All right, let’s skip all the introductory remarks and get to
the point. Is victory still possible in Iraq? Yes, though the Bush
administration keeps doing its level best to kick that prize away
from our troops.
We can tally up the mistakes later (I’ll mention two of the
worst ones at the end) but the first step to winning in Iraq is to
define victory — and not to define it in such a way, as the Bush
administration has done, that leaves us hostages to the Iraqi
government. That is a strategic error of the first magnitude.
Even after the president’s recent address, announcing that
America’s patience with the Iraqi government is not limitless, and
promising a — by my lights, not very dramatic — surge of troops,
not enough has changed. The Bush administration’s rhetoric of why
we fight has shifted from the politically cynical — and deeply
stupid and insensate — mantra of “stay the course (because you
can’t trust the cut-‘n’-run Democrats),” which the American people
rightly recognized as no course at all, to an equally pitiful
emphasis that American defeat in Iraq would be a disaster.
No one ever won a war by fighting for “not defeat.” You win a
war by smashing up the enemy, by so overwhelming him but that he
has no choice but to surrender or die. Instead we have “stayed the
course” (where is the urgency in that?) and we have whined that
losing would be a bad thing.
Yes, losing would be a bad thing — and the Bush administration
should know, given that it has managed to lose both houses of
Congress, alienate its own supporters, and convince the American
people by a whopping majority that we cannot “win” in Iraq. Well
done, Mr. President!
A PRESIDENT WITH SO LITTLE understanding of his own electorate can
hardly, in fairness, be held to account for failing to understand
the political realities in a country far away and of which he knows
little — though this is scant consolation for those of us who not
only think the war was the right and necessary thing to do but who
share Mark Steyn’s conviction that “if Iraq’s lost, the Dems and
the media will have a whole new quagmire template for the next 40
years.”
But whatever the failures of the administration, it is always a
bad idea to bet against the American military.
Indeed, on the military front, things are not so dire as you
might think.
First, while the American military — to avoid echoes of Vietnam
— disdains kill ratios and body counts, it appears that Iraq is
indeed a meat-grinder — for the insurgents. If the
Islamists have made this their main battlefront, they’re paying a
heavy price to maintain it.
Second, while the Bush administration’s proposed “surge” of
troops should have occurred in 2003 — or at the very least by
2006, and should have been more than double the size of what Bush
has promised — it will, if swiftly and fully enacted, make the
general pacification of Iraq by the end of the year an
achievable goal. But the plan must be enacted now, and with vigor.
Delays and half-measures never won fair victory. As usual, General
George S. Patton had it right: “A good plan, violently executed
now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
But more fundamental than this, if we are to win in Iraq we need
to start with the recognition that we have already
won.
Before the war, we faced a hostile regime commanding the entire
infrastructure of a fascist state. Now we face terrorists with
roadside bombs. That’s a big reduction in enemy capabilities.
Toppling Saddam Hussein was a militarily achievable goal that
our armed forces won splendidly — game, set, and match. We
eliminated an overt enemy of the United States who had nurtured a
Weapons of Mass Destruction program, who maintained a large army
that fired on our planes patrolling the no-fly zones every day, and
whose regime trained and harbored anti-American terrorists. And in
ousting Saddam Hussein, we convinced Moammar Gaddafi to surrender
his weapons of mass destruction program, and chided Pakistan into
shutting down A.Q. Khan, who was the main funnel of WMD technology
to rogue states. That’s no small accomplishment.
For an encore, we even guaranteed the security of three honestly
conducted national elections in Iraq. That, too, was a militarily
achievable goal, which we accomplished in 2005.
The problem is, once Iraq had a government, the Bush
administration made a refrain of “We’ll be in Iraq until the job is
complete, at the request of a sovereign government elected by the
people.” And we’ll stay “to get the job done so long as the
government wants us there.” But since when has it been a wise
policy to subordinate America’s national interests to those of a
foreign government, let alone an Iraqi government that has taken to
vetoing or protesting American military policy?
THE NUB OF THE ISSUE is that transferring political power to the
Iraqi “government elected by the people” means transferring
military power at a rate not far behind; otherwise, our troops are
not only hostages to a government we didn’t elect, but we
will increasingly find ourselves at odds with our putative
ally.
Iraq can be democratic — it was democratic before, under the
British imperium — but it will be an Iraqi democracy; that is, a
democracy with secret police and a short way with dissenters. Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has political goals far different
from our own. He doesn’t care a whit about the rights of Sunnis; he
cares for ensuring and perpetuating the newfound dominance of the
Iraqi Shiites. That’s not bad news for us, but it is bad news for
al-Qaeda terrorists (and for Saddamites too). They know what
congressional Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee don’t:
al-Qaeda is Sunni.
And while there is no inherent military reason why our troops
cannot train the Iraqi army to defeat the insurgents, we need to
bear in mind what a “pacified” Iraq will look like.
We need to accept that Iraq will never be a country in our own
image. Assassination, whether through roadside bombs, decapitation
(by hanging or knife), a random spray of bullets, militia street
battles, or government hit-men, is a traditional form of Middle
Eastern greeting that we are not going to eliminate. All we should
care about is leaving behind a reasonably pro-Western government.
And if the standard of such government in the region is the likes
of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, Iraq will be as pro-Western
as any.
And what about the argument that Shiite Iraq will become a tool
of Shiite Iran? Not much to fear there. Neighboring states don’t
often willingly accept — or welcome — an Anschluss.
Iranian influence in Iraq is in direct proportion to our presence
there. We want peace and harmony between Sunnis and Shiites, but
because Prime Minister al-Maliki would rather the Sunnis be reduced
to a state of near dhimmitude, he has no interest in
repressing Shiite militias backed by Iran. Once we leave, however,
the prime minister will have every interest in protecting his own
power and Iraqi sovereignty against his Iranian neighbor, and
suddenly it will be less important that Iran is Shiite than that
Iran is Persian and Iraq is Arab.
ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY that even though the “surge” is smaller and
later than it has any right to be, it should provide the necessary
force improvements to expedite the transfer of military
responsibility from our shoulders to the shoulders of the Iraqis in
a politically acceptable way. The surge needs to be swift and
dramatic — let us pray that it is. And let us pray that the Bush
administration drops its cowardly cover-your-ass rhetoric about a
“long war.” This shouldn’t be a long war for us. Our little brown
brothers should be turned loose to take the scimitar to their
enemies — without American referees — as soon as politically
possible, which should be early 2008.
The result will be an Iraq at least as pro-Western as some of
our other semi-allies in the region — and that, for any realistic
statesman, is certainly good enough.
And this is where we come to the two worst errors the Bush
administration has made in Iraq — and I say this not as a Monday
morning quarterback, but as someone who held this view before the
war ever started. We should never have pledged to uphold a unified
Iraq. We should instead have created an independent Kurdistan, an
independent Shiite Mesopotamia, and an independent (and largely
Sunni) rump state of Iraq. And while Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks were absolutely right to invade
Iraq with a light force — for speed and surprise — we should have
reinforced our initial victory with a doubling of our troop
strength to stem the inevitable initial chaos. If we had done these
things, if we had simply abided by two of the cardinal lessons of
military history, “divide and conquer” and “reinforce success,” our
job would be done, most of our troops would be home, and President
Bush would not have received his electoral thumping. But you know
the old saw about those who don’t read history….
