Time to Face Reality: We Cannot Win in Iraq

 

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." – Donald Rumsfeld

 

November 22, 2006 -- One of the most damning criticisms of Bush you can make is that, despite all the military bravado, he’s actually not very good at waging war.  The Iraq fiasco has been a failure of intelligence in the broadest sense of the word, but ultimately Bush’s military woes might be owing to the failure something much worse in a political leader: a failure of intuition.  The problem with Bush’s method of waging war is that it’s based on an incredibly narrow conceptual framework that ignores the vitality of local differences and in the name of spreading democracy around the globe treats the world as if it could potentially become the same kind of place everywhere.  But the world will never be the same kind of place everywhere, as long as there are new people being born to challenge the status quo.  From the beginning the Bush administration has approached reality on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq as if this important aspect of human nature did not exist.  The war on terror is a logician’s war: it was dreamed up by a bunch of academics in air-conditioned Washington think tanks back in the 90s.  None of these guys knows the first thing about life in the streets, which unfortunately is where the fighting is taking place. 

 

The whole mess could have been avoided if the military brass at the Pentagon had only bothered to read a couple pages of War and Peace.  Here’s Tolstoy over a hundred years ago explaining very straightforwardly why we will never win in Iraq:    

 

            One of the most tangible and advantageous departures from the so-called rules of warfare is the action of scattered groups against a body of men obliged to operate in a dense mass.  In fighting of this kind, instead of combining into a crowd to attack a crowd, men divide, attack separately and at once run away when threatened by superior forces, only to resume the offensive at the first favorable opportunity. 

                 People have called this kind of war “guerrilla warfare” and assumed that by giving it this label they have explained its meaning.  Incidentally, this sort of warfare not only fails to come under any rules but is in direct contradiction to a well-known law of tactics which is accepted as infallible.  This law lays down that the attacking party shall concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his adversary at the moment battle is joined. 

                 Guerilla warfare (always successful, as history testifies) operates in flat contradiction to this rule.

 

Military leaders, Tolstoy explains, mistakenly assume that the strength of an army will always be identical with its numerical proportions, but in doing so they fail to properly account for an unknown factor. 

 

            Military science, finding in history innumerable instances of the size of an army not coinciding with its strength, and of small detachments defeating larger ones, vaguely admits the existence of this “unknown” and tries to discover it – now in some geometrical disposition of the troops, now in superiority of weapons, or (more frequently) in the genius of the commanders.  But none of these hypothetical identifications of the unknown factor yields results which accord with historical facts.       

 

So what is the identity of this unknown factor according to Tolstoy? 

 

            This unknown is the spirit of the army – in other words, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger on the part of all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under leaders of genius, of whether they fight in two- or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat 30 times a minute.  Men who are eager to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.

 

In other words, it’s not necessarily a question of superior numbers, but a question of morale.  If you ask American troops in Iraq if they are prepared to give up their lives, they might say yes, but this doesn’t mean that they’re actually willing to do it.  They understand that dying is a natural risk of being at war, but deep down none of them really wants to be at war.  Given the choice between dying heroically on the battlefield, and doing their jobs and coming home and seeing their families again, by and large American troops are going to choose option number two, not because they’re cowardly or unpatriotic, but because they’ve been raised to believe that their lives have value.  For them, dying in war is an act to be feared, lamented, honored, never an act to be embraced enthusiastically.                    

 

The problem is that they are facing an enemy with absolutely nothing to lose, and people with nothing to lose, as Tolstoy says, will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.  As long as there are human beings who are willing to turn themselves into bombs in Iraq, there can be no question of a U.S. victory.  This isn’t a judgment against the troops, or a statement of pessimism: I would love for peace and stability to come to Iraq, just as I would love for peace and stability to come to all nations.  But at this point our inability to “win” this war is simply a fact of nature, as mysterious and necessary as the flow of human blood through human veins. 

   

When the likes of George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman and John McCain and David Brooks insist that the solution in Iraq is to add more troops, they are making the same mistake that has been made by military leaders throughout history in thinking that the key to resisting the messiness of guerilla warfare is superior organization.  Really this attitude is a form of hubris, in which the attacking party is so in awe of its own military strength that it exaggerates its potential, naively assuming that it has the power to master even the human spirit itself.  Whether 20,000, 50,000, or 100,000 troops are added to Iraq, the result will be the same: more confusion, more killing, more despair.  Eventually we are going to have to face reality, which is that the only “solution” to Iraq is to withdraw completely and leave the country to stabilize itself by its own devices.

