Coming and Going for all the Wrong Reasons

The way we went to war in Iraq said some bad things about the American people, as well as our leadership. Naïve and myopic are words that come to mind. Naïve was the conviction that Iraqis would welcome any American dictate and policy, naïve was the conviction that the overthrow of the Ba’athist government would be the war, and that the ephemeral and studiously ignored aftermath would inevitably be easy, given the clear benevolence of American motives. Here enters the myopia which plagues us; it must be acknowledged that the real driving force behind the current “anti-war” sentiment in the country is the feeling that the war has simply gone on for too long.

The national “debate” about the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was fueled by naiveté and myopia, leaving no room for a sober analysis of several issues. For example, President Bush was proposing that the United States do exactly what Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg for doing and exactly what Saddam Hussein did by invading Kuwait; the United States would invade a sovereign nation that had neither attacked it or threatened it with attack. The United States would start a war. The United States was now a country that, if it unilaterally concluded that its interests were threatened, arrogated to itself the right to break the most fundamental law of civilization, the right to wage aggressive war.

Four years on, most Americans disapprove of this war. President Bush’s surge will guarantee that the war will not end in the next two years. The house-to-house battle for Baghdad, so mercifully avoided during the invasion, now awaits us. In 2003, Bush declared that America was victorious in the battle for Iraq. Four years on, the capital of Iraq is the most dangerous place on the planet. While the threat that Iraq posed in 2002 was nearly non-existent, the threat that it poses now is very, very real. All those fickle millions who were so eager to engage in this crime when there was no real threat are now equally eager to simply wash our hands of Iraq even though the threat that now exists there is far worse than we could have imagined it becoming.
Out of sight, out of mind will not work in Iraq.

And yet we must withdraw. We must withdraw because there is no American military solution to this problem. Period. When officers in the American military say this in public, that there is no American military solution to this problem, every American soldier who dies after this utterance is being murdered by his own government. Period. Americans are dying in Iraq so that Mr. Bush will be out of office when Mr. Bush’s war is lost.

We are so far behind the curve in Iraq that we are introducing new counterinsurgency strategies into a situation that has not been a classical insurgency in at least 12 months; Iraq’s biggest problem currently is the civil war, which has proven far more lethal to Iraqi people and institutions than the Sunni insurgency against American forces. By sending more troops to aid the Iraqi government, we are not putting down an insurgency against that government. We are in fact funding and arming one party to a civil war. That is what we fail to grasp; the Iraqi government is not the “democracy” fighting the “terrorists”. The Iraqi government is a group that represents one side (the Shi’a) of an ongoing civil war.

The ultimate tragedy is the manner in which the United States will leave Iraq. It will leave Iraq not because it has achieved victory or because the American people have decided that the interests of the Iraqi people are best served by a withdrawal. The United States will leave Iraq because when so many Americans clambered for war four years ago, it seemed never to dawn on them that people would die. It seemed never to dawn on them that years of effort would be needed to rebuild a brutalized society. And so, when the going got tough, Americans reached for the remote.