How we got here
Posted by Paul on 25th February 2007
So let’s face it- we’re in a real mess in Iraq. We can’t seem to leave, or else the country will probably explode into a massive spasm of violence; we can’t stay, because our presence inspires smaller spasms of violence; us going there and being there now has made terrorism worse, not better; and nobody seems to see any truly good way out- all the choices at this point are bad, bad, and worse.
How did we get here?
Easy. George W Bush was elected President, and he surrounded himself with people who “think” like him.
Here’s a really telling story from Ron Suskind, a long-time reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
(You should go read the entire article- it’s long, but it’s very, very telling. Published in October of 2004, it’s a shame more people didn’t read it before the election that year.)
People often look at the rhetoric of the left/liberal/progressive side of the fence, the rhetoric of the people that seem like they’re “way out there”, and call them loony. But those folks, the ones on the left side of the spectrum, the ones who were screaming (prior to 9/11) that Bush’s pals in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) were agitating for a war with Iraq, turned out to be exactly right. 9/11 provided Bush and the PNAC types with exactly the excuse they needed.
The fact of the matter is that more than two years later, nothing seems as spot-on as this passage from Suskind’s article:
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster’s sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he’s a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.
The point here is that this, essentially, is what the Bush folks are saying about the war in Iraq. They’re saying we can win, so long as we don’t lose confidence; that if we just stick it out (and kill enough Muslim terrorists, Iraqi freedom fighters, and so forth) we are bound to win in the long run.
Dick Cheney, quite probably the worst Vice President of all time, had this to say recently:
“Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That’s their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home,” Cheney added. “And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of Al Qaeda. I said it and I meant it.”
What Cheney and Bush and company don’t get is that the world doesn’t work that way. In Iraq, we are essentially in the spot that the United Kingdom was in 1778 or so. As long as they don’t lose, they’re going to win. Eventually. Our present tactics are simply not going to win the war; that much should be clear to everyone and anyone looking at the situation.
What’s more, Cheney talks as though our problems in Iraq are all from Al Qaeda- yet the vast majority of the fighting between forces in Iraq isn’t really Al Qaeda; a lot of the attacks upon our forces aren’t from Al Qaeda; and what we call “Al Qaeda” in Iraq is only loosely connected with the Al Qaeda folks who actually attacked us on 9/11. (Remember those guys- Osama and such? Still running around free? Yeah, those guys.)
So basically, we got here by putting into power a bunch of people who believe that through their own willpower and determination they could remake the world however they want. Thank God they’re going to be out of office before China and India become the next superpowers in the world.
It’s ironic to me that just a few weeks ago President Bush compared the present Iraq situation with the American Revolutionary War. In his speech at Mount Vernon, for President’s Day, Bush even talked about how the American freedom fighters were up against a seemingly unbeatable enemy, the British:
“America’s march to freedom was long and it was hard and the outcome was really never certain,” he said, contrasting the ragged army fighting in their homes against the invading forces of one of the most powerful nations on earth.
How he can miss the obvious parallel to today’s situation- the ragged army is the various bunches of Iraqi insurgents, and the big bad guys (from their point of view) is the USA.
Bush went on to say…
But the rebels’ faith in Washington’s visionary leadership created a free nation, Bush said. “In the end, George Washington understood that the Revolutionary War was a test of wills, and his will was unbreakable.”
Now, folks like Cheney are going to blame the Iraq loss on those who opposed it. They’re going to say that people like that- people like ME- are the ones who failed.
How this can be “reality” is beyond me. The difference between Bush, Cheney, and me is that unlike them, I understand that things don’t simply happen because I wish them to happen.
Where am I going with this? Here: What we do now, and next, should depend entirely on an assessment of the situation as it exists now. Not how we’d like it to be, not how W and Dick assure us it will be if we just believe hard enough; we must look at how things are right now.
And we can’t ignore the advice of people who are in the “reality-based” community.
Reality says we can’t win in Iraq. Hell, we don’t even really know what “winning” is; if it’s to topple Saddam, establish a sovereign and democratically elected government, and see that government come up with a reasonably fair, workable constitution, we’ve already done that.
The fact that the above stuff exists in a nation in the midst of a civil war is only an inconvenient fact, after all.
No, by almost any definition we can’t win. We aren’t doing much good for the civil war, and unless we stay for decades then whenever we leave the powder keg is going to go off anyway.
