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Iraq: the next benchmark
Thirty Iraqis were killed yesterday by terrorists. Twelve of them were new recruits to Iraq’s National Guard who were taken out of a bus and slaughtered. But, but, this isn’t supposed to be happening, is it? After all, we captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, and that was supposed to mean the end of the insurgency, right? Oh, excuse me, I meant, we handed over sovereignty to an interim government in June 2004, and the terror attacks were supposed to stop then, right? That’s what everybody was saying, in the lead-up to that moment, that we had to hold it together, we couldn’t lose the faith, because once sovereignty was handed over, the insurgents’ cause would collapse because then they would be fighting against Iraqis instead of the U.S.-led Coalition…. Oh, sorry, I meant, we destroyed the insurgents’ strongholds in Fallujah in the fall of 2004 and that was The Great, the Magnificent Turning Point in the War, wasn’t it? No, no, that wasn’t it, because, after all, the insurgents just had to decamp from Fallujah and continue their terror campaign from elsewhere—of course. Oh, I know what it was. The Iraqis held an election in January 2005, and that was supposed to mean the ultimate victory, or at least the Light at the End of the Tunnel, or maybe the Point From Which There Would Be No Turning Back, or something. Oh, I’m sorry, wrong again, I meant to say, when a new Iraqi constitution is written by the end of 2005, that will be the moment when the terrorists finally realize that the Game Is Up and they have to abandon their Desperate Attacks on the new Iraq, or, maybe not, but maybe, when an elected Iraqi president takes office under the new constitution, sometime in 2006, that will be the Light at the End of the Tunnel moment, or something …
Folks, I know nothing of military and strategic affairs. I am simply possessed of a logical mind that cannot endure statements that don’t hold together. I’ve been saying since the summer of 2003 that our leaders’ pronouncements about our Iraq policy have not satisfactorily corresponded to what they say they want to accomplish there, or to any material reality, because the building of Iraqi infrastructure and the creation of a new government have nothing to do with the job of defeating our enemies. Before you build a new government in a defeated country, first you have to destroy the enemy and have order. But we didn’t do that, because we thought that the mere process of building democracy would somehow defeat the terrorists, in the same way that the Israelis thought that the “peace process” by itself would magically change the murderous Palestinians into friendly neighbors. Just as the neoconservative slogan about the Proposition Nation is a liberal substitute for nationhood that in fact subverts nationhood, creating a democracy in Iraq was a liberal substitute for waging and winning this war, which in fact got in the way of waging and winning the war. It certainly got in the way of clear thinking about what was required to win it.
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