Mr. Moderate

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?

And from that perspective, the greatest possible loss, where the US gets chased out of Iraq with its tail between its legs, isn’t going to be much worse. And Iran can sense the weakness in the US position, as it is actively and openly funding Islamic militia forces to fight against the US military. It is now in much the same position as the Communist government in North Vietnam was during the Johnson administration. The American people elected Nixon as President, and Nixon adopted a two-track strategy of carrying the war to North Vietnam through an intense air war, and negotiating our way out of Vietnam during the Paris peace talks. Nixon was at least not under any illusion that the Vietnam War was actually “winnable.”

There is already some rumbling coming out of the Iraqi Parliament to the effect that it ought to pass a law requiring the US military to leave Iraq by some date certain. You can bet that the Iranian sympathizers within the Parliament are pressing hard for such a law, and in fact opinion poll after opinion poll within Iraq has shown that this is also the true will of the Iraqi people. The only real question for President Bush is whether the Iraqi Parliament or the US Congress will manage to pass the first law requiring him to remove the US troops from Iraq. During the Vietnam War, Nixon was under no such pressures, as both the South Vietnamese and the US Congress gave him strong support for continuing the war as long as was “necessary.”

With this in mind, we can see that if the “surge” strategy is highly successful, then both the Iraqi Parliament and the US Congress will ask that the US forces be removed from Iraq. On the other hand, if the “surge” strategy is a hopeless failure, at least the US Congress will demand that the troops be removed. To keep the troops in Iraq for a long time will require that Bush engineer a protracted stalemate during which he can argue that withdrawal spells disaster for everybody. But again, the Iranians are not likely to allow a protracted stalemate to persist long enough for Bush to make such an argument. If it starts to look like a stalemate, I believe we can count on the Iranians to supply more weapons and trained Iraqis to fight against the US forces so as to push things off of “top dead center” once again.

Increasing numbers of former US military leaders have recognized the hopelessness of this situation and have called for an immediate, or at least rapid, withdrawal of US troops. The United States is not achieving any benefit from standing in the middle of the road while Iraqis fight out their own civil war. Think about this: the Palestinians are actively involved in a similar civil war; would anybody here be deemed sane if they proposed to order the US military to intervene in that civil war? Unfortunately, the situation in Iraq is at least that bad, and is probably worse.

So, even the greatest victory possible for the United States at this point in time will still be viewed by future historians as a great defeat at least as bad as our defeat in Vietnam. What we really need to do in Iraq is to try to leave with some part of our national dignity intact. We did not manage that in Vietnam (I know, as I’m a Vietnam Veteran myself).

Congress should refuse to appropriate any more money for this war, and should refuse to appropriate any money at all for the Department of Defense without language requiring the rapid removal of US forces from combat missions inside Iraq which are not strictly defensive in nature. Let the various Iraqi factions fight it out amongst themselves, much as Hamas and Fatah are fighting out their own (far simpler) civil war in Palestine.

As I said, the only real mission now is to get out of Iraq with as much of our dignity as is possible. Unfortunately, at this point in time, victory is not an option.