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March 13, 2006 Friday the
13th falls on Monday this month
Should we stay in Iraq?
This should be read in conjunction with my previous musings,
in particular the TO&E for Imperial Forces,
and thoughts on Iraq and the conservative
movement I did last week. One day I will pull together all my writings
on this subject and do a coherent essay. Alas, this isn't it.
It's a subject that occupies more of my time than I want to
give it, and I suspect that is true of everyone else in the country: and
that, I think, is both the problem and the solution. The fact is that most
of the country no longer cares about the war in Iraq. We went in expecting a
quick victory. We got that, and most of the nation, including most of the
Army, hadn't thought beyond that point. There were, I am sure, some military
planners who remembered that we had started training troops in military
government for occupying Germany beginning in 1943 and we weren't entirely
ready when we found ourselves in control of a country that had once been the
most culturally and, dare I say it, politically advanced nation on Earth;
the land of Goethe and Schiller, the land that invented sovereignty with the
Peace of Westphalia; that land that sent Angles and Saxons to merge with
Britons and Normans to become the motherland of America. The occupation and
reconstruction went well, particularly in our sectors in comparison to the
Russians, and over time we forgot that it hadn't all been smooth sailing;
but surely some of our planners remembered that.
Colin Powell famously warned the President that "If you
break it, you own it." Deposing Saddam would not instantly bring about peace
and order. The President ordered the invasion anyway. His explanations for
this made no strategic sense: Saddam was as thoroughly deterred as anyone in
history, and was pretty well incapable of harming us. He was desperately
trying to assure the US that he had no weapons of mass destruction while
continuing to bluff his neighbors and his internal enemies that he had the
means to bring them all down in one insane Gotterdamerung. I don't say this
was clear to the CIA at the time, but it ought to have been: many of us who
are not experts on the Middle East understood that was probably the
situation, and it was I think clear to anyone who thought about the
situation that Saddam was deterred, and if further assurances of his
deterrence were sought, he would be desperate to provide them so long as
this be done with covert means that would allow him to continue his bluff.
A cowardly bully in charge of a country. A man hiding in his
own nation, seldom sleeping twice in succession in the same place, cringing
like an outlaw; such people are easily understood by anyone who pays the
slightest attention to history.
He was vulnerable, and if Iraq could be converted into an
ally of the United States in the coming cultural wars with Islam, that would
be an enormously useful thing to do. And the exiles, beginning with Chalabi,
were assuring everyone that it would be a snap. The neo-conservatives, of
whom Francis Fukuyama was then one, were proclaiming that liberal democracy
was the wave of the future and the end of history. From the left, the Jacobin sentiment that
within every human heart beats a desire for democratic socialism is the
prevailing secular religion of all our academics even if they don't give it
the name of Jacobinism, so there was no opposition from that quarter. The
only principled opposition to invasion of Iraq came from the Old
Conservatives. Opposition from the left and from the Democrats came from the
fact that it was Mr. Bush's war. Madeleine Albright and her cohorts would
have cheered on an invasion of Iraq led by Clinton, as they cheered on our
incursions in the Balkans.
So Bush invaded.
There is an analysis of possible motives by David Warren
<http://davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?artID=582>
that is worth your attention. Go read that now; it won't take long.
The key passages are these:
...if Mr Bush thought he could restore the
status quo ante of a Middle East that was no threat to the West, without
pushing democracy down anyone’s throat, he would do that. But as he examined
the problem presented to him by the Arab raids on New York and Washington,
the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001, he saw that something more would be
required. He believes, still, that there can be no lasting peace in the
world until the “root cause” of this terrorist violence is removed. Hence,
the evangelizing for democracy. Hence, the willingness to kick-start, by
taking out two of the most abhorrent regimes known to man, and trying to
repeat in Afghanistan and Iraq what the Americans accomplished in Germany,
Italy, and Japan after World War II.
In this view -- which I hold to be Mr Bush’s --
we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who
accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and
an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind,
only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered
secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of
mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary
weapons of mass destruction.
