Iraq Foolery

So sue me; I was reading the Wildcat. I know that the editorials are almost universally fatuous bullshit from cocksure little undergrads whose life experience can fit in the period at the end of this sentence, but even given my low expectations, I was flabbergasted by the presumption of one Matt Stone. Here is his opinion on Iraq:

"Iraq ain’t no picnic. And it ain’t a walk in the park either. But the
idea – propagated by almost all Democrats and a sprinkling of
Republicans – that withdrawing America’s troops from Iraq will solve
our problems there is destructively short-sighted.

At a candidates’ forum for the District 8 congressional race held at
the UA on Tuesday evening, Iraq received the earliest and most
passionate attention. One Democratic candidate, Bill Johnson, advocated
the withdrawal of any and all deployed troops around the world – from
Germany, South Korea, Japan and so on. And most Republican candidates,
while carefully avoiding the name George Bush, stuck to playbook,
stay-the-course rhetoric.

But there was one breath of fresh air when it came to Iraq – and it
came from underdog Republican Frank Antenori, a 38-year-old Army
Special Forces veteran of three wars, including Desert Storm and the
invasion of Afghanistan. Antenori wasn’t afraid to say it straight: L.
Paul Bremer, the former American proconsul in Iraq, was "an idiot," a
bureaucrat doing a job the military should have had all along.

"Stability in Iraq can only be served by an increase in the number of boots on the ground."

Antenori rightly pointed out that General Douglas MacArthur, a military
man if there ever was one, administered Japan for a full seven years
following World War II before a national government was formed.
Stability was the key; representative government could come later.

The Bush administration has refused to learn from history. Not enough
troops, too many convoluted rules of engagement, an inability to
foresee the insurgency – the charges pile high against the Bush White
House. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ought to resign for these
grave and lethal errors. But moreover, Antenori argues that the Bush
administration was too quick to form a sovereign Iraqi government,
especially one that can barely function in an environment of chaos and
fear.

For all the errors then, what is the solution now? Cut and run? Stay the course?

To pull out now, despite the political mood in America, would serve no
one – not American interests in the region and certainly not Iraqis,
whose society would descend into complete chaos. The Iranians would
fill the Iraqi political vacuum, instability would spill over into the
territory of our regional allies (especially oil-producing Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait) and a security vacuum would allow terrorist organizations
to find a new home, engendering further instability.

To stay the course would imply doing the things we’ve been doing for
the past three years with barely any success – an equally unpalatable
option.

Stability is critical, and stability can only be served by an increase
in the number of boots on the ground. Sen. John McCain, a potential
Republican challenger for the presidency, has repeatedly called for
additional troops in Iraq. America ought to do the job it should have
completed three years ago: stabilize Iraq and allow the domestic
economy to flourish. That can only occur with additional military
presence.

In District 8, unfortunately, all four leading candidates either
recommend withdrawing American troops from Iraq or don’t mention
anything at all. Patty Weiss and Gabrielle Giffords, the two Democratic
front-runners, are eager to cut and run. The Web sites of Randy Graf
and Steve Huffman, the leading Republican candidates, don’t mention
Iraq at all.

This kind of political groupthink is appalling. To cut and run in Iraq
would be akin to America’s ignominious withdrawal from Somalia in 1993,
a country that remained anarchic for 13 years and now has an unfriendly
Islamist government patrolling the streets of Mogadishu.

In these pages, I have previously argued that the invasion of Iraq was
wrong and, strategically speaking, not in America’s national interest.
Those views don’t change. But a complete withdrawal, as many
opportunistic congressional candidates are advocating, is a policy that
looks no further than the next couple years. Our problems in the Middle
East will be much more long-term, and you can be sure that they will be
far more severe with an unstable Iraq rather than a functioning one.

Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, told President Bush in the
run-up to the 2003 invasion, "You break it, you buy it."

We’ve bought it; let’s not toss it into the rubbish bin too soon."

What grand geo-strategic insight, "Iraq ain’t no picnic." I guess the rustic ‘ain’t’ is so that we know he tough and practical… or something. I really haven’t any idea what thoughts occur to people like young Master Stone; evidently, none that haven’t been fed to them by Fox News or another official propaganda organ of the GOP. Anyhow, I felt a need to respond. So I wrote a letter to the editorial board of the Wildcat in response.

Matt Stone’s opinion article, "Only one way forward on Iraq: more
troops" contained a number of unexamined, and very likely false
premises that fatally undercut his thesis.

The first premise he blithely asserts is that in the absence
of American troops Iraq will descend into chaos and civil war. This is
far from a given. Indeed, many feel that the continued presence of
American troops sustains the Sunni insurgency and allows the Shiite
majority to avoid a political settlement with the Sunni minority.
Removing American troops will enhance stability far more than
increasing the size of our occupation force ever could.

Stone’s second fallacy is facilely applying the history of
Japanese reconstruction to our military occupation of Iraq. Stone
points to our successful military occupation of Japan as proof that a
larger and longer commitment will also work in Iraq. But the Japanese
nation was a centuries old institution with a unified ethnic identity
and political legitimacy centralized in the Emperor, who decreed
cooperation with the occupation; these advantages were strong supports
to our success in Japan. Not a single American soldier died in combat
in Japan during that occupation. Iraq has none of the conditions that
contributed to successful nation-building in Japan, and as a result
2,500 American soldiers have died.

A much closer historical analogy to Iraq is Vietnam, where our
continually escalating commitment of forces by those who saw victory
always just over the horizon cost us the lives of over 50,000
Americans. The lesson Vietnam taught military strategists is that a
guerilla resistance with sufficient popular support to replenish
attrition is effectively undefeatable by a foreign occupier. As in
Vietnam, so in Iraq; the only possible resolution is a political
settlement or a civil war. Our military force in Iraq, even if greatly
increased, cannot force the former, nor prevent the latter.

Stone’s third premise is founded in the overweening
paternalism and inapposite nature of the ‘Pottery Barn Rule.’ America
does not have a special place in Iraqi internal affairs because we
invaded and toppled the Ba’athist regime. The ‘you broke it, you bought
it’ maxim asserts an ownership interest in Iraq that is false and
gravely insulting to Iraqis. Iraq belongs to the Iraqis. We have no
duty to sacrifice the lives of our sons and daughters to shape Iraq’s
political destiny. Nor is it clear what men with guns and bombs can do
to fix a broken pot. If Iraq is a broken pot, what it needs is potters,
not warriors. More practical and peaceful aid, not more soldiers, is
the proper remedy for a fractured Iraq.

Our political discourse on Iraq is all too frequently
dominated by those who, like Mr. Stone, display little appreciation for
geo-political reality, the lessons of history, or the limits of
military force as a political tool, and instead rely on jingoism and
wishful thinking in lieu of reason. It is all too easy for those who
seek to avoid responsibility for a monstrous and criminal failure of
policy to throw yet more lives of our valiant servicemen and women at
the problem and hope for the best. But those who died for lies and
hubris yesterday are not honored by sacrificing more lives needlessly
today. We can only mourn our fallen and renew our vow to those who gave
their last full measure of devotion; "Never again."