What now?

Three op-eds in today's Washington Post deal with the subject of what we are and should be doing in Iraq right now. I've sort of gotten away from commenting on other people's comments on current events, but I think it gives me a good excuse to offer my own ideas on Iraq by contrast, so I'll give it another whirl. David Ignatius starts us off by discussing whether autocratic regimes are more capable of handling the threat of terrorism then democracies. He begins with the assertion that the situation in Iraq has actually worsened America's terrorist problem (a claim I agree with), but then delves into a discussion as to whether the Iraqi government as it's being structured can deal with the insurgency and terrorist threat.

"Here's where the fundamental contradiction in Bush's strategy becomes clear. If Iraq has shown anything, it is that there's no easy equation between democratic government and success in containing terrorism. In the short run, prying the lid off a tightly controlled society such as Iraq may actually make the terrorism problem worse. The cruel instruments of repression are gone, while the constraints of an orderly, law-abiding, democratic society are not yet present."

He then launches into a discussion of whether democratic reforms will actually undermine the ability of Middle Eastern governments to deal with terrorism:

"Or take the case of Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak's undemocratic regime is in many ways an abomination. But it does have one area of undisputed success -- combating terrorism. Egypt's chief of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, is said to be a clever spymaster who excels in counterterrorism operations. But Egypt's Mukhabarat, like Jordan's, is a symbol of repression, and you could argue that in a more democratic Egypt, Suleiman will go the way of Kheir. The haunting question is whether, by weakening state control, democratic change will undermine Egypt's ability to contain the terrorist network that produced Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders."

I can't agree with Ignatius that democratic reform undermines the ability to battle terrorism. For one, a lack of real democracy is what fuels some of this terrorist activity. It is true that not all terrorists can be appeased, but it is a simple fact that terrorists are much more succesful when they enjoy a greater level of support in the general population. And such support is more generally given when the ruling government is undemocratic, corrupt, or autoractic. In essense, democracy is the means by which disatisfaction is channeled away from acts of violent terrorism, to acts of civil participation. Greater democratic reform offers more alternatives to a frustrated populace, which in all liklihood will turn away from support of terrorists, seeing no need for them anymore. Secondly, democracies have shown themselves capable of dealing with terrorism. Once the mechanisms are in place for a strong system of law, justice and law enforcement, terrorists can killed or imprisoned.

Nonetheless, Iraq does face a dilemma in trying to create a democratic government in the midst of a violent insurgency. Those who subscribe to the school of "realpolitik" would argue that first the government must be strong and stable, before it is democratic. The problem with this approach is that a strong but dictatorial government will foster more terrorism, as people grow more and more disasatisfied with the government and feel their only recourse is to join in or suppory the terrorists and rebels seeking to undermine it.

Jim Hoagland believes that the Bush administration has in fact shifted it's goal to a working and stable government in Iraq that may only be more or less democratic, and that Bush's speech on Tuesday signalled this change with it's emphasis more on obtaining security against terrorist attacks and less on democracy for the Iraqis.

"The new emphasis on leaving behind a workable Iraq rather than staying until that Arab nation has become a model of democracy for the entire region was captured in the president's pledge to 'prevent al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban -- a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends.'

That is a relatively modest goal compared with the lofty ambition to put freedom on the march that Bush has laid out in the past. He is not renouncing such ambitions -- indeed, he should not -- but he did begin speaking to the American public more realistically about applying them in Iraq in his speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina."

I'm not convinced that this administration has quite degraded itself to abandoning the last honorable goal it had for invading Iraq-creating a stable democracy however long the odds-in favor of a strategy of simply re-creating a secure regime that can get a handle on the insurgents and terrorists. In my opinion it's more likely that what Bush said is the result of his speech being tailored to the domestic political audience, in an effort to offer the American people some compelling reason for our remaining involvement in Iraq. After all democracy is fine and dandy, but we invaded to secure ourselves against WMDs and the war was justified primarily in terms of self-preservation, not democracy promotion. Hence the mentioning of 9/11 repeatedly, to remind the American people that what's at issue is our own safety. However, it is impossible to know if the administration is in fact signalling a change in course as Hoagland suspects. It is not a long leap from a speech that simply focuses on security, to a policy that is concerned only with security.

Richard Cohen in turn discusses how the situation in Iraq has come to resemble the situation in Vietnam. Apparantly he didn't always feel this way:

"About two years ago I sat down with a colleague and explained why Iraq was not going to be Vietnam. Iraq lacked a long-standing nationalist movement and a single charismatic leader like Ho Chi Minh. The insurgents did not have a sanctuary like North Vietnam, which supplied manpower, materiel and leadership, and the rebel cause in Iraq -- just what is it, exactly? -- was not worth dying for. On Tuesday President Bush proved me wrong. Iraq is beginning to look like Vietnam."

He then lists the ways the two have come to resemble each other:

"The similarity is most striking in the language the president used. First came the vast, insulting oversimplifications. The war in Iraq was tied over and over again to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although that link was nonexistent."

He's right. There was no and never has been any actual link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, that is now irrelevant. If anything, the Bush administration could never have planned on getting most Americans to believe that Saddam actually had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. The real goal was simply to conflate Iraq and the general psychological fear of terrorism in our minds, so as to foster an emotional response that would overcome any reasonable objections to the invasion. However, the association between Iraq and the threat of terrorism is now quite real. The fact is the invasion has created a new training ground for Islamic terrorists, and whether or not they ever intend to come over here to attack us, they are certainly attacking our soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and civilians over there.

"Second, just as Lyndon Johnson and others referred to communism as if it were a worldwide monolith, so Bush talks about terrorists."

This is without a doubt true. Whether or not the Bush administration thinks of terrorism as a single, monolithic threat, Bush certainly refers to it as one time and time again. Over-simplification is a hallmark of this administration.

"Bush sounded downright Johnsonian in talking about progress in Iraq. He cited rebuilt 'roads and schools and health clinics,' not to mention improvements in 'sanitation, electricity and water.' This, too, had a familiar ring. We got the same sort of statistics in Vietnam."

Bush isn't the only one. Conservative supporters of the administration and the war are always going on and on about the failure of the "media" to highlight the successes in Iraq. This glosses over the fact that schools are useless if kids can't safely get to them, and roads are pointless if they simply become pathways for IEDs. This also glosses over the fact that we build roads and schools here in America all of the time without our soldiers getting shot and blown up to do so.

"Finally, Bush descended to Vietnam-speak. This is the language used by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to obscure the truth by emitting a fog of numbers."

This is depressingly true. It was Benajamin Disraeli who said "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics." The Bush administration trots out time and time again numbers that are intended to reflect some progress in Iraq;-numbers of Iraqis trained, amount of money spent on reconstruction, number of people who voted in the elections-all in an effort to offer some counter-weight to the constant suicide bombings and attacks on our soldiers. Numbers are important of course, but in general the more numbers get trotted out, the worse things are going.

The gist of these three columns is that Iraq is not going as planned, has never really gone as planned, and now we and especially the Iraqi people are paying the awful consequences. It's my belief that we are beyond any special new plans or approaches that are going to rescue what by almost any measure has been a failure to rebuild Iraq, beyond doing what we're doing and hoping for the best. The Bush administration must buy time at home in the hopes that we can finally create a stable, democratic and peaceful Iraq, and the only way to do so is to be relentlessly honest with the American people. Alas, this may be the hardest thing for them to achieve.