The
war is lost
By
James Carroll
Boston Globe
03 September, 2003
The
war is lost. By most measures of what the Bush administration forecast
for its adventure in Iraq, it is already a failure. The war was going
to make the Middle East a more peaceful place. It was going to undercut
terrorism. It was going to show the evil dictators of the world that
American power is not to be resisted. It was going to improve the lives
of ordinary Iraqis. It was going to stabilize oil markets. The American
army was going to be greeted with flowers. None of that happened. The
most radical elements of various fascist movements in the Arab world
have been energized by the invasion of Iraq. The American occupation
is a rallying point for terrorists. Instead of undermining extremism,
Washington has sponsored its next phase, and now moderates in every
Arab society are more on the defensive than ever.
Before the war,
the threat of America's overwhelming military dominance could intimidate,
but now such force has been shown to be extremely limited in what it
can actually accomplish. For the sake of "regime change,"
the United States brought a sledge hammer down on Iraq, only to profess
surprise that, even as Saddam Hussein remains at large, the structures
of the nation's civil society are in ruins. The humanitarian agencies
necessary to the rebuilding of those structures are fleeing Iraq.
The question for
Americans is, Now what? Democrats and Republicans alike want to send
in more US soldiers. Some voices are raised in the hope that the occupation
can be more fully "internationalized," which remains unlikely
while Washington retains absolute control. But those who would rush
belligerent reinforcements to Iraq are making the age-old mistake.
When brutal force
generates resistance, the first impulse is to increase force levels.
But, as the history of conflicts like this shows, that will result only
in increased resistance. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has rejected
the option of more troops for now, but, in the name of force-protection,
the pressures for escalation will build as US casualties mount. The
present heartbreak of one or two GI deaths a day will seem benign when
suicide bombers, mortar shells, or even heavier missile fire find their
ways into barracks and mess halls.
Either reinforcements
will be sent to the occupation, or present forces will loosen the restraints
with which they reply to provocation. Both responses will generate more
bloodshed and only postpone the day when the United States must face
the truth of its situation.
The Bush administration's
hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing
more than hallucination. High-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human
beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea. As rekindled
North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs prove, Washington's rhetoric
of "evil" is as self-defeating as it is self-delusional. No
one could have predicted a year ago that the fall from the Bush high
horse of American Empire would come so hard and so quickly. Where are
the comparisons with Rome now? The rise and fall of imperial Washington
took not hundreds of years, but a few hundred days.
Sooner or later,
the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in
Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it. That means the United States
must yield not only command of the occupation force, but participation
in it. The United States must renounce any claim to power or even influence
over Iraq, including Iraqi oil. The United States must accept the humiliation
that would surely accompany its being replaced in Iraq by the very nations
it denigrated in the build-up to the war.
With the United
States thus removed from the Iraqi crucible, those who have rallied
to oppose the great Satan will loose their raison d'etre, and the Iraqi
people themselves can take responsibility for rebuilding their wrecked
nation.
All of this might
seem terribly unlikely today, but something like it is inevitable. The
only question is whether it happens over the short term, as the result
of responsible decision-making by politicians in Washington, or over
the long term, as the result of a bloody and unending horror.
The so-called "lessons"
of Vietnam are often invoked by hawks and doves alike, but here is one
that applies across the political spectrum. The American people saw
that that war was lost in January 1968, even as the Tet Offensive was
heralded as a victory by the Pentagon and the White House. But for five
more years, Washington refused to face the truth of its situation, until
at last it had no choice.
Because American
leaders could not admit the nation's mistake, and move to undo it, hundreds
of thousands of people died, or was it millions? The war in Iraq is
lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?
James Carroll's
column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright
2003 Globe Newspaper Company