsayers, pollsters and Ouija board operators to be consulted for this cycle of consultations to be complete. Meanwhile, as Bush dithers Iraq continues to burn.
Among all the classic Washington dog and pony shows in our experience it has been particularly tiresome to watch George Bush pretend to reach new conclusions which strangely resemble all the old conclusions from which he has never really strayed. Because of course the administration has never had any intention of changing anything. Every remaining proposal left on the table appears to be mere tactical gloss on the same old failed strategy which the administration in its famous stubbornness and lack of creativity and honesty with itself refuses to acknowledge. The entire episode has been a remarkable attempt by a failed administration to avoid the obvious facts on the ground, the laws of history and the judgment of the American people as to how well the war in Iraq is going.
Current proposals, not yet officially announced, of inserting a few tens of thousands more troops in Iraq, a “surge” of 10 to 20% more troops for an indeterminate period of time, amounts to putting a new coat of paint on a house that has already largely fallen apart. After having 150,000 troops on the ground in Iraq for two and a half years and watching helplessly as events spun more and more erratically out of control while they did absolutely nothing but tell us that, secretly, surreptitiously, we were really winning, now they want to put a few more troops on the ground to do what? They won’t say. How an additional thirty thousand troops can achieve in a few months what a hundred and a half thousand troops couldn’t in a few years is left for the imagination to supply.
For years it has been widely conceded that there is no possible military solution in Iraq. How more troops will jump start the diplomacy, diminish the fractious influence of our occupation and bring the fissiparous factions in Iraq to some consensus is not explained. Any explanation as to what about more troops will fix the water and power plants, warm the population to our increased presence and do anything but drive the militias temporarily underground, will not be forthcoming. On the contrary, this “surge” will be far more likely to fuel another round of violence, absolve the Iraqis of another year of urgency and allow them to continue to pause from making the tough decisions that must be made. The “surge” will only cause the Iraqis differences to deepen further.
2. Apple Picking Time in Vermont
The President has hidden behind the military from the beginning in this war. Yet for years he has avoided putting enough troops on the ground in Iraq to actually fulfill the mission they were given. Overlooking the well known fact that the military asked for hundreds of thousands more troops on the ground at the beginning and was overruled and ignored the President has persistently claimed the military didn’t want more troops and had never asked for them. Now when it’s far too late and the military is uniformly opposed to this latest pointless and symbolic gesture of a buildup, to maintain his unerring instinct to refuse good advice in favor of bad, the President proposes to ignore sound advice again.
Butt covering time in Washington is as much a tradition as apple picking time in Vermont. So now all of a sudden, when any increase in troops is far, far too late to achieve anything of value, in a particularly facile and futile gesture the administration is finally proposing to send in the cavalry long after all the settlers have been slaughtered. In fact, the troop increase the President is finally looking at seems designed to inflict the maximum hardship on our over stretched and belabored military while being too small to achieve any real tactical good. Again, like this whole war, it is strategy almost perfectly designed to fail.
Clearly this is lunacy, the last gasp of a dying policy, to suggest at this time that a few more troops can possibly matter on the ground in Iraq. It whispers of political desperation and personal fanaticism, a one last chance to cover the tracks of an inept administration casting around for something, anything which may sound unique and new, but is really the same old policy in a new suit of clothes. Whether it will work or not seems an ancillary consideration to the administration as to whether it sounds machismo while remaining at the same time certain not to any represent any real change. In other words, this is the old stay the course policy in other words.
3. Necessity as its own Convention
The refrain of the war’s supporters has grown weak and sniveling. It is no longer that we will win in Iraq but has become “we can’t afford to lose this war.” This is hardly valid reason to continue a policy that can’t possibly succeed. Earnestness has never won wars. Persistence in a failing policy only guarantees that we will lose worse. If the war on terror is really a war, then Iraq is just a single battle in it. To keep throwing good troops and good money after a lost cause on a single battlefield is every bit as irrational as the reasons for fighting this war in the first place were erroneous.
For our nation to engage in a strategic withdrawal from a battlefield that does not advantage us and serves no further purpose to our overall goals in the war on terrorism is not a defeat but exactly how good commanders may lose battles but still win wars. A careful, measured draw down of troops aligned with appropriate diplomatic pressures and compensatory alliances is a sign not of weakness but of national strength and preservation, patience and wisdom.
