More Thoughts on Iraq

Like most people, my thoughts on Iraq have evolved over time. I was of course staunchly opposed to the invasion. I thought the way the occupation-and later the fight against the insurgency-has been managed by the Bush administration has been reprehensible. I have almost no faith that the Bush administration knows what it's doing now, despite the fact that it's had 2 1/2 years to get smart and experienced people involved in handling Iraq. And of course since the invasion and the initial chaos Iraq has both created a national government and descended into an insurgency that is killing civilians on a massive scale. Despite efforts to involve more Iraqis in the fighting, there still aren't enough capable Iraqi units and our soldiers are still doing the brunt of the fighting and dying in ever greater numbers.

Despite all this, I still do not favor a near-term withdrawal.

As you may or may not have heard, yesterday Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He believes that our soldiers have become "a catalyst for violence" and should be brought home, presumably to sap the strength of the insurgency. If you read Nir Rosen's column that I talked about the other day, you'd see this is valid argument, and others besides Murtha have been making it for some time now. Still others believe that our soldiers cannot stabilize Iraq, and there's no point in them being there if that central goal is impossible to achieve. And still others have been opposed to the war from the beginning, and have called for withdrawal from nearly the minute our soldiers entered Iraq.

As I stated in my earlier post, despite Rosen's statement otherwise, I still do not believe that the insurgency will abate if our soldiers leave. The insurgents have made a point of targeting not only our soldiers, but Iraqi civilians and the Iraqi national government. Rosen argues that the Shiites are capable of defending themselves against the Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadists, but given the well-documented inability to train Iraqi units capable of fighting on their own, I don't see how it's possible for the national government to defend itself. To me it is not clear yet that Iraq is doomed to civil war, and since the Iraqi national government cannot yet defend itself, it falls to our soldiers to fight the insurgents until it can or it becomes clear that it cannot. I believe that whatever the pre-war arguments were, stability should be and is in fact our primary goal now.

But this isn't the only reason that I believe we should stay. I think that not only is Iraq's stability on the line here, but so is our credibility.

I know. It sounds absurd to talk about "credibility" at this point. We pissed away years worth of credibility in the way we went to war. How on Earth can we hope to salvage it now? And how is credibility a reason to fight a war anyway?

Despite the lies which predicated the invasion, and the ineptitude with which the occupation has been managed, most people would agree that we as a country are genuinely interested in a functioning democracy taking over in Iraq. This alone, and our good faith efforts to bring such a democracy about, is helping to restore the credibility we destroyed in invading Iraq. Now if Rosen is right, then democracy is in fact already doomed. To me then we are fighting to prevent a civil war which will kill many, many thousands more Iraqis then have died or will die at the hands us or the insurgency. To me this is also a worthy cause, even if we can't create democracy in Iraq.

To me then, the question becomes this: is civil war certain, despite our efforts? The issue of our credibility turns on the answer to this question. There is no doubt that if we leave Iraq, we are doing no less then abandoning the Iraqis to their fate. Whatever opponents of the war say, this would be the natural result of immediate withdrawal. To abandon the Iraqis before it becomes completely clear to us that we can do no more to help is in my mind pissing away what little credibility-and yes, honor-we've managed to hang onto in this mess. We undertook an obligation to the Iraqi people-Sunni, Shiite, Kurd or whoever-when we invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein, an obligation to stabilize the country and create a fair and just government for the Iraqi people. It is an obligation so great that we cannot release ourselves from us until it becomes absolutely certain that we can no longer fulfill it. To do otherwise is not only to me an immoral act as a nation, but it shows to the rest of the world that yet again, for all our talk of democracy and human rights, it is our own best interests that come above even our most solemn obligations. In this case it would be even more egregious because we created the instability in Iraq in the first place. And I do not believe that we have reached the point where we can say with certainty that there is nothing our soldiers can do to help create stability. Therefore, I cannot support immediate withdrawal.

Now I know that this invites comparisons to our approach in Vietnam, and to talk of "peace with honor." But there are important respects in which Iraq is not like Vietnam. By the time Nixon came to office, it was already clear that we could not win in Vietnam. We had been fighting there in significant numbers for the better part of five years, and advising the South Vietnamese and the French for nearly 20. And in all that time we had continued to prop up various South Vietnamese governments, one after the other, that were more inept, incompetent and undemocratic then the last. And Nixon's "Vietnamization" actually involved a widening of the war, into Cambodia. By the time the last of our forces left, we had long lost any chance to redeem ourselves in the conflict.

That's simply not the case in Iraq. We've only been in Iraq a little more then 2 1/2 years. The process of forming a national government is still in the formative stages. The insurgency in Iraq simply cannot compare to the insurgency in Vietnam, in either strength or goals. There's still time to create a capable Iraqi army, still time to bolster the national government, still time to help try to bring peace to Iraq.

What I do support are benchmarks for withdrawal. As the Iraqi national government grows more capable of defending itself, we should shift more of the fight against the insurgency to them, until there comes a time when the national government can do all of the fighting itself, or can fight with the aid of a mere token force on our part, with military and economic aid. This is akin to Nixon's "Vietnamization" approach. But the failure of that approach in Vietnam was in the application, not the concept. It's only reflects common sense that if we ourselves are unable to defeat the insurgency, then we should do our best to see that the Iraqis themselves are.

There are legitimate criticisms to this approach. The Bush administration may create arbitrary benchmarks that may or may not be met. Benchmarks may become excuses-not justifications-to leave. Benchmarks may not be able to reflect real, measurable progress in Iraq. And whether or not stability is even possible, benchmarks or not, is the big argument.

And yet I cannot bring myself to believe that the time has come to bring our soldiers home, and leave the Iraqis to sort out this mess for themselves. We were wrong to invade Iraq. We would be just as wrong to leave before we've done everything we possibly can to create a stable country there.