Burnt Orange Report

Choose Victory (A Predictably Long Dobbs Post)

By Andrew Dobbs

So George W. Bush has reasserted his by now well-tread position on the War in Iraq: “stay the course”. His “Plan for Victory” as the banners noted was to “not run.” He tells us that the process will take time and patience and that soon things will be so much better and we will finally be able to begin drawing down troops. Yet with a government riddled with corruption and beset by insurgency, a military defined largely by its incompetence in the face of murderous thugs and a recent history of chaos, this all seems a bit insanely optimistic.

I can hear the cries now. Dobbs flip flops again? Hardly. Because the opposing sentiments seem far more shortsighted than George W. Bush’s at this point. Calls for withdrawal to just “over the horizon” would lead us to abandon the Iraqi people, break our commitment to them and make it clear to the families of fallen soldiers that their sons and daughters really did die in vain.

I suppose these statements will raise the righteous indignation of withdrawal supporters, but what part of this isn’t accurate? Iraq is unable to defend itself against the homegrown intrigues of Baathists and Bin Ladenists, not to mention the international ploys developing in Syria and Iran. Indeed, other than complete chaos the most likely scenario is that the government we have worked so hard to establish will relish the absence of US oversight to amp up their already considerable corruption and fight amongst themselves over who gets to be the next dictator or mildly legitimate plutocrat. Seems like a desperate place for the people of Iraq to be, and little as they like us now they are likely to be livid when the problems that our haphazard occupation has created would explode into transcontinental crises that would plague us for decades.

But more significant than all of this, we would have to live with the knowledge that 2,000 soldiers have died in vain. Many of you will argue that their lives were already lost in vain in that this war was “unwinnable.” That, my friends, is idiotic. Does anyone really think that with the most powerful military in the history of the world, an $11 trillion economy and 300 million people we really can’t beat a group of maybe 10,000 insurgents that are loosely organized, lightly armed, poorly trained and spread over a country “slightly more than twice the size of Idaho”? Remember that we invaded the country and toppled its full-fledged government and laid waste to its standing army in a matter of days. This is a pre-conference schedule game, people. This is one of those “money games” where some Division II team gets their skull cracked by our scout team.

The only thing we lack is the one non-negotiable when it come to war: the will to win. We need to decide to win this war. Bush wants us to stay the course as we circle the drain in a particularly execrable part of the world; Pelosi et al want us to flee ASAP. Instead, we should admit that “the course” has been terrifically blown and rather than staying it we should change it and rather than giving up we should redouble our efforts until we have won. We should decide to win or resign ourselves to losing.

Bush’s incompetence is proved by all of the reasons we mentioned above. He continually talks about the “hard work” of this effort, but any job can be made hard if you are bad at it. He claims that “he gives the generals what they ask for” and that “they haven’t asked for more troops/money/materiel/whatever.” That probably has something to do with the fact that the last guy who made a bold request for troops was Eric Shinseki who was subsequently compelled to update his resume. Generals don’t become generals because they tell their superiors things they don’t want to hear, nor by declining to learn from the mistakes of those who bilged out. They quickly learned to ask for what the President wanted to give to them.

And for a president who casually admits that longtime political hack Karl Rove has a role in foreign policy decisions and has appointed another PR maven fresh out of Travis County, Karen Hughes, to a significant diplomatic post it should come as no surprise that politics will always take priority over doing what is right. Interestingly enough his gamble failed to pay off: he is more unpopular than he would have been had he actually done what he claims he has, to demand mutual sacrifice for the war effort. Short of the couple hundred thousand soldiers and their families (out of 300 million people and perhaps 100 million families) and in particular the 2,000 who have died, what have we really had to sacrifice during this war? Bush kept cutting taxes! We not only haven’t had a draft, hadn’t had cutbacks in consumer goods or restriction of any of our liberties or forswearing of our luxuries, we actually have more money in our pockets than we did before the damn thing. Indeed, the only thing we have sacrificed is our dignity and the only thing we have gone without is our pride of place as the last great hope of humanity. A bunch of the same slick, well-heeled political hacks that are less than a decade removed from county commissioner races in Houston were the ones telling him how to fight a war without really trying and now that it is clear that they fucked up, his congenital inability to admit failure and his cultural brand of stiff-neckedness is leading us to disaster.

The thing that keeps me up at nights (and it is now 3 AM) is the fact that this guy gets to be president for another three years, and Democrats aren’t offering a whole lot more. We pride ourselves on our moral superiority and we mouth silly platitudes about how we aren’t pacifists, we simply believe that we should only fight “just wars.” The sad fact is that all wars are unjust, but that in a world full of evil we sometimes have to choose our particular brand of injustice. War is little more than politics writ large and with grossly inflated stakes. There is little use in opposing a war that is already begun, as one is most likely to lose the battle (as we stay in the war) or in the event that one succeeds can have only the cold celebration of knowing that their side lost and their countrymen died for no good reason. Keeping your country out of a war is often noble; pulling it is never more than a tragedy. Rather, we should simply resign ourselves to the reality of the war and try and win the damn thing. Sensible Democrats and the few honest Republicans now freed from their party leaders’ iron grip now that chaos has set in in DC should come together to pressure this administration to win the war.

