November 13, 2006

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Changing Course in Iraq? The Dangerous Inertia of Past Commitments

Americans want to see a new approach to Iraq. They said that clearly on Election Day when they rejected the Bush Administration’s bumper-sticker version of the choices we face: “stay the course” or “cut and run.”

But none of the Iraq policy choices actually available at this point are attractive. The truth is that once the President ignorantly, willfully, and mistakenly committed to redesigning the non-nation of Iraq using military force and an American occupation, we became stuck to the tar-baby, destined to a serious loss no matter what we do.

George W. Bush will probably be long gone when someone else will have to make the humiliating and tragic decision to pull American troops out of Iraq.

It took Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger six years, thousands of American soldiers’ lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives to extract America from Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam quagmire. As inevitable as the outcome was, it was still traumatic and humiliating to Americans, tearing the political and social fabric of the country and the sprit and souls of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families. Over the weekend John McCain emphatically insisted that under no circumstances should we allow America to be forced out of Iraq in a similar manner.

There is the rub, the reason why we probably are not about to see any winding down of the American occupation of Iraq and may actually see an increase in the number of troops at risk there. The same arguments that led Lyndon Johnson to commit ever more troops to “pacify” Vietnam are now being used to justify more troops to provide “security” in Iraq. Just as we had to send more troops to Vietnam so that we could train Vietnamese troops to fight the battles instead of us, so too are influential critics of the Bush policy, such as Senator McCain, urging that more troops be sent to Iraq so we can give the Iraqi army and police the breathing room they need to take control of the country themselves.

But Iraq’s Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia as well as various tribal groups within each of these three major ethnic and religious groups have been battling with each other for power since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. The British tried for a half-century to create a stable national government, only to be frustrated by civil unrest and coup after coup. What is going on now in Iraq is not new. It has characterized the entire modern history of Iraq. Will a few more American troops do what the British Empire for half a century could not?

Sometimes the most rational thing to do is not to seek victory. For aggressive males, from Bush to McCain to many quiet Democratic hawks, that is unthinkable. Not to win is to lose. But Dwight Eisenhower, when campaigning for president in 1952, amidst the growing carnage of the Korean War, spoke up and simply said that if elected he would end that war, not win it. Even before he took office he flew to Korea and began negotiating a truce. Eisenhower, a Republican and the general who had led the Allied troops to victory over Hitler, had the courage to realize that some wars are simply wasteful and therefore stupid. Eisenhower’s negotiations were successful and a truce ended the Korean War, leaving a tyrannical communist regime in place in North Korea, a regime that remains in place to this day a half-century later. On the other side of that truce line remained a massive deployment of American troops, but troops who were not fighting and dying.

But the Korean example may be the exception. Following the Spanish-American war we took control of the Philippines only to face armed resistance that lasted 17 years at the cost of 4,300 American soldiers. Despite the opposition of leading Americans, including William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie, the war dragged on and on, including an extended fight against a Muslim insurgency that resisted American occupation and control. That was over 100 years ago.

Our Marines also occupied Nicaragua for 20 years early in the 20^th century as we sought to assure a government friendly to American interests. After American troops left, the Somoza family’s dictatorship served as a stand-in for US interests for the following 40 years. Then, in the 1980s, the US indirectly went back to war in Nicaragua training and funding the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista government that had forced the Somoza family out of power. Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who the US-led right-wing forced from power in 1990, was elected president of Nicaragua just last week. Clearly our military adventures can last for a very long period of time with very mixed results.

But in the heat of the moment, facing the possibility of the failure of a misguided military adventure, very powerful constituencies are forming that strongly oppose rational thinking, cutting our losses, and abandoning the fantasy of winning by militarily crushing our opponents. We are about to face that now as independent, but hawkish, Republicans and Democrats, as well as the military, argue that we as a nation cannot afford to be seen as weak and defeated. That, they are already telling us, would undermined the credibility of our military force, embolden Iran, and allow rogue regimes to return to Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it was we who destabilized Iraq. It was we who have strengthened Iran. It was we who have drawn the Islamic jihadists to Iraq. It was our ignorance, arrogance, and blundering use of military force that created this mess. More of the same will not extricate us.

It will take ingenuity and courage to avoid a long drawn out, bloody, and costly occupation. That will be the outcome if we do not face very hard choices now and combine diplomacy with troop redeployment to extract ourselves from the mess we, ourselves, have created. Conventional wisdom and lingering imperial ambitions are what got us into this trap and if not now consciously rejected will keep us sliding downward into an increasingly bloody quagmire in Iraq.