1 The Limits of the Surge
There is a new surge to declare the “surge” a great success. Fine, everyone wants as good an outcome in Iraq as we can get. But to take what was always intended as a temporary and marginal attempt to establish greater security in Iraq and try to turn it into a new path to elusive “victory” can simply not be done. You may as well dress a hog in a gown, earrings, high heels, dub her a beauty queen and take her to the prom as label the war in Iraq a success. While the surge may have some use it is only acceptable as a way to extricate ourselves from Iraq, not a way to embed ourselves deeper into the conflict for another decade. Yet that is precisely what the administration is trying to turn the surge into.
Therefore the surge is just another fraud and fantasy atop a long train of failures and fantasies. It is a form of mental masturbation to think for a moment that a foreign force, by creating increased security in certain pockets of Iraq for brief periods of times, can somehow override the massive undercurrents of a civil war which our invasion and occupation has created. A comparison might be to a nurse changing the bandages on a mortally wounded patient. It may look and feel better for a time but better cosmetics can do nothing to cure the contagion still festering beneath the gauze.
Yet this marginal security effort is being hailed by the unreconstructed supporters of this war, who have never once been right about anything in Iraq, as “winning”. This is naïve. They have let a few very small and ambiguous successes expand their heads, cloud their reasons and dull their judgments again. The surge by definition is not a strategy for winning anything in Iraq. It is a police action around the edges of a civil war, designed to mitigate the worst of our losses and use this temporarily enlarged force structure for a temporary breathing space, nothing more.
Those who were so quick to get us into this war are now too quick to label the surge a success and imply that this is a path to some artfully ill-defined “victory” in the future. Yet if a political reconciliation is not agreed to in Baghdad that can be instituted in the rest of the country this added security is not in the least sustainable. Any and every gain we achieve at such extreme costs may be wiped out in an instant with the death of an ally, a change in the political winds or a well placed bomb. It goes against the grain of history and reason to suppose that there is any long term advantage to the United States by staying in Iraq indefinitely.
The surge is only useful as a way to grease our way out, to reduce our commitment and let the Iraqis stand up as we stand down. Slightly enhanced security is certainly not an excuse to stay indefinitely or to claim we are winning or to be used as a backdoor rationale or cobbled on justification for having erroneously invaded Iraq in the first place. We must not allow this administration to squander even this small, belated success by moving the goal posts yet again and redefining our way to further defeat. But there are signs that that is just what they are prepared to do.
In the end the reasons for all our failures in Iraq lay at the beginning. It is natural law that mistakes this large must carry within them consequences proportional to the original mistake. Any proposition based on a premise which turns out to be untrue will never succeed merely by being indefinitely maintained. Anything that follows from an untrue beginning will be counterproductive to its own ultimate intention and compound and grow worse the longer the course is mistakenly persisted in.
This comprises a near perfect description of our strategy in the Iraq war. Given the dishonest reasons for starting this war is it any wonder it is ending so badly? Yet the proud founders of this war still secretly seek a politically painless conclusion (for themselves) to the foundering fiasco they’ve engineered. We went into Iraq with no clear reason to go, no plan to manage the country once we arrived and no plan to ever get our troops back out. This constitutes a near perfect recipe for disaster.
And disaster is exactly what we have received at their hands. The sooner we accept it the less it will cost us in additional money and loss of American life.
Hidden deep in the denial of the proponents of the war in Iraq, like the seed at the heart of the malignant bloom, lays an interesting insight into how history works. Or why it doesn’t. Any war should have a single, clear, overwhelming reason apparent to all to be fought or it should not be fought at all. Nebulous, open-ended wars for variable reasons, shifting purposes and disingenuous goals can only end badly for those who instigate them. While waiting on others to perform for us, with no definite end game of our own, no goals, no diplomacy, no structure nor benchmarks of our own, all we have in Iraq is attenuating mission creep and wishful thinking.
Because to indefinitely wait for the Iraqis to develop a policy which may help us some day is hardly a replacement for having a policy of our own which can help us today. The sad truth is that after four years of incompetence we still have no policy in Iraq that is not wholly dependent on others to execute. This is indistinguishable from our having no policy at all in Iraq. This is a position of unforgivable weakness and dependence entirely unbefitting the world’s most powerful country.