This also happens to be one of those beautiful times when the right policy also happens to make for good politics. No matter how many people tell the pollsters that they oppose the war, few relish the prospect of surrender and those that do tend to live in places we win anyways (for better or for worse). They cannot stomach a vote for the man and the party that has led us into this shameful enterprise, yet the prospect of voting for a party that seems to be capitalizing on our losses seems cold comfort. Polls reflect this, as Bush’s unpopularity is paired with disdain for our party. John Murtha could have been a voice for a new position, and I think he still can, though I’d like to see others (perhaps Harold Ford as he runs for US Senate or Chet Edwards, a good pro-military Texas Democrat and the President’s congressman) stand up and make our party’s position clear: we don’t believe in staying the course, we believe in changing the course. We don’t believe in withdrawal, we believe in winning. To coin a bumper sticker: Don’t Withdraw—Win.

I’ll wrap up with my thoughts on what winning would be. The necessity of this task proves the absurdity of the way Bush jumped into this war. Typically victory is self-evident: a certain bit of territory is obtained, a political entity is obliterated or a particular enemy surrenders. But because the president, in his intense desire to go to war and his shameful attempt to do so without demanding any sort of gut check from the American people, kept moving the goal posts to find a casus belli that pleased everybody we don’t know why we went there any more. In fact, the reason he initially sold the effort on—weapons of mass destruction—turned out to be a non-starter: the weapons were not there. Mission Accomplished. But rather than declaring victory in what ended up being false terms, I believe we should look to the legitimate reasons that existed for war.

First, the US and its allies had a legitimate cause for war beginning in 1998 when Saddam Hussein broke the terms of the ceasefire agreement that halted hostilities during the First Gulf War. In essence, Saddam’s expelling of the weapons inspectors resumed the First Gulf War, which was fought because the government of Iraq refused to recognize the sovereignty of its neighbors and endangered global security by threatening the oil resources of Saudi Arabia. So the first measure of victory is to establish an Iraqi government that respects the sovereignty of its neighbors and cooperates with the rest of the world in a peaceful and constructive way. We need a strong, respected, legitimate central government that has the approval of its people and the rest of the world.

Secondly, Saddam Hussein was sympathetic to, solicitous of and beginning to cooperate with international terrorist groups that wish to harm the United States and our allies. This is a point that the Left likes to deny, despite the fact that a Senate Intelligence Committee Report signed by both John Kerry and John Edwards noted that there had been some cooperation between the government of Iraq and members of al Qaeda. These contacts were testy, embryonic and casual, but it was clear that the longstanding animosity between the two groups had begun to thaw in the wake of 9/11. Don’t believe this? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man who is currently “leading” the insurgency and is recognized by Osama bin Laden as the head of “al Qaeda in Iraq”, was in Iraq before the invasion with the approval and full knowledge of Saddam’s government. That, my friends, is harboring a known terrorist, one who is now responsible for hundreds of American deaths. Additionally, Saddam’s support of Hamas, Hezbollah, Abu Nidal and other primarily Palestinian-led terrorist groups was actually trumpeted by his government, and he openly gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to suicide bombers and their families. These groups have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and others. Our second measure of victory is an Iraq that is free of terrorist operations and able to continue to ferret out and prosecute terrorists in their own country. Additionally, Iraq should be led by a government that is allied with the United States in the War on Terrorism.

Thirdly, the government of Iraq was brutal to its own people to the point of creating a moral imperative for the United States to address the issue. The first step in this effort should be to remove the mote from our eye: we should acknowledge our wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and make a commitment to refrain from any form of torture. We must then establish the organs of representative democracy that will lead to lasting self-determination and respect for individual rights. A particular threat to human rights in Iraq is its proximity to three vicious suppressers of human rights: Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Iraq needs defensive military capabilities that will enable it to protect itself from threats posed by these countries and others without raising the specter of a return to her past as a threat to these same neighbors. Finally, we need to recognize the threat to the Iraqi people’s dignity that economic devastation and the exacerbating effects of UN sanctions pose. The US and its allies (which can include many of those who were opposed to military action) must help Iraq develop its economy in a way that allows for free enterprise, economic independence and widespread prosperity. This effort will take a generation or more, but reestablishing and expanding the oil industry, helping the agricultural sector recover and creating a climate suitable for other enterprises must be undertaken.

I’d say that an Iraq with a legitimate and self-sufficient government that is freely elected, respectful of human rights, an ally to the United States and other free nations, an Iraq free of terrorism, economically developing at a fast pace and able to defend itself from threats foreign and domestic is a good measure of victory. We will have to spend quite a bit of time and effort killing terrorists, training soldiers, cajoling government officials, building infrastructure and sealing off borders, and it might take a few years. It will, most likely, take decades for us to be comfortable with having no troops on the ground (we still have troops in Germany and Japan, for goodness’ sake), but we can have a minimal presence in a relatively short time as long as we are willing to win and make the sacrifices that demands. Our choice is simple: sacrifice and victory or “staying the course” and withdrawing towards defeat. Honor or shame.

Choose Victory.