Irresponsible on Iraq

The Washington Post’s editorial today demonstrates why it has replaced the New York Times as the nation’s lead serious newspaper. “Irresponsible on Iraq” points out that the past two weeks’ debate over Iraq, as to who lied, – the administration about the reasons for getting into Iraq, or the Democrats saying the administration did by conveniently forgetting their agreement with the information at the time on doing so – “is a shameful exercise in demagoguery and name calling.” The editorial says, “It sounds like the final days of a bitter, mud-slinging political campaign….Which raise the question: Is their priority to win in Iraq – or in next year’s midterm elections?”

The Washington Post editorial concludes with the stark stakes:

“If there is to be any chance of that war being won, the United States will have to commit its own forces to the fight for years, though perhaps not at current levels. The alternative is to risk defeat that would be devastating to U.S. security. That’s a hard truth to face. It can’t be done amid a partisan free-for-all.”

Robert Kagan and William Kristol outline the consequences of Rep. Murtha’s proposal for a withdrawal over the next six months and establishment of a rapid-reaction force in the region. Iraq could likely devolve into civil war, and become a haven for terrorists funded by its oil riches. Iraq could well become an unstable state that its neighbors feel constrained to physically intervene in for their own security or agendas, leading to a larger regional war. The U.S.’ regional reaction force would “only take us back into war when the inevitable disaster began to unfold.”

That the United States can lose by war weariness may be the spoken consensus. That the United States can’t win is the largely unspoken undercurrent from, on the one hand, opponents of U.S. goals or defeatists at accomplishing anything noble or grand and, on the other hand, by retrospective analyses from those frustrated by slow, costly or incomplete results.

Those who would have the U.S. more or less quickly withdraw ignore that on the ground there the opposition is vastly weakened and the Iraqi capabilities increasing, although both positive trends are slow.

Beneath the heat of debate on whether or how much or how long the U.S. military should be engaged abroad, that is the dangerous weariness consensus emerging that too many are ignoring. Most responsible commentators and, more importantly, the bulk of Americans also recognize that we can’t win unless the Iraqis provide their halting progress toward their critical contribution.

Some who advocate an explicit timetable for withdrawal make the rational argument that it would motivate Iraqis to cooperate with each other more if they are less able to count on an American umbrella. What’s ignored is the rational conclusion that would be drawn by more Iraqis: accommodate and hedge to the invigorated insurgency.

What one analyst calls the “Three Year Rule” is what runs contrary to the impatience with the difficult process of developing the essential Iraqi contribution to their own security and stability. “In all of America’s wars, popular support for the war effort sharply declined after three years.” fn Further, even when ultimately victorious, we tend to withdraw to our own domestic interests, allowing freer reign to seeding future challenges to which we must respond. For example, the popular demands for immediate American demobilization after World War II contributed to a weaker post-war posture vis a vis the Soviet purposefulness in Europe, dominating the East, supporting civil strife in Greece or electoral thrusts in Italy and France.

Take all the heat, what the Washington Post calls the “demagoguery and name calling,” or the domestic electioneering, out of the national discussion and one is still left with this core issue.

America is neither a scheming imperium, as its most avid critics charge, nor an inept one, as those critical of reaching strawhorse standards of supposed U.S. efficiency charge. America is a reluctant imperium, at most, usually late to do so in hope of others acting, once conditions have worsened that make the job tougher, that at best can focus to apply its superior strength and wealth and then for too short a time relative to long-term problems.

Polls show about 19% of Americans in favor of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Thus, the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize the perils. Meanwhile the pessimism, if not the willingness to yet withdraw, of liberal-centrist elites is much higher. Over time, the collapse of public opinion leaders – whether out of impatience with the ways of war, partisanship, or having other priorities -- does erode public support.

Overwhelmingly negative reporting, whether driven by contrary purpose, the news cycle, or ignorance, doesn’t help. Neither did the White House strategy of letting Iraq recede from its public utterances, expecting that would reduce the erosion of public support for the war, this tactic now belatedly abandoned in recognition of Democrats exploiting it to increase the volume and intemperance of their accusations for petty electoral gain.

Surely, we’re told, better planning for post-Saddam would have yielded less opposition and more reconstruction progress. The Pentagon does now recognize this, by elevating the role of “stability operations” in military planning, and this can only be helpful, particularly as State and other U.S. agencies have not been very useful. In another theatre, where they’ve led in reconstruction, a long established U.S. agency, the Agency for International Development, and conduits through established specialists in non-governmental organizations, has not yielded especially praiseworthy or effective results in Afghanistan.

Surely, particularly at first, a much larger U.S. occupying and pacifying armed force would have been at hand to counter the surprising to most size and determination of the insurgency. Still, the very asymmetry of guerrilla tactics would have been at play in its disruptiveness, and even the exceptional flexibility of U.S. military tacticians would still have been playing catch-up. And, the refusal of most Sunni to easily yield their decades of control over the majority Shia and Kurds would still have needed to be dissuaded by force and by the slow, painful process of building a new civic culture that had not existed before.

And, after a decade of spending the post-Cold War “peace dividend”, it takes a generation of far heavier spending and development to build the significantly larger armed forces that would have allowed a much larger force to be sent to Iraq. No one can rightly accuse Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld of being less than blunt in saying one fights with the military one has.

In other words, even if the U.S. had not committed the grave retrospective errors that most recognize, the U.S. would still have faced a large long term armed commitment.

Post-Vietnam, military strategists recognized the difficulty of sustaining public support for such long, painful commitments. The primary response was to lessen pressure from public opinion due to the draft bringing the commitment into most Americans’ homes, a more professionalized and lethal armed forces operating more purposefully to bring swift battlefield victory, and reducing costs and homefront peacetime pressures by shifting more reliance upon a more ready reserves.

Outside of that, no one has met or found the solution to the core dilemma of how to fight a necessarily long war. Regardless of how Iraq turns out, that will remain the core challenge facing America, Americans, and those who might ally with or depend upon us.

In all the brouhaha during the past month about Supreme Court nominee Miers, and the Congressional addiction to pork, the frustration by conservatives has been unleashed against those Republicans either less conservative-media party line, more liberal, or more focused on maintaining an electoral majority big tent to avoid more Democrat interference or retreat from our vital national security interests in adequately fulfilling our mission for a more benign MidEast. That immaturity of prioritization in the midst of a war, literally over time for the very survival of Western civilization, is both irresponsible and unhelpful toward unifying the majority behind the sacrifices and patience needed for the long war we are in and from which there is no escape or avoidance. The United States is center target.

There’s more to it than this, but even the strategically visionary Winston Churchill made many serious errors during World War II, and was turned out of office to be replaced by international weaklings at its end. War weariness and self-crippling divisiveness are nothing new, nor are the results.

Regardless of immediate electoral advantage, regardless of pettier frustrations, those who are responsible must focus on building greater unity of resolve, not on diminishing allies.

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footnote: See, John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. New York: Wiley, 1973, for analysis of American public opinion from World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.