Get Out Now

I used to be an intellectual. Now I'm just mad.

I thought of that tonight as I was reading about the events in Lebanon today. Scott McClellan or somebody like him said we have to be cautious about the resignation of the government there. The departure of the previous, pro-Syrian government is no guarantee, he said, that we'll see free or fair elections in the van. And who are we to commenting on whether another country has free or fair elections? Look at the election we've just been through. Would anyone call that a free election? Or was it a herd of scared voters stampeded by propaganda into voting for a war criminal? I don't want to think that it could be true, but right now I don't have any other explanation. I just cannot think how people could have voted for someone who committed the acts that Bush committed. I said something like that to Leslie, and she replied, "People are scared." That seems to be all that one can say.

So much of the reasoning about this war has been consequentialist. It'll all be worth it, we say, if we can bring about peace and democracy in the Middle East. It'll all be worth it - all the blood and grief - if we can bring democracy and freedom to the whole region. I say no, no, no. Stop measuring things in the balance. We can't bring out the scales of international justice here, to offset bad causes with good outcomes. We can't excuse ourselves by pointing to the good we did. There are some things you just don't do, no matter what. You don't shoot someone in the back, you don't sleep with your neighbor's wife, you don't falsely defame someone to protect yourself, and you don't attack another country that hasn't threatened you. To say that the war in Iraq is okay as long as we achieve a good outcome there is like saying that the Nazi holocaust was okay because the state of Israel could never have been created otherwise. The Jewish homeland became possible because Hitler tried to wipe out all of the Jews in Europe. No one says the holocaust was worth it because it gave birth to Israel.

All the commentators now say that whatever you think of the war, the act is done now and we have to make the best of it. We have to stick it out. Well, yes, we do have to make the best of it, but the second point about sticking it out does not follow from the first. The commentators take for granted, without bothering to argue the point, that the way to make the best of of Iraq is to stay in Iraq. What makes us think that we are having a salutary effect there? What makes us think, when almost everyone there hates us, that we can help them? It's a universal rule of human relations that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. Why shouldn't this principle apply to nations as well? The Iraqis don't want our help. Even our puppets are happy to carry on their affairs without us. What can we do there?

The conventional answer is that we have to stay in Iraq until we have trained sufficient security forces to maintain peace and order in the land. We have to be patient, people say. Give the Iraqis time and they will develop security forces with the training, morale, discipline, leadership, equipment, information and power to defeat the insurgency and its criminal allies.

Now give that answer a second thought. We have 150,000 soldiers in Iraq: the best equipped, most committed, most highly trained and powerful force in the history of warfare. No one questions the quality of their leadership. Everyone comments on how their morale holds up despite the terrible circumstances of their duty. Their ability to gather information and locate enemy leaders and stores has improved. Yet this force is clearly unable to disarm its foe. If we can't disarm the insurgency with 150,000 troops, why do we think that 100,000 Iraqis can do it? The Iraqi force won't have the armor, the heavy weaponry, or the air power that we do. The insurgency has exploited our vulnerabilities, and Iraqi vulnerabilities, with skill and resolve. Why do we think the Iraqis will succeed where we have failed? Why do we think that we can train them to do what we can't do ourselves?

Now give the be patient answer a third thought. The enemy says that they will continue to attack Iraqi security forces as long as they act in concert with the American occupation forces. People say that if we leave Iraq a civil war could develop, but a civil war has already developed because of our presence there. The insurgents have directed their attacks against Iraqis who fight on our side. Suppose we left and the insurgents had no occupation to fight against. Would they continue to kill Iraqis? Would suicide bombers continue to drive their cars into the middle of large crowds of recruits to blow them up? We don't know. But the logic of this question is clear. There's a chance that the civil war in Iraq would take a different course were we to withdraw. And we can't know what would happen were we to withdraw unless we actually do it.

People say that we have to stay in Iraq three to five years, that we have to be ready to lose as many soldiers there as we lost civilians on September 11, 2001. Do the people who say that actually believe that at the end of five years of occupation, we'll have a situation in Iraq that's much better than it is now? Time is not on our side here, yet people say be patient. Don't rush to get out of there - no timetables for withdrawal. But what evidence do we have that thirty-six more months and 1,500 more lives will bring the outcome we want? Who can point to a process or a set of conditions that indicates progress toward our goal? Any rational analyst of this war can see that our presence in Iraq is the key catalyst for the violence there. The dynamics of the war will change when we are gone. We don't know how they'll change, but we do know that things won't stay the same if we leave.

That brings me to a last point. Consequentialist reasoning in this situation focuses on what we can do for the Iraqis, and by their example what we can do for the entire region. The argument to outcomes says that if we can spawn democracy throughout the Middle East and South Asia, we can defeat Al Qaeda. Even if you believe that argument, even if you believe that we are fighting our enemies in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, we have more direct ways to accomplish the same goal. The visionary argument says that if we bring democracy to the entire region, we can drain the fundamentalist swamp and get rid of the murderous alligators that threaten us. Our experience with that kind of operation indicates that even if you do obliterate the swamp, the alligators just go somewhere else, like the golf courses.

We have to attack Al Qaeda directly. We have to act against our enemy in collaboration with other countries, in collaboration with other groups. We have to concentrate on the tasks right in front of us. The visionaries offer up an appealing goal - security for the West if we can make the whole Middle East safe for democracy - but the vision is illusory. We will lose our position of leadership in the world if we follow their path. In fact, we already have lost it.