November 16, 2006
Iraq and 1944 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST Julie Fenster posted tersely and eloquently on Monday, listing four of the American war dead from 1944. One of the men who died was the son of a former governor, one of an ambassador, a third the son of an assistant to the President, the fourth the son of one of the most famous American novelists. The title of the post was “Maybe That’s Why They Were in a Hurry to Win and Bring the Soldiers Home . . .” A possible implication of this list and title is that the sons and daughters of less celebrated and powerful people seem to be the ones dying in Iraq, and that an unnecessarily protracted war is the result of this change in the class of Americans doing the fighting.
If that is what the post meant, I am not sure I agree. For one thing, the path to victory during World War II led pretty directly to Berlin, Tokyo and Rome. It is not so clear where the path to victory lies in Iraq. It is not fair to say that the Bush administration cannot even define victory, because it did, even if it is now backing off that definition. Victory was initially defined as the creation of a democratic and peaceful Iraq. Many people doubt that such a victory is possible. If the Shiite majority makes Iraq peaceful by terrorizing their former Baathist (and mostly Sunni Arab) overlords into giving up their own terrorist insurgency, that might mean a kind of democracy, but the majority will probably fall out over internal disputes. Some faction may win the next fight and create peace by establishing a new tyranny, but that will not be a democratic Iraq. So the Bush administration may have invaded Iraq in pursuit of an impossible victory, which is bad enough, but it should not necessarily be indicted for being in no hurry to win because it was cynically indifferent to the lives of non-elite American soldiers. The Bush administration may fairly be accused of waging counterinsurgency very badly, but that is not the same thing as not being in a hurry. Similarly, if the administration failed to commit sufficient forces, or provide the right sort of forces, that failure seems unlikely to have been the result of sheer indifference to the duration of the war. It may be attributable to gross self-deception, but that is a different thing.
If the Sunni Arab insurgency somehow wins, which seems impossible, the peace of effective state terror may again prevail, but again, not democracy. It is (just) possible that a democratic, federal, and reasonably peaceful Iraq will evolve—with the defeat of the Sunni insurgency, compromise among the victors, who realize that no faction is strong enough to win absolute victory, and the peace of exhaustion—but if it does, it seems unlikely to happen very quickly. In that case, such an outcome, or even the arrival of the least bad achievable outcome, may well require the willingness to put off bringing the troops home. A number of people argue that American troops make a very bad situation even worse, that it is the presence of American troops that causes the violence they are dispatched to stop. That seems a bit too convenient to be true, since it means that the least immediately painful course of action would also be the most just and prudent course of action, which is a rare state of affairs. I think the debate should be about what course of action is likeliest to avert some of the worst outcomes: endless civil war, a regional war drawing in Turkish, Iranian, and Arab forces, a brutal theocracy beholden to Iran’s current rulers. It is at least possible that the goals of victory and swift withdrawal are mutually exclusive. American politicians still may wind up rating the least painful immediate course, a swift withdrawal, over any other consideration. If they do, they will probably continue the pattern of decision-making that has dogged the Iraq war since the fall of Baghdad.
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