The Big Picture

I just wish the journalists would think for themselves for once. Okay, I know I shouldn't paint all the journalists with one brush, but you know what I mean. Once they get on a line of thought, you can't get them off of it. One line of thought, or premise, has been that we need to counter the insurgents' attacks with attacks of our own. So we level Fallujah and defeat Sadr's forces in Najaf. We mount an offensive against the insurgents near the Syrian border, and go after them in Samarra, Baghdad, and any number of other cities. We find their weapons caches and their hideouts, we capture their leaders, and we round up suspects to bring them in for what we used to call questioning, a euphemism for torture. None of it worked. The more we tried to limit the insurgents' ability to fight, the worse the insurgency became.

Another broad effort has been the transfer of sovereignty. The reasoning is that if the Iraqis see that they're running the show, they won't have any reason to resist the occupation any more. We want to bring democracy to the country, after all, and democracy means self-rule. So we have a formal transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June a year ago. We have elections at the end of January this year. The Iraqis will form a government and write a constitution. Most of all, we've been training Iraqi infantry and police forces to achieve the military and security objectives we haven't been able to achieve. Instead of more order, we see the beginnings of a civil war as the insurgents attack the poorly trained Iraqi forces. We have tried to reconstitute Iraq's armed forces for almost two years now, and it hasn't worked.

Civil reconstruction has been a third broad area of effort. No one even pretends that progress in this area is a goal anymore. Courts, schools, health facilities, pipelines, water purification plants, sewage treatment plants, oil refineries, electirical power plants, roads, civil service functions, garbage pickup, distribution of electrical power, all the things that make civil society run well: all these things are on hold until order is restored. Ask any Iraqi or American official when that will be, and their truthful answer is, "We're working on it." Press for another answer, and they'll say, "It could take years."

But here's something the journalists who write about Iraq have missed. No matter what the insurgents do, they've succeeded as long as they tie American troops down in Iraq. Yes, the Iraqi insurgents want to push the Americans out as soon as they can. That's their aim: get rid of the occupiers. The foreign fighters in Iraq must recognize that having American troops in Iraq is a bonanza for them. They can kill Americans there much more readily than they can kill them anywhere else. They know that while Americans fight in Iraq, they can't fight elsewhere. Al Qaeda knows that while we are in Iraq, they are winning, no matter how the battle goes from day to day.

So that's the problem with the goals we've laid out. That's the problem with our strategy. The car bombs could stop tomorrow. All the other attacks: sniping, roadside bombs, hit and run ambushes, mortar attacks, every sort of skirmish and sabotage, all the assassinations and kidnappings, all these could stop suddenly, and we would still be losing as long as we remain there. We have enormous resources committed there, and while they're tied up in Iraq they're unavailable for fighting anywhere else. We've had to pull forces from other parts of the world just to maintain a force of 135,000 in Iraq. When we do finally leave Iraq, will anyone here at home want to send our young men and women out again to fight Al Qaeda elsewhere? Will we have any motivation at all to fight the war we should be fighting? No, we'll be so happy that the war in Iraq is over, we'll have forgotten about the war we should have been fighting, the war we would have fought had we not gone into Iraq.

That's getting ahead of things, though, because the prospects for getting out of Iraq soon are nil. Supporters of the war there say that we don't bear any opportunity cost for committing our resources there. That is, they say, we are fighting the right war, for the right reasons, for the right goals. They maintain that when we leave Iraq, we won't need to fight elsewhere. Iraqi democracy will be established, and as it spreads throughout the region, to Saudi Arabia and Syria and even to Iran, Al Qaeda will have nowhere to hide. In the open air of free societies Al Qaeda will wither and dry up. No one will want to fight for Al Qaeda when the benefits of Western democracy and free enterprise are all around. That's the Wolfowitz cure. That's the democracy cures all ills strategy.

But who, in or out of our government, has made a convincing case that creating a democracy in Iraq will bring about the defeat of Al Qaeda? Why couldn't Al Qaeda operate just as effectively in an open, democratic society as it does in a closed one? The planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks showed that Al Qaeda could operate equally effectively in Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States. We say that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that we are pressing them hard in Iraq, but where's the evidence that we have reduced its ability to fight? Who believes that a quiet Iraq will mean defeat of the organization that attacked the World Trade Center? The scary thing now, two years into the Iraqi war, is that people don't even care any more how we're doing in the fight against Al Qaeda. They just want to be done with fighting, period.

So how can we counter the prevailing premise? How can we keep the big picture in front of us? The big picture is so different from the main line of thought we see in coverage of the war. Take for example the prevailing line of thought that existed while Reagan was president. Then most people thought that we had to reach an accommodation with the Soviets. The United States and the Soviet Union had to live on the same globe, and the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust was to work things out with them. We didn't say nasty things about them, and we tried to find ways to cooperate. Least of all, we didn't want to provoke them. We had managed to survive the Cold War for more than a quarter century, and we should keep on keeping on.

Well, Reagan comes along and says about the Soviet Union, "These are bad guys and they're going to lose." Look what they've done, he would say. He even said, "How's this for a strategy: we win and they lose." You can't get much more blunt than that. Then he achieved his aim, using military force and diplomacy adroitly to force the Soviet Union into conceding Eastern Europe shortly after Reagan left office. No one thought he could do it until it happened. When it did happen, people said that he must have been right after all.

We're in a similar conceptual situation with Iraq. Everyone thinks that the only way we can succeed there is to bring democracy to the people while we train a new armed force capable of containing the insurgents. How often have you heard this one: "Whatever you think of the war, we're committed now, and we have to see the job through." How often have you heard: "We can't leave now. There'd be chaos and a civil war." Well let me tell you that the civil war has already started. Everyone all over the world has concluded correctly that we can't do anything to stop it. Everyone knows the limits of our strength, the extent of our weakness.