And the key question, which Mr. Warren goes on to ask, is
the question many of us raised before all this started: What if democracy is
not the wave of the future? What if the true face of Islam is precisely that
of the history books, of Suleiman the Magnificent, a scholarly and refined
man of high culture, who conquered most of the Balkans and was stopped at
the gates of Vienna only by the Grace of God and the efforts of the Imperial
landknechts (who proved to be quite as tough as the hitherto invincible
Janissaries). What if the true face of Islam was seen in Jerusalem before
the Crusades, when the local populations were forcibly converted except for
those successful enough to pay the ruinous tribute? What if the true face of
Islam was shown in the tax collectors of the Balkans who took children as
tribute; children forcibly converted, placed in celibate barracks, and
trained to become the fearsome Janissaries who threw their prisoners into
the fire?
And what if democracy in Turkey means the end of the
successors of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk and his generals who imposed separation
of church and state on a nation that didn't want it, and doesn't want it
now? Turkey remains a somewhat Western first world nation only because the
Army periodically comes out of barracks and deposes democratically elected
Islamist regimes on the grounds that separation of church and state is the
fundamental constitutional principle of modern Turkey and the Army is sworn
to uphold that constitution.
What if democracy in the Middle East means a choice between
Sunni Wahabi and fundamentalist revolutionary Shiite preachers?
And I put it to you that all the evidence points that way:
that democracy in Iraq will bring the election of people who don't like us
at all, and will feel no gratitude for our having deposed Saddam?
Which leaves open the question: should we stay?
The first answer looks obvious, but it actually raises a
question: given the pessimistic view that emerges from an objective look at
the situation, why in the world stay longer than it takes to conduct an
orderly withdrawal? And the answer to that second question is, the Army
wants to stay. The Army (and I emphatically include the Marines and Special
Operations Groups in that shorthand "Army") believes it has invested the
blood of comrades in Iraq, and wants to stay long enough to make that
meaningful. The Army believes it can win.
And so long as the Army believes that, we the people have an
obligation to those we sent in harm's way to let them try.
And no: of course that is not democracy, and it is not the
kind of thing that those who love the Old Republic should be thinking; but
then sending the Army into Iraq, not just to topple the regime and get out,
but to go in and rebuild the nation, wasn't anything the Old Republic would
do. It was the act of Empire.
And Empire must listen to the Army. I don't mean that Empire
turns over domestic or even foreign policy to the military (although it
certainly must pay attention to the needs of the Army when it is at home;
something we have sorely neglected, and which we will have to remedy soon
enough if we are going to keep a large standing army); but I do mean that
Empire must listen to the Army once it has been sent on a mission, has
spilled the blood of comrades, and the mission is left undone.
If the people believe that the mission can be accomplished
and we should stay the course, then the Army's opinion does not govern. The
answer to that complaint is the answer Jimmy Carter gave Charlie Beckwith
when Beckwith complained that the Iran rescue wasn't going to work and he
didn't want to lead it: "Shut up and soldier." But we do not have that
situation here. Here we have a military that was sent on a mission and
believes it can still be accomplished.
And Empire or Republic, we owe them enough to stay the
course so long as they believe they can win.
========
Footnote: except for the families of troops killed and
wounded in Iraq, the war hardly touches the nation. We are three years into
this war. Three years from Pearl Harbor the United States was engaged in
Europe and the Pacific, there was rationing and travel restriction, we had
domestic surveillance and much neighborly vigilance and snooping, loose lips
sank ships, there were scrap drives at every school in the land, and our
popular culture media were filled with patriotic plays, movies, and songs.
We must be vigilant.
The war in Iraq hasn't called for much sacrifice on our
part; yet we are the ones demanding that our inconveniences be ended.
Discussion in mail.
=============
The West retreated from Africa. With this result:
http://www.reason.com/0603/fe.th.why.shtml
Key excerpt:
Economists used to think wealth came from a
combination of man-made resources (roads, factories, telephone systems),
human resources (hard work and education), and technological resources
(technical know-how, or simply high-tech machinery). Obviously, poor
countries grew into rich countries by investing money in physical resources
and by improving human and technological resources with education and
technology transfer programs.
Nothing is wrong with this picture as far as it
goes. Education, factories, infrastructure, and technical know-how are
indeed abundant in rich countries and lacking in poor ones. But the picture
is incomplete, a puzzle with the most important piece missing.
The first clue that something is amiss with the
traditional story is its implication that poor countries should have been
catching up with rich ones for the last century or so—and that the farther
behind they are, the faster the catch-up should be. In a country that has
very little in the way of infrastructure or education, new investments have
the biggest rewards.
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western
Civilization as it commits suicide.
Why are we not like Cameroun? I invite you to take that
question seriously.
Then go read The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle. We tried to address some of those issues.
====================
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