The conventional wisdom seems to be that Vietnam was a bad war because we lost. Pity, because the tragedy is that there was nothing there to win.
It is a distinction that I fear has been lost among our political leadership on both sides of the aisle. It’s easy to imagine war as capture the flag – two grand armies fighting to seize the other’s capital city. Onwards for glory, to Mexico City or Richmond or Berlin. But the world can be maddeningly more complicated.
During the campaign John McCain insisted on what I would call the Martingale strategy of combat: just keep throwing troops at the problem. It reflects all the frustrations of Gulliver among the Lilliputians; how is it that this band of people who cannot block our advance in any cardinal direction can so stymie our will? Why won’t they give in? Surely you don’t expect us to give in to them? They cannot make us yield.
But is it yielding to have the confidence in our strength to follow our interests? The heavyweight champion does not need to fight every barroom goon.
The New York Times has a memo from Col. Timothy Reese, who should win a prize for putting a military signature on the blindingly obvious:
Our combat operations are currently the victim of circular logic. We conduct operations to kill or capture violent extremists of all types to protect the Iraqi people and support the GOI. The violent extremists attack us because we are still here conducting military operations. Furthermore, their attacks on us are no longer an organized campaign to defeat our will to stay; the attacks which kill and maim US combat troops are signals or messages sent by various groups as part of the political struggle for power in Iraq.
I say “blindingly obvious” because this was just about the only possible outcome the minute we admitted no grievance with Iraq.
For reasons I have never fully understood, we possess the ability to simultaneously believe ourselves entitled to attack anywhere on the planet and universally loved. The extreme example of this is John Bolton, who managed to argue on The Daily Show that the US should support both attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the grass-roots Iranian opposition, as though attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would not make us rather unpopular among the masses of Iranians.
This is the core of the strategic blunder in Iraq. We have the tools to get to Baghdad. We can push our forces most places on the globe, and few nations can deny us freedom of movement. What we cannot do is make people like us, and here the problem is not a shortage of howitzers or fighter planes, but a shortage of common sense.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who through intrigue and brutality held together a state of three different peoples. We killed him. We could kill, or force into hiding, anyone else who displeased us. But none of the killing changed the fact that someday we will leave, and each group knows this, so each group will use every day between today and the day of our departure to make our presence work for it.
For a time, the Sunnis saw their best strategy as killing us and hoping we would leave so they could kill Shiites. Eventually they changed their minds and decided it was better to take our money and husband their resources for the fight to come with the Shiites. The Shiites liked us when we were fighting the Sunnis and did not like us when we were interfering with their militias, so from time to time they would give us intelligence on Sunni locations and from time to time they would attack us to keep us from getting too comfortable. The Kurds want their own state and are desperate to kick Sunnis and Shiites alike out of their area, so they ally with us when it comes to military actions and they oppose us when we get our human rights hat on.
We cannot change the interests of these groups. Each group sees its interests as more important than some mythic Iraq, and our insisting otherwise doesn’t make it so. It shouldn’t particularly surprise us – we fought our own civil war, and we are still face endemic corruption, cronyism, and regionalism. Indeed, the Republican party runs on regional and class grievance: they are making fun of you, but we are real and true and will show them.
Back to Reese:
The GOI [Government of Iraq] and ISF [Iraq Security Force] will continue to squeeze the US for all the “goodies” that we can provide between now and December 2011, while eliminating our role in providing security and resisting our efforts to change the institutional problems prevent the ISF from getting better.
How could it be otherwise? Why would they not try to take what they can from the Brinks truck we overturned in their midst? It is not coming from their taxes. When our soldiers die, they do not go to the funerals. We are external in every sense, to be used to the best advantage and discarded.
There is no point blaming the Iraqis for corruption or not following our commands. They are doing their best for themselves. We should blame ourselves for not doing the same.
During the campaign, McCain would assert that the US withdrawl from Vietnam caused the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia. This is dubious historically – our bombing and invasion of Cambodia did much more to weaken the Lon Nol government than our presence in Saigon – and illogical strategically: even if it were true that our exit from Vietnam directly caused the rise of Khmer Rouge, would it have been better for the US to stay?
We invaded Iraq for our set of reasons: we thought they were working on WMD, we wanted to rid ourselves of Saddam, we wanted a distraction from a failing hunt for Al Qaeda, we thought we would be welcomed with flowers and usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and gushing oil. Some were good reasons, some flawed, but none matter today. There is quite simply no reason for us to be there now. If Washington awoke tomorrow to discover that a fluke storm had blown every American into Kuwait, we would not rush to regroup and reinvade; we would thank God for delivering us from the awful burden. Well, the privilege of having a strong military is that just as no one could stop us from entering Baghdad, so no one can stop us from leaving. We can leave immediately.
Perhaps a sudden withdrawl would be followed by a bloodbath as Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds fought it out. Perhaps…but that’s not our problem. If tomorrow the Azeris, Arabs, and Persians in Iran decided to mix it up, I hope we would have the common sense to stay out; it’s just not our fight. There is no such thing as “you break it, you buy it,” for the simple reason that we owe nothing to the people of Iraq. We invaded for us, not for them. We can and should leave for us, not for them.
It just so happens that our departure would make them very happy.
And if people should say we “lost,” let them. We will be the stronger, and our leadership needs the wisdom and courage to seize this.