So the conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say that we have to get out of there as soon as we can. Even the most vocal opponents of the war concede that we have to stay there long enough to hand security responsibilities over to the Iraqis, and that, people say, will take at least until the end of 2006. Well, when we come to the end of 2006, come back to read this essay, and ask yourself if we've achieved any of the goals that the conventional wisdom has set out for us. Ask if we've reduced the level of violence, turned over responsibility to the Iraqis, or made advances in the area of civil reconstruction. Even if we have made progress in any of these areas, we'll have failed if we're still tied down in Iraq, still fighting people who weren't even our enemies until we made them so.

The conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say what Reagan said in 1980: "We win and they lose." People think that if we pull out, we lose. We'll have failed, they say, and that outcome is not acceptable. Everyone will see that we lost, that we can't stick it out. But it's not true. The only way to win this war is to leave this battlefield and correct our mistake. The sure way to lose the war is to stick it out in Iraq. The sure way to grant our enemies just what they want is to stay in Iraq and bleed ourselves there. We've gone down the wrong path there. We have to turn back if we want to win, because at the end of this path lies futility, defeat, humiliation, and a total loss of confidence in ourselves. These things will happen not because we couldn't win, but because we couldn't lose. We couldn't lose our self-certainty and conviction that we've done the right thing, that we've set out on the right course. Remember, if we win the war in Iraq by sticking it out, we'll lose the war against Al Qaeda that we should have been fighting.

One of my favorite passages from the New Testament is a quotation from Jesus: "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away." The first part of the passage applies to the United States during its period of world leadership. The United States and its leaders had vision, optimism, practicality, judgment, good intentions, wisdom, faith, and hope. As promised, the country had everything a human society could want, in abundance. Now all the signs indicate that since 9/11, the United States and its leaders do not have any of these things. It has not vision but blindness, not optimism but discouragement, not practicality but utopianism, not judgment but thick-headed self-righteousness, not good intentions but selfishness, not wisdom but stupidity, not faith but gullibility, not hope but fear. As a result, everything that it has will be taken away. It has already begun to happen.

I said before November 2004 that if we didn't replace our leadership, we would not recover from the mistake our president made when he went to war in Iraq. We didn't replace him, but I don't want to believe that it's too late. I still think that some solution has to present itself, some way out has to appear. "Way will open," the Quakers say. But where? And how? I don't know if faith will answer those questions.

Making reference to the box we're in, Leslie recalled a moment during the debates last fall when Bush asked Kerry, "So are you saying that our troops in Iraq have died in vain?" At a time when no one can say anything against our troops, Kerry was stymied. "He had him," Leslie observed. I replied right away that Howard Dean would have responded differently. He would have come back at Bush directly:

"Yes, Mr. President, you're right. Those troops died in vain. They died in vain in a war you started. They died in vain in a war they should not be fighting, and you put them there. You're responsible for these useless deaths, and their futile sacrifice is on your head. These young men and women, so willing to give everything for their country, trusted you. Their parents and brothers and sisters trusted you. Their wives and children trusted you. The whole country looked to you after the September 11 attacks to lead us back from that dreadful loss. And what did you do? You sent our armed forces into a useless war, justified it with obvious, self-serving dishonesty, and refused to admit your mistake after everyone else could see the truth about what you had done.

"And you try to charge me with defeatism and with not supporting our troops? Mr. President, those troops took an oath to protect our Constitution. That means they promised to serve their commander in chief, and they trusted you to lead them well. Do you know what you did, Mr. President? You betrayed them. You asked them to do something that you wouldn't do yourself when it was your turn to serve, and you asked them to do it for dishonest reasons. So I need to ask you, Mr. President: When are you going to support our troops? When are you going to send them to fight our real enemies, rather than false enemies that you cooked up because you had a grudge against Saddam Hussein? You've misled the citizens of this great country much too long now. If you can't admit that you've done something wrong, shut your mouth and go home."

But the Democratic party thought that Howard Dean couldn't win against George Bush. They thought that John Kerry was a more effective fighter, more electable. Well, hindsight got 'em on that one. Kerry hardly talked about the war in his campaign until the fall, and even then he only raised his criticisms in a few speeches. He spent so much time, overall, trying to answer Bush's question: Why did you vote for the war? After Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it seemed that his campaign was worried: criticism of the war might come across as unpatriotic. On the contrary, Kerry's criticism of the war in Iraq was patriotic, just as his stand against the war in Vietnam was an example of courageous patriotism. Unlike his anti-war activities in the 1970s, though, Kerry in 2004 acted too hesitantly. As a result his opposition to the Iraq war appeared unfounded and equivocal. Dean would not have been such a reluctant critic.

That's enough for this one. I've built up these thoughts for so long. Then when the dam opens, too much water goes down the spillway. Consequently I have an essay that's longer than anyone wants to read. But, it all counts toward the book I want to write. Ugly War is already nearly book length. If I add these other essays to the existing long essay, we'll be ready to publish. But it's hard to see who would want to read it. Mostly now I think these writings are of historical interest. Students of this time can see that some people could see what was happening, as it happened. We didn't have to wait for it to be over before we could see what a big mistake we had made. We could see that this war was a mistake before it was launched, and what a bad course of action it was as it unfolded. But seeing the truth about the war hasn't made people willing to do the necessary and right thing: redeploy our forces to fight the people who attacked us.

Goodnight, now.