As President Bush weighs his options in Iraq in the wake of the release of the Iraq Study Group's report, there are several themes in our national dialogue that need to be explored.
First, there is the endless battle between defeatism and vision. We are all optimists and we are all pessimists, but the things we choose to be optimistic and pessimistic about make all the difference in the world.
Second, there is the question of whether we believe that America deserves to win in Iraq. I believe that a case of national guilt is coloring our choices -- a factor that I haven't seen discussed much, if at all. I think we need to address it now.
Third, we need to address our national seriousness when it comes to the Iraq war. Is winning optional, or essential? The answers to these questions will determine where we go from here.
You will find that this discussion is lengthy by weblog standards, but please get a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and take your time. Then let me know what you think (politely and intelligently, of course).
Defeatism and Vision
Tony Blankley shares some important thoughts in The Lonely President:
The American presidency has been called "A Glorious Burden" by the Smithsonian Museum, and the loneliest job in the world by historians. As we approach Christmas 2006 Anno Domini, President Bush is surely fully seized of the loneliness and burden of his office.
For rarely has a president stood more alone at a moment of high crisis than does our president now as he makes his crucial policy decisions on the Iraq War. His political opponents stand triumphant, yet barren of useful guidance. Many -- if not most -- of his fellow party men and women in Washington are rapidly joining his opponents in a desperate effort to save their political skins in 2008. Commentators who urged the president on in 2002-03, having fallen out of love with their ideas, are quick to quibble with and defame the president.
James Baker, being called out of his business dealings by Congress to advise the president, has delivered a cynical document intended to build a political consensus for "honorable" surrender. Richard Haas (head of the Council on Foreign Relations) spoke approvingly of the Baker report on "Meet the Press," saying: " It's incredibly important ... that the principle lesson [of our intervention in Iraq] not be that the United States is unreliable or we lacked staying power ... to me it is essentially important for the future of this country that Iraq be seen, if you will, as Iraq's failure, not as America's failure."
That such transparent sophism from the leader of the American foreign policy establishment is dignified with the title of realism only further exemplifies the loneliness of the president in his quest for a workable solution to the current danger. . . . .If Washington gossip is right, even many of the president's own advisers in the White House and the key cabinet offices have given up on success. Official Washington, the media and much of the public have fallen under the unconscionable thrall of defeatism. Which is to say that they cannot conceive of a set of policies -- for a nation of 300 million with an annual GDP of over $12 trillion and all the skills and technologies known to man -- to subdue the city of Baghdad and environs. Do you think Gen. Patton or Abe Lincoln or Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin would have thrown their hands up and said, "I give up, there's nothing we can do"?
Or do you suppose they would have said, let's send in as many troops as we can assemble to hold on while we raise more troops to finish the job. If the victory is that important -- and it is -- then failure must be unthinkable, even if it takes another five or 10 years.
And yet, when I exclusively interviewed two members of the Baker commission last week, they explicitly told me that they didn't propose increased troop strength because their military advisers told them it wasn't currently available.
Well, in 1943, we didn't have the troop strength for D-Day in 1944, and in 1863, we didn't have the troop strength (or the strategies) for the victory of 1865. But we had enough to hold on until the troops could be recruited and trained (and winning strategies developed). And so we do today. I have been told by reliable military experts that we can introduce upward of 50,000 combat troops promptly -- enough to hold on until more help can be on the way.
Blakely demonstrates the kind of vision that I've argued is seriously lacking in current discussion of the Iraq war. Sure, we have what passes for realism about the war, but it's largely indistinguishable from pointless pessimism that can't see beyond today's horizon. Can we commit more troops to Iraq? Of course. Can we commit more weapons? Yes. Can we adjust our strategies and tactics? Certainly. Wisely, military planners are now considering just such changes.
Too much of what passes for "realism" consists of perpetual pessimism about America and Iraq's young democracy, combined with naive optimism about murderous tyrannies like Syria and Iran. We are urged, for example, to form an Iraq "support group" that includes Iran, even as Iran openly threatens Israel with extinction. The optimism of the Iraq Study Group is badly misplaced. So its its pessimism.
How did America become such a nation of defeatists when it comes to prospects for success in Iraq? I think there's more at work here than just realism. Sure, circumstances on the ground are challenging, but America has overcome far worse in the past. There's something else at work in our national dialogue. It's the guilt factor.
The Guilt Factor
The guilt factor goes something like this: America was wrong to invade Iraq, some would argue, either because the invasion wasn't led by the toothless U.N. or because it turned out (apparently) that Saddam Hussein did not have a full-fledged WMD program. (I'll set aside for now the evidence that has since come to light showing that Hussein did indeed have some WMDs before the invasion and may have removed weapons of mass destruction to Syria).
If one assumes that America was mistaken -- indeed, morally wrong -- to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, then of course it is hardly a foregone conclusion that America should successfully finish the job and establish a new democracy in Iraq. Indeed, some might see it as a form of "justice" for America to lose the war and for Iraq to slide back into tyranny and terror.
If it seems impossible that anybody is so foolish as to think this way, consider this: If we faced the same circumstances we find in Iraq at home in America, on our own soil -- near-daily homicide bombings and beheadings from insurgents, for example -- would we just throw up our hands and give up? Would we even discuss the terms for surrender? The America I know would never consider surrender.
If we faced these same circumstances in Afghanistan, where we are fighting a "good" war -- would we simply walk away? This question is not hypothetical, for we are facing some of these same circumstances in Afghanistan right now. Shall we simply declare defeat and go home?