We will continue to face insurgent attacks, only they’re going to get better and better with tactics- between January 20th and February 18th, insurgents shot down 7 US helicopters, more than they shot down in all of 2006- and without the needed number of troops (somewhere upwards of at least a half-million) we can’t possibly run an anti-insurgency campaign that will work. They’ll just move around the country; we’re “surging” into Baghdad and guess what? They’re melting away into the surrounding countryside, biding their time.
There is, in short, no way to “win”. Not in any reasonable world. So the question instead becomes “how do we get out of there and keep ourselves as safe as possible, while creating (as much as we can) the conditions for the Iraqi citizenry to be safe and the civil war to not be too bad or turn into genocide?”
I don’t know, but I know a couple of things. First, we can no longer allow the “if we just wish for it hard enough it’ll happen” crowd to run the show on their own. They’re the morons that got us into this mess in the first place; they’ve screwed up so many things that their judgement is obviously worthless.
Second, we’ve got to recognize that we MUST get input and buy-in from nations in the region. Unfortunately for the Bush crowd, that means Iran and Syria. It’s hard, because he hates them, but the fact is that they’re next-door neighbors and have as much at stake in Iraq not becoming a genocidal mess as anyone else does- more, in fact.
(An optimist would see this situation and choose to view it as an opportunity to strike a connection with the Iranians; working together on the Iraq situation might make it easier for us to work out some kind of accomodation on the nuclear technology issues that we have with Iran. Put yourself in the Iranians’s shoes; would you rather be approached in a friendly manner, or threatened with carrier battle groups and attacks?)
Third, no matter what else, we’ve got to start getting out. Our guys there aren’t helping, as our British allies have already recognized (they’re beginning their pullout already). There’s no sense in throwing away American lives and money when we can’t attain our goals, and it’s madness to do that when we aren’t even really sure what our goals are.
Fourth, we need to change the US policy back to one of “we only attack when we’re attacked, or under a very clear imminent attack.” Bush changed the US policy to basically say we could attack someone if we suspected they might be trouble for us in the future- and threw out decades of US policy that had, frankly, worked quite well in keeping us out of war.
Fifth, we need to return attention to Afghanistan. We must, absolutely must, bring Osama to justice. This might not seem like part of the Iraqi issue, but since 9/11 was at the genesis of the entire mess, odds are that resolving that is going to have to be part of the solution.
When it comes to Afghanistan, we are going to have to deal with Pakistan. And that’s at least as complicated as the whole Iraq/Iran issue, because Musharraef has been playing Bush like a piano. He’s not doing anything to secure the border with Afghanistan, Osama and his pals are almost certainly hiding in and out of Pakistan, and we can’t do anything effectively without either Pakistani help or simply ignoring them completely and risking a war with them.
As long as we’re in a situation in Iraq with no moral standing (our previously stated reasons of WMD or 9/11 are so obviously garbage now that we don’t really have a reason to be there) we can’t draw upon the world’s support in dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Which leads me to the most important thing, number six. We MUST apologize to the world for screwing up and rebuild coalitions with the globe. There’s nations which stand to offer us huge amounts of help; India alone, for example, could play a HUGE part in helping us deal with Pakistan (a little pressure from the Indians, with their billion people and nukes, might get Pakistani leaders seeing things much differently than they do now) and if Europe were to buy in to a real solution in Afghanistan and with international terrorism, we could significantly improve our situation within just a few years.
None of this is going to be easy, but it’s all obvious- obvious, that is, as long as we jointly recognize that we can never again fall prey to magical thinking. We can’t ever believe that simply because the man in the White House wills it, it’ll be done; the real world just doesn’t work that way.
What’s so tragic about this is that there’s plenty of Republicans who know, believe, and understand it. Likewise, there’s a good portion of Democrats who know it. What’s a shame is that on both sides, there’s a shocking number of people who don’t get it.
Those people need to be clobbered and ridiculed. Dick Cheney should be getting mocked 24/7 right now for his comments; he is, essentially, just like the terrorists who he professes to be opposed to. They, too, believe that simply by being stubborn and not giving in, they can recreate the world the way they want.
When it comes to winning or losing in Iraq, they’re right, but they’re wrong when it comes to changing America. They could never defeat us here. What matters is the in-between; how do we get the rest of the world buying into OUR value system instead of theirs? Right now, we’re doing everything wrong and losing that battle, and that needs to stop immediately.
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