Iraq Is FUBAR

I had a car accident several years ago. I was driving to church on a Sunday morning with my little daughter on a quiet Sunday morning. On a street that runs between Allston and Brookline, I entered an intersection at the top of a hill. A large vehicle slammed into my wife's small Chevy Nova, at the front door hinges on the passenger side. The driver had run a red light in an intersection with poor visibility. My one-year-old, in the car seat in the back, had a small bruise on her neck. I went to the hospital to have eleven stitches in my forehead, where my head hit the rear view mirror.

Well, these accidents happen. What's interesting is that the driver of the other car, who wasn't hurt, never asked how I was. He didn't ask about my daughter, either at the accident scene or later. As far as he was concerned, the car he hit was empty. The damage he caused wasn't too important to him. More interesting, he lied about what he had done. He said I had run the red light. How do I know? When we tried to get fair compensation for our car, which was not repairable, the insurance adjuster refused to give us more than half of its value. The adjuster said the driver of the other car claimed I was at fault in the accident. Take fifty percent, because you're not going to get more.

Here was an individual who would not take responsibility for what he had done. It just wasn't possible for him to imagine that he could cause damage like that. Nope, it didn't happen that way. Blame lies elsewhere, not with me. I didn't do anything wrong. ...Does that kind of thinking sound familiar to you?

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When I was in the Navy I served first as the gunnery officer, then as the electronics material officer. My men in the gunnery division took care of the forward, five-inch gun mount as well as the fire control equipment. My men in the electronics material division took care of the radar and communications equipment. They had an expression for equipment that had to be replaced: FUBAR. I believe the word dates all the way back to the men who did so much with so little in World War II. It means Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. As often as my men used the term, it actually represented an important decision making standard. If a piece of equipment, or a module or a circuit board or a wiring harness or some important mechanism couldn't be repaired, you had to order the whole thing right away. You didn't have time to tinker away with various repair strategies when the fighting readiness of the whole ship was at stake.

I'd like to say more about the title of this article at this point, but time is short as usual. Plus the condition of Iraq - fucked up beyond all repair - is pretty self-evident now. We slammed into the country with a big vehicle, and now the condition of the country is someone else's fault. Colin Powell said that if we break it, we own it. Well we sure broke it, and we sure don't know how to fix it. It's hard work, President Bush says, which means we have to have patience. Give us some time and Iraq will become an exemplary, constitutional republic. Twenty-five years from now Iraq probably will be an exemplary nation-state, and the Republicans will take credit for it.

Let's follow the example of Thomas Aquinas now. He liked to pose a question, offer an answer, make objections to the answer, then answer the objections. I'm not going follow that pattern as rigorously as he did, but it's a good model of argumentation to keep in mind.

On the Aquinas model then, our question is: What do we do now in Iraq? One answer is, we should get out of there as soon as we can. We consider the objections to that proposal, and we respond to the objections. At another point, we might want to consider other proposals in response to the original question.

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Have you noticed how the war's defenders have the same answer to all criticisms? If you don't want to stay the course, they say, what would you do instead? You're not suggesting that we pull out, are you? You're not suggesting that we concede defeat, are you? We don't have any choice now but to see it through. We have to finish what we started. You may not like the war - nobody does. But we don't have much choice but to stay.

I'd like to know why the burden of explaining the future falls on the war's critics here. What plans have the war's leaders offered that are convincing and effective? Every single thing we have tried has failed. What's more, the war's leaders can't articulate any course of action that's convincing. The long-range plan in place now is to train Iraqi troops to take over security responsibilities. But everyone acknowledges that the key problem is not training but leadership. The Iraqi units don't have good leadership among the non-commissioned and junior officers. We can train new soldiers how to fire an automatic rifle, but no fighting unit is effective without good leadership. Without it the soldiers aren't motivated. We have motivated, well-trained and well-equipped soldiers in our units, and we have not been successful against the opposing forces. How do we expect the Iraqi units to do what we haven't been able to do? No plan from the administration has answered that question.