Yet despite the running debacle that this war has been its adherents still exhibit reluctance to question and a complete unwillingness to discuss the basic assumptions about the war in Iraq. Once it was clear in the early months of the war that WMD – or weapons of mass destruction, the ostensible reason for the invasion - would not be found, the first fall back position of the administration was that the entire purpose for the war never really mattered. Our leaders embraced a complete contradiction in terms as their casus belli from the start and said the war was necessary to fight even if all the reasons given for the necessity of fighting it had been in error!
It’s hard to imagine another instance in the long sordid history of the world where such a belief could be proven true. If you are on your way to a meeting and it’s cancelled, would you go on anyway in the hopes that another meeting of equal importance to you might spontaneously erupt? If you discover that the structural supports for a bridge are far too weak to support it, do you still use them to build the bridge? Presumably only if you expect to never have to use the bridge yourself.
Finally, if you are given warning that the investment you’ve made was a scam, do you keep pumping more money into it in hope that faith and a little more money alone can somehow overturn the much larger forces of bankruptcy and criminality which are swallowing it up? If so I have some Enron stock I’m willing to make you a really good deal on.
Because once your original reason for initiating a complicated and costly enterprise proves invalid for whatever reason what percentage of times does your conscience and experience tell you that you can merely superimpose another reason you have just invented on top of your old plan and anticipate success on the fly? Probably more close to zero than not.
A careless and unnecessary war is the most expensive wound that any nation can possibly inflict on itself. Once the need to fight the war in Iraq evaporated at its outset its continuance immediately moved to the negative side of the ledger and we became little more than a glorified police force and underpaid mercenaries (at the expense of the American taxpayer of course) in service to a deteriorating country. Essentially then, for four years and up to this very day, the work we are doing there, based on a false premise, is for free (after costs to ourselves, naturally). Because once it was proven there was no national or material reason to start the war there has never been any possible future benefit even remotely equivalent to the costs we have already accrued in Iraq in staying, especially when we keep adding to them.
Then we have the “surge” which, according to the very definition of the word, is a short term operation of limited scope. Leaders and generals who consistently confuse short term tactics with long term strategy may sometimes win a battle but always lose wars. This is exactly what we have done and continue to do in Iraq. Consequently our leaders’ lack of personal self control, perspective and institutional critical analysis have put us in the classic loser’s position of chasing ever diminishing potential returns with ever escalating actual losses. This war is the structural equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail around the trunk of a tree until it gets too tired to do it anymore.
Therefore the very idea of us ever “winning” something in Iraq by this point in the game is an oxymoron, a complete non sequiter, and a dishonest appraisal of our true situation in this war. This war has long since become defectively and dangerously remedial, as we try and generally do not succeed at partially repairing of a few of the problems our occupation continues to create. Disguise it as you will, from its very inception Iraq has been a total loss across the board for the foreign policy of the United States. The surge is like a broke drunk gambling his last fifty bucks trying to recoup the many thousands he has already lost.
2 From Pyrrus to Custer to Bush
We are told that we can never leave Iraq. The damage it will do to Iraq is incalculable. True, it can’t be calculated. No one alive can predict what will happen if we depart and whether it will help Iraq more if we leave in six months or stay six years. The only certainty and the only fact we do control is that the longer we stay the worse in immediate costs it will be for the United States and the sooner we leave the better. This is absolutely the one and only fact in Iraq about which there can be no dispute.
The base theory that leaving Iraq will make matters worse is in error because it takes as its assumption that things will get better if we stay. This is wrong on three counts.
- Number one, Iraq has gotten worse every day we’ve been there so how much better can we make it by staying longer? And if it’s truly inevitable that it’s going to get worse when we leave, whenever we leave, then by definition we must stay forever, which, according to our own irrefutable record there, means Iraq and our entire policy in the region can only continue to grow worse. In any nation a resented foreign occupation, unless it becomes a participating instrument of the oppression, is the one kind of open wound which never allows a nation to recover for the extent of its duration.
- The second wrong contention they make is that if we leave Iraq now we will only have to return later to a country we never had any reason to invade in the first place. This theory is self refuting. It is yet another blatant and desperate duplicity, a typical fear-mongering technique of this administration, which is totally unsubstantiated by known fact or worthy of any response.
- The third reason this theory is wrong is that our position in Iraq is the poison in the well of every other policy aim we have in the region and the world. We cannot have any kind of effective strategy against terrorism until the war in Iraq has become a dot in our rear view mirror. Although we’re told we must stay in Iraq to fight al Qaeda, in fact, we cannot effectively fight and beat al Qaeda until after we are out of Iraq.