Of course we will not surrender if we face these same circumstances in Afghanistan. Even the leftist New York Times refers on its op-ed page today to Afghanistan as "one war we can still win." Acknowledging that there is a very real risk that the war in Afghanistan could be lost as the Taliban regains strength, the New York Times' contributor Anthony H. Cordesman urges a greater commitment to Afghanistan, both militarily and economically. The op-ed concludes with this call to action:
The United States team has made an urgent request for $5.9 billion in extra money this fiscal year, which probably underestimates immediate need and in any event must be followed by an integrated long-term economic aid plan. There is no time for the administration and Congress to quibble or play budget games. And, once again, the NATO countries must make major increases in aid as well.
In Iraq, the failure of the United States and the allies to honestly assess problems in the field, be realistic about needs, create effective long-term aid and force-development plans, and emphasize governance over services may well have brought defeat. The United States and its allies cannot afford to lose two wars. If they do not act now, they will.
America "cannot afford to lose two wars"? I've got news for the New York Times: America cannot afford to lose one war. And here's another news flash: Afghanistan and Iraq are but two fronts in the same war.
It's OK to lose one war, but not the other? Why? There's a subtext here that explains it all: guilt. The New York Times agreed with, or at least didn't violently object to, taking the battle to the Taliban in Afghanistan, while it did object -- at some point along the way -- to the justification for the Iraq war. Hence, it considers it acceptable, or "affordable" anyway, for America to lose the war in Iraq.
When national guilt colors your evaluation of circumstances in a war, of course every problem seems insurmountable and challenges are met by calls for retreat rather than by calls for improved strategies and a commitment of additional resources to ensure victory.
I believe that such national guilt over Iraq is unwarranted, if only because Saddam Hussein's Iraq was torturing and murdering Iraq's own people, running training camps for Islamic terrorists, and funding homicide bombers to the tune of $25,000 per family. But even if you believe the Iraq invasion was not morally justified, it reflects a certain lack of seriousness, in my opinion, to treat victory in the war, once begun, as optional.
The national guilt to which I've referred goes beyond the Iraq war. Some on the left feel guilty about America's very existence -- as if its stunning economic success and freedom were an insult to every impoverished backwater regime on earth run by some half-baked dictator. Of course, America's success is not their loss; it could be their gain if they were wise enough to note the building blocks of our success and emulate our best ideas. And yet, as Robert Samuelson argues today, America's use of its military and economic dominance to promote stability around the world has been, on balance, a net positive to the world:
By objective measures, Pax Americana's legacy is enormous. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear device has been used in anger. In World War II, an estimated 60 million people died. Only three subsequent conflicts have had more than a million deaths (Vietnam, 1.9 million; Korea, 1.3 million; and China's civil war, 1.2 million). Under the U.S. military umbrella, democracy flourished in Western Europe and Japan. It later spread to South Korea, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Prosperity has been unprecedented. Historian Angus Maddison tells us that from 1950 to 1998 the world economy expanded by a factor of six. Global trade increased 20 times. These growth rates were well beyond historic experience. Living standards exploded. Since 1950, average incomes have multiplied about 16 times in South Korea, 11 times in Japan and six times in Spain, reports Maddison. From higher bases, the increases were nearly five times in Germany and three in the United States.
You can always find things to lament about America, if that is your goal. No nation on earth has a perfect legacy. But when you put America side by side with regimes such as Iran, which oppresses its own people and is now busy exporting its brand of misery around the world, the contrast is stark. The thought of what we would find in a world dominated by nations such as Iran is sobering.
Thus, we need to set aside any national guilt about either the invasion of Iraq or America's position of dominance in world affairs. All things considered, we have made reasonable choices. Those who argue otherwise often have numerous skeletons in their own closets, or, to speak more literally, numerous political dissidents in their own jails.
Lack of Seriousness
We also have a severe problem of lack of national seriousness in relation the Iraq war. As Jack Kelly writes today:
I panned the puerile recommendations of the Iraq Study Group in an earlier column, and will not re-plow that ground here. But the mere existence of the ISG tells us some unpleasant things about ourselves that we ought to know, but evidently don't.
First, there is the speed with which Congress palmed off its responsibility to conduct oversight of Executive Branch policies to a private panel of has beens. It's time our lawmakers paid more attention to their responsibilities, and less to their privileges.
Second, there is our preference for celebrity over authority. Though the panel contained two former secretaries of state (James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger) and a former secretary of defense (William Perry), it was comprised chiefly of people who know next to nothing about either the Middle East or the military.
We listen to famous people because they are famous, not because they have any insight into the topic at hand. (The news media paid little attention to the opinions of retired generals Jack Keane, Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey, who met with the President Monday, though they have forgotten more about Iraq than the members of the ISG ever learned.)
Third, the glee with which many in the Washington establishment -- particularly in journalism -- greeted the (glaringly obvious) finding that things are not going well in Iraq suggests an elite so insulated and out of touch that it sees no ill consequences flowing to themselves from a defeat being inflicted upon their country. The appropriate response of serious people would have been concern, perhaps anger. But an elite that sees a big setback in the war against Islamofascism chiefly in terms of its impact on domestic politics is not comprised of serious people.
America needs to shake off its lethargy and its guilt and refocus its energy on what it does well -- defending democracy and freedom against terrorists and tyrants. We need to treat winning in Iraq as critical not just to Iraq's survival, but also our own survival -- as history may ultimately prove it to have been.
Already enemies of freedom around the world are emboldened by what they perceive as America's lack of will in Iraq. Already there is talk of catastrophe in the region if America pulls out of Iraq and, more tellingly, the end of "Pax America," the age of America's dominance on the world stage. While I'm all for a light touch in international affairs, I'm certain that Iran and Syria and Russia, to name a few, will exercise anything but. If you think America's dominance in world affairs is bad, wait and see what genuine despots will bring.
"The United States and its allies cannot afford to lose two wars." Or one.
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