July 12, 2007
How Goes the War? III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST I look forward to John Steele Gordon's response to my post on party realignment. In the meantime, I will offer a few thoughts in response to his post on the war in Iraq. First, I have to take slight issue with his use of Kimberly Kagan’s Wall Street Journal editorial as evidence that the President’s “surge” policy is working. Ms. Kagan is the wife of Fred Kagan, one of the principal authors of that policy. If concerns about media bias are going to enter into a discussion of the Iraq war, one might begin by asking why The Wall Street Journal doesn’t identify her as such. This isn’t, incidentally, the first time that a conservative media outlet has obscured the family ties of certain surge proponents, as Andrew Sullivan notes here. As far as the substance of Kagan’s piece is concerned, the author claims that U.S. forces are fighting insurgents more aggressively, and with greater success, than before the surge. She also says that this is “creating an opportunity for Iraq’s leaders to negotiate a political settlement. These negotiations are underway. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to form a political coalition with Amar al-Hakim and Kurdish political leaders, but excluding Moqtada al-Sadr, and has invited Sunnis to participate. He has confronted Moqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has actively prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January.” If Kagan is correct, and the surge is poised to crush the Iraqi insurgency and make way for a political settlement, I will be tremendously relieved. Though, by my assessment, the Iraq war has been, and continues to be, a dismal failure, I would like nothing more than absolute victory. The moral issues Thomas Friedman raised in his article yesterday are also very troubling, and the prospect of a genocide following an American withdrawal is awful to contemplate. One of the reasons I supported Sen. Joe Lieberman’s reelection was that I felt his opponents didn’t fully appreciate just what withdrawal from Iraq might mean. The approach to Iraq, though, that collects scraps of good news and begs, “Give it another six months,” has its limits. As does Colin Powell’s folksy axiom: “You break it, you bought it.” At some point, you have to look at the criteria you’ve set for success and judge the mission by those criteria, outside evidence notwithstanding. By the expectations the Bush administration initially put forth for the Iraq war—an easy invasion, followed by an easy, swift, cheap reconstruction financed by oil revenues—the war has been an undeniable failure. Even looking past that, though, and accepting the surge as a reality, the war continues to fail. There is scant mention in Kimberly Kagan’s sunny editorial of the benchmarks by which President Bush actually agreed to judge the surge (see here), and the White House is barely bothering to deny reports that the July 15 assessment of these benchmarks promises little good news. It’s great that fighting has subsided in Ramadi, and the tidbits of good news that Kagan cites sound encouraging. But while we in the United States are scavenging for good news, a working political system still eludes Iraq’s leaders, and most of the country’s major political questions, related to oil, elections, representation, and regional autonomy, remain unresolved. We can quibble over whether “failure” is the right word to use for this situation. There’s little evidence, however, that “success” is a term that might apply. Blaming the media for the public’s plummeting support for the war is a very weak method of misdirection, especially since it was the media’s enchantment with stunts like the President’s USS Lincoln landing that allowed the war to go forward unchallenged for so long. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Gordon is still clinging to the canard that the American media lost Vietnam. Whether our adventure in Vietnam was a complete failure by 1973, I suppose people can debate. There’s nothing to indicate that victory was anywhere in sight. And with that year seeing even a reelected, thoroughly hawkish President Nixon pushing for honorable defeat by way of the Paris Peace Accords, it’s hard to believe that the Sulzbergers were to blame for American withdrawal. That kind of thinking is usually confined to this hysterical set.
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