Yet we are told that we have specifically chosen Iraq to be the key battleground against terrorism in the world. If so this is the worst place in the world to have it. To start this second war, not only did we leave the first, real war against terrorists in Afghanistan unfinished, we immediately got mired in a country in the throes of an even more complicated civil war that just happens to provide the perfect cover and breeding ground for just the type of terrorism we are fighting and which hadn’t existed there before we invaded.
Five years later al Qaeda is thriving and we are still stuck in Iraq playing both ends off against the middle while all sides play each other off us. The President still tries to insinuate that the situation is black and white there when it is really plaid – a multicultural, multi-ethnic, cross border, intertribal, international and sectarian civil war.
No sane nation has ever willingly put itself in a situation to have to fight a two front war. No sane nation has ever willingly put itself in the middle of another country’s open ended civil war as exists today in Iraq. But this administration has gone out of its way to voluntarily rush to do both these things to us simultaneously. Now we are actually fighting two entirely separate wars half way around the world (though they are gradually growing together), one of which we didn’t even have to fight, neither of which we can win while pursuing the other.
In fact, the forces we have in part unleashed in Iraq are far bigger than even the United States can handle. Because every day we stay we back ourselves more deeply into what is essentially a much broader regional conflict, the equivalent of a 21st century Islamic Reformation - between Islamic conservatives and ultra conservatives cross hatched with age old conflicts between nations and between Shia and Sunni- which is embroiling the entire Muslim world in turmoil. This fight for the future control and shape of Islam has little to do with us, is a fight we have no business being in the middle of, is a fight whose ultimate results we can have little effect on (except negatively) and is a fight we from which we cannot possibly derive any benefit.
As far as killing all the terrorists in situ, as Iraq is fissiparous and its borders are completely porous, independent fanatics or state sponsored proxy terrorists can and do freely pass from anywhere across the Islamic world extended in unlimited numbers into Iraq to attack our troops while we are bogged down in the open ended civil war we have started there. To pretend that the number of terrorists in Iraq is static and limited and may be contained and “beaten” there is absurd. To say that this is a “classic” insurgency which would typically take ten years to subdue is a complete oversimplification and dangerously misleading. Moreover, with all our other concerns in Iraq, for our president and military to dare terrorists to come to Iraq to fight us, where we are only able to fight them, as it were, with one hand tied behind our back, is a loser’s bet. We are mounting a small military surge against a potential terrorist tsunami.
Iraq is a terror generating machine. So instead of containing terrorism the war we started in Iraq is almost perfectly designed to spread and foment it. It is the engine of our troubles not the vehicle of their solution. To say this is the ideal place to defeat terrorism couldn’t be more wrong.
Still George Bush insists on holding our entire foreign policy hostage to this entirely untenable military situation in a war we have nothing to win while we wait for tenuous political goals to be reached by others who are not only incapable but don’t necessarily mean us well and are using us to consolidate their own narrow advantages. Iraq is the worst of all possible worlds for America, all sorrow and loss, a slowly deteriorating war of national attrition and exponentially climbing costs. To choose Iraq as the best place in the world to fight terrorism is the biggest miscalculation since Custer’s decision that the Little Bighorn would be the ideal spot to engage Sitting Bull. By comparison, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and keep us there forever makes Custer look like a tactical genius.
3 Pyrric Losses
From its thoroughly discredited start, by now the war in Iraq has morphed into an odd and uncomfortable combination of vague national altruism and domestic political damage control. It is not what it started to be and we are not even quite sure by now what it has become.
Because all of a sudden, in a classic bait and switch, instead of the purely defensive war we were told we were going to fight (i.e. attack them before they attack us), we have become the imperialistic aggressors of good (?) in the world.
According to the war’s adherents we are not just the world’s policeman, we are the world’s lone perfectionists of virtue who shall alone decide how foreign countries should be run and are willing to amend them at massive and uncertain costs to ourselves and little hope of success for our efforts. According to the neo-imperialist proponents of this war we are ever on the lookout for any country poor and poorly run to preemptively invade and force to progress. In Iraq, the prototype test of their hypothesis, such is our uprightness and endless our wealth that we have invaded the place that some think was the original Eden in order to restore it to its previous purity. This is something that not even God could do.
Not only is this course irrational, because of course, this cannot possibly be done, but it’s childishly naive as a national premise because it can contain within it no particular benefit to the people of the United States, even if it was remotely possible to bring about. Our people are the most generous people alive and other administrations have worked to make the lives of Americans better. The Bush administration has decided to work to make other nations’ citizens’ lives better at the expense of our own citizens and is succeeding much better at the latter than the former.