Conversely, blind commitment to failed policies reeks of weakness and is how mediocre commanders lose wars and how poorly run nations turn dangerous missteps into irreversible defeats. Even “winning” in Iraq at this point would not be worth suffering the additional losses necessary to hold open the increasingly slim possibility of that ever happening. This war was a Pyrrhic endeavor from the outset, with very little national interest to it from the point of view of the United States. Its bottom line worth to the country will not improve by throwing more costs into a lost cause.
Blind commitment to a lost cause comes from the personalization of policy. Egomaniacal personalities get in the way of patriotism. Consider Hitler in World War II. After rashly opening a second unnecessary war against the Soviets before his war in Western Europe was completed, his egocentric “no retreat” commands to his generals only hurried and deepened the defeat Germany was to suffer. After beginning a second war halfway around the world in Iraq before the war in Afghanistan was complete, George Bush is replicating a classic mistake. His blind adherence to a failed policy has long since become more about his personality and politics than policy. In short this is George Bush’s war, not America’s.
But then far more than any other this has been the most personalized, politicized, privatized and profiteered war in American history. The noble cause of protecting America from terrorists who would attack us was hijacked by this administration from the beginning to play out their own foreign policy grudges, fantasies and prejudices. While using terminology which spoke in terms of World War III, it has been fought with the level of commitment, jingoism, capability, rationale and honesty more appropriate to Grenada or the Spanish American War. Unfortunately, since the war in Iraq has always been more about what was best for George Bush and his retinue than what was best for the country, they are unilaterally determined to continue to pursue their own self-interests at the expense of the interests of the country.
As suggested, the politicization of this war is unprecedented in American history. Even those sent over to work in Bremer’s transitional administration were vetted for their political correctness and loyalty – not to America or the Constitution or even according to their expertise or knowledge of Iraq – but to right wing Republican causes. The political debate prior to the war was timed and truncated and rigged for maximum political advantage to the Republican Party in the mid-term elections of 2002. Finally this war was engineered for private corporations and highly paid mercenaries to profit egregiously at tax payer expense so campaign contributions could be kicked back to Republicans in office. That’s why there has been so much outsourcing of this war to private contractors and private security organizations, not to save the American taxpayer money, because clearly it hasn’t, but for politicians to profit their friends at the nation’s expense.
George Bush and his supporters won’t agree to draw down troops in Iraq not because they are concerned about America suffering a defeat, but because they, personally, want to avoid having to admit their manifold mistakes and shoulder responsibility for the debacle that has been Iraq. For George Bush the sole goal remaining then is for the troops to remain in Iraq until the end of his term of office so he may keep alive the merest gauzy illusion that the war in Iraq may still be “won” according to some vague declension of the word or other. This, so for the rest of his life, he can preserve the illusion that none of this was really his fault and so he won’t have to admit the incompetence of his watch and blame others when the inevitable defeat he has created occurs on theirs.
Anyone who thinks that it is worth the loss of another American life to continue this juvenile political protection plan is complicitous in the fraud and unfit for public service.
4. Wagging the Dog
The central enigma to the policy in Iraq, putting aside the original dishonest rationale that propelled us into the war, has been the theory behind it. How long can a war (or anything else for that matter) that began as a fraud, has been compounded with massive errors of judgment and execution, that had no real national purpose in it from the outset, be persisted in in the faint and disappearing hope of salvaging some vestigial good from its mounting losses? Everyday the potential for accounts receivable on the return of our investment in Iraq grow worse for the American taxpayer. The authors of this war seem determined to push the law of diminishing returns to its maximum excruciating limits.
Ask yourself when this has ever happened. When has an adventure that was started this badly, executed this incompetently and maintained this dishonestly over such a long period of time ever resulted in a positive outcome in spite of all of its universally negative components? Is there a single person in the country who now expects this war to turn out well? This war is being continued as an ongoing cover-up of its own meretricious instigation for the benefit of a few dishonest and weak willed politicians desperate to avoid owning up to their own dishonesty and incompetence. When does persisting in a mistake for all the wrong reasons ever accidentally turn into an unexpected benefit? How many wrongs does it take to add up to a right?