 

This is naturally a brutal decision, and one that is very easy for me to make, sitting at my comfortable desk, just as it’s very easy for George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman to send young Americans to their deaths sitting at theirs.  The stakes of leaving Iraq are enormous: chaos, sectarian violence, terrorism.  And it’s a decision that many of the soldiers themselves are not going to share.  The news out of Iraq has been so bad of late, I was surprised to read an article in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago in which several enlisted soldiers and officers in Iraq gave their support for the war, saying that a U.S. withdrawal right now would be a total disaster and a complete betrayal to the Iraqi people.

“Pulling out now would be as bad or worse than going forward with no changes,” said Capt. Jim Modlin, 26, of Oceanport, N.J.  “Sectarian violence would be rampant, democracy would cease to exist, and the rule of law would be decimated. It's not 'stay the course,' and it's not 'cut and run' or other political catchphrases. There are people's lives here. There are so many different dynamics that go on here that a simple solution just isn't possible.”

Said Capt. Mike Lingenfelter, 32, of Panhandle, Tex.: “We'll pull their feet out from under them if we leave.  It's still fragile enough now that if the coalition were to leave, it would embolden the insurgents.  A lot of people have put their trust and faith in us to see it to the end.  It would be an extreme betrayal for us to leave."

The first thing that springs out at me reading these quotes is the personal tone, the sense of loyalty.  What is pure propaganda coming from Bush’s mouth – the nonsense about spreading “freedom,” for instance – is for these guys a daily working reality.  They’re not concerned with the price of oil, or geopolitical positioning, or making their buddies a billion dollars, but with simply trying to improve the living conditions of Iraqis.  The political concepts Bush exploits merely as a means to consolidate power have real substance and value for these soldiers.  They’ve been over there for years, they’ve formed personal attachments, of course they wouldn’t want to see the country descend into chaos and bloodshed overnight after working so hard to secure it.  And it’s for this reason that when a guy like Capt. Jim Modlin says we shouldn’t leave Iraq it carries about two hundred times more weight than when a guy like John McCain says it.                       

Except that Capt. Jim Modlin is a soldier and not a historian.  Were he a historian, he would understand that the mission in Iraq is doomed.  There is nothing under the sun that can be done to change that, and in the end one of the saddest evils in the long list of evils committed by the Bush administration is the pure inhumanity of forcing our troops in Iraq to confront the inevitable question each soldier is going to have to wrestle with in the loneliness of his conscience for years to come: what on earth was it all for?  What could possibly justify all that carnage?       

 

History may repeat itself, but at the very least we hope to learn a little from our mistakes.  A shameful legacy of the Vietnam era was the experience of the returning soldiers who came home only to find themselves shunned by a generation of spoiled college kids who couldn’t possibly comprehend the miseries of war.  That’s not going to be the case this time around.  We’ve learned by now who the real baby-killers are, and it’s certainly not the men and women who have been slogging it out in one hundred ten degree temperatures through the dust and the sweat and the blood with the screams of their dying comrades in their ears.  They’re people like David Brooks, the former CEO of body-armor maker DHB, who in 2004 staged a $10 million bat mitzvah for his daughter while our soldiers bled to death overseas on $25,000 a year.  People like James Mulva, the CEO of ConocoPhillips, who over the summer earned millions of dollars in record oil profits while the rest of us had to pinch pennies just to get back and forth to work everyday.  People like Lee Raymond, the former chief of Exxon, who last January retired on more than $140,000 a day.  People like Dick Cheney, whose stock options this year are enough to buy out a small European country.  People with gated mansions, chauffeurs, the right connections.  People who order bombs to be dropped on people with no connections at all. 

 

If there’s one good thing that’s going to come out of the Bush years, it’s that it’s allowed many Americans to see the world for the fallen, imperfect place it really is.  The only certainty about the Iraq war is that the troops are going to have to come home eventually, and when that day finally arrives, those of us who can even remotely fathom what they’ve been through will greet them not like a bunch of brainless chicken hawks whooping it up in the airport arrivals lounge but with the dignity befitting people who have stared death in the face and lived to tell about it.