Therefore both reasons given for this war in Iraq – both the original (destroying WMDs) and the supplemental (the establishment of utopia there) - are erroneous. Part of the reason for flagging public support for this endeavor, aside from its pure mismanagement, stems from the fact that none of the excuses given for fighting it have been either true on the one hand or attainable on the other. Yet five years in, proponents of this war still use variants of these two thoroughly discredited rationales interchangeably as reasons to keep us at it.
In their defense, admittedly, based on its dismal record, the efficacy and point of this war are difficult to explain to a novice and one struggles to relate just how incongruous and irrational this war that was never true in theory or relevant in fact really is. The war in Iraq might be compared to a madman inventing a flying machine. He pastes feathers on his arms, ties a jet engine on his tail and plots a course directly to Mars. The mechanics, the engineering, even the physics, astronomy and trajectory all have been exactly wrong. This may be understandable for a madman who lives in a cellar, tangled up in his own wings crashing to the ground from the roof of his car for the fiftieth time in a row, but for a great nation it is one of the most unforgiving and unforgivable wars ever forced down the throat of a free people.
Even more bizarre, worried about a failure of national will, somehow in the fairy factory of the President’s mind, his failure has become the American peoples’ fault. In order to convince us to continue fighting a war that never should have been fought, every week his rationales for staying the course in Iraq have become steadily less cogent and coherent. This is what mission creep looks like in operation. Each reason put forward has promiscuous echoes of previous failed rationales within it, a little like a bad painter redoing his canvas over and over, never improving it, merely turning it darker and more and more impenetrably opaque.
So we are peevishly assured we must fight al Qaeda in Iraq or continue to establish peace and security in the region that our invasion has done so much to destabilize. Or we must stay the course, even the wrong one, to establish our credibility no matter how discreditably it reflects upon us, even long after we have found out that what we are doing makes no sense.
Above all, we are told, we must never discuss a timetable for ever actually extracting our men and women from the fighting in Iraq.
But what kind of cynical, bankrupt government and failed generalship is it that fights a war without a goal or reason and then doesn’t bother to establish an exit strategy to get their army out intact when the war’s pointlessness is discovered? Isn’t one of the key requisite determinants of the success of any battle to preserve as much of your army as you possibly can by getting your troops back home safely? How can you call a battle a victory when your army is destroyed in the process of fighting it?
This war would be the very definition of a Pyrric victory except it isn’t even a victory, only total Pyrric loss. Must we see our army destroyed to satisfy the depraved delusions of this war’s authors? This is defeat by definition. It is national masochism. This is how despots fight wars, selfishly, with no regard for their own people or their nation’s future. Yet five years in and there is still no hint of an exit strategy out. Not once has any way home been suggested by George Bush, his administration has banned the term “exit strategy” from its vocabulary and the war’s supporters collectively damn anyone a defeatist who dares criticize them so they may keep our policy in a state of perpetual stasis that has certain defeat as its only conceivable outcome.
So now the administration’s world changing altruism has morphed once more back into what this war has always really been about, guilt and fear. And the proponents of this war still tell us that we were right to invade Iraq. “The world’s a better place,” proclaims George Bush self righteously, in a statement that finds no corroboration in fact, even though we certainly aren’t better off for it.
He says this even though the Middle East is in dangerous turmoil. Iraq itself is in ruins. al Qaeda is on the rise and both Lebanon and the Palestinians more radicalized. Pakistan is teetering on the brink. Afghanistan is unsettled and regressing. Iran is emboldened to the point of threats and nuclear truculence. Everywhere the forces of moderation are under molestation. Some of these problems would exist anyway but who can argue that each has been made far worse by our unnecessary incursion into Iraq?
Meanwhile, the President’s own approval rating is the lowest for the longest period of time in American history. His political party is in retreat and under continual fire. At home costs in lives and national self-respect and treasure have been enormous and irretrievable while abroad the US is less liked and trusted than at any time in our entire history.
The President and his supporters are extremely proud of their prowess in putting the United States in this position. There is something manic about their fervor, dangerous, perverse, even mad. Even Custer, that other George, must have at some point before he died suffered the realization that he had made a huge mistake. George Bush and his supporters are visited with no such insight as they look out upon the world and all the fine work they have done and see that it is good.