The core fallacy of the proposed plan of adding additional troops to Iraq is that a few men in suits in the green zone in Baghdad are in effectual control of Iraq. Clearly the power has long since moved to the streets and out of the control of the elected government of Iraq. Once a power vacuum has been created in an ancient nation and it breaks down into all its historic ethnic, religious, sectarian and tribal animosities, to suggest that a few hundred people in a few square miles in a country the size of Texas being propped up by a foreign occupying power can somehow exercise control of Iraq is the essence of the principle of wagging the dog.
In their feverish reaction to 9-11 this is a variant of the same mistake this administration has made from the beginning. They have confused point of a gun diplomacy and brutal military action (the antithesis of the grounds from which democracy might arise) with winning hearts and minds of a multitude and allowing democracy to flourish. The vast gulf between the goals they say they wish to achieve and the means used to achieve them make for a gap in credibility unprecedented in our experience. Military action cannot win the hearts and minds of a people, it cannot force them to be more democratic, it cannot force peace down their throats via the end of a gun, and yet we are told we must keep trying to achieve the unachievable by these wrong means even if we keep continuing to fail. This administration has absolutely failed to grasp the essence of the nature of power and with its extraordinarily unsophisticated analysis of events has therefore consistently misused our power and has effectively lost control of its own policies and turned them counterproductive to their own stated purpose.
5. The Revenge of the Poindexters
This war in Iraq might best be understood as the revenge of the Poindexters. John Poindexter was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandals which ensnared and compromised the entire second term in office of Ronald Reagan. This was the last great fiasco those we now call neo-cons got us into. In the mid-eighties, ignoring that the Soviet Union itself was near collapse, they decided that Nicaragua, the weakest and poorest nation in the hemisphere, was the greatest threat to American security in the world! Knowing there was no way we could possibly abide or outsmart anyone as shrewd and worldly as Danny Ortega and the Sandinistas diplomatically, they decided we had to overthrow them militarily.
Since almost no one else in the United States shared their deep fears of the great threat the Sandinistas represented to the United States, they eventually had to lie and cheat and go outside of American law to try to effect the culmination of their odd, paranoia based theories. They concocted a plan of negotiating with terrorists and hostage takers in Iran (which they steadfastly denied they were doing while they were doing it) to create an embarrassing absurdity of lies and illegal policies of breathtaking stupidity from which no good derived but much harm and embarrassment was left for the American people to swallow.
Since they never learn from or admit their mistakes, Poindexter, as well as a number of others, with nothing to recommend them but their previous errors, were rehabilitated to join the Bush Administration as really deep thinkers. Obviously the Bush administration was a rabbit’s warren of such people who were as irrational in their fears and as uncommitted to American law and the rights of the citizens to be told the truth as Poindexter. He was eventually discredited, if you’ll recall, when he tried to institute as a diagnostic tool (!) the theory of creating a glorified office pool to bet on when and where the next terror attack would occur against the United States (see reference to Ouija board above). Apparently this was so that in the grief of the aftermath of the next 9-11 at least someone would be making a buck on the side and high-fiving their buddies. When this plan became public he was summarily dismissed as having proved to be too stupid for even a neo-con to publicly approve.
6. Gambling with other peoples’ lives
Normally in life when someone is consistently wrong in all their predictions and assessments they begin to be humbled by the accumulated weight of their own errors. We are not so fortunate with our leaders and their supporters. Somehow they take their complete failures as proof of a necessity to maintain their illusions more rabidly.
Even though this has been a massacre of a policy from the beginning somehow Iraq has come to symbolize the culmination of all their current delusions. Custer, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs now must add George Bush to their list. Yet even though these neo-cons have achieved nothing but the opposite of what they expected in their foreign policy and although every prediction and claim and rationale they have made since the eighties has been proven wildly erroneous, they still insist we must not, at all costs, deviate from continuing these mistaken policies.
So when a coherent proposal was put forward for withdrawal from Iraq (Baker-Hamilton) to cut our losses to consolidate our gains, the proponents of the war cried outrage. First, intentionally confusing acknowledgment of certain failure with having caused the failure in the first place, they claimed that the very people who have been against this war from the beginning would somehow, after the fact, be responsible for the very defeat that their counsel if followed would have prevented. In other words the neo-cons instead demand the United States must accept the defeat they have led us into bravely, manfully, or else somehow be the cause of the defeat their own misjudgments have clearly made unavoidable.
