The Intelligence Issue - Another Pass

On Saturday I wrote a few paragraphs, then lost them when I cleaned the keyboard! Tip: always save your work before you do anything else. It happens to all of us.

Anyway, here is one of the main points from the original. If we had not failed in Iraq, we would not be so concerned with the intelligence issue now. Since we have failed, we want to find out who is responsible for the failure, and this seems a promising path, both for Bush's political opponents and for people who are simply dismayed by how things have turned out.

Here's another way to put it. This perspective highlights the irrelevance of the issue to the central problem, which is what we should do now. If Bush's operations in Iraq had turned out great, we wouldn't care how dishonest he was in getting us there. Because his operations there have turned out horribly, we'll rightly hold him responsible, and that's true even if he were totally honest in the arguments he used to get us there. Yes, it was maddening to listen to the way he argued his case back when the war was still in the future. Bush lost his credibility with me a long, long time ago. Now, though, we don't need to make judgments about what he says he's going to do. We've seen it. Now we can make judgments about what he has already done. We can see that what he has done is a complete failure.

That's not to say that Bush's honesty is a non-issue. We need to make judgments about his trustworthiness all the time. We don't need to hash out WMD and the CIA's intelligence for the hundredth time, though. We can judge Bush by his own statements here. All of the reasons Bush gave for going into Iraq were false. He has one left, the one that he clings to all the time now. We're going to bring democracy to Iraq and to the region. We're going to prevent a civil war, and help the Iraqi people secure their country. Who believes that anymore? Bush has failed by his own standards. That's the only standard you can judge a leader by. Has the leader achieved what he said he would achieve? Has he made things better, or worse? You answer that for yourself.

Reagan said that heroes aren't braver than the rest of us, they're just braver five minutes longer. I think abou that saying pretty often. It seems that success often comes from the fortitude that let's you stick it out just a little bit longer. You keep going even when you think it's not worth it anymore. Your dream seems further away then ever, but you persevere. That does take courage. Does this principle hold here? Will we succeed in Iraq if we hold on a little longer? Do you think that our current leadership has the capacity to achieve success, given their past record? You answer that for yourself.

Someday, the war in Iraq will end, and the Republicans will take credit for it. They'll say, "See, we told you that peace would come to that country eventually, if we just saw it through." They'll say that even if the end of the war eventually comes about because we left the country. It's not going to end while we're there, that's for sure.

For a long time, defenders of the war kept saying that if we left, a civil war would break out. We had to stay there to prevent that. Now the country's anarchy has deteriorated into civil war: a war of all against all, it seems, except that the country's ethnic groups do keep the conflict more organized than that. Now even the war's most vigorous defenders can't deny what we see all around us there. We have a civil war there now, and we have not been able to prevent it.

Now the war's defenders say that we can't fail in Iraq. We can't signal defeat to our opponents. We can't let the terrorists, as we like to call them, show the world that they can beat us. Soon we'll see that we've been failing in Iraq from the start. Yes, we removed Hussein from power, but that's not what we need to be doing. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. Let me say that again. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. He did not help those who did attack us. Let me say that again. He did not help those who did attack us. We cannot go around attacking countries because we think that some people in those countries might want to attack us in the future. Bush has said the opposite: if we think someone in another country might attack us in the future, we have to take action right now. After September 11, preemptive war is a necessity.

Well let's get something straight: the Iraq war was not preemptive and it certainly is not necessary. The commentators' idea that this was a war of choice is absurd. The war is both unnecessary and foolish. If you want to call a foolish mistake a choice, that's fine. It makes you look that much worse, if you admit that your crime was the result of a deliberate choice.

All right, I want to say this part as clearly as I can. The war in Iraq is a crime. That doesn't make criminals of the brave soldiers fighting the war. You can draw your own conclusions about the people who started the war. It doesn't matter what reasons they give to defend their aggression. They believe that the September 11 attacks justify any acts of self-defense they deem necessary. They believe that they have to undertake measures, even measures that violate the United Nations charter, in order to protect the United States from more attacks. They'll never admit that they've done something wrong. But even though the Democrats have been gutless wonders, and have declined to call the war a crime, historians will not be quite as bland. Let's hope they do have the courage to tell the truth. Maybe they'll read these essays someday after I'm gone, and they'll agree. They'll wonder why so few commentators said the truth - that the war is a crime. The only explanation is that no one is willing to say such things in the midst of a war, since it harms morale, and injures our fighting strength.

We have to do whatever is right and just and effective to absolve this crime. We can't win the war that started on September 11 from where we are now. We can't win the war in Iraq, either. To win the first we have to stop fighting the second. To win the first we have to pull out from Iraq and regroup. That is not cutting and running. Regrouping accomplishes a lot of practical tasks on the battlefield. When an army regroups, it readies itself for the next stage of the battle. It takes units that are scattered, leaderless and ineffective and makes them effective again. Weapons and water are distributed, assignments given, and leaders are connected with troops that need new orders. We need to regroup after the Iraq fiasco. We night to regroup in order to fight effectively again. Regrouping is not defeat.

That's not going to happen for the next three years, though, so we have to be patient. In the meantime, we have to find leaders who can help to plan the next stage of the war even though they do not hold power in our government. We have to be ready for the changes that are coming. We may not have hope now of rapid progress anywhere, but we have to act quickly when the time comes. We have to prepare.

That's all for tonight. Please visit The Last Jeffersonian, and please sign up for the journal on the home page if you haven't already!