Boots on the ground
By lex, on October 25th, 2006
Here’s another view on the war in Iraq, written by a guy who has a bit more credibility than one of those Green Zone reporters Michael Fumento goes on about – a US Army intel sergeant with dusty boots, operating outside the wire in the thick of the fray responds to James Taranto’s column yesterday **, a column in which Taranto unrepentantly repeats his support for the war in Iraq – it might just be the most authentic thing I’ve read this year:
I wrote heavily in favor of this war before I enlisted myself, and I still maintain that going into Iraq was not only the necessary thing to do, but the right thing to do as well.
There have been distinct failures of policy in Iraq. The vast majority of them fall under the category “failure to adapt.” Basically U.S. policies have been several steps behind the changing conditions ever since we came into the country. I believe this is (in part) due to our plainly obvious desire to extricate ourselves from Iraq. I know President Bush is preaching “stay the course,” but we came over here with a goal of handing over our battlespace to the Iraqis by the end of our tour here.
This is all ineluctably tied up not with military strategy but with the US election cycle of course – how long could politics abide at the water’s edge? Until the first mid-term elections, as it turns out. One party ran on the war and won, and the other party took note, carving out a niche in the opposite camp and then working steadily to enlarge it. There’s really no use apportioning blame between them, this is what partisans do. This is their nature.
How many lives and how much treasure would be spent before the people lost focus and gained resentment? Three thousand more or less of ours, over $300 billion, and both of those figures would make honest people blanch even if they had come with signs of perceptible and continuing progress.
And finally, critically, given the fact that national will is our strategic center of gravity: How much patience would “we” have before deciding that it was all “their” fault? Not quite five years, it now seems – one political party waits with breathless anticipation to reclaim the crown of legislative majority, trembling slightly at the need to not say anything of an affirmative nature that might be turned against them, while the other shambles casually towards the exit sign, whistling tunelessly, hands in their pockets and hoping not to be the last ones out the door as the abandoned house of national policy burns down to the ground behind them.
What next? Well, according to our sergeant:
If we continue on as is in Iraq, we will leave here (sooner or later) with a fractured state, a Rwanda-waiting-to-happen. “Stay the course” and refusing to admit that we’re screwing things up is already killing a lot of people needlessly. Following through with such inane nonstrategy is going to be the death knell for hundreds of thousands of Sunnis.
We need to backtrack. We need to publicly admit we’re backtracking. This is the opening battle of the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose it because of political inconveniences. Reassert direct administration, put 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground, disband most of the current Iraqi police and retrain and reindoctrinate the Iraqi army until it becomes a military that’s fighting for a nation, not simply some sect or faction. Reassure the Iraqi people that we’re going to provide them security and then follow through. Disarm the nation: Sunnis, Shias, militia groups, everyone. Issue national ID cards to everyone and control the movement of the population…
The short of it is, the situation is salvageable, but not with “stay the course” and certainly not with cut and run. However, the commitment required to save it is something I doubt the American public is willing to swallow. I just don’t see the current administration with the political capital remaining in order to properly motivate and convince the American public (or the West in general) of the necessity of these actions.
At the same time, failure in Iraq would be worse than a dozen Somalias, and would render us as impotent and emasculated as we were in the days after Vietnam. There is a global cultural-ideological struggle being waged, and abdication from Iraq is tantamount to concession.
Every thinking person – or I should say, “every person who can think beyond the next election cycle” – knows that the sergeant is right with respect to consequences. Leaving the field to the jihadis means that they will bring the field to us: It’s not a matter of if, but when, how and where. And as Robert Kagan writes, we broke Iraq and it’s up to us to put it back together again – it is tempting but unfair, having destroyed the former government, to complain about the quality of the current one. So seeing this thing through to victory is both a strategic and moral imperative. Or rather it is if we wish to maintain a position of leadership in the world – we cannot, like the elves of Lothlorien, merely diminish and “go into the west.” We are already there.
But doing what we must do is maddening: The US of the 1940′s – with a population half our current size – spent 400,000 of it’s citizens lives in in the fight against last century’s brand of fascism. And yet I see no practical way that we can muster the half-million living men that our strategic sergeant deems necessary to finally pacify Iraq. It will not be possible without rashly throwing all the chips on the table, leaving nothing behind for other contingencies, and committing an army of volunteers to a brutal theater “for the duration.” The only other alternative would be a draft, and no one wants an army of draftees even if the political will existed to levy them, or the time and infrastructure was available to train them. Neither of which is true, I believe.
And as frustratingly venal and impotent as our political allies and their agents in Iraq seem to be – some of whom keep monstrous company, by the way – merely “replacing” them is also out of the question as it would give the lie to those 14 million empurpled fingers.
We have not yet lost a stand-up fight, it is difficult to even imagine how we might. But neither can we seem to finally win this war. Bored, and tired and shocked at the horror that has been painted for us, we wish it all away. It is a muddle and a mess, and we have no patience for either – we want it over, want them gone, want ours home.
We can try that for a while, but I suspect that the debt we incur in doing so will accrue with terrible interest. But how much longer can we ask our soldiers to fight this way, invincibly unvictorious?
** 07-16-2006 Link Gone; replacements found – Ed.