I hope you are not as confused reading their arguments as I am trying to write them, but somehow, in their torturous self justifications, to continue headlong toward an even more complete defeat actually becomes preferable to desisting from progress toward that same defeat. We “owe” it Iraq to do this to ourselves. Meanwhile, they insist, not continuing on this well worn path toward certain defeat will not allow a long since evaporated chance of “victory” to occur. This noble defeat in Iraq, which justifies their illusions, therefore, is much better for the nation than a policy which might minimize that defeat because it does not vindicate the very illusions that led to the defeat!
So like gamblers addicted to the illusion of their own errors, no matter how much it costs us, they want to double down our bets in Iraq by adding more troops and committing the Untied States to at least two more years (coincidentally the remaining term of George Bush’s presidency) of complete engagement to an obviously failed policy. They gamble with other people’s lives the way some gamble with other peoples’ money.
7. Fighting Fear Itself
At the deepest core of the administration’s polemical policy is fear, an ungoverned paranoia which imagines and creates enemies and enmities where none exist. As the world is too big for their frail imaginations, their fright grows too great for their capacity to resist. To a small mind even a small problem becomes overwhelming. In an earlier day it was stated that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Apparently that is more than reason enough for this administration to fear. Before 9-11 no terror threat was too big for them to ignore, after 9-11 no fear has been too small to overcome.
By choosing to fight fear with fear they have turned a very specific challenge posed by a few janissaries of a discredited subgroup of Muslim extremists into a generalized war against all of Islam. Anyone who is not our friend and is Islamic must be our enemy. Unfortunately that requires too steep a requirement for most nations in the world, especially in the Middle East, to rise to. This means that our list of enemies must necessarily continue to grow while our list of friends continues to decline. As a democracy we mirror the qualities of our leadership. In their fear, this administration has turned the United States into an insufferable bully power, an abuser of civil liberties and a betrayer of international law.
Having taken us to war on the wings of a cowardly invention they now say we must continue the war or risk “losing” a war that we never had any real hope of winning or reason to fight in the first place. They have come to believe their own propaganda before the war that we had a national interest in Iraq. They demand we must continue to fight our fears in Iraq even after the initial reason for the fear (WMDs) has been discredited. And now they say we must continue even in face of massive losses, to try to achieve a national interest which never existed to begin with. Rather than acknowledging their mistakes to correct them, they propose that many more Americans must die to justify them.
Some apologists say it doesn’t matter now what mistaken fly-by-night scam was used to get us into Iraq, now that we’re there we must “win”. Nonsense. What goal can be achieved removed from its original purpose? Severing the original end from the means to achieve it while casting around for a new end to achieve, means that the means themselves have become an end in themselves to our government, and the longer this nebulous policy is pursued the more absurd its own justification becomes.
You cannot begin a war on a miscalculation of fear and then justify its continuation as a validation of your own fortitude and claim “defeat” as the alternative to its continuance. The nation can never be defeated by Iraq but only by the continuing incompetence and abysmal lack of integrity of our own leadership. The nation will find that “victory” for us can only come in Iraq when our current Iraq policy is ended. Only greater defeat may be purchased with its continuance. Any policy which does not have American withdrawal as its primary component will serve as a further betrayal of the nation. The country does not owe, as it has not owed up till now, further sacrifice in Iraq merely to cover the cowardly political rear ends of the proponents of this war.
It may be cynical to accuse someone of intentionally having set out to harm their country but this President and his neo-con advisors have unconsciously, condescendingly and belligerently mismanaged policies so harmful to us that it is hard to believe they weren’t conceived with our defeat in mind. This is not only an exceptional indictment of the lack of capability of our leadership but to the ineptitude of the entire political environment which has produced him and his advisors.
Obviously the marching militant martinets, the congenitally fearful, the chicken hawks, tin soldiers and gambling Poindexters who got us into this war never will be smart or brave enough to get us out of it on their own. It will be a mark of distinction as to how much the Republicans in Congress have learned and how strong the Democrats have gotten to see if they have the guts to stand up to this misbegotten proposal and kill it before it starts.
