The Big Picture

What would happen if journalists thought for themselves? Once they get on a line of thought, you can't get them off of it. One line of thought, or premise, has been that we need to counter the insurgents' attacks with attacks of our own. So we level Fallujah and defeat Sadr's forces in Najaf. We mount an offensive against the insurgents near the Syrian border, and go after them in Samarra, Baghdad, and any number of other cities. We find their weapons caches and their hideouts, we capture their leaders, and we round up suspects to bring them in for what we used to call questioning, a euphemism now for torture. None of it worked. The more we tried to limit the insurgents’ ability to fight, the worse the insurgency became.
Another broad effort is the transfer of sovereignty. Analysts reason that if the Iraqis see that they're running their country, they won't have any reason to resist our occupation. We want to bring democracy to the country, after all, and democracy means self-rule. So we have a formal transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June 2004. We have elections at the end of January 2005. The Iraqis will form a government and write a constitution. Most of all, we train Iraqi infantry and police forces to achieve the military and security objectives we haven't been able to achieve. Instead of more order, we see the beginnings of a civil war as insurgents attack poorly trained and poorly protected Iraqi forces. We have tried to reconstitute Iraq's armed forces for almost two years now, and it has not worked.
Civil reconstruction is a third broad area of effort. No one even pretends that progress in this area is a goal anymore. Courts, schools, health facilities, pipelines, water purification plants, sewage treatment plants, oil refineries, electrical power plants, roads, civil service functions, garbage pickup, street cleaning, building construction, electrical power distribution, and every service to make civil society run well: all these projects wait until someone restores order. Ask any Iraqi or American official when that will be. Their truthful answer is, “We're working on it.” Press for another answer, and they'll say, “It could take years.”
Here's something the journalists who write about Iraq miss. No matter what our opponents do, they succeed while they tie American troops down in Iraq. Yes, Iraqi insurgents aim to push the Americans out as soon as they can. Their open goal is to get rid of the occupiers. Moreover, Iraqi resistance has help from other countries. Foreign fighters in Iraq recognize that having American troops in Iraq is a bonanza for them. They can kill Americans there much more readily than they can kill them anywhere else. They know that while Americans fight in Iraq, they can't fight elsewhere. Al Qaeda knows that while we are in Iraq, they have an advantage no matter how the battle goes from day to day.
That’s the dilemma that makes our goals questionable, our strategy self-defeating. Whether we stay or go, the outcomes look bleak. The car bombs could stop tomorrow. All the other attacks: sniping, roadside bombs, hit and run ambushes, mortar attacks, every sort of skirmish and sabotage, all the assassinations and kidnappings, all these could stop suddenly, and we would still be have no clear plan to defeat the enemies who attacked us in 2001. Even a great power cannot do everything. The considerable resources tied up in Iraq are unavailable for fighting anywhere else. We've had to pull forces from other parts of the world just to maintain a force of 135,000 in Iraq. When we do leave Iraq at last, will anyone here at home want to send our young men and women out again to fight Al Qaeda somewhere else? Will we have the passion to fight the war we ought to fight? No, we'll be happy that the war in Iraq is over; we won’t remember the war we should have been fighting – the war we would have fought had we not gone into Iraq.
That's getting ahead of things, though, because the prospects for getting out of Iraq soon are nil. Supporters of the war there say we don't bear any opportunity cost when we commit our resources there. They say we are fighting the right war, for the right reasons, for the right goals. They maintain that when we leave Iraq, we won't need to fight elsewhere. Iraqi democracy will be established, and as it spreads throughout the region, to Saudi Arabia and Syria and even to Iran, Al Qaeda will have no place to hide. In the open air of free societies, Al Qaeda will wither and melt like the wicked witch of the West. No one will want to fight for Al Qaeda when the benefits of Western democracy and free enterprise are all around. That's the Wolfowitz cure: an Oz-like strategy where democracy cures all ills, the White House receives a broomstick and we all get a medal. By the time Wolfowitz and his fellow charlatans are done, Iraq will need a panacea, but it won’t come from us.
