Critical Thinking about the War in Iraq

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I was around for the Vietnam War. That one too was billed as a war we MUST win to preserve freedom and life as we know it. That war lasted 14 long years and cost us 57,690 US dead (not to mention the 2 to 2.5 million South East Asian dead -- many of them civilians). From 1959 when we first got involved all the way through 1973 when we left with our tails between our legs, our Government in Washington and the Pentagon brass assured us that of two things. 1 -- We must win this war or life as we know it in the free world will come to an end. 2 -- We are winning. All we need to do is stay the course.

With 20/20 hindsight, we see that both those assurances were either misguided ramblings of idiots or complete fabrications. The free world did not topple like dominos after South Vietnam fell and we weren't winning. Not only were we not winning, but the White House knew this at least 4 years before we left and stubbornly kept us there to save face for themselves. Ten thousand young Americans died in that four year face-saving fiasco.

Given that our government got things so terribly wrong back then, it seems legitimate to me to question the Bush Administration and the Pentagon now. Is it true that we must win the war in Iraq? Is it really the centerpiece of the war on terror? And more importantly, can we win the war in Iraq? Can we win the war on terror outside of Iraq, or only by being there?

I think most Americans now see what I saw so clearly before we ever went in to topple Saddam, and what George Herbert Walker Bush saw during the first Gulf War. If you topple Saddam, how do you then govern its fractured society? We should never have gone into Iraq. We could have done a far more effective job fighting the war on terror by concentrating 150,000 boots in Afghanistan and actually capturing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership instead of outsourcing that vital effort to a bunch of tribal warlords. The monumental stupidity of that move alone is enough to prompt serious questions as to the administrations ability to effectively pursue a global war on terror.

OK, we shouldn't have gone into Iraq, but we did. And when we choose to invade Iraq, we should have gone in with the 4 to 500,000 troops it would have taken to maintain security in a nation of 26 million people after Saddam's security forces were disbanded. But Rummy had a brighter idea. His insistence on a much lighter force cost us any possibility of a good outcome. Yet he's still in charge and the Commander In Chief just gave him a thumbs-up for another 2 years. "You're doing a heckuva job, Rummy."

We have a misguided invasion followed by a fatally flawed strategy to win, and yet I am supposed to believe the rhetoric of the right that we must and will prevail in Iraq. Sorry, but I've had enough. I'm going to look at the situation with my own two eyes and use my own head to think through what should be done rather than relying on the Bush/Cheney/Rove disinformation machine to do my thinking for me.

What has the Iraq invasion accomplished? We've energized global terrorism and provided bin Laden a recruiting tool beyond his wildest dreams. We've toppled a Sunni strongman on the borders of Shiite Iran, eliminating a check on Iranian influence from Tehran to Hezbollah controlled Lebanon, thus establishing the beginnings of a radical Shiite triangle around our key Middle-Eastern ally, Israel. We've tied down 150,000 American troops, starving the effort to rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan and pursue bin Laden and the Taliban. We're fast on our way to burning through the first trillion dollars to do all this. Even if we stay for 20 more years, there is every likelihood that the sectarian violence will continue and that we will increasingly be seen by the people of Iraq as part of the problem and not part of the solution.

In Vietnam, we were seen by the people as an invading army, not as liberators and protectors. The French before us were seen as the same. That struggle went on for 30 long years, and in the end no outside army, no matter how strong, could "win". The people of Vietnam worked out their own solution. I am afraid that after all this waste of human life, we will come at some point to realize that the same is true in Iraq. No matter how long we stay, we don't belong there and they do. They will not quit coming. They will wear us down like a small stream ate into solid rock and built the Grand Canyon. Ultimately, we will loose.

Perhaps the Iraqis will find a solution in a soft partition and some sort of federal government. Perhaps the ethnic cleansing will run its course and Sunnis will be forced to retreat to other Sunni Arab nations, leaving Iraq to the control of Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his al-Mahdi Army. Perhaps the greater financial and population power of the Sunnis throughout the Muslim world will come to bear on a political solution. In any of these solutions, the longer we stay, the more we will be hated and the more we will force our brave troops into the middle of someone else's civil war. No good can possibly come of that.

I do not believe that al-Qaeda in Iraq will prevail if we pull out. Their arms and numbers are too small. They will be sitting ducks for the al-Mahdi Army. But even if they do prevail, our strategy to win the global war of terror should include staying out of Sunni/Shiite struggles for power and striking our real enemy, al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism where ever we find it, be it Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Europe.

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