GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker returned from Iraq this week to report that "progress is real" in the post-surge world. So real, in fact, that we can't go surge-free any time soon. For, although "progress is real," it is also "fragile" and "reversible." Armed with this fragIle but reversible real progress, we are now advised to embrace a new policy of suspending troop withdrawals (part of what was promised post surge if only we agreed, pre-surge, to surge). The Washington surge gurus (McCain, Bush, the Washington Post editorial page, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, among others) tell us that de-surging can only be embraced if "conditions on the ground" permit it.
They don't.
So we must . . . surge forward, or on, or upward, or somewhere for the foreseeable future.
The Washington Post editors claimed today that "the reduction in violence [in Iraq] had been so great as to be undeniable," and then skewered Obama and Clinton for having been surge-resistent pessimists when W initially proposed the idea. This is like screaming at the coach whose team is down by three touchdowns because he fails to hand out "Attaboys" to his team when they go eight and out as opposed to their usual four and out. The progress was undeniable. It was also probably irrelevant.
Violence, for now, is down. Progress, however, is only undeniable because things were so bad to begin with. We are nowhere near the end state Bush and Cheney forecast in 2003, and we are never getting there. That is why they keep changing the goalposts. First it was to get rid of WMD. Then when we found none of that, it was freedom and democracy for Iraq. Now that neither of these is likely (at least not without the sort of pro-Iranian resuilts we cannot otherwise endorse), it's stability. Slowly, that is giving way to a Nixonian sort of "peace with honor," which is how politicians frame losing, and this will itself be followed by a Rambo-esque hunt for the felons who refused to let us win (because patriots like Bush and Cheney and McCain never lose, they just have victory taken from them by those who refuse to "stay the course").
I now realize that the politicians really did learn lessons from Vietnam, though not the ones we thought they had leaned. The first lesson is never predict victory. This is a precondition for ceaseless surging, otherwise known as all war all the time. But you have to be careful how you sell it, or you won't close the deal. You can't admit that you will have to be there "for 100 years" (as McCain found out the hard way). Rather, you have to embrace the second lesson, which is to predict "devastating consequences" in the event of troop pull outs. This, of course, is not a prediction of victory if we continue to fight. Rather, it is a prediction horrific chaos if we do not. Combined, the astute practitioner of these simple rules freezes the debate. He or she neither gets caught in a Westmorland-like "light at the end of the tunnel" expectation of success nor in a "hanging on the helicopters" picture of ignoble retreat. Instead, he or she gets to . . . surge.
Lesson three is never look back. This lesson is particularly useful to policy makers, especially those who (like McCain and Bush and Lieberman, and . . . Hillary) really blew it at the start of the game. By focusing, as Ambassador Crocker put it yesterday, on "what will happen [rather] than what has happened," those who fail get to keep on keepin' on.
And no one else gets to call them on their mistakes.
Lesson three is the holy grail for the ambitiously incompetent. It would be nice if even one of them -- McCain, Bush, Lieberman, anyone -- resigned given their utter failure in 2003 to vote for and implement the correct policy. In a parliamentary system, there would have been multiple no confidence votes. Here, however, we just get spin --about patriotism, or chaos, or quitting, or the future. Personal responsibility apparently is very important when it comes to sex or drugs. But totally irrelevant when it comes to war.
The truth is that no one knows when the so-called "conditions on the ground" will change and permit the troops to come home. So, whether we admit it or not, we are making an open ended committment to stay in Iraq. This is the latest lie we are being told by those we elect to tell us the truth, especially when it comes to national security. But they haven't and they won't, and maybe now they can't.
People who lie to themselves often enough end up believing the lies. This is why lying is a bad habit -- it's not just the mendacity, it's what the mendacity does to you after you repeat it enough. An erstwhile friend of mine (and graduate of Yale Law School) ruined his career and his life by lying. But long before he went to jail for his lies, he had already lost his self respect, and mine, along with any influence he might have had over his colleagues. The possession and exercise of power (political, financial, or emotional) can mask that loss for a time. But not forever. And not in a way that ever matters.
Here are the real "conditions on the ground" in Iraq:
1. We do not know when we will be able to get out. Positing what has to happen tells you nothing about when it will happen.
2. Our current President, and at least one of the individuals who may be our next President (McCain), have, as a matter of policy, refused to say when we will get out.
3. Most of the elites in our society are not calling them on it, or on their past failures.
4. Consequently, the failure continues.
The condition on the ground?
Halberstam said it best forty years ago.
It is a quagmire.
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