Mr. Moderate

The thing I liked about Colin Powell is that he “got it.” Powell understood the lessons of our tragedy in Vietnam, and the so-called “Powell Doctrine” called for eight essential questions that must be answered affirmatively before the US military is committed to action in a foreign land. Of those eight questions, history has shown that only the 7th, the support of the American people, was true at the time of the invasion. And of course, as time has worn on, the support of the American people has dwindled away. Why? Because it was clear that the answers to the other questions were “no” at the time of the invasion.

We can argue until the cows come home whether or not President Bush and/or his key national security aides knew that one or more of the answers to the eight questions were “no” at the time of the invasion. But today, four years after Bush appeared under that ludicrous banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” Bush refuses to declare victory and get out as quickly as possible.

I an a veteran of the Vietnam War. I arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1968, and only spent a couple of months in the war zone, but I can still claim first-hand knowledge of what transpired there. And two years later, I was assigned to the communications center of the entire US Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations message center at the Pentagon. There I was exposed to the communications to and from our commanders in Vietnam about what was happening on a daily basis. This gives me an even deeper first-hand understanding of the Vietnam War.

In the Vietnam War, we were fighting only one insurgency, parented by the North Vietnamese. And in Vietnam, we did not have Catholic and Bhuddist militias battling it out with each other and the US forces. In Iraq, we have at least four distinct insurgencies, plus at least one active terrorist organization and dozens of sectarian militias, all seeking to kill Americans and each other on a daily basis. The parents of the insurgencies are: the former Baathist leadership of Iraq, the Syrian government, the Iranian government, and the government of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government plays its role by supplying Imams trained in its Wahabbi version of Sunni Islam, each of whom comes with readily-available cash to fund militant activities by people who will agree to follow their lead. Both the Syrians and the Iranians are running traditional proxy wars similar to that run by the North Vietnamese government. And the former Iraqi Baathists have billions of dollars left over from the massive looting conducted by Saddam Hussein before he was deposed as President. That massive amount of money allows them to run their own insurgency without a separate “safe haven” nation to operate out of.

When you are confronted with a classic insurgency of the type being mounted by Iran and Syria, you have to ask yourself the same eight basic questions posed by the Powell Doctrine. If you can answer each question in the affirmative, then you must invade the “safe haven” nation that is running insurgents, weapons and cash into battle against you. If you cannot honestly answer all eight questions in the affirmative, then you must promptly abandon your current war effort as it has become lost. Save what remains of your weapons and forces and regroup to fight another time, after you can once again honestly answer all eight questions of the Powell Doctrine in the affirmative.

As only Senator Reid had the courage to observe, the Iraq War is lost.

In fact, at this point in time, the answer to all eight questions is in the negative. There is not one of the eight Powell Doctrine questions which can now be answered in the affirmative. It isn’t even close.

1. At this point in time, it is clear that no vital national security interest is at stake for which our men and women need to die.

2. It is also clear that we lack anything resembling an attainable objective. The Iranian government has so co-opted the Iraqi government that it is running a large intelligence, command and control cell out of the office of the Iraqi Prime Minister. If we were to remain in Iraq, we would need to do two things: 1) abolish the current government and start over; and 2) invade Iran. That is not an attainable objective with our presently available force levels.

3. Nobody wants to even look at the risks and costs involved in continuing the war. The right-wing just wants to continue to throw good money after bad because it refuses to admit defeat. The left-wing is so scared of being branded as “losers” and “defeatists” that they refuse to show any spine and cut off funding for all future offensive operations. So, both sides have essentially agreed to continue funding the ongoing war without even looking at the risks and costs involved.

4. Bush went in with huge promises of non-violent rebuilding efforts. But all the money was diverted into “security efforts” paid to “security contractors” (read “mercenaries”). Non-violent approaches weren’t given any chance at all. And it is way too late now. Of course, the biggest error was when Bush failed to send in more WMD and nuclear inspectors before the war began. If he had sent 20,000 inspectors to Iraq and 150,000 troops to Afghanistan, we might have gotten bin Laden. But that is just 20/20 hindsight, isn’t it?

5. The main thing wrong now is that there is no plausible exit strategy which avoids endless entanglement. We have now been endlessly entangled, and there is no end in sight. That is exactly why it is time to “cut and run,” no matter how distasteful that option might be to the American people. Somebody needs to have the guts to stand up and say it.

6. Nobody wants to admit what the consequences of our current actions in Iraq really are. We have grown a huge terrorist organization inside of Iraq that clearly was not there before we invaded. We have started the multi-party proxy war referred to above. If we stay, all that will continue to get worse, unless we are willing to commit massive numbers of troops, on the order of five to ten times as many as we have now. More, even, than were there for Gulf War I back in 1991. (In that war, the total number of allied combatants approached 900,000.)

7. While the Iraq War was initially sold to the American people as necessary, and thus was broadly supported by them, the people aren’t total fools, and have gradually come to realize that they’ve been bamboozled by Bush. At this point in time, our current President would have trouble winning another election. Luckily, the Constitution prevents him from trying. As for the hard choice which confronts us now, the American People are not at all in favor of going to war with Iran, although I suppose it would be possible for President Bush to try to lay out the case I’m making here and spin it so as to come out favorable to such an invasion. However, at this point, I really doubt that there are enough fools left to support such an action.

The American people don’t like to lose, and there will be more recriminations over this war in the future. But we have lost, and we might as well be honest and admit our shame. Then, we can do the right thing and get the heck out!

8. The last issue of “genuine broad international support” hasn’t ever been true. The Coalition of the Willing consisted of the United States, Great Britain, and about 20 very-tiny contingent from a collection of relatively-unknown nations, most of whom have abandoned us by now. There is no substantial international support for our doing anything but getting out of Iraq.

So here we are, once again, at the end of a war that should never have begun, refusing to admit our defeat.

I, for one, am man enough to call it like it is: the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory.

Bush had the world on his side after the September 11th attacks. But nobody could see the reasons for invading Iraq after that. Bush frittered away all that good will, and America is once-again the much-despised imperialist wanna-be. That is the really sad defeat for the United States.

Some poor soldier is going to be stuck at the last death in the Iraq War. I sure hope that President Bush has the courage to visit the family members of those who die from here on out and explain to them why he sent their family members off to die in a war which had already been lost.