Brave Humans

I’m against the Iraq War, I think I’m for a surge, and I think we need to stand up a government in Iraq that will stand up to us and maybe even be chosen by a populace that will in all likelihood hate us for at least a decade. And the topper is that I don’t think these are contradictory.

So first, how can I be against the war and for more war? No, this is not flip-flopping or moral uncertainty. The Iraq campaign was promulgated in an atmosphere of fear-mongering and deception of the American people. The Iraqis were not buying uranium, the 9-11 terrorists had no connection to Mr. Saddam Hussein, and destroying the Ba’athist government in Iraq did not make the world (or everyday life in Iraq or America) safer. To clarify my position slightly, I was in support of the Afghan campaign, as there was enough evidence that two administrations (Clinton and Bush II) were both able to make cogent (and, so far as I know, truthful) arguments for that action. But that is a whole other topic. The Iraq campaign should never have started. It was wrong.

Some of my support of pursuing the war and the idea of a “surge” is based on a sense of national responsibility. It’s the china shop rule- “You break it, you bought it”- and yes, I believe we broke it. The early mis-steps have been hashed over substantially by both liberal groups and disaffected military who have been driven, against most precedent, to speak out against the hierarchy and the Commander-in Chief. Take it that I accept that we had no plan to “win the peace”, that we arrogantly and mistakenly disbanded the Iraqi Army (thereby creating the well-armed base of one portion of the insurgency), and that we showed a callous disregard for the lives and the culture of the Iraqi people by following the overweaning arrogance of civilian “authorities” like Mr. Rumsfield who wanted to impose his own fingerprints on this war. He has done so to our detriment. The body count of Iraqi civilians has been debated, but the day-to-day killings are a tragedy for which someone must take responsibility as well as action to address. As humanitarians mourn the human cost, scholars will count the historical cost of artifacts, sacred places, and knowledge that was lost, looted, or destroyed because we, as the only standing army, took no precautions to protect anything but Iraqi oil. Museums, neighborhoods, and infrastructure were all left exposed to the spoilers, the disaffected, and the people who really do just want us to look bad so that it is OK to kill us.

Someone has said that the first job of government is to have a monopoly on violence. As a man of peace, I dislike that spin and would prefer to say “Government must provide security.” There is also a pragmatist in me. It’s the same side that abhors the death penalty and also considers that the state may have a vested interest in having some people be dead- but that’s another story too. That pragmatist is telling me that we may need to provide enough force in Baghdad to stand up an Iraqi Army that is capable of holding Baghdad without us. America must help an Iraqi government develop a relative monopoly on violence. If we can get an Iraqi Army developed that is responsible to an elected government, that is strong enough to secure life around Baghdad, and then spread the peace of the sword to other relatively peaceful places such as Basra, then we could probably bring our surviving children home. If we can help them face down the spoilers, who will continue to destroy any humanitarian or infrastructure successes we make and kill our people just because they need to see us fail, or because they need the secular government to fail so that they can re-establish the Caliphate, or because they want a Shia-based government friendly to Iran, or because they are just opportunistic criminal gangs, or because we have killed their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, or any other of the complex reasons that we have not troubled to understand……yeah, it gets overwhelming. But unless we help someone get a grip on things, the steady day-to-day bloodshed will continue, and if we leave now, the streets will be piled with the corpses of anyone who ever helped Americans or espoused secular government. So we must be in a strong enough position to hand the opportunity for power and a relative monopoly on violence to someone. And since most folks there hate us now, the new government will need to hate us to have a chance of survival.

To do this, I suspect that the very best we might do is to set in place people who are more secular than religious in nature. But any government is going to need to win the support of the populace to last, and in the Middle East that seems to mean working with religion to some degree, and Sadr is not going away. He will most likely need to be co-opted, or if not him, someone else like him who can deliver the populace. So I assert that we most likely need to support people who will vilify us and will not act as friends in many crucial points over the next few decades.

The current application of the old imperialist model of exporting our Democratic values with guns is not working. So maybe the addition of numbers to establish some stability and to pacify an area forcefully for long enough for Americans to come home, set our own house in order, and face the next round of anti-imperialist hatreds through diplomacy is the best we can do in cleaning up this mess. Perhaps we could decide to pay a tenth of the current cost of the war to make reparations, to fund hospitals and schools and therapists and infrastructure. Perhaps we could reflect on how to really show what our values are and on more peaceful ways to export them. And while that seems as out of reach as peace in our time, if we do not plan and hope, what will we become?