Jan 07, 2007 - 04:03:43 CST
This is the hardest column I have ever written.I'm no expert on foreign policy or war or the Middle East, but here's how it seems to a patriot from the heartland.
We are in a no-win situation in Iraq, and we Americans are directly responsible for it.
This story is not over, but the last chapter in all realistic scenarios ends in disaster: civil war, wholesale ethnic cleansing, the collapse of the Iraq infrastructure, regional destabilization, a lessening (not increase) in the world flow of oil, and perhaps much worse. Perhaps much, much worse.
When we finally face this thing we have done, when we finally cut and run, in 2007 or 2009, we will leave Iraq much worse off than we found it. In fact, the instability we have precipitated may spread throughout the region and touch off revolutions in Saudi Arabia and possibly even Egypt.
Our actions have strengthened Iran, the country with the greatest urge to dominate the Middle East and the least progressive regional agenda. The Iraq War (2003-?) may come to be regarded as one of the worst blunders in the history of the United States, a long-term, perhaps permanent, blow to American honor and prestige in the world's arena.
We have made the barely tolerable existence of the Iraqi people intolerable. The lives of average Iraqi families were bad under Saddam Hussein. They are much worse in the unrestrained anarchy that we have unleashed among them. Not to mention the odiousness and humiliation of an occupation by foreigners of a completely different religious foundation.
Our Iraq adventure was a pre-emptive war. In other words, it was a war we did not have to fight, but rather chose to fight - for what at the time seemed to our government like compelling reasons.
Though we did not realize this at the beginning, it was a war that we cannot win without setting up something like permanent shop in Iraq with two or three times the number of troops we have committed. Even then, there would be no guarantee, as 20th-century British imperial experience in Mesopotamia has shown.
If you think I am wrong, I hope you will let me know and teach me how to think more clearly about our dilemma, because I do not write any of these words in righteousness, and I am not sure of my analysis.
I am just sick at heart, mostly for the American families who have lost a child, a husband, a wife, a father or mother to this war, partly for the millions of suffering people in Iraq, and - as a patriot - for the threadbare Jeffersonian ideals of American civilization.
Either the war in Iraq is lost or it is going to be lost, troop surge or no surge, no matter what illusions we may harbor, no matter what spin we put on it now or later. There is a slender chance that we can restore stability to Iraq, but if that happens it will take years, not months, and the casualty rate for Americans and Iraqis is going to rise dramatically. Are we prepared to pay that price?
The war is costing approximately $4.5 billion per month, $100,000 per minute, $150 million per day.
The numbers vary a little, depending on what you read and when. But the dollar cost is staggering, both in what we spend there, halfway around the world, and of course what, in consequence, we do not spend here on the pressing needs of American life.
As the new year arrived, the American death toll in Iraq reached the grim milestone of 3,000. On Jan. 1, the New York Times published (over four haunting pages) the photographs of the 1,000 American soldiers who have most recently been killed in Iraq. Four of the 1,000 are North Dakotans. I do not mention them by name because I do not wish their families to feel exploited for what may seem to be political purposes. But think of their Christmas - in New Salem, in Jamestown, in Minot, in Fargo.
Three thousand is the number of American deaths - so far. The number of Americans wounded and, in many cases, maimed in the war runs to the tens of thousands.
The only moral justification for a voluntary war of this sort is that the result justifies the violent invasion of another people's sovereignty. But what if the result is unmitigated disaster?
Our government (George Bush, Colin Powell) told us there were weapons of mass destruction from which we might expect an imminent threat. Apparently not accurate.
We were led to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 (George Bush). The U.S. government has now acknowledged that this was not true.
We were told that the Iraqi people would greet us as liberators (Dick Cheney). Wildly wrong.
We were told that we were planting the good seed of democracy, not only in Iraq, but in the entire region (Paul Wolfowitz). In retrospect, ludicrous.
We were told that our objectives could be accomplished with a modest military presence (Donald Rumsfeld). Not so.
We were told that if we don't fight the bad guys there, we'll only have to fight them here. That may have some validity, but virtually all experts have said that what we are now seeding in the Middle East are future terrorists, not the first shoots of democracy.
These things really bother me. First, that our politicians and commentators are now blaming the Iraqis for the deepening mayhem in the streets. The new theme in 2007 seems to be that "the Iraqi people are going to have to step up and take responsibility for their future."
This, of course, is true, but it seems pretty self-serving for us to have removed the props of order in Iraq and now to wonder why the result is a nightmare of pandemonium. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell famously gave us the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it." Our new attitude seems to be: "We broke it, now you Iraqis own it."
However stark this sounds, it may be that average Iraqi people were better off under the old paradigm of dictatorship, repression and enforced order, rather than under occupation and the widespread breakdown of civil restraint.
Second, it bothers me greatly that the 3,000 soldiers who have given what Abraham Lincoln called the "last full measure of devotion," may have sacrificed their lives in futility.
Of course we honor each of them deeply, even if the cause for which they fought was unjust. The irony of this is that these soldiers and their families are among the most patriotic of all Americans. They believe in this country, in the prudence of their government, of the justice of the American cause.
Those who trust the most are paying the highest price. Because we have no draft, we fight our wars with volunteers. At minimum, these men and women deserve to be led by a government that is especially cautious, historically well-informed, sober and realistic, and somber in the face of the grave thing it has undertaken.
These must be lonely and troubling days for the president. If he is a mature human being, he must be haunted by the terrible nightmare we have touched off in Iraq and the Middle East, the impossible position we now find ourselves in, the immense suffering of the Iraqi people, and the cost to the American people in lives, in woundings, in disrupted families, in dollars, in world prestige. What a burden to be the president of the United States in such circumstances.
What would you do if you were the president?
All my friends believe we should declare victory and get the hell out. I'm uncertainly and uncomfortably with John McCain: more troops, an indefinite stay.
However chimerical it may be, I believe we now have to stay for the long haul, until we restore order and help build the thing we promised.
There is a paradox here. To do this, we will need a draft. But if we had a draft, this war would never have occurred in the first place.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenksinon at jeffysage@;aol.com.)
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