Instead of a plan we have counter-objections. The war's defenders say that if we leave, the country will tip toward civil war. But the civil war has already started. Iraqis have been killing Iraqis by the hundreds and thousands for many months now. That looks like a civil war to me. It doesn't matter what we call the people on the other side: terrorists, insurgents, foreign fighters, gangs, rebels, tribesmen, Sunnis, a restive population, Shiites, suicide bombers, gunmen, fundamentalists, militant Islamists, Al Qaeda, criminals, kidnappers, Baathists, Hussein loyalists, members of the feared intelligence services, Sadr's army, diehards or dead-enders. The country has fallen into a civil war since we invaded, and we don't know how to deal with it.

Another objection from the war's defenders is that if we leave, it will embolden our enemies. That's a good one. Half a dozen members of the opposing force blow themselves up every day as part of their war-fighting strategy, and we think our withdrawal will embolden them. We will give ourselves a new set of problems if we withdraw, but an enemy that is more willing to fight isn't one of them. Our enemies have been willing to fight for a long time, and we've given them a great opportunity to prove it in Iraq.

A third objection is that we can't concede defeat. A superpower of our stature can't do that. Why not? Why can't we concede defeat? What terrible thing would happen that's worse than what's happening now? A concession of defeat, with recognition that the war was a mistake from the beginning, would show maturity and an ability to deal with the truth. But I'm past arguing for that now. In fact, we don't actually have to concede defeat. We can, as one writer put it rather unoriginally, declare victory and go home. We invaded Iraq to change the regime, and we accomplished that. We can't do any more good there, so let's pull our forces out. We can explain why we're doing it, and put a good face on it. We know the administration is good at putting a good face on things. We can undertake the process slowly - no sudden redeployment is required here. We can undertake the process in close coordination with the new government, and with other groups throughout the country. As ambivalent as some political and religious leaders might be about our presence there, I don't think many of them would try hard to make us stay.

That brings me to a last point. We say we want to bring democracy to Iraq. We've transferred sovereignty to the newly elected Iraqi government. We know that by a very large majority, the people want us to leave. If the new government were to hold a referendum on the question of our presence there, we don't have any reason to doubt the outcome of the vote. So how can we say now that our staying promotes democracy, that our leaving inhibits it? How did we reach a point where we occupy the country, against the people's will, in order to establish democracy? How did we reach a point where we refuse to leave, when the people clearly want that, because it would endanger democracy? Everyone says that the security situation would worsen were we to leave, but would it? It's an article of faith now, but I haven't seen any convincing arguments on that question. No one has explained the process by which things would get worse were we to leave. People just believe that it's so.

So let's take another look at the proposition, "We got ourselves into this mess, now we have to see it through." Perhaps we've already seen it through, and we don't know it. For that matter, how will we know when we've seen it through? When everyone in Iraq is prosperous, happy and secure, right? Good luck. That's going to take a long time. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might see new goals for ourselves that look better than the ones we say we have now. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might see new possibilities that benefit both us and the Iraqis, new insights that come from acknowledging our mistakes, and new ways to fight the war we should be fighting. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might win.

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So far I haven't been able to think of a good subtitle for Ugly War. The possibilities seem too long, too depressing, too uninteresting, too pessimistic: not anything that would make someone want to read the book. Five years from now, who would want to read a book titled: Ugly War: Why the United States Should Get Out of Iraq? The title I just thought of sounds a little more perky: Ugly War: How to Succeed in Iraq. Altogether, it'd be good just to call it Ugly War, the way Thomas Paine titled his pamphlet Common Sense. The people who read Thomas Paine knew what he was talking about. He just had to reach his audience at the right time, when they were ready to agree and to act. I don't know when our citizens will reach that point, but I sure hope it's soon. I can't say that Ugly War will be the force that tips things the other way, but something has to do it. The longer we fight this war, the more we lose. We've lost a lot already.