Who, in or out of our government, has made a convincing case that creating a democracy in Iraq will bring about the defeat of Al Qaeda? Why couldn't Al Qaeda operate just as effectively in an open, democratic society as it does in a more traditional one? The planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks show that Al Qaeda can operate equally effectively in Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States. We say that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that we are pressing them hard in Iraq, but where's the evidence that we have reduced its ability to fight? Who believes that a quiet Iraq will mean defeat of the organization that attacked the World Trade Center? The scary thing now, two years into the Iraqi war, is that people don't even care any more how we're doing in the fight against Al Qaeda. They just want to be done with fighting, period.
So how can we counter the prevailing presumption that a democratic, self-sufficient Iraq means victory for us? How can we keep the big picture about our goals in front of us? The big picture differs so much from the main line of thought we hear everywhere. To see the importance of the larger view, think of the prevailing line of thought that existed when Reagan entered the White House. Then most people thought that we had to reach an accommodation with the Soviets. The United States and the Soviet Union had to live on the same globe, and the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust was to work things out with them. We didn't say nasty things about them, and we tried to find ways to cooperate. Least of all, we didn't want to provoke them. With temperance and discretion, we had managed to survive the Cold War for almost two generations. Keep your head low, avoid eye contact, walk softly and don’t say anything provocative.
Reagan arrives, labels the Soviet Union an evil empire, predicts its so-called workers’ state is headed for history’s dustbin, and calls on Americans to help dump it there. He even quipped, “How's this for a strategy: we win and they lose.” You can't get much more blunt than that. Then he and his team achieved that objective, using military force and diplomacy adroitly to force the Soviet Union into conceding Eastern Europe shortly after Reagan left office. No one thought he could do it until it happened. When it did happen, people said that he must have been right after all.
The actions required now differ, but we’re in a similar conceptual box with Iraq. Everyone thinks the only way we can succeed there is to bring democracy to the people while we train a new armed force capable of containing the insurgents. How often have you heard this one: "Whatever you think of the war, we're committed now, and we have to see the job through." How often have you heard: "We can't leave now. There'd be chaos and a civil war." Well let me tell you that the civil war has already started. Everyone all over the world has concluded correctly that we can't do anything to stop it. Everyone knows the limits of our strength, the extent of our weakness.
The cubic container we’ve fashioned won't allow anyone to say we have to withdraw to fight another enemy. Even the war’s vocal opponents concede we have to stay there long enough to hand security responsibilities over to the Iraqis. That, they add, will take at least until the end of 2006. At least. When we come to the end of 2006, come back to read this essay, and ask yourself if we've achieved any of the goals the conventional strategy sets out for us. Ask if we've reduced the level of violence, turned over responsibility to the Iraqis, or made advances in the area of civil reconstruction. Even if we have made progress in any of these areas, we'll have failed if we're still tied down in Iraq, still fighting people who weren't even our enemies until we made them so.
The conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say we win and they lose, we lose and they win, or anything that could possibly be perceived as cut and run. People think that if we pull out, we are humiliated, and humiliation implies we’ve lost. We'll have failed, they say, and that outcome can’t be possible. Everyone will see that we lost, that we can't stick it out. But it's not true. The only way to win this war is to leave this battlefield and correct our mistake. The sure way to lose the war is to stick it out in Iraq. The sure way to grant our enemies just what they want is to stay in Iraq and bleed. We've gone down the wrong path here. We have to turn back if we want to win, because at the end of this path lies futility, defeat, humiliation, and a total loss of confidence in ourselves. These things will happen not because we couldn't win, but because we couldn't lose. We couldn’t lose the war. We couldn't lose our self-certainty and conviction that we've done the right thing, that we've set out on the right course. Sadly, if we try to win the war in Iraq by sticking it out, we'll lose the war against Al Qaeda that we should have fought from the start.
One of the most insightful passages from the New Testament is this teaching: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away.” The first part of the passage applies to the United States during its period of world leadership. For all its faults and mistakes, U. S. leadership offered the world wealth beyond measure, individual dignity, freedom from coercion based on natural rights, clear vision, optimism, practicality, good judgment and generous impulses, wisdom, faith, more hope for peace and prosperity than the world had known. The country had everything a human society could want, in abundance. The signs after 9/11, evidenced by the Iraq war, indicate the United States and its leaders do not have any of these precious qualities. It has not clear vision but blindness, not optimism but fire and blood, not practicality but utopian fantasies, not good judgment but thick-headed self-righteousness, not generous impulses but selfish anxiety, not wisdom but fatuous gall, not faith but gullible aggressiveness, not hope but nervous fear. As a result, everything it has will be taken away.
During the 2004 presidential debates, a friend pointed to the box that Bush created when he went to war in Iraq. President Bush challenged John Kerry, “So are you saying that our troops in Iraq have died in vain?” I wish Kerry had replied, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask that question, you slimy little criminal.” You can’t say that in a presidential debate, though. At a time when no one can say anything against our troops, Kerry was stymied. “He had him,” my friend observed. I replied that Howard Dean would have responded differently. He would have come back at Bush directly:
“Yes, Mr. President, you're right. Those troops died in vain. They died without purpose in a war you initiated.
“Our courageous young Americans died from a huge strategic blunder – a futile, wrong-headed war. You’re responsible for these useless deaths – our soldiers’ unfortunate sacrifice is on your head. These young men and women, so willing to give everything for their country, trusted you. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives and children all trusted you. The whole country looked to you after the September 11 attacks to lead us back from that dreadful loss. How did you respond? You sent our armed forces into a long, destructive war, justified it with obvious, self-serving dishonesty, and refused to admit your mistake after everyone else could see the truth about what you had done.
“You want charge me with defeatism and disloyalty? Let me ask you this. Who is not supporting our troops: the commander in chief who leads his armed forces on a foolish, misconceived mission, or the mother who tries to organize some resistance to this fanciful crusade? The vice president who suggests that critics in or out of uniform are traitors, or the sergeant who leads his platoon through danger and difficulties, no matter what he thinks of the war?
“Our troops promised to protect our Constitution. They promised to serve their country faithfully. They trusted you to lead them well. You failed to honor that trust – you betrayed it. You asked our soldiers to do something that you wouldn't do yourself when it was your turn to serve, and you asked them to do it for dishonest reasons. So I need to ask you, Mr. President: When are you going to support our troops? When are you going to send them to fight our real enemies, rather than false enemies that you cooked up because you had a grudge against Saddam Hussein? You've misled the citizens of this great country much too long now. If you can't admit your mistake, at least stop the vile suggestion that your opponents are unpatriotic traitors who don’t support our men and women in the field.”
The Democratic party thought Howard Dean couldn't win against George Bush. They thought John Kerry was a more effective fighter, more electable. Hindsight proved them wrong on that judgment. Kerry hardly talked about the war in his campaign until the fall, and even then he raised his criticisms in only a few speeches. He spent too much time in the end trying to answer Bush's question: Why did you vote for the war? After Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it seemed his campaign had little to say about military matters. Criticism of the war might appear unpatriotic. On the contrary, Kerry's criticism of the war in Iraq showed the best patriotic impulse, just as his stand against the war in Vietnam exemplified courageous patriotism. Unlike his anti-war activities in the 1970s, though, Kerry the presidential candidate acted too hesitantly. As a result, his opposition to the Iraq war appeared unfounded and equivocal. Dean would not have been such a reluctant critic.
Seventy-five years from now, analysts will recognize that some citizens saw how we erred after 9/11, while it happened. We didn’t have to wait for the war to be over in order to see our mistake. We could predict the destructive, self-defeating effects of this war, before we launched it. We could see what a bad course of action it was, as it unfolded. But seeing the truth about the war hasn't made us – as a nation – willing to do the necessary and right thing: redeploy our forces to fight the people who attacked us. When you focus your attention in the wrong place – indeed, when you focus your attention in any place, you miss the big picture. When you miss the big picture, you make big